Chapter Eighteen

A MATTER OF TIME

Dr. Oskar DeSilvo tried to calm himself. It was time to go. The meeting was scheduled to start in just a few minutes. More than a century after he had put his plan into motion, after the endless days waiting out the news from Greenhouse, after all and everything, it was time.

His nerves were not what they should have been. He stared into the mirror, and smoothed down his yellow scholar’s robe, checking fretfully for any untoward wrinkle or stain. Not that there was any need to worry, of course. His ArtInts had cleaned it just that morning, and they never missed a thing. Even in his present state of mind, that brought a smile to DeSilvo’s face.My ArtInts might fail to report the theft of an aircar or the unauthorized departure of two people, but at least my laundry comes back looking good.

He was nervous. No, no sense fooling himself. He wasscared, downright frightened. This was the moment it all came down to. As much as it galled him at times to realize it, heneeded these people.

He had gotten as far as he could by himself, and perhaps a bit farther than he should have, riding on the backs of ArtInts and robots and fabricators and autofacs. He knew it was something of a wonder he had accomplished as much as he had. He needed skills and abilities—and judgments—that machines couldn’t give him, that only human beings could provide. He needed intuition, political advice, social skills. He would need an army of people, with every skill imaginable—if things went according to plan.

His long-dormant instinct for the political aspect of things was coming back to him, and it confirmed what he already knew: He neededthese people in order to get all theother people he would need later on. They would be the lever that pried the door open. They would give the plan credibility that only they could bring to bear—Koffield especially. Outsiders would listen to Koffield.

But DeSilvo needed more. He would need facilities, facilities far larger, far more capable, and far more accessible than this remote and tiny base.

But before any of that could happen, he would have to convince his guests, convince them of what must seem a mad scheme—and do so after he had done everything in his power to demonstrate to them that he was a madman. And he would have to do it by himself, alone.

Alone. He had been alone so long, in so many ways. He had forgotten the ways of people, how to deal with them, how to talk with them, how to be one of them. He had made several near-fatal mistakes already. Yuri Sparten had tried his best to kill Dr. Oskar DeSilvo—after DeSilvo had pointlessly and needlessly provoked him. Waving Last Chance Canyon in front of Sparten had neutralized that danger, at least, but DeSilvo knew he had made any number of lesser such errors.

Hehad to make them see. Hehad to succeed.

 

Two hours later, they were all assembled in the main conference room. DeSilvo half listened to Koffield’s brief and polite opening remarks, then stood, nodded to Koffield, and began to speak. “Thank you, Admiral. Before I begin my main remarks, I would like to report that the results of the Greenhouse NovaSpot Ignition attempt are in. The Ignition attempt was successful, though it seems there were more than a few anxious moments. As I believe you will see later, this news greatly simplifies planning for the project I am about to propose.”

Oskar DeSilvo paused for a moment and looked about the room.

“Two plus two,” he said, “equals four.”

That drew the reaction he had expected. They shifted in their seats, gave each other odd looks, and were plainly not much convinced of his sanity. Good. He would move from the odd to the sane and bring them with him.

“Two plus two equals four. With a little thought, all of arithmetic, and a good deal of mathematics and geometry, can be inferred from that one statement, by trying inversions and reversals, by testing alternate cases. Having added them together, you might be tempted to remove two from two, thus inventing subtraction, and discovering zero, all at the same time. Subtract once again, and you will invent negative numbers. Two plus two can be restated as two twos—two times two. You have invented multiplication. Multiply the result by two again, and you have invented geometric expansion. Another brief intuitive leap, and you will invent division, the reverse of multiplication. Take a piece of graph paper, set one box equal to each unit of what you are multiplying, and see it as geometry.

“More and greater leaps of intuition would be required to discover or invent irrational numbers, imaginary numbers, calculus, and so on, but plainly those leaps were made.

“Two plus two equals four. Think of Ulan Baskaw’s first book as the terraforming equivalent of that simple formula. Just as our first simple equation opens the door that leads to all of mathematics, her book opened the door to a real science of terraforming. All that was new and important in her later works was there, in latent form, implied and inferable, in that first work. And yet those intuitive leaps, those connections, were not made for a thousand years.

“It was Anton Koffield who brought her work to the scientists on Greenhouse who could make the best use of it. But they were not exposed to Baskaw’s last and greatest known work, simply calledContraction . It is the knowledge in that work that makes the doom of all the living planets, including Earth, utterly predictable.

“Two plus two equals four. In the field of interstellar transportation, the timeshaft wormhole might be thought of as that same equation, with a similar wealth of possibilities implicit and inferable from it. And yet it would seemnone of the logical connections were ever made in the last thousand years or more, thatno one in all that time ever made the intuitive leaps that would have revealed so much more. We use a crude form of time travel to traverse the stars. Consult the sources, far back in the middle near-ancient period, and you will find that the idea of a wormhole between two points in spacepredates the idea of a wormhole link between two points in time. Yet there have been no explorations of that concept for uncounted generations. Timeshaft wormholes use time travel to facilitate travel through space, but it would seem there has been no exploration of whatthat implies. We know how intimate the relation is between time and space. To transit one is to transit the other. Then why have none of the connections been made?

“The answer, of course, is that theyhave been made, over and over again—but the discoveries have been suppressed just as often.That is the true secret of the Dark Museum. Any invention that would slightly improve conventional interstellar travel, for example by making timeshaft dropships faster or more efficient, is suppressed as long as possible. Sooner or later, there is an ‘outbreak,’ and a given improvement reaches the general public before it can be suppressed. A good example of that is temporal confinement systems. Compared to the plumber’s nightmare that is a cryogenic canister system, the new temporal confinements are vastly cheaper, safer, less costly, and require less space and mass aboard ship. They have significantly reduced the barriers to interstellar travel, even in just the past few decades.

“But still, the powers that be have managed to slow the rate of improvement. Nor are their motives dark and sinister. They seek to prevent otherwise inevitable chaos and suffering. By my admittedly rough and uncertain calculations, they have significantly delayed or permanently suppressed enough minor improvements to prevent at least three additional worlds from being terraformed. Three worlds that will never experience the sort of collapse and upheaval that killed Glister—and is about to kill Solace.

“But follow this logic to its extreme, and you’ll find that the best way to prevent death is to see to it that no babies are born. Furthermore, this policy of delay and suppression merely puts off the inevitable. Earth and all the other worlds will die just the same—just not as quickly.”

“What—what about going the other way?”

DeSilvo frowned at the interruption, but managed to keep his temper. It wasessential that he keep his temper. It was Jerand Bolt who had spoken up, of course. The man never was shy about barging in on a presentation. For once, however, he seemed to be asking a serious question rather than making a snide joke.

“What do you mean, Mr. Bolt?”

“Suppose instead they—we, humanity—pushed technological advancement so far and so fast that weexpanded from world to world, terraforming so many worlds so fast that we were expanding faster than the collapses could keep up with? There are always new worlds ahead, and we don’t fall back on Earth.”

DeSilvo frowned. “I’m not sure I followed that.”

Koffield spoke up. “I think I did,” he said. “In other words, we collapseoutward, if you will. We terraform one world, and before it collapses, we terraform two worlds farther out, beyond the worlds we’ve already used—and used up—in Settled Space—to hold the eventual refugees, and while those worlds are being settled, we terraform four more still farther out, and so on.”

Bolt nodded. “Yeah, like that.”

DeSilvo scowled harder, but held on to his composure. The idea had never even occurred to him, and he had no ready answer. But Koffield and the others came to his rescue.

“The galaxy’s big, but it’s not infinite,” he said. “And we couldn’t use all of it anyway. All of Settled Space is one tiny little spherical volume, centered on the Sun, in the midregions of the galaxy. The studies I’ve seen project that large swatches of the inner and outer zones of the galaxy would have virtually no terraformable planets. Too much hard radiation and other nasty stuff in close and in the spiral arms, plus there are problems with the relative abundance of various elements in large volumes of the outer galaxy. That still leaves a lot of possible planets for expansion—but a geometric rate of expansion would take much less time than you might think to use them all up. And then what? We’ve talked about the Collapse Wars that will come toward the end, as the last worlds still surviving struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by refugees and so on. Imagine the Collapse Wars multiplied by a thousand.”

“Even if it could be done, I’d be against it,” said Norla. “It makes humanity into some sort of plague expanding out from a central point, devouring all in its path, and then moving on after it has wrecked everything. How many worlds like Glister do you want? How many worlds like Mars?”

“I’d even suggest it’s immoral,” Ashdin said. “Life is obviously rare in the galaxy, but it’s plainly not impossible—we’rehere. It might have arisen elsewhere—or might arise elsewhere in the future. Suppose we terraformed every available world to suit us? We’d leave a whole galaxy full of contaminated, used-up, dead worlds of no use to anyone for the rest of time. We’d wreck all those potential living worlds forever, just so we could terraform them to suit us for a very brief span of time.”

“All right, all right,” Bolt said. “I promise not to rape the galaxy. It was just a question.” He turned to DeSilvo. “Sorry, Doctor,” he said. “I didn’t mean to sidetrack things. You were talking about contraction and suppressing technology.”

“Um, ah—yes.” Oddly enough, the interruption seemed to have gained him some points. Bolt’s apology for the interruption was by far the most courteous and respectful DeSilvo had ever seen Bolt. “Yes. Technological suppression. But that type of suppression is merely part of the story. Any and all efforts to invent faster-than-light transportation or communication have been ruthlessly put down—but not just for the obvious reasons. While it is true enough that FTL transport would massively destabilize the whole of Settled Space, drastically increase the rate of interstellar settlement and expansion—and probably bankrupt the Chronologic Patrol, which would no longer collect revenue from the timeshaft wormholes it would still have to guard—those are almost trivial considerations up against what I believe is the main issue.”

He paused, took a sip of water from the glass in front of him, and looked around the conference table. He had them. At least for the moment, he had them. All of them, even Yuri Sparten, were listening to him. All of what he had said had been sane, at least so far. But would he still have them when he crossed the next line? That was where it would start to sound lunatic.

“Two plus two equals four. That simple equation points the way forward, if only we have the wit to see it. Timeshafts are wormholes that move us through time. But inside the math, the engineering, the computational modeling required to build and control a timeshaft hide the tools and the knowledge needed to build an FTL spacecraft. They are hidden as deeply as calculus is hidden inside two plus two equals four.

“I can offer no proof of it, but I believe that this fact is a major reason that the Chronologic Patrol has always maintained a strict monopoly on timeshaft wormholes.

“But I digress, if only slightly. Two plus two equals four, and space and time are intimately linked, different sides of the same coin. The timeshaft, a crude and limited device for traveling through time, taught humankind how to travel faster than light. What was there that FTL could teach?

“There is an ancient joke about a physicist explaining relativity. The physicist tells his friend it is easy to envision the basic principles. Imagine, he tells him, a spinning toroid—a doughnut-shape—being fired out of a cannon. Then you just take away the cannon, and the doughnut, and the spin, and there you are. We rely so fully on the timeshafts that it is about that hard for us to envision true faster-than-light travel. But we must go a step further.

“FTL lets us travel between the stars without timeshafts. But knowledge implicit and inferable from the tools used to invent FTL, combined with information that can be derived from the study of large and powerful temporal confinements, points us forward to a way totravel in time without a timeshaft.

The room was silent, his audience plainly shocked. Time travel was the great evil, the great danger, against which all the precautions, all the defenses of the timeshaft wormholes and the whole power of the Chronologic Patrol were directed—and space travelers, above all other groups, were endlessly indoctrinated on the subject. He had spoken blasphemy, sacrilege, to a congregation full of true believers.

He pushed it further. He had to go on, say what he had come here to say.

“The crowning mistake of my career,” he said, “was in following Baskaw’s ideas in the wrong direction. Her work made it plain that the faster a world was terraformed, the sooner it would fail. I cannot now say for certain why I refused—willfully refused—to see and understand that, when it was plainly there before me.” Confession was good for more than the soul. Let them see that he was sorry, that his past behavior was hard for evenhim to comprehend, and perhaps they would better believe in his present sanity.

“The best explanation I can offer—and I know it is only a partial explanation—is that I believed too much in myself. My ideas, my organization, my plans and designs, were so brilliant and polished that I was certain they could overcome the immutable laws of nature enshrined in Baskaw’s equations. I was more than wrong—I was blind. Not only were the proofs that two plus two equals four in front of me, but so were the keys that would unlock the future. Because the future is made in the past.”

The room was dead silent. Some of them could already see where he was going. But even those who could not were alert, sensing that answers were at hand.

“Take a hundred years to terraform a world, and it will last a hundred before collapse. Take five hundred years, and it will survive five hundred years.So what will happen if we take a million years?

There it was. Out in front of them. Now for the rest of it. “We shall expand outward, as you suggested, Mr. Bolt. Deep into unknown space. Out to a planet as yet undetected. But also deep into time. We shall find our planet, but be careful to determine no more than its mass and its orbit. We shall detect no information that we might change, for fear of skewing causality. We shall move from our time to the distant, deep past, and initiate the terraforming process. Then we shall visit that world in different times, always moving forward in time relative to our initial visit. We will let a thousand, ten thousand, even a hundred thousand years pass between one visit and the next. We shall spend more time allowing a single wave of species to establish themselves, one small phase of the operation, than was ever spent on the longest-term terraforming project to date.

“This is not a project for one man, or eight or ten people, or even hundreds. We will need thousands of workers and technicians. We will need facilities, supplies, spacecraft, technology. I believe that Greenhouse would, for many reasons, best suit us as a base of operations—especially now that NovaSpot is operational.”

“Where are you going to get all that?” Norla Chandray demanded. “How are you going to recruit that many people? How are you going to convince Neshobe Kalzant to hand over that sort of hardware?”

“I’m not going to,” said DeSilvo. “You are. That is a major reason you are here. You are the people to whom Kalzant and the rest of the Solacian leadership will listen. They certainly will not listen to me. But they will know what you have seen, what you have learned. They will hear and believe what you tell them.”

“But this is madness!” Koffield cut in. “I can’t even begin to list all the reasons it’s insane. Go back in timea million years ? That would create endless threats and dangers to causality.”

“And we shall guard against those threats and dangers,” DeSilvo said. “For example, we will have strict restrictions on who and what can go into the deep past. No vehicle that could reach Earth, no device that could generate any sort of signal or static that might be detectable from long range.”

Strong, unreadable emotions played over Anton Koffield’s face. “Itcan work,” DeSilvo said. “We can make it work.” He took a datapad from the hidden pocket in the sleeve of his robe and held it up. “All the plans and projections and engineering estimates are here. Full information on the plan so far.”

“The plan doesn’t matter,” Koffield said. “I can’t believe for a moment that it could possibly work, but even if it could—ifit could—I have sworn an oath to protect the past from the future, to protect casuality. That is the sworn duty ofevery officer and enlisted person of the Chronologic Patrol.”

“Youaren’t a CP officer,” Yuri Sparten said. “Not anymore. I finally thought to check in the copy of the Grand Library data we took from the Solar System. It includes detailed service records of CP personnel. You’re listed as dead for more than a century, Admiral. Off the rolls. No pay accumulating, all survivor benefits long since paid off to your sister’s descendants. I checked the law sections too, and the CP regulations. There have been a few other cases of time-stranding and mistakes where people were kept in cryogenic storage for too long, that sort of thing. They’ve got regs that cover your situation. The way I read them, they’re supposed to let you off the hook and get on with your life. It also protects the CP from having to pay you full benefits forever, and it keeps the accountant ArtInts from having to keep an active file on you for the rest of time.”

“What do the regulations say, Mr. Sparten?” DeSilvo asked.

“I’ve, ah, got it right here. It’s ah, CP Regulations Part Three, Section Two, Paragraph 23.4 subparagraph B.” He cleared his throat and began to read from a datapad in front of him. “‘Should any officer or enlisted person be reported as presumed dead for a period of ten or more standard years, such officer or enlisted person in fact surviving but prevented from communicating with any or all commands or offices of the CP, by reason of physical incapacity, chronologic displacement, malfunction or failure of equipment, or similar unforeseen and nonpreventable circumstances, said circumstances not resulting from any dishonorable act or dereliction of duty on the part of said officer or enlisted person, or from the incarceration of the officer or enlisted person as ade facto orde jure prisoner of war or by incarceration by nonmilitary organizations, then that officer or enlisted person shall be considered as honorably discharged and/or retired effective as ten standard years from the date listed on the certificate of presumed death’—and it goes on from there to cover lots of other contingencies.”

“I think I followedmost of that,” said Jerand Bolt. “If you’re listed as dead for ten years, but it turns out you’re not, you get ten years’ pay and benefits and a discharge. But what’s the deal about being incarcerated? Why should it matter whether or not you’re locked up if you’re listed as dead?”

It was Koffield who answered. “If not for that clause, then a criminal gang or an enemy military could fake your death and keep you locked away, and have all that time to work on you, convince you to help them. After ten years and one day, they could show you the regulation, and your own death certificate, and say—‘You’re discharged. You’re released from your oath. Now it’s okay to help us with a clear conscience—and you’re still entitled to back pay from the CP.’ ”

DeSilvo could not help it. He stared hard at Anton Koffield in astonishment. When, precisely, had he worked up the nerve, or the curiosity, to check the regulations? How long had he beenpretending to be an admiral? How long had he let them all assume it? Or did it matter to this group? A glance around the room made it clear it did not.

It was a subtle concession to him, to DeSilvo, that Koffield considered himself free to act guided by nothing but his own conscience. Why else would Koffield have specifically mentioned being released from oaths?

“Thank you for clarifying that point, Admiral,” DeSilvo said, careful to use the title that Koffield had just admitted had long ago become merely a courtesy. It was a delicate moment, and one that he would have to handle carefully. He looked around the room, to all of them. “I understand your concerns. I have studied the potential flaws in this plan—technical objections, scientific objections, ethical objections, even the very basic question as to whether it is physically possible in the first place. I believe I have answers to all those objections, and we can discuss them when we review the plan in more detail.”

DeSilvo turned back to Koffield. “But your objection, Admiral, I regard as the most serious. That is why I wantedyou, more than anyone else, to come here, to Glister, and hear me out.”Because if I can convince you, you can convince everyone else, DeSilvo added silently to himself.And if I can convince you, I can convince anybody.

“I think that Mr. Sparten has made a good case that you are no longer legally bound by your oath. Whether or not you are still morally or ethically bound is, of course, a matter that you alone can decide.

“But I would suggest to you that, whatever its wording, theintent of that oath was not to protect causality—buthistory . To prevent the future from attacking, invading, thehuman past. To prevent someone from going back a hundred, a thousand years and altering the outcome of a battle, or an election, or an assassination attempt. But should the temporal laws and the CP oaths be extended to infinity, through all of time and space? There are any number of precautions we can and will take to prevent interference with history.”

“You can take all the precautions you want,” Koffield said. “None of them will make damage to causality—to history, if you must—absolutely impossible. There will always be a risk.”

“Yes,” DeSilvo said, thrilled to spot an opening, a gap in Koffield’s shield of honor and absolutes. He had granted the difference betweenhistory andcausality . Thathad to mean something. “There will be a risk, I believe, an extremely small one. But perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps it will be a very large risk. Perhaps we will discover later, after the fact, that it was a virtual certainty that our plan would result in massive damage to causality. If so, then I say to you it would still be worth the risk.

“Why? Because if we do not act,our history,our chain of causality,is going to die . All our projections show that not just our interstellar civilization, but the human race itself, will die out. Barring a miracle, we’ll be extinct somewhere between eight hundred and three thousand years from now. And not just the human race, butall complex life-forms. Earth will be blanketed, choked, and killed by a symbiote-mold thicker than the one on Mars, unless the planet is infested by something worse.

“Maybe—maybe—something will be dragged from the wreckage someday. Life of some sort will still survive on at least some of the ruined worlds. Some, perhaps even many, of the failed worlds will reevolve complex life in a few tens or hundreds of millions of years. Earth is probably the most likely world for life to reemerge. Perhaps some forms of complex life will even survive the collapse. Cockroaches, or rats, perhaps. But that is the best—thebest —we can hope for. If you remain absolutely faithful to the letter of your oath, and not to its spirit, that will be the best possible result of your choice.

“You have seen Solace dying, and Glister dead, and Mars, a corpse of a world tormented after death by the parasites that killed it. That is our future, if we leave the past alone. You know that. You have seen it.”

Koffield nodded, most reluctantly.

“It comes down to this, Admiral Koffield: I offer you a choice between absolutely rigid, literal-minded adherence to an oath that I doubt still binds you—and the survival of the human race, of life itself. Which shall it be?”

The silence hung heavy in the room, but the longer it lasted, the surer DeSilvo was of Koffield’s answer. He felt his heart singing, his soul shouting in triumph, as he read the face of his adversary, his ally, his mirror image.

At last, Admiral Anton Koffield, Chronologic Patrol (ret), nodded once again, paused a moment, then came to his feet. He looked around the room, at all the faces there—and seemed to see beyond them as well, to far-distant horizons, of past and future. Finally, he looked directly at Oskar DeSilvo.

“You are sure of your plans,” Koffield said. It was not a question, but it required an answer.

“I am,” said Oskar DeSilvo. “I am sure we are doomed without them, sure that there is a least a chance they will work, and sure that we must try them.”

“Very well,” he said. “I believe there is no hope if we go on as we are. Therefore, we have no choice but to change things. We must take great care, and great precautions. But it would seem our only hope of a future lies in visiting the past. Even if I personally believe that my oath still binds me, the law releases me from that oath, and in any event here we are beyond the reach or bounds of any law. Under the circumstances, my own opinion of myself must weigh very lightly in the balance.”

He paused one final time, very briefly, then plunged on to the end. “The past calls to us,” he said at last. “Let us go there.”