Chapter Four

MIRRORS AND SHADOWS

Yuri Sparten stood in the darkness and watched the death of planet Earth. Again. Every run of the simulation model ended the same way.

“Starting to believe him?” asked Norla Chandray, looking up at the image of a ruined world hanging in the darkness. She made sure the data was stored, then reset for the next run.

“Maybe,” Yuri said. “But we’re still depending a lot onhis system, his ArtInts, his programming, his initial data. I won’t really be happy until we can do some runs that aren’t at all dependent onhim. ” He paused a moment and looked up again at the blank spot in the middle of the air, where the simulation system had shown them the Earth that was to be. “Well, nothappy, of course—but that’s what it will take to startconvincing me.”

Norla nodded. “That’s about the way I figure it. But let’s just say it’s getting harder todis believe. We already knew the terraformed worlds were in big trouble. Why should Earth be immune?”

Yuri shrugged. “Why should it?” he agreed glumly. Plainly, Earthwasn’t immune. That was proved in every run of the model. As the terraformed worlds collapsed, their refugees descended on Earth, bringing any number of highly evolved microbes and other unpleasant things back home with them. The details of how and when it happened changed from one run of the simulation to the next, but always, sooner or later—often sooner—Earth died. In some runs, the home planet lived fifteen hundred years or more into the future. Other times, it was little more than half that long. Only rarely did it last much longer than a thousand.

But DeSilvo claimed to have found a way out. All they had to do was deal with the devil, and he would save them all. “So is it today?” Yuri asked.

“What?”

“The big meeting.”

“Yes. And you should be there.”

“Probably best that I wasn’t,” Yuri replied. “I’m really not that excited to be in the same room withhim. ” After all, he had done his best to kill DeSilvo a few days before.

“You’re allowed to say his name, you know,” Norla said, plainly amused. “You can say ‘DeSilvo’ instead of—” she paused to place one hand outstretched in melodramatic fashion and put the other to her forehead—“‘him.’

Yuri Sparten laughed and smiled—two things he hadn’t done in a long time. Up until a few days before, he’d been playing the part of a sort-of double agent, watching Koffield for the SCO Station Security Force. What he had not realized was that, more than likely, the Chronologic Patrol Intelligence Corps saw all of what the SSF saw—or that DeSilvo had been tapping the SSF’s comm since well before Yuri had been born. Yuri had found out the hard way that he was not suited to such work, to the secrets and the evasions and the out-and-out lies. He was surprised to find how much of a relief it was to be exposed, to have the game be over and done with. He was discovering that he liked himself a great deal better, now that the mask had come off.

“All right, all right,” he said. “I don’t think it’s such a good idea if I spend much time withDeSilvo. Better?”

“Better. But you’re going to have to, sooner or later. We’re all cooped up here together. And for what it’s worth, I don’t think DeSilvo will enjoy today’s meeting much. Did you read Dr. Ashdin’s background report?”

“Not yet.”

“You should. She wasn’t pulling any punches. It’ll be worth hearing what she has to say.”

“Well, maybe,” said Yuri. He made an adjustment to one of the projection controls and thought for a moment. He couldn’t sulk in his quarters forever—and if his whole life revolved around avoiding DeSilvo, then he had more or less surrendered control of his lifeto DeSilvo. Why should he do that? “Maybe I will be there.”

“Good,” said Norla. She was checking her setting, getting ready for the next simulation run. “But there’s something else. Something the admiral heard from Marquez.”

“What?”

“Marquez said that DeSilvo told him that there was a diehard colony not all that far from here,” Norla said.

Yuri looked up at her sharply. “What?”

“Diehards. About seven hundred kilometers away. Sounds like DeSilvo was talking as if he knew all about them.”

Yuri’s insides froze up hard as the ice on the surface of Glister. Whatever good mood or marginally less hostile attitude toward DeSilvo he might have had died in that moment. Everyone knew about diehards—the saying was they might die hard, but the way they lived was harder. They might hold out two or three generations, in whatever wreckage was left behind when the main population left, but there were limits to how much could be scavenged, how completely supplies could be used and recycled, limits to how long the machines vital to their survival could be kept running, how often they could be repaired. And two or three generations was long enough for inbreeding to be a problem, or for any system of succession to the leadership to collapse. From what Yuri had read, it was political problems as often as starvation or life-support collapse that did in diehard colonies.

“What’s he done for them?” Yuri asked, already knowing the answer.

“So far as Marquez could tell, nothing.”

Yuri looked at Norla. Her expression was carefully neutral. Yuri couldn’t help but wonder why she was telling him this, and telling him now.

“This place could support hundreds of people indefinitely,” he said. “And in all this time he hasn’t lifted a finger to help starving people when he could fly a food drop to them in two hours?”

“Hold it. Hold it. We don’t know they’re starving.”

“Ever hear of an overweight diehard?”

“Ever hear of a diehard who didn’t shoot first and ask questions later—or maybe not ask at all? And besides, think about it. DeSilvo was in temporal confinement for something like a hundred years. He was still in it up until a few days before we landed—and we’ve only been here a few days. I can’t even see how he’d know they were there. We did an infrared-signature search from orbit, andwe didn’t pick up anything. What sort of detectors hashe got?”

“He could have anything,” Yuri said. “Stars alone know what he pulled out of the Dark Museum.”

“But he couldn’t know for sure they’d be there unless he had some sort of vast network of ArtInts scanning the planet for the last hundred years, or unless he started looking for diehards the second he came out of temporal confinement.”

“Seems like a lot of trouble to take either way,” Yuri conceded. “But keeping sensor equipment running that long in this environment without human maintenance would be close-on impossible. Probably a lot easier to search for the diehards once he woke up.”

“Agreed. Butwhy would he search for diehards?” Norla asked. “Seven hundred kilometers away makes it a pretty wide search radius if he’s just trying to secure his perimeter or some damn thing. And why would he make it known he found them? Either he just accidentally let it slip to Marquez, or else he had a reason for doing it. And I don’t think it could be an accident.”

“Why not?”

“DeSilvo’s done nothing but plan for our arrival since before you were born. He’s a planner, a schemer. He’s not the sort who does things impulsively.”

“So what would his reasons be?”

Norla shook her head. “I don’t know. But unless he’s even more out of touch about human behavior than I thought, he’dhave to know that Marquez would repeat the news—and that sooner or later, probably sooner, the word would get to you—the son of Glistern refugees,and the man who tried to kill him a few days ago. So why would he do that?”

Yuri shrugged. “Maybe whatever plan he’s got can’t be affected by what I do.”

“Or maybe it absolutelydepends on you.”

“So, what? Should I do exactly the opposite of what I’d do if I did think it was just by chance that he mentioned it?”

Norla smiled. “That’s got so many conditionals in it I’m not even sure I followed it the whole way. But maybe that would be a good idea—if we knew for sure what he expected you to do—and if we knew for sure that wedidn’t want his plan to succeed.”

“But we haven’t the faintest idea what sort of plan he has!”

“Or even if the diehards are there. Maybe he’s just plain been alone too long and has a tendency to babble. Maybe he was just making conversation. Or maybe he was lying. Maybe there isn’t any diehard colony out there—but he wants us to think there is.”

Yuri groaned. “I thought I was out from under all this,” he said. “No more spying, no more cover stories, no more secrets.” A few minutes before, Yuri had felt lucky to be unexpectedly free of the land of secrets, out of the forest of mirrors. Truth and lies, right and wrong, honor and deception had become mere reflections of each other, each reflection reversing the original, before being reversed again in some further mirror. Now he was thrust back in again, his return as involuntary as his departure.

“Sorry about that,” Norla said. “But I think DeSilvo’s put us all back into the game.”

Yuri nodded and returned to his work, setting up the next run. “Yeah,” he said. He worked silently for a moment, and spoke again. “I’ll be there for Dr. Ashdin’s presentation,” he said. “I have to look at him, see if I can get some sort of feel for what he’s doing.”

Have to. The words echoed in his head, for they were all too true. He had no choice in the matter.And who was it who took away my freedom to choose? Yuri knew the answer to that one all too well. He was already doing what DeSilvo wanted, his motions and gestures as utterly controlled, as involuntary—and as meaningless—as the motions of DeSilvo’s reflection, a shadow forever trapped inside a mirror.

 

They met in the usual conference room. Koffield got there a bit early and watched as the others came in. DeSilvo arrived last, his expression completely neutral, a chessmaster’s face, carefully arranged so as to reveal absolutely nothing.

The rest of the party having assembled, Koffield nodded and looked around the table. “Shall we begin?” he asked.

“If we must,” DeSilvo said. “The tone of Dr. Ashdin’s written report was far different from what I expected it to be. It was my impression that it was not to be anywhere near as accusatory as it seems to have become. I thought Dr. Ashdin’s written report was simply to gather together a coherent narrative of past events.”

“Yeah—so we maybe we can figure out better what you got wrong and what you got right—this time,” said Jerand Bolt.

DeSilvo glared at the source of the interruption. “If you please, Bolt, I would appreciate if we could maintain a level of discourse on a professional, if not scholarly, level.” The fact that Bolt had saved DeSilvo’s life a few days before clearly did not earn him much license.

“Right,” said Bolt. “I’ll do that.”

“I’d appreciate it,” DeSilvo answered smoothly. He looked past Bolt to Wandella Ashdin, who sat between Bolt and Koffield’s place at the far end of the table. “Dr. Ashdin. You’re a scholar, not an advocate. Surely you agree that this need not be an adversarial proceeding.”

“I agree that I do notwish it to be adversarial, and it was not my intent to make it so. But I fear I can see no way to avoid that result completely. We are here to review and consider what has already happened, with the goal of deciding what to do next—and also to decide whether or not we should be guided by your ideas of how to proceed.

“You yourself said that we must draw our own conclusions, because you felt you could not entirely trust yourself or your data. Indeed,you brought us to this place in part for the purpose of examining the situation and providing you with our views. And, needless to say,you caused most of what happened, and it was, ultimately,your actions that brought us to this place, and these circumstances. How can we judge the matters before us without, in some degree, judging you and your actions? Tell me how to square that circle, and I will do it.”

She paused briefly, but was greeted with nothing but silence. “There is no law here, no social restraint on you. You control our access to light, food, air, water, warmth, our ability to leave, and virtually everything else. There can be no middle ground. We must have the courage to judge our jailer, knowing he could, at a whim, be our executioner, or else we must speak so as to please you—in which case there was no point at all to bringing us here.”

DeSilvo did not answer at first. He looked around the room. His fingers twitched for a moment, as if he were about to start drumming them on the table, but then he brought his hand under control. “Your points are all well taken, Dr. Ashdin. I do not agree with them—but my situation is strange, as well. In order to get what I want from you—your honest evaluations and true opinions—I must accept certainother honest and true thoughts. I reluctantly withdraw my objections.”

Koffield was fascinated. He had thought they had been brought there because DeSilvo was a sane man who knew he might have driven himself mad, cut himself off from humanity and humanness in new and strange ways. But he was starting to understand that DeSilvoknew he was mad and wanted them all there to push him back to sanity. DeSilvo, indeed all of them, teetered precariously, balanced on the point of a knife. Tilt too far one way or another, and it would be all over. The only safety, the only way forward, was in the extremely narrow middle ground, where madness and sanity stood in judgment of each other.

There was no safe way to say any of that. But then, there was no longer any safe way to say or do anything. “Perhaps it would be best if we got started,” he said. “Dr. Ashdin?”

“Thank you, Admiral.” She stood up and looked around the room.

“I will begin by amplifying a few points made in the written background report,” she said. But another voice cut in before she could go on.

“Excuse me, Dr. Ashdin,” said Dixon Phelby. “Before you begin, I have a question regarding one point in the background report. If Baskaw’s work was suppressed hundreds of years ago, why wasn’t DeSilvo stopped from using it when he started talking up the terraforming of Solace?”

“I think I can answer that,” said Koffield. “It seems as if it was my old outfit, the Chronologic Patrol, that did a lot of the suppressing. Five or six hundred years is a long time for an institution to remember a certain thing. More than likely, they simply lost track of what they had suppressed, and failed to monitor properly for a fresh outbreak of the same idea. Once an idea gets past them, and there is public knowledge of something they want to have stopped, it’s too late. The genie is out of the bottle and can’t be stuffed back in. By the very act of successfully making Baskaw’s ideas public, DeSilvo had defeated them.”

“And ‘suppress’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘wipe out’ or ‘erase,’ ” said Norla Chandray. “It can mean ‘slow down’ or ‘delay.’ After all, they did manage to keep Baskaw’s ideas from getting out for several centuries. We saw lots of things in the Dark Museum that had been suppressed five hundred years ago, but are now in common use. What happened to Baskaw’s work is just more of the same.”

“Does that satisfy you on that point, Mr. Phelby?” Ashdin asked.

“Yes, pretty much. Please forgive the interruption.”

“Not at all,” Ashdin replied. “It was a valid point. Now then.” She paused and looked about the room. “I will begin by touching on certain events after the horrific Second Battle of Circum Central. After surviving that disaster, and a journey of tremendous hardship, Captain Koffield got his ship home. However, because his ship could no longer use the destroyed timeshaft wormhole, he and his crew arrived home eight decades into their own future. TheUpholder and all aboard her were home, and yet marooned, trapped in their own future, prevented from returning by the very laws they had enforced.”

Something in her shifted as she began to speak. She stood taller, her voice became louder and stronger, taking on the tones of an academic addressing her classroom. No longer a refugee-scholar wandering the starlanes, she had become a university professor again, dispassionate, and yet impassioned, speaking with the confidence of one who had mastered her material—and wanted her class to understand that she was planning a most challenging final exam.

“Koffield had followed his orders and done everything he was supposed to do, and done it splendidly. He had protected the past against an assault from the future. His superiors promoted him, decorated him—and put him up on a very high shelf. The political climate made it impossible for him to command another ship. Officially, he was a hero. Realistically, his career was over.”

Koffield knew that the others in the room were looking at him, but he kept his gaze fixed on Ashdin, who addressed the gathering as impersonally as if he and DeSilvo were long dead rather than in the room, close enough for her to touch. But what was he supposed to do? Burst into tears? It was no particular effort to keep his face impassive.

“The shelf they put him up on was a meaningless and vaguely defined assignment to the Grand Library. In the eighty years that had passed since his departure, the terraforming of Solace had been declared complete—and final collapse of Glister hadnot occurred.

“Both of these events were significant to another man then resident in the Grand Library habitat—Dr. Oskar DeSilvo.

“I wish to put his actions at the Grand Library in broader moral context. To do so, we must first turn to what DeSilvo’s fleet of ships did when they arrived in the Glister system. The three surviving FTL craft were programmed to rendezvous with the slowboat fleet, and this they did. They transferred their cargoes and their datastores, and configured themselves for the final assault on Circum Central. Each of the three FTL craft took a pair of attack drones aboard, flew them to the vicinity of Circum Central, released them, then departed before the attack even began. They returned to the slowboat fleet, then about a hundred astronomical units outside the Glister system.

“Even from that vantage point, it was plain that Glister had not yet collapsed. Though his contingency planning had not been all it could have been in other ways, at least DeSilvo had allowed for the possibilities that his eighty-year projection might be inaccurate. In such a circumstance, the fleet was programmed to put itself in a long, slow orbit of the planet, tens of billions of kilometers out from the orbit of Glister itself, and wait for the inevitable—vultures circling in the darkness, waiting for the victim to expire.

“Like all good scavengers, DeSilvo’s ships didn’t hesitate to hurry the victim along just a bit by wrecking the wormhole and making transit to Glister far more difficult. Consider: The slowboats were programmed to deal with the contingency of Glister still being populated. They simply went into a distant parking orbit. But the FTL ships, part of the same fleet, faced with the same contingency,went back and wrecked the wormhole anyway . I should also note that DeSilvo had enough confidence in his prediction of Glister’s collapse to create the whole huge project I have described. Butnever once did he make any effort to warn the Glisterns . All his efforts were engaged in a plan to take advantage of the catastrophe’s aftermath.

“Let us turn to the other event—DeSilvo’s encounter with Koffield at the Grand Library. Here too, I believe, is an insight into DeSilvo’s mind. Four ships were utterly destroyed at Circum Central, and one other damaged beyond repair. Thousands were either dead already, or in peril of their lives because the relief supplies were lost. All that, thanks to DeSilvo’s actions, actions for which he allowed Koffield to be blamed. But all that was far away, remote, far from DeSilvo’s personal experience. He made no effort of any kind to make restitution or to compensate for any of the losses he had caused.

“But hesaw Koffield, face-to-face, at a cocktail party. Hesaw the man he had injured, and the insult and humiliation that Koffield suffered. I think Admiral Koffield would be the first to agree that his own emotional distress was the least of the injuries caused by DeSilvo’s actions. But the difference was this: DeSilvowitnessed that distress. He tried to make amends, even if the amends were ludicrously inadequate. Later, as we shall see, DeSilvo went to a great deal of trouble to cause Koffield harm once again—after Koffield was safely out of the way,where DeSilvo could not see or hear him. Later still, DeSilvo arranged for a way to confess his crimes to Koffield from light-years away.

“This fits a pattern of DeSilvo hiding away, keeping himself removed, acting at a distance. He is capable of inflicting terrible harm on others, so long as they are far away—but he cannot bear to see suffering he has caused, no matter how slight.

“In any event, DeSilvo met Koffield and took misplaced pity on a man who needed no pity at all. DeSilvo then made another of the greatest mistakes of his career. He offered Koffield a chance to work in the DeSilvo Institute, where they were preparing a history—actually, more of a DeSilvo hagiography—of the Solacian terraforming project. This simple act was DeSilvo’s undoing.

“While working at the DeSilvo Institute, Koffield discovered a reference to Baskaw’s work, then discovered that the works themselves had been erased. He tracked down surviving copies of the text. He studied them in detail and realized that they proved, very clearly, that Solace would fail in a manner similar to Glister’s failure. He put a rush message, containing his preliminary results, aboard theChrononaut VI, the next ship outbound to Solace, then spent several frantic weeks refining and expanding his work. Meantime, he booked passage aboard theDom Pedro IV, bound for Solace. He planned to deliver a warning in person.

“Koffield studied Baskaw’s antique mathematics and made a terrifying discovery: It was not merely Solace that would fail.The problem was systemic to all terraforming procedures: The faster a world is terraformed, the faster it will fail.All the terraformed worlds—which is to say, every inhabited world but Earth—would, eventually, fail.

“But DeSilvo discovered what Admiral Koffield was doing. Telling himself that he was acting to prevent needless panic on Solace, he sabotaged theDom Pedro IV, reprogramming its navigation system to travel direct to Solace without any use of timeshaft wormholes. In effect, he converted theDom Pedro IV into an interstellar slowboat. As a result of this, the crew was kept in cryogenic sleep nearly five decades longer than intended in the flight plan. Two crew members died as a direct result—and, of course, the ship and ship’s company were suddenly stranded one hundred and twenty-seven years in their own future. Thus, DeSilvo had time-stranded Koffield twice, for a total of more than two hundred years.

“By then, of course, Koffield’s warning was far too late. The rush message he had sent aboard theChrononaut VI had been read and ignored, and the disappearance of theDom Pedro IV had become a minor local legend. The story was barely remembered nearly thirteen decades after the fact.

“In the meantime, DeSilvo was busy being dead again—a favorite refuge for him. During the time Koffield was still doing his research at the Grand Library, DeSilvo entered temporal confinement while his medical staff grew a new heart for him.

“After he was revived, he did not focus on Baskaw’s work, and, I suspect, found many reasons to do anything, everything, but. It was not until years later that he began to reconsider his actions. It was something close to ten years after the departure of the sabotagedDom Pedro IV before DeSilvo finally looked once again at Baskaw’s work and applied modern mathematics and analysis to it. He reached the conclusions that Baskaw had been right when she warned that a Solace-style terraforming was inherently unstable, and that Koffield’s warning had been legitimate. However, DeSilvo convinced himself that it was already too late to warn Solace, that to do so would do more harm than good.”

Wandella Ashdin paused a moment and looked about the room. “So far, my account has mainly been a cataloging of what Dr. DeSilvo didwrong . Now we must come to what he didright . He acted hesitantly, cautiously, and made sure to insulate himself from consequences as much as possible. But, in all justice, Dr. DeSilvo had the courage to see that his past projections had been spectacularly wrong. It would be rash indeed to have faith in further predictions without some testing of his methods, comparing predictions against interim results—and it could take decades to gather that data.

“He thought long and hard about how best to make use of those decades and how best to maintain, expand, and finally make use of the tremendous resources that he still controlled.

“So, at last, he began to make substantive moves, to do more than pour a token thimbleful of water on the forest fire he had so carelessly ignited.

“It seems highly likely that this was the first time he sat down and read Baskaw’s fourth, and, so far as we are aware, final work, simply entitledContraction. This was the book he found in the Dark Museum, one that Anton Koffield later discovered as well.

“The contraction of the title is, of course, the contraction of interstellar civilization, the inevitable withdrawal back toward the Solar System and Earth, as the terraformed planets fail, one by one.

“Dr. DeSilvo began to run increasingly more detailed and sophisticated simulations of the fates of the various worlds and their interactions with each other. He modeled the effects of back-migration, economic destabilization, population pressure, and the psychological effect on the population as the knowledge of the coming collapse spreads. He also applied terraform modeling to study biological contamination.

“The results of his simulations were bad—indeed they could hardly be worse. Once his data and models were reasonably refined, he discovered that every test run ended the same way: not with the Earth as the last surviving world after the Interstellar Contraction was complete, but with Earth overwhelmed by population spikes of incoming refugees, political upheaval, and perhaps war, and, worst of all, by biological back-contamination and crossbreeding. Plagues sweep the planet. Hybrid microbes, viruses, molds, spores, and worse infest everything, eat everything, choke off food supplies for native species. By the end of every run, humanity—indeed all vertebrate species—are extinct. Contraction goes as far as it can, all the way down to zero.

“This was the data he could not bring himself to believe, the predictions he could not trust after all his other predictions had failed.

“He suddenly found himself in a position to answer a question he hadn’t thought to ask himself for decades, perhaps centuries.Why were certain inventions suppressed? The Chronologic Patrol’s core task, after all, was to protect the past from the future, to prevent any form of time travel that might threaten causality. The Dark Museum should have been full of machines and devices related in some way to time travel; inventions that might threaten casuality. But many, if not most, of the suppressed inventions were related to star travel and terraforming.

“Dr. DeSilvo suddenly saw the Chronologic Patrol’s technology suppression policy had been aimed at slowing, and, if possible, stopping, any improvements in interstellar travel that would make going from one star system to another too cheap, too fast, or too easy.

“He studied the cultures of Earth looking for clues, looking for patterns—and finding them.

“He saw ways of doing things, attitudes, traditions, that were enshrined in law, habit, and custom. He saw infrastructure—empty roads, unused power service, overbuilt food production systems, transportation networks with capacity for ten times the traffic, half-vacant cities with the vacant places carefully maintained.

“He saw population and family policies that resulted in a steady decline in the population long after it had dropped below the calculated ‘optimum’ range. He saw governments and other institutions that placed tremendous reliance on artificial intelligence systems that had been installed and programmed centuries before—ArtInts fully capable of working, of guiding and shaping subtleties of policy, and even of tradition, decade after decade, without losing interest, without changing their minds.

“In short, he saw that Earth had, for centuries, been quietly preparing herself for an influx of refugees. He saw that the Chronologic Patrol had likewise been suppressing advances in terraforming and discouraging new projects. In that they had been completely successful: No new terraforming projects had been started since Solace. Terraforming was turning into a historical science, an activity no longer performed. The logic behind this was plain: The fewer planets that were remade, the fewer planets that would inevitably collapse.

“In short, slowing and preventing expansion, and preparing for eventual collapse and contraction, were the hidden long-term policies of the Chronologic Patrol and of Earth.

“But DeSilvo’s simulations showed that even with all of these preparations factored in, the ecology of Earth would still fail—a bit later, and a bit more slowly, perhaps, but just as completely. It seemed unlikely to him that Earth and the CP would focus so much of their time and energy toward the far-off goal of keeping one last dying world alive for an extra hundred years.

“But, perhaps that was too narrow a view. If the best possible outcome was to keep the race alive an extra century, to allow two or three more generations a chance to live, to let perhaps billions live and love and think and feel, to stave off, even for just a little while, the prospect of an Earth covered in a dreary, malevolent crust of mold and matted algae—no, that was very much worth the effort.

“Or perhaps—perhaps—there was some other truly long-term goal Earth and the CP were working toward, something that would take so long that keeping Earth alive a year, or even a day, longer, might tilt the balance. Or perhaps DeSilvo’s simulations were inherently flawed—an error he worked desperately to find, but could not.

“None of these answers were really plausible or satisfactory. So why were Earth and the CP merely working to prepare Earth to accept a massive influx of refugees and slowing outward expansion? Why were they following a policy of contraction management?

“Clearly, someone must have performed some sort of projection or analysis well before the policy of contraction management was established. Just as clearly, the policy had been in place for centuries. Therefore, their projections must have been done using the mathematical and simulation tools of that day.

“Based on his examination of the models, data, and predictive tools they would most likely have used, it was all but certain that the scholars who had done the original work had stretched their tools too far. The odds were excellent that they had not been able to make a sufficiently long-range forecast, or one that was reliably accurate. Their work would have failed to predict Earth’s collapse—or might even have made the positive—though false—prediction that Earth would survive.

“It was decision-makers informed by these flawed forecasts who had set policy—and programmed the ArtInts to keep following that policy, long after their human masters and clients had likely forgotten the matter altogether. That is one danger of suppressing important knowledge—restrict it too completely, and the odds increase to near certainty that the knowledge will be lost altogether.

“But all Dr. DeSilvo knew for sure was that he did not know for sure. There seemed no doubt that all the other worlds would, sooner or later, fail. And there seemed at least a strong possibility, perhaps a high probability, that Earth herself would die, probably somewhere between a thousand and fifteen hundred years from now.

“There was no way to act publicly, directly. If he called a press conference and announced his findings, at best he would simply not be believed. Worse, he would likely be killed, or locked up for good, or wind up with his mind ‘adjusted’ in some way. Nor could he have really blamed the authorities for doing so. If the collapse was inevitable, speaking of it publicly could only produce panic and might even hasten the end, for example by inspiring people to back-migrate sooner rather than later. Besides, he could not even be sure of his own conclusions. He did not wish to cry wolf.

“There was also the small matter of the impending collapse of Solace. There could be little argument that he, Oskar DeSilvo, was directly responsible for that. On a smaller scale, he had to make some sort of amends to Anton Koffield, and to the others he had wronged.

“Dr. DeSilvo decided to deal with the situation he faced—a situation largely of his own making. It would take decades for him to be able to confirm even the beginning of the trend lines his simulations predicted. TheDom Pedro IV would arrive at its destination in ten-plus decades. He decided to let that be the baseline for his data collectors.

“However, Dr. DeSilvo, as always, was still unable to deal well with authority or with being proved wrong. He found the chance to tweak Admiral Koffield’s nose a time or two more, even as he confessed and sought to recruit Koffield to his work. At the same time, Dr. DeSilvo’s fondness for puzzles and tricks perhaps got the better of him.

“But there was also a certain degree of logic behind the way Dr. DeSilvo worked. In effect, he set Koffield and his party off on a scavenger hunt, so that each clue they—we—found led them forward to the next clue. Koffield and his party were made tosee things—the nightmare landscape of Mars after the Great Failure of that first terraforming attempt, the beauty of Earth, the customs of Earth’s people, the state of terraforming research, the half-empty cities, the Dark Museum itself, and many other things besides. You were all there for at least part of the journey, and some of you for nearly all of it. That part you know. We were led to this place, and to the choices we now face.”

She paused, then turned to face Koffield directly. “So there we are,” she said. “And, let us face facts—thereyou are. We will not be ruled by you in these matters, but it would be pointless to suggest we will not beguided by you. I have presented what I believe to be an honest and balanced statement of the events that brought us here. That it came across as an indictment of Dr. DeSilvo, I do not doubt and do not deny. To report the facts is to report his crimes. Now we must ask—and must askyou —what are we to do now?” Ashdin sat down, and the room was silent.

Koffield frowned. Blast the woman! He had not expected this. To be asked to consider the matter, yes—but she seemed to be asking for his own, personal, immediate snap judgment. He knew, instinctively, that even a moment’s hesitation on his part would be fatal. He had to speak, and speak decisively, at once, to maintain credibility as their leader.

“What we do is believe him,” Koffield said, after a pause of less than a heartbeat, not sure of his own reply until he had made it. And perhaps that had been Ashdin’s goal—to force him to give them his gut feeling, his unexamined first reaction. The rest was easy from there. “We believe him when he tells us he thinks he has found a way. It is no trick, no fraud. He might be mistaken, but if so, the mistake is sincere, and not some gambit within a gambit, no mirror in a mirror.”

“Why do you say that?” Yuri Sparten demanded.

“Because he has allowed all this to happen,” Koffield said, deliberately speaking as Ashdin had, pretending DeSilvo were not there. “Consider what drives Oskar DeSilvo—and then consider what Dr. Ashdin’s report hascost him. Think how humbling, how humiliating, this presentation has been for the man who could command our deaths at any moment—and remember this is a man capable of convincing himself that virtually any action that suits his needs is of great benefit. He sincerely believed that all his acts were for the greater good.”

“He managed toconvince himself they were all for the greater good,” Norla Chandray objected. “That’s not at all the same thing.”

“Granted,” Koffield said. “But if so, how could he convince himself that this proceeding”—he was very careful to avoid calling it a trial—“was to his benefit?”

No one answered that.

“I think your failure to answer is answer enough,” Koffield said. He gestured to DeSilvo, at last acknowledging his presence. “The actions that Dr. Ashdin have described were acts of megalomania, of madness. But Dr. DeSilvo’s willingness to subject himself to unexpected humiliation and accusation here, now, in order to serve the greater good—and thelater good—is, I suggest, strong evidence of sanity. That he doubts himself enough to bring us here is further evidence that his megalomania is at least somewhat under control.

“We must accept that his present actions are at least to some degree altruistic, and also meant to make sort-of amends for past deeds. Those are sane motives. He may have further agenda—I would be surprised if he did not. But that’s as may be.”

“So you trust him?” Yuri Sparten said, plainly unconvinced and unmoved.

“Not in the slightest,” said Koffield. “I trust hismotives, to some extent. But he might be mistaken as to his conclusions. I could have it wrong about his being sane at present—he might be delusional but utterly convincing. But on balance, I think the most likely circumstance is that he is more or less sane and trying to do the right thing—perhaps while benefiting himself. But that merely leads us to the next question—is he right? Are his predictions reliable?”

“That is the question you were to answer, Mr. Sparten.” It was DeSilvo, speaking for the first time in a long while. His voice was gentle, respectful. “You, above all, have the least reason to trust me, and the most reason to hate me. But it has fallen to you, and to Officer Chandray, to judge the value of the predictions I have made.”

“We haven’t had enough time to make a complete analysis,” Yuri objected.

“No, of course not. You have had only a few days to consider data that took many years to accumulate. But surely you have made some progress, reached some sort of initial findings.”

“Well, yes. But we’re nowhere near done.”

Koffield spoke. “Mr. Sparten—there can always be surprises, some unexpected factor that changes everything. But there also comes a point when you get afeel for the data. You have had enough time to judge the basic quality of the work—the data, the models, the procedures—and probably enough time to set up alternate models and procedures as a check. Am I right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then report to us on what you have found so far.”

Sparten hesitated, looked to DeSilvo, and frowned. “It seems all right,” he said, the anger as plain in his voice as in his face.

Koffield had wondered why the devil DeSilvo had leaked word of the diehard outpost. Maybe this was why. Maybe it had been to bring Sparten’s hatred to the boiling point, then call on him to report on his analysis. If Sparten, seething with rage, still had to report that DeSilvo had gotten it right, then that could only lend credence to a positive report. Maybe there was no Last Chance Canyon outpost. Maybe DeSilvo had made the whole damned thing up for the sole purpose of setting Sparten off.

But after so long alone, the man was so detached from human behavior that it seemed unlikely he could anticipate anyone’s reactions that precisely. He had put Sparten into a homicidal rage with a casual remark just a few days before. Would he really risk playing that game again so soon—or try something as elaborate as planting a false story with Marquez, trusting that the story would reach Sparten?

Koffield shook his head. That was the trouble with paranoia. It could make any story almost plausible, until the truth was buried under a whole forest of fictions that seemed more believable than the facts. But facts, not guesses or emotions, were what they needed. “You’re going to have to give us a little more than ‘It seems all right,’ Mr. Sparten,” he said gently. “This is a most important issue, and we need a useful summary of your results to date.”

Sparten looked again from DeSilvo to Koffield, and his expression shifted. He blushed, a schoolboy caught out in poor behavior in front of his most respected schoolmaster. “Yes, sir. Excuse me, sir.”

He paused, took a sip of water from the glass in front of him, and spoke again, in careful, professional tones. “The results of our examination showed Dr. DeSilvo’s predictions are more than all right. They are highly reliable. We have tested the model by using alternate data sets, as extracted from the copy of the Grand Library on boardDom Pedro IV . We have tested the data by constructing our own predictive model system. Our model was of course much less sophisticated than Dr. DeSilvo’s. His took months or years to create, and ours was something we put together in less than a day—but it was elaborate enough to provide a check, a comparison. We then used our model and the Grand Library data—in other words, a complete independent check, none of it based on Dr. DeSilvo’s work. The results weren’t precisely the same as Dr. DeSilvo’s—they couldn’t have been, since we were using different algorithms and data and models—but they were highly similar. They satisfied every statistical check we could make.”

“No outliers?” Koffield asked. “No data runs that were completely outside prediction?”

“Two,” said Norla Chandray. “But they told us nearly as much as the other runs. One was just the randomizers happening to set most of the possible initial variables—political instability, disease virulence, speed of technical innovation—up toward the bad-news end of the scale. That gave us our shortest run—Earth only lasted eight hundred years. And we did one run where we deliberately forced all the variables to the good-news end of the spectrum. Earth survived so long we thought she was going to make it, but then she crashed hard—very hard, the fastest collapse of any run once it did come. The end came at about thirty-one hundred years. Andthat was forcing all the news to be good.”

“But we can’t predict the future!” Sindra Chon protested. “We can’t know for sure that such and such will happen if you set some arbitrary artificial variable to this or that level.”

“No one issaying we can predict the future,” said Dixon Phelby. “We don’t know what’s going to happen in the next five minutes, let alone three thousand years. But if you examine a large enough system, with enough actions, and at least some sort of understanding of what the rules are—even if you don’t understandhow the rules work, or why—then you can get damned good estimates. Maybe you won’t be able to predict to the millimeter how much rainfall you’ll have ten years, three days, and two hours from now next—but maybe youcan say the odds are 90 percent you’ll have between three and six centimeters of rain in a given month ten years from now.”

“Which means there’s a 10 percent chance youwon’t have that much rain,” Sindra countered. “There are reasonable odds that you’ll have more, or less, or none.”

“True enough,” said Norla. “But the results we’re getting would be more like saying that for the period from five to ten years in the future, there’s a 99.999 chance that it will rain atsome time. The odds are about that high that some variant of the collapse will come. Would you want to gamble that Earth will survive if you were on the other side ofthose odds?”

The room was silent, until at last DeSilvo spoke again. “Let us return to the main point at hand,” he said gently. He stood up. “Mr. Sparten—do you believe my results? Do you now think that Earth, and all the other living worlds, are likely to die, from the causes we have discussed—sometime in the period between eight hundred and three thousand years from now?”

Again, silence, until, at last, Yuri Sparten spoke. “Yes,” he said, with infinite reluctance. “We need to keep digging, keep studying, keep refining, keep getting data—but that will merely confirm that all the worlds, including Earth, are going to die.”

DeSilvo nodded. “Thank you,” he said. “Those words would be difficult for any of us here, but I know that they were hardest for you, because of who I am. But—I am pleased to say that is not the whole story. Yes, all the worlds, including Earth, are going to die—unless we, here, those of us around this table, act.” He paused dramatically. “For, you see, I have the answer.”

The room was deathly silent at first. DeSilvo looked around, surprised. He plainly had been expecting an excited, enthused reaction. The silence held a few more seconds, then was broken by derisive snorts of laughter.

Koffield looked to Ashdin, and she at him. She shook her head and shrugged, as if to sayWhat else would you expect ?

And Koffield could have answeredVery little else. DeSilvo had as much as promised them some such magic answer, back when they had arrived, a few days ago, in what already seemed another lifetime.We’ve just gotten through agreeing you’re a megalomaniac, Koffield thought as he watched DeSilvo.And now you say that only you know how to save all the living worlds?

“Perhaps—perhaps that was not the best way to put it,” DeSilvo said—inspiring a bit more disrespectful laughter, led by Marquez and Bolt. “Please!” The room quieted. “I know, very well, how mad my claim must seem. For what it’s worth, I do not imagine we can do itall . But we can demonstrate a possibility, show it to others.”

“A possibility of what?” Jerand Bolt demanded.

“A possibility of—of hope,” DeSilvo said, seeming to flounder a bit.

Koffield watched DeSilvo closely. He looked very much like a man who had expected to electrify his audience and had failed utterly—a man who knew he had best get offstage quickly, before anything else could go wrong.

“I will say little else about my plan at present,” DeSilvo went on, speaking a bit faster, “save only this: We’ll need Greenhouse as a base of operations. There are resources there that are available nowhere else. But, ah, as chance would have it, the attempt to ignite Greenhouse’s new SunSpot—NovaSpot—is almost upon us. Much depends on how well that effort succeeds, and I would prefer to delay saying anything else until we know more.”

Koffield got the distinct impression that DeSilvo had been casting about for some reason to stall—and had found it in Ignition Day.

“I have plans to cover all the likely results of the Ignition attempt,” DeSilvo went on, still talking fast. “Failure, success, various degrees of partial success. Wecan proceed if Ignition fails, but only with difficulty, and only in a manner far different from what we otherwise would do. The range of possibilities is great—but it will be, ah, greatlyreduced once we know the results of the attempt at Ignition. In the meantime, Mr. Sparten, Officer Chandray—get back to your studies. Continue your efforts to prove me wrong.”

He stepped back and walked to the door. He paused before leaving, and turned to face them. “After we know about Ignition there will be time enough to consider the unhappy chance that I am right,” he said. He bowed to them. “Until news of Ignition, then,” he said, and left them all, making an odd and hurried exit.

The room was silent for a moment. Then Jerand Bolt laughed again. He stood up in front of his chair, leaned forward a bit, just as DeSilvo had done, and gestured just as DeSilvo had, reaching up with his right hand to rest his palm on his chest. “For you see,I have the answer,” he said, with an exaggerated theatricality that really wasn’t all that much more overdone than DeSilvo’s had been. He laughed again and dropped back into his seat. “Can youbelieve that guy?”

“Yes,” Koffield replied sadly. “Yes, I can.”

Bolt was taken aback.“What?”

“His performance just now might not have been much, but his data’s all been good,” said Norla. “Bad acting doesn’t mean he’s done bad science.”

“You’re not really goingalong with him, are you?” Bolt demanded. “Him and his ‘answer’?”

“Everything leading up to his ‘answer’ checks out. What haveyou got?” asked Sindra Chon. “Anything better?”

Koffield spoke before Bolt could reply. “Someonehad better come with an ‘answer,’ he said. “Otherwise, humanity’s doomed. So yes, we’re going to wait until he’s ready, then we’ll listen.” He gestured around the room, and DeSilvo City besides. “What else have we got to do?”

 

It was some hours later, after Koffield had turned in for the night, and was lying awake in bed, unable to sleep. There was something he had missed, a movement, half-hidden in shadow, that had put his subconscious on guard, even if his conscious mind had missed it. Then it came to him. He remembered, and put the pieces together.

“What else have we got to do?”

Koffield’s gaze had fallen upon Yuri Sparten as he had asked that question. Koffield remembered Sparten’s expression at that moment.

A tight, angry little smile, almost a smirk—as if Sparten had an answer to that question—an answer that Koffield felt sure he would not like one little bit.

Andthat was a notion that banished any thought of sleep for a long, long time.