The Depths of Time (46 page)

Norla stood, and walked a step or two closer to him. Her own heart was suddenly pounding, her own blood roaring through her veins. There was something that scared Anton Koffield, and anything that scared him had to be terrifying indeed.
“
How could that be?
”
she demanded.
“
Losing a whole planet—what could make that seem insignificant?
”

He moved a step or two away from her, not in any particular direction, but simply not wishing to be too close to her, to anyone.

Get close to something, and it hurts when you lose it,
Norla thought, and drew back herself.
“
What is worse?
”
she asked again.

“
Work the math,
”
Koffield said bitterly, his voice quiet and cold.
“
All you need to do is work the math. Eliminate as many variables as you can. Simplify by canceling out whatever you can from both sides of the equation. Sometimes— not always, but sometimes-^-the more you can cancel out, the more generalized the equation, and the more things it can tell you. Sometimes it
’
s all the things with meaning that cancel out, and what you end up with doesn
’
t tell you anything at all. Sometimes the math is very elegant, very pretty and simple, and quite meaningless.

“
And sometimes it takes fifty years, or a hundred years, to learn enough to let you spot the variables and values
and whole subequations that can be done away with. Or it takes that long to see what the very pretty equation that seemed to say nothing is actually telling you.
”

Koffield looked hard at Norla, as if daring her to turn away from what he had to say.
“
Baskaw
’
s commentary at the back of the second book used some complicated math to show that the techniques used at Solace
might
be unstable. The third book used some simplified and generalized— but still very complex—versions of the same math to demonstrate that Solace, or any world terraformed in the same way,
must
be unstable. Baskaw did not have a large enough base of knowledge and data to go further. Today we do. I did what any modern worker in the field would be able to do. I cleared a lot of the underbrush out of her math, eliminated things that didn
’
t need to be in it, and brought it down to very simple terms.

“
Among other things, what the Baskaw formulae tell us is that, all other things being equal, the period of stability for a given artificial ecosystem is a function of its inherent, internal complexity and the time it took to establish the ecosystem. Stability equals Complexity times Development Time. S equals Q times T(d). S=Q*T(d). The simpler the ecology, and the faster it is created, the shorter the time it will last. Solace is a very simple ecology, and was created in a great hurry. Solace is doomed.
”

“
But you already told me that. You said there was something worse.
”

“
There is!
”
Koffield almost shouted.
“
I just told you! That same formula applies to
every
other artificial environment, and the value for complexity is not very high on any of them. There have been ecological collapses before— starting with the Mars disaster, right on up to the present day.

“
We
’
ve always told ourselves they were one-off mistakes, caused by this or that specific failure. Fix this problem, enhance that system, try it again, and everything will be fine. But that
’
s not true. The problem is systemic. It
’
s inherent in the process. It
’
s true everywhere, all the time. There are lots of ways to mask the problem, and lots of ways to fix things, at least for a while. You can double or triple the period of
stability, if you try hard enough and get lucky. You can even
do better than that by importing additional species and bio-mass. But absent that sort of manipulation, what it comes down to is this: Take five thousand years to build a com
pletely isolated ecology, and it will last about five thousand
years. Take five years, and it will last about five.
”

Koffield pointed out the porthole to the station outside,
to Solace, to the universe.
“Every terraformed planet,
every habitat, is doomed.
Sooner or later, they
’
re
all
going
to fail. All of them. And there
’
s not a damned thing we can do about it.
”

Norla rolled up her sleeve and activated the subcutaneous injector against her right shoulder. The device shot its drugs and antibodies and pseudovirals under her skin. She didn
’
t know, and didn
’
t care, if the cocktail of chemicals in the injector was supposed to keep her from spreading a plague she carried out into the station or supposed to keep her from catching a plague that was already out there. Norla felt numb, lost, her spirit deadened. If she caught their plague, or they caught hers, what did it matter? They were all going to die. The planet was going to collapse.

Koffield used his own injector, then readjusted the sleeve of his tunic and needlessly straightened his collar. He looked every bit the ramrod-straight military man, emotionless, imperturbable. Norla envied him that. She had no such ready-built role she could draw on, or hide behind. She had only herself.

But if Koffield had his military persona to hide behind, to use as a shield between the outer world and his inner self, there had to be a cost. It had to eat at him. How much of the inner man still survived behind that shield-wall? How much of his soul had been hollowed out by the endless discipline, the rigid self-control?

“
Ready?
”
he asked her.

“
No,
”
she replied, quite honestly.
“
Let
’
s go.
”

He nodded and worked the airlock controls. The inner door slid open, and they stepped inside, Koffield hauling the secured container along with him, as well as a carrier
bag packed with spare clothes, toiletries, and the like. Norla carried a similar personal effects bag, along with a small utility satchel, but the latter was more for form
’
s sake than anything else. It held a pocket camera and a note recorder, but beyond that, she couldn
’
t think of much she
’
d be
certain
to need. She had not the faintest idea what was to happen next. She could think of a thousand things they
might
need, from gas masks to assault lasers to Artlnt pocket translators to inertial trackers, more than would be possible to carry. But even given the evidence they had already seen that not all was as it should have been aboard SCO Station, it seemed to her it would be more diplomatic to assume—or at least pretend—that everything on board would be normal.

Norla stepped into the airlock, sealed the inner door, and reached for the button that would open the outer.

Assistant Station Operations Supervisor Yuri Sparten stood on the walkway inside the Personnel Access Tunnel, a meter or two back from the ship-end of the PAT, staring thoughtfully at the hull of the—well,
mystery ship
was probably the most accurate term. He had burrowed deep into the station
’
s record archives and been able to confirm a number of details concerning the
Cruzeiro do Sul’s
story, but the whole affair sounded too much like the sort of story invented to scare children sitting around a campfire. The ghost ship that came out of the past, the dead crew returned to life.

Yuri felt fidgety, anxious, as if he ought to be doing
something.
Acting more to use up nervous energy than because it needed doing, he stepped forward to the end of the PAT and started a hand check of the PAPs seal to the ship
’
s hull. Pointless, of course. There was hard vacuum on the other side of the seal. If there had been a leak, he would have known about it without having to run his hand around the edge of the seal.

Yuri heard a clang and a thud from inside the ship. That had to be the inner hatch sealing. They
’
d be coming out in a moment. But now that he had started it, he felt obliged to complete his pointless check of the pressure seal. He knelt by the end of the PAT and ran his hand along the seal below the base of the hatch.

A low click and a slight hissing noise were all the warning he had that the outer hatch was about to open. He straightened up suddenly, almost toppling over in the low gravity of the near-axis decks. He moved back a step or two from the hatch, feeling strangely embarrassed, as if he had almost been caught at something untoward.

He managed to come to a respectable version of parade rest just a fraction of a second too late. That much he knew the moment he caught the man
’
s eye. It plainly required an act of will on the man
’
s part not to dress Yuri down on the spot. Never had Yuri seen a man who so obviously did not belong in civilian clothes. The man might as well have had the words
SENIOR OFFICER
stamped across his forehead.

Yuri was suddenly very self-conscious, as if the man were subjecting him to parade-ground inspection.
“
Welcome to Solace Central Orbital Station,
”
he said to them, speaking a bit more slowly and carefully than he normally would. Accents might well have shifted a good deal over the last century.
“
I am Second Assistant Station Operations Supervisor Yuri Sparten.
”
Unsure of what gesture— a handshake, a salute, a kiss on both cheeks—they might think proper, he offered none.

“
Thank you,
”
said the man.
“
I am Anton Koffield, and this is Norla Chandray. Our spacecraft is the lighter
Cruzeiro do Sul,
off the timeshaft freighter
Dom Pedro IV.
”

“
Very nice to meet you,
”
said Chandray, smiling at him mechanically, an insincere expression that did not reflect her feelings, but was merely meant to reassure Yuri.

“
I am delighted to meet you both,
”
he said, the words sounding awkward and insincere even to him. It seemed to him that Koffield was staring at him intently. He found himself fretting over whether his dark grey uniform was properly cleaned and pressed.

Yuri was suddenly acutely aware of his own youth, and felt embarrassed by it, as if it were a fault or handicap he had to overcome. He was dark-skinned, slender, long-boned. He liked to think he was capable of moving with remarkable grace, but knew how befuddled and clumsy he could be. Yuri had a long, angular face, and he practiced in the mirror to make sure his jaw was set, his eyes determined-looking. He kept his black hair trimmed so short that it looked from some angles as if he had shaved his skull.

But it was no time to worry about his own appearance. He was supposed to be evaluating the visitors. He forced himself to settle down. He decided to concentrate on Chandray for the moment, she being far less intimidating. She was as plainly civilian as Koffield was military. She was a rather nondescript sort, a little over thirty standard years or so, a kilo or two on the heavy side, pale-skinned and round-faced, with-dirty blond hair cut so short it barely fell flat.

“
Thank you for meeting our ship,
”
Chandray said, and Yuri suddenly realized he had let the silence go on too long.

“
It is my privilege to serve,
”
Yuri replied, offering the formal phrase with a very slight, very correct bow.

“
Thank you,
”
Koffield said.
“
It is an honor to be so well received.
”

Not quite the conventional response, but they hadn
’
t exactly had much chance to practice modern standards of etiquette. It would do. The two visitors both spoke with odd but perfectly understandable accents.

Chandray looked around the lock complex, and Yuri caught her wrinkling her nose and making a face. It was plain to see that the station
’
s air scrubbers weren
’
t doing a good enough job to meet with her approval. Koffield probably felt the same way, but there was no reading anything in that face. Well, if they thought the air up this way was a bit whiff, wait until they got down to Perimeter Level. Even Yuri thought Perimeter smelled like five thousand people who hadn
’
t bathed in far too long—and that was not far off the mark.

Both of the visitors had the slightly sallow, wan-looking appearance of people who had not yet quite recovered from a long time in cryosleep. Nor was the slightly lost look on the woman
’
s face all that unexpected. Yuri had seen the same expression on the faces of the abandoned and dispossessed who seemed to crowd in on every part of the station.

It was Koffield
’
s grim features, his face as hard as stone, that surprised Yuri. The man looked not like a refugee, but like a man prepared to do battle.