The Depths of Time (69 page)

“
Think about it,
”
Norla said as they started to follow Koffield once again.
“
Think not just about what you knew before we got here, but about what the admiral told you about the Greenhouse-and-SunSpot technique—
it wasn’t DeSilvo’s idea.
He had to pretend to the whole of Settled Space that he had thought of it himself. But he knew, deep down inside, that he had stolen the idea, plagiarized it from a woman dead hundreds of years before. Solace was his. That he built in his own image. He knew it, and everyone else knew it—and it was true. But Greenhouse? Would he really want to be interred and memorialized on the one world that
had
to stand for all his lies and self-deceptions? Greenhouse was the world that reminded him he was a fraud.
”

“
And that is all the reason you have for thinking DeSilvo is not buried here?
”

“
That
’
s all,
”
Koffield said.
“
Except for one thing. You assume DeSilvo died and stayed that way thirteen years after I left for Solace. Why?
”

“
What do you mean,
‘
why
’
? Every text, every source, every biography, every witness agrees on the day of DeSilvo
’
s death.
”

“
Were you there? Did you see it? He died and cheated death many times before. Can you
prove
he died then, for good and all? Or even that he is, in fact, dead? If we opened up the urn in his tomb, would you be able to say for certain the ashes in it were his?
”

It was Ashdin
’
s turn to stop in her tracks, Norla pausing alongside her, but Koffield did not so much as look behind.
“
You
’
re not just saying it
’
s not his tomb?
”
Ashdin asked.
“
You
’
re saying that the man isn
’
t even
dead?”

Then Koffield did stop and look back.
“
Why not?
”
he asked.
“
I was born over three hundred years ago,
”
he said quietly.
“
I have spent more than three-fourths of that time in cryosleep. DeSilvo had already been in and out of cryosleep and temporal confinement dozens of times when I knew him. He had only actually lived about eighty years of biological time by then, though centuries had gone by. I think it is at least possible that he either feigned death—or truly caused himself to be clinically, if temporarily, dead, merely to avoid confronting me before I left for Solace. Sooner or later, yes, he probably did have his final death. But how can we know for sure? When it comes to a man who has died and flirted with death that often, when it comes to a man who could and did manipulate and fake records in highly sophisticated data-storage systems, I will need something more than books that agree that he died before I believe he is dead for all time.
”

Ashdin did not answer, and the three of them started moving again, walking in silence for a time.

Koffield was the first to speak, though not about the matter at hand.
“
That should be Sunflower Dome up ahead, just to the left,
”
he said.
“
Or at least, what
’
s left of it.
”

Sunflower was not like Research Dome behind them. Sunflower was no gleaming swell of sky-blue. They had blown Sunflower a long time ago, and it was as dark and as grey and as dead as everything else on the surface.
“
Are we sure we want to go through there?
”
Norla asked.

“
No reason not to. It
’
s directly between Research and Founder
’
s. It
’
ll take us at least two hours to walk around it.
”

“
Maybe I wouldn
’
t mind taking up two hours of my time to avoid it,
”
Norla said. But that sort of talk wasn
’
t going to convince Koffield, and she followed behind without further argument as they bore toward the wreckage of Sunflower.

It took no great amount of time for them to reach the edge of Sunflower
’
s debris field, the bits of blown-out dome, broken pieces of machinery, twigs, leaves, branches, whole trees torn up by the roots and thrown out onto the airless surface, and, worse by far, dead birds and small animals, their ruined, pathetic bodies mummified and baked down to nothing by the extreme cold and heat of Greenhouse
’
s surface.

Norla spotted the twisted corpse of a squirrel lying in the dirt where it had been thrown by the blowout, its fur turned black by the unfiltered fury of the SunSpot
’
s radiation. She thought of the jay and the squirrel doing merry battle in the trees of Research Dome, and could not bear to think that the wiry, stiffened, lifeless thing was the same sort of being at all. Was that what the future held for Research Dome as well? Was there no way to stop the inevitable collapses?

Perhaps, somehow,
knowing
they were inevitable, knowing that all domes and habitats and terraformed worlds were doomed was the first step. What was the term the terraformers had used over and over during that chaotic symposium?
Masked causality?
No.
Cause-pattern masking,
that was it. The deep connections between events got hidden behind the random noise of everyday life, so that twenty-three linked and similar events were seen as twenty-three separate and unrelated incidents. Maybe, someday, taking that mask off would lead them to a way to solve the problem. It was a faint sort of hope, but it was all she could find.

“
Orlang told me this one went wrong,
”
said Ashdin.
“
The idea of blowing a dome is to sterilize it so you can
reuse it. You
’
re not supposed to destroy the dome completely. But this was one of the first ones they blew, and they miscalculated the charges and set them wrong. Instead of getting some holes in the dome so it would decompress suddenly, they got a complete structural failure. They
’
ve learned to do it better since.
”

“
They
’
ve had a lot of practice,
”
Koffield said grimly.
“
This whole world is nothing but domed settlements and farms and experimental plots.
”

The debris got bigger, and heavier, as they drew near the perimeter of the dome itself. They walked around a fifteen-meter oak tree lying on its side. The decompression explosion had uprooted it and thrown it clear out of the dome. The ruined tree had leaves still on its branches, and dirt clumped to its roots. To see a once-living thing that massive, out in the hard vacuum, to see death in the landscape of the unliving airlessness, tore at Norla
’
s heart. All was doom. All was death.

Picking their way through the debris, they came to the solid anchor wall, still intact, that had once held and supported the clear dome that was not there anymore. Someone had bulldozed the debris away from an airlock door that was the near twin of the one through which they had departed Research Dome. The rubble was shoved up against the anchor wall to each side of the lock.

Both the inner and outer doors of the lock stood open, and they stepped through, into the wreck of Sunflower Dome.

Apparently the wreckage of Sunflower was a convenient enough overland shortcut to merit bulldozing paths through the interior ruins as well. There were three paths cleared through the rubble. One led due east, the second bore off to the southeast, and the third went northeast. Koffield had studied every available map before departing, and led them unhesitatingly down the northeasterly path.

Having the rubble cleared out of their way only made the wreckage to either side seem worse. They walked past ruined fields, buildings with the doors and windows blown out, pieces of clothing, datapages, books, papers, a child
’
s toy doll—small, personal things, abandoned by their owners, scattered by the decompression explosion, and then left where they had fallen. The wrecked buildings, stands of trees that, somehow, had remained standing after the disaster, loomed up ahead of them as they walked and then receded into the rear.

The scale of the place made it seem the ruin of a haunted mansion built long ago for a race of giants. It seemed unbelievable that any mere humans could be capable of building so much, of reaching for such great height—or of then letting it fall from so high, into such depths of loss and failure. Overhead, the Sunspot was rising steadily in the east, as the huge, dim, aloof bulk of Comfort remained frozen in one spot in the sky. But if the sky seemed strange and alien, the landscape was more so.

It was an incomprehensible place. Norla thought of barbarians walking through a once-mighty city, past structures far mightier than they could dream of, surrounded by evidence of a long-vanished power that had far surpassed their own abilities. Could the Solacians of today, the ancestors of the people who had made this place, build anything as grand as this ruin?

But the operative word was
ruin.
Today Sunflower Dome was like this. Tomorrow, quite literally, it would be Founder
’
s turn. And then? This was the doom that awaited the trim, cheerful parks of Research Dome, and everyplace else, save Earth herself, that Norla had ever seen. Koffield had shown them that, shown that every dome and habitat and world would die. Past, present, future.

The knowledge seemed more curse than anything else. It did not bear thinking about.

“
If it
’
s not a tomb—
if
it isn
’
t—what is it?
”
Ashdin asked, breaking the long silence that had held since they reached the wreckage of Sunflower
’
s airlock.

“
I beg your pardon?
”
Koffield said.

“
The tomb. You
’
ve told us your reasons for thinking that
’
s not what it is. So what do you think it is?
”

“
I haven
’
t the slightest idea,
”
Koffield said. But then, after a moment, he corrected himself.
“
No, that isn
’
t quite true. I have ideas. But they seem absurd, even to me.
”

“
What are they?
”
she demanded.

He paused for a minute, set down the cart handle, and flexed his hands, stretching the kinks out of them as he turned around.
“
Shall we rest for a minute?
”

“
Fine with me,
”
said Norla. They were in the middle of what once might have been an ornamental garden, with large flat boulders, the right height to serve as benches, set here and there. She sat down on one of them, and Ashdin sat next to her. Koffield remained standing, and paced back and forth in front of them.
“
So,
”
Norla said.
“
Tell us. What do you think DeSilvo built instead of a tomb?
”

“
And how you reached those conclusions,
”
put in Ashdin.

“
Very well,
”
he said.
“
Start with the maxim
Think like your enemy,”
he said.
“
That
’
s what I always heard from my instructors when I was learning to be-an intelligence officer.
”

“
But—
”
Ashdin cut in.

“
Before you can launch into debate on the point,
”
said

Koffield,
“
no, I don
’
t believe DeSilvo to be my enemy—at

.least I don
’
t know it for certain. But he was, or is, certainly my opponent. I sought to uncover what he sought to hide.

. He wanted one thing, and I wanted another. Fair enough?
”

“
I suppose so,
”
Ashdin said, not well satisfied.

“
So I need to think like him, understand him, if I am to make sense of what he does.
”
Koffield stopped pacing and looked directly at Ashdin, his face faintly visible behind the faceplate of his suit.
“
You still see him as a hero, a genius. I no longer do. Is he, was he, evil, or delusional, or insane? I don
’
t think so. And yet, somehow, he committed a crime so vast that you, Dr. Ashdin, and I daresay most people, have trouble even seeing it as a crime. The only defense I can see is that, somehow, he did not know the consequences of what he was doing, but I cannot believe that. He
must
have known. He terraformed Solace with the certain knowledge that the terraformation would collapse and fail. He used a technique to make it happen faster, but he had to know perfectly well that the technique would bring the doom on faster. You have seen the evidence I brought, heard the story I told. What other explanation do you have?
”“
We only have your word to go on concerning this Ulan Baskaw woman and her books,
”
Ashdin said.
“
Her name doesn
’
t appear in any archive, any history, that I have heard of.
”