Chapter Three

HISTORY IN THE DARK

The great looming shapes of the dormant machines slumbered in the darkness, cocooned in protective blankets that blurred their shapes and purposes. A thin layer of dust, the accumulation of a hundred long years, lay upon them, obscuring the mothballed hardware just that little bit more.

Anton Koffield trudged wearily along the labyrinthine corridors, back toward the lifts that would carry him to the upper levels of DeSilvo City, to regions of light and warmth and human contact—at least to the degree any of those commodities were available on the frozen corpse of the world that was Glister.

He had learned a great deal on his exploration of the lower regions—and yet, in another sense, nothing at all. He had seen a lot of machines, true enough. Some of the hardware he found he could identify. Some he could not, at least not with full confidence. Certainly no sign of any autofacs, but he hadn’t really expected DeSilvo to leave anything that valuable out where it might be found.

The challenge was to fit what hecould identify into some sort of coherent whole. Knowing what sort of hardware DeSilvo had should at least tell him what DeSilvo was capable of, even if it did not reveal his intent. All very sensible in theory—but the machines that he had found were so powerful, so capable of so many things, as to provide him no real clue. DeSilvo could do nearly everything with them—and therefore might be planning to do almost anything.

But Koffield had knownthat much for some time.

He was tired, dead tired. Time to go back to his quarters. Time to go to bed.

 

The moment Koffield opened the door to his room, before he entered, he could hear soft breathing. Someone was there, waiting in the dark, behind the door. He instantly had to fight down his old training. He knew who was in the station. Of those, there were two people who might conceivably have the motive to go for him.

DeSilvo did not have the physical courage. Sparten would have the nerve to do it, and might well have dreamed up some damned-fool reason why it was his noble duty to kill Anton Koffield—but no, he would have come straight at Koffield, not waited in ambush.

But Anton Koffield had no wish to stake his life on that sort of amateur psychology. Better to—

But then the breathing turned to a gentle snore, and Koffield caught a whiff of a fragrance he knew quite well. He chuckled to himself. He was getting twitchy.

He reached around the doorframe and flipped on the lights by hand, then pushed the door the rest of the way open. There, sitting in the room’s one comfortable armchair, was Wandella Ashdin, sound asleep, a datapad on her lap.

Koffield stepped into the room, crossed to the chair, and gently tapped her on the shoulder. “Dr. Ashdin? Doctor?”

“Huh! What? Oh!” Dr. Ashdin looked around in bewilderment for a moment, then came back to herself. “Oh, for heaven’s sake. Forgive me, Admiral. I didn’t intend to doze off.”

“It’s quite all right,” Koffield said.

Dr. Ashdin struggled unsuccessfully to stifle a yawn. “Just, just give me a moment, please.”

“Of course,” Koffield said. There were a pair of scruffy yellow plastic chairs sitting with their backs against one wall of the room. Koffield got one of them, brought it over, and sat down facing Wandella Ashdin.

Ashdin looked about the way everyone imagined the ideal grandmother would look, with a gentle face framed by frizzy snow-white hair. Her sky-blue eyes somehow made her seem constantly surprised, and that was not far off. She was far from the most organized person in Settled Space. But her work, her research, was always first-class. And, at a guess, it was her work she was there to discuss.

“What’s on your mind, Dr. Ashdin?” Koffield asked.

She picked up the datapad off her lap and handed it to him. “This is,” she said. “It’s got my background report—basically a summary of prior events. The things that we’ve learned in bits and pieces here and there, put into some sort of rational order. Something everyone could read before the presentation and refer to later.”

Koffield took the datapad from her. “Why is it so important that you sat up in my room until all hours of the night before your presentation?”

Wandella smiled wryly. “Because it might get us all killed if DeSilvo doesn’t like it. And he won’t.” She stretched and yawned. “I tried like hell to tell the truth—but the truth is pretty hellish. I started out just doing a basic summing-up. I read it over tonight, and realized that it was something more like the case for the prosecution. It might go too far.”

“And you want me to take a look at it before you give copies to everyone?”

“That’s right. Tonight, if at all possible, so they can all have it in the morning.”

Koffield nodded reluctantly. So much for getting some rest himself. “I’d be happy to,” he said.

The two of them stood up, and Koffield saw her to the door.

Ashdin gestured at the datapad. “I suppose that’s the first draft of the first history of all this,” she said. “Very strange.”

“What is?”

“To be living a part of the history that I am writing.” She tapped her finger on the datapad Koffield held. “And something else that I find odd. I have to keep remembering that practically everything in there is a secret we’ve uncovered. No one else knows all of what we know. History isn’t usually classified.”

“Or maybe it usually is—but we never know,” said Koffield with a smile.

Thatis a most disturbing idea,” said Ashdin. “Good night, Admiral. And thank you.”

 

Koffield closed the door behind his guest, then sat down in the chair she had just vacated. He began to read, not trying to take the whole thing in at once, but skimming over it, trying to get the feel, the flavor of the piece before studying it carefully.


Just over a thousand years ago, in the year 4306 of the Common Era, someone named Ulan Baskaw wrote the first of a series of books that were of great importance to the field of terraforming. We know virtually nothing about Baskaw . . .


Not even if Baskaw was male or female, though the convention was to assume Baskaw was a woman. Koffield skipped down the columns of text, reading a bit here and there.


. . . To oversimplify things almost to the point of absurdity, her work put forward the idea that, when terraforming a given planet, one could use a nearby world as a sort of nursery, a breeding ground for species one planned to introduce. . . . There was much more to her ideas that we will not explore here. Suffice it to say Baskaw’s ideas were truly revolutionary.

. . . between the dates of Baskaw’s second and third books, the attempt to terraform Mars experienced its final collapse. A careful examination of the third volume reveals subtle textual clues that suggest Baskaw did in fact visit Mars in the period just prior to the collapse. . . .

Her third book demonstrated not only that some terraformed worldscould fail, but thatall terraformed worlds would, inevitably, fail. Again, to oversimplify to an almost criminal degree, Baskaw found that the faster a world was terraformed, the sooner it would fail.

. . . Her fourth, and, so far as we know, final work is entitled, very simply,Contraction . It was discovered twice, once by Dr. DeSilvo, then by Admiral Koffield—in the Dark Museum of Suppressed Technology. It therefore represents the clearest possible evidence that Baskaw’s work was, at least in part, deliberately suppressed.


And they did a good job of it,Koffield reflected. Baskaw’s work did not seem to have been paid the slightest attention for centuries.


. . . her first three books were discovered—and appropriated—by Dr. DeSilvo. He plagiarized her works, then did what he could to destroy all surviving references to the original. He erased the texts of her first three books from the Grand Library and claimed her ideas as his own.

Dr. DeSilvo then took these appropriated ideas and used them as the basis for a new terraforming project on the planet Solace.

. . . he applied Baskaw’s techniques and completely ignored the warning in Baskaw’s third book, which used a further expansion of her own mathematics to prove that the techniques DeSilvo was using would inevitably result in an unstable ecology, doomed to collapse.


And the collapse is happening right about now, back on Solace. If only that were the worst of it. Koffield read on, skimming quickly.


Dr. DeSilvo in effect suddenly had power over an entire world, indeed an entire star system. He had at his disposal a vast array of equipment—spacecraft, earthmoving equipment, massive power generators, and so on . . . he quickly established a clear pattern of “borrowing” those resources for other purposes. . . .

The resources of the terraforming project were used to pay for various medical and life-extension services for Dr. DeSilvo, to finance the DeSilvo archive in the Grand Library. . . . Dr. DeSilvo out and out stole a large number of spacecraft, artificial intelligence systems, and other major pieces of equipment.

. . . When he tapped in to the mother lode of suppressed inventions—the Dark Museum, he could not resist the chance to go further, much further. . . .

But simple information—data, schematics, plans, and so on—was not enough for the plan that was gradually forming in his mind. He would need workshops and facilities of all sorts . . .

He had to build the machines he would need to build the machines to build the machine to build the machines he wanted.

. . . In all of this, he had to work through robots, teleoperators, artificial intelligence systems, and so on. He did it all without any witting human assistants—though no doubt many unwitting ones.

. . . He wanted glory. He wanted to shower technological wonders down on a grateful and astonished humanity and bask in their appreciation. But how?

. . . Once Solace was completed, he would set himself up as a wizard of invention and dole out inventions and discoveries claiming the credit for himself. He arranged things so that, if things had gone as planned, his “workshop” would have opened for business decades after he should have died, given any sort of normal human life span.

The likely reason for that was to put several extra decades at least between himself and the “diversions” of material. He of course planned to use cryogenic and/or temporal confinement to wait out the necessary period of time.


Koffield was about to skip down a bit farther, but a line or two caught his eye, and he scrolled back up.


. . . Given what is known of Dr. DeSilvo’s psychology, it is quite possible he was going to open that workshop and present himself to the outside universe as his own son—DeSilvo Junior.


Thatwas an interesting theory. Koffield could believe it. It fit in with DeSilvo’s endless rejuvenation treatments and transplants, his quest for eternal youth. But that quest was tied up with another, more morbid tendency. Did Ashdin discuss that? He skimmed ahead. Yes. There it was.


It would also fit in well with an odd psychological need—Dr. DeSilvo’s impulse—perhaps even compulsion—to mimic death. Dr. DeSilvo built himself a very fine tomb on Greenhouse and arranged his own simulated death over a century ago. He spent much of the intervening time in temporal confinement. He also used cryogenics or temporal confinement to wait out other periods of time. And, he did, in fact, literally die, several times, each time being placed in powerful temporal confinements or cryostorage systems while his medical staff spent weeks or months planning how best to revive him. On some level, Dr. DeSilvo enjoyed being dead. “Returning” to life as his own son or grandson might well fulfill that peculiar need . . .

. . . Dr. DeSilvo first selected the location he wanted for his cache—a base on the planet Glister. His projections, using Baskaw’s methods, were that Glister would be a dead world by the point in time he had chosen. He would then be able to scavenge the abandoned wreckage of the world in order to build the facility he needed.

But, if he wished tohide his secrets in the future, he had toreach the future. The obvious technique would be to put his treasures in hidden storage, put himself in temporal confinement, and simply wait. But his FTL drives would deteriorate if left in untended storage for that long. Besides which, the equipment in question was quite large . . .

He decided to move his treasure out of the Solacian star system, while avoiding the use of the timeshaft-wormhole transport system.

But he then made an error—a huge error, with tremendous consequences for all those in the Glistern and Solacian star systems, and perhaps, for all of humanity.


And, for what it was worth, some pretty nasty consequences for a certain Anton Koffield. Consequences that were still being played out. He could see by glancing ahead that this was the part of the story where Dr. Ashdin really took the gloves off. He read through her account thoughtfully, concentrating on Wandella’s analysis.


. . . He chose Glister of the future as the space-time point in which to build his facility, because his projections showed that Glister would have collapsed utterly by then. . . . He would make doubly sure that his treasure was safe from prying eyes if he wrecked the timeshaft wormhole that served Glister.

Part of his fleet of robotic ships he would send direct to Glister without benefit of FTL or wormhole transit—so-called slowboats. They would travel far below the speed of light, taking decades to make the journey.

Other ships, rigged for FTL travel, would take a shortcut to the future—straight through the wormholes. During that transit, they would track certain parameters of the wormhole with a precision great enough to accomplish his next goal: the destruction of the wormhole. . . .

Dr. DeSilvo claims that his plan assumed that the Chronologic Patrol ShipStandfast would flee the attack and not respond quickly or aggressively enough to stop all of the ships driving for the wormhole. He claims he did not intend to cause harm or casualties as he forced passage of the wormhole. He imagined the guard ship standing off at a safe distance and firing carefully aimed single shots at the attackers. Either he was monstrously incompetent or lying when he says he tried to avoid causing death or injury.

Instead of standing well off from the Intruders—as the ships came to be called—theStandfast went straight for them, diving in with all guns blazing, risking—and losing—the ship and the lives of all aboard in order to try to fulfill her mission. That was just the first of DeSilvo’s miscalculations concerning his wormhole transit plan.

. . . When the Intruders came through the uptime side of the wormhole, they used similar tactics. TheUpholder fought back, taking serious damage herself, her crew suffering many deaths and other casualties.

Three of the Intruders survived the wormhole transit and escaped theUpholder. Each carried a complete set of the information Dr. DeSilvo had diverted.

. . . the three surviving Intruders returned from Glister to the vicinity of Circum Central. Each deployed a pair of drones, then departed, returning their valuable gear—mainly their FTL drives—to Glister.

. . . They continued their attack as if the other ships were not present. TheUpholder, though badly damaged, attempted to stop them . . . TheUpholder, with great skill and luck, managed to destroy two of the drones attacking the wormhole.

. . . Captain Koffield saw he had no choice but to destroy the wormhole. This he attempted to do—and he spent years believing he had done so, years in which every other person believed he had done it as well. People blamed him for the death of those aboard the convoy ships that were destroyed, for the loss of the relief supplies they were carrying to Glister, even, quite illogically, for the collapse of Glister itself, decades later. In truth, the loss of that convoy probablyextended the planet’s survival time. More people died sooner as a result of the relief convoy’s failure to arrive, leaving fewer mouths to feed in the grim decades that followed.

. . . Captain Koffield was blamed for all of this, and much more . . . The destruction of the wormhole was not his doing; the one surviving Intruder had seized control of the wormhole and wrecked it. It would have been destroyed even if Koffield had abandoned his post and ordered his ship home.

All of Settled Space looked to Captain Koffield and saw blood on his hands. Only Dr. Oskar DeSilvo knew he was not to blame—and Dr. Oskar DeSilvo said and did nothing.


Not feeling entirely comfortable reading about himself, Koffield moved forward a bit in the text, to where Dr. Ashdin further discussed DeSilvo’s motives. As if anyone could ever know them for sure. If and when the true story of DeSilvo’s career got out, the debate over his motives would never end. But he was interested in what Wandella’s thoughts on the matter might be.


. . . The game was not worth the candle. Even if he dismissed the harm to others from his calculations, the effort and cost needed to fly through, then destroy, the wormhole far exceeds the value Oskar DeSilvo gained from the effort. So why did he do it?

. . . there was one entity, one group, that had more power than he did. The Chronologic Patrol controlled the paths between the stars, controlled the gates that linked past and future.

If DeSilvo, working alone, could defeat or, better yet, humiliate such a powerful organization, then surely that would prove that his own power was still intact. Besides, DeSilvo had already defeated the Patrol once, by finding, penetrating, and robbing the Dark Museum.

But there was a good chance that the Chronologic Patrol was like the lion bitten by the flea: The flea celebrated his victory, but the lion didn’t even know that he’d been bitten. The Chronologic Patrol likely did not know that anyone had so much as found the wreckage of the Dark Museum.

But to attack a timeshaft wormhole—to brush back the defenders, to defeat the security systems, to come from the direction no one expected, to wreck the wormhole—and to come and go traveling faster than light, demonstrating how far beyond their crude devices you have gone—then they wouldhave to know they had been assaulted, been defeated.

All that damage had to be done simply because Oskar DeSilvo had to thumb his nose at the Chronologic Patrol. . . .


Well, perhaps. Koffield stopped reading there, set the datapad down, and rubbed his eyes. No explanation was ever going to be entirely satisfactory so far as he was concerned. But Dr. Ashdin had made a good start.

He would have to read through the whole report by morning, but Anton Koffield already knew he was going to approve its distribution. It was honest. It was accurate. And yes, it was angry. But cold, hard, dispassionate anger was an entirely justified reaction to all DeSilvo had done.

In any event, the danger in speaking plainly was as clear to Dr. Ashdin as it was to Koffield. As for the report endangering the rest of them . . . how much more danger could they be in? DeSilvo could kill them all at any time, for any reason, or no reason.

No. If as careful a scholar as Wandella Ashdin was prepared to speak truth to power, and do so in the stronghold of the man she was judging, then he had no right to stop her from so doing.

The question was, would DeSilvo feel he had the right, and the need, to stop her—or even all of his guests—from doing anything, ever again?

They’d all find out the next day.