Chapter Twenty-six

COUNCILS OF
WAR AND TIME

FOUNDERSDOME
GREENHOUSE

“There you are!” Berana Drayax announced as she poked her head around the door.

Villjae and Elber looked up from their main planning chart. The first contingents of refugees—correction,settlers was the officially preferred term—from Wilhemton District on Solace had landed two days before, and they’d been busy ever since.

Zak Destan had been aboard, which was the bad news. So had Zari and Jassa, and that was the good news. Elber had enjoyed a brief, almost frantic, reunion with his family—then been forced to return to work, precisely because his family, and several hundred of their companions, had arrived.

“Good morning, Madam Drayax,” said Elber.

“Morning, ah, ma’am,” Villjae echoed.

“As if either of you had slept enough to call what came before night,” Drayax said. “I hope you weren’t planning to get any rest today.”

The two of them had been up half the night trying to deal with cargo gone astray, a power system that had gone dead in two of the dormitories, and the discovery that the standardized personal effect boxes issued on Solace were, somehow, exactly eight centimeters wider than the officially designated lockers intended to hold them on Greenhouse.

“What is it, Madam Drayax?” Elber asked politely. He was always respectful, always courteous—but still he got a secret thrill at being allowed to address, and deal with, as important a person as Berana Drayax.

“I’m not sure myself,” she admitted. “We just got a call that there’s some sort of big meeting that’s going to happen, over in Research Dome, rush-rush, this minute. They won’t say why, but they think they might want to allocate some domes away from settlement for some big new project.”

Villjae groaned. “Not more poaching,” he said. “We’ve just got our dome space allocation rejiggered from the last time.”

“It gets better,” Drayax said. “Sounds like maybe they want to grab some of our people for the project. Who knows? Maybe an hour from now, you won’t have to worry about dome space allocation. Come on.”

Villjae glanced at Elber. “Ah, both of us?”

Drayax shrugged. “They didn’t say. Might as well. You two are joined at the hip anyway. Why not? You both might learn something. And besides, it’s going to be a meeting. Maybe you can sleep through it.”

 

Twenty minutes later they were aboard a runcar, moving through the newly restored tunnel system that once again connected Founder’s to the other domes in the area. A quick transit through the airlocks—normally kept open, but sealed for some reason at the moment—a ride up a lift, a brisk walk across part of Research Dome, then the three of them found themselves at the doors of the Terraformation Research Center.

Elber’s peasant reflex for trouble came to the alert the moment he saw the armed guards on either side of the entrance. Drayax herself frowned, for half a second, but then her face became a mask of calm, noncommittal cheerfulness.

Elber and Villjae exchanged worried, surprised glances. The sight of the guards had surprised Drayax. That was something that just didn’t happen. But the guards knew her, of course, and they waved her party through the front door of the building, and it was too late to worry about it.

Inside, another guard carefully checked all of their IDs, held a brief and whispered discussion with Drayax, then over a comm handset, and personally escorted them to a large, well-equipped conference room.

There was a big, elegant, oval polished-stone table in the center of the room, with extremely comfortable-looking padded work chairs for about twenty set around it. The walls were lined with about thirty or so severe-looking high-backed chairs for assistants and fetchers and carriers of one sort or another.

They were the first to arrive. Drayax took a seat at the far end of the table from the door and signaled for Villjae and Elber to sit behind her, against the wall.

Elber sat down nervously, not at all sure he was glad to be where he was. He had just barely been keeping up with things as they were. This room, and all its quiet elegance and power, fairly shouted out loud that he was way out of his depth.

Then the doors opened, and the others started to arrive. They came in by ones and twos, some with assistants trailing behind. They seemed to be scientists for the most part, and it was plain they knew as little as Elber did about what was going on. The room gradually filled, with the higher-rankers like Drayax at the table, and the smaller fry seated around the sides of the room, where Villjae and Elber were seated.

Then, suddenly Drayax stood up, very briskly, just as a well-dressed, worried-looking, extremely upper-class lady strode into the room, surrounded by a whole cloud of aides and assistants. About half of the room’s occupants shot to their feet as fast as Drayax, with the rest a bit slower on the uptake. Villjae gasped and got to his feet himself. Elber scrambled to stand up, without knowing why. It was only after he was standing that he realized that the upper lady was the highest upper there was—Planetary Executive Neshobe Kalzant.

But his eyes didn’t bug out of his head altogether until he noticed one of the “assistants” she had brought along was someone he had met before—Captain Olar Sotales. Elber felt frozen in place, as incapable of motion as a deer caught in a carry van’s headlights late at night. Then Sotales sawhim, and nodded absently, the way one might with a colleague seen across the room.

Elber was still standing there when Villjae gave a tug at his arm and guided him back into his seat. Somehow, Elber had missed the moment where PlanEx Kalzant had taken her seat, and everyone else had sat down as well.

He looked to Villjae and saw that his friend was as shocked and bewildered as he was. Plain to see there had been a big mistake. They shouldn’t have been allowed into this meeting. But it was also plain that it was already far too late. There were secrets in this room, that was clear, and Elber and Villjae knew there were secrets—which was almost as bad as knowing what they were. Elber could already see there was no possible way they could be let out.

Kalzant was explaining something, no, announcing someone, but the roaring in Elber’s ears, and the shock and mortification in his head, made it impossible for him to follow it. Besides, what hethought he heard couldn’t be right.

But then everyone in the room—including PlanEx Kalzant—was standing,applauding, as three new arrivals entered the room. The first was an average-looking woman somewhere in her thirties. He had the feeling he had seen her before, long ago and far away. The man behind her likewise looked familiar. Then it came to him. Hehad seen them, or their twins, years before, when he was a refugee on SCO Station. They had been riding on a runcar that paused close by where his family was camped. He remembered, vividly, the expressions on their face—shock, loss, astonishment. That was why they stuck in his mind. They were uppers, but with the look of refugees in their faces. They looked found now, and grim, and worried. The man’s face—it seemed to Elber that he had seen that face elsewhere, as well, perhaps in a book or a history presentation.

But when he looked at the third person he knew at once precisely who it was—and who it could not possibly be.That face looked down from the wall in every schoolroom on Solace. That face belonged to Oskar DeSilvo.

He was so taken aback by it all that he didn’t think to listen to what Oskar DeSilvo was saying. But it wouldn’t have mattered. Even after all that had gone before, hestill wouldn’t have believed what the man had to say.

 

Oskar DeSilvo risked a split-second glance away from his presentation to look over the audience, and confirmed his hopes: Almost a half hour in, coming close to the end, and things were going well. They were listening, thinking, allowing the ideas in. They might not yet be saying yes—not by a long shot—but at least they were not screaming NO! and running for the exit.

The airspace over the center of the table was alive with charts and diagrams and holographic images. He cleared away two or three that were no longer needed and expanded the image of the Harmonic Gate.

“To emphasize once again—the Harmonic Gate is, in some ways, a close relation to the timeshaft wormholes we are familiar with. In theory, paired Harmonic Gates could in fact be used in place of wormholes, and would be far cheaper and easier to create and operate.”

“So why don’t we?” Sotales asked.

“Several reasons,” DeSilvo replied. “First, theory and practical reality don’t always coincide. In this case, gates that are too close together in time interfere with each other—they jam each other, if you will. Harmonic Gates get their name from the fact that they interact with each other through a phenomenon closely analogous to the behavior of sound waves. When both are properly tuned, and the two gates are in the same relative energy position to a continuously present anchor mass, one gate will fall into temporal resonance with another, and a timeshaft will form spontaneously between the two gates.”

“What—what was that about anchor masses?”Drayax asked.

“My apologies,” DeSilvo said. “I tend to get too glib with jargon at times. For our purposes, what it means is that both gates must be in roughly the same orbit about a large body, such as a star, that doesn’t change mass all that much or that rapidly during the time period separating the two gates. If one gate was placed in a radically different orbit, or moved to another star system—or if the star went nova, or somehow added or ejected a large fraction of its mass all at once, then the timeshaft simply wouldn’t form.”

Drayax nodded. “All right. I’d want to see the math, but all right.”

“Very good. To continue: The main reason we can’t build timeshafts using Harmonic Gates instead of wormholes is that the frequencies required to tune one gate to another increase as the time period growsshorter . The increase is very gradual for longer periods, but it piles up dramatically as the interval decreases. In round figures, to tune in on a gate one year away would require a frequency a million times higher than what would be required to tune in on a gate that was one thousand years distant. At the same time, producing those higher tuning frequencies induces all sorts of other resonances at other frequencies. You get massive interference—static—that jams the tuning signal. It would require truly horrifying amounts of power to overcome it.

“The long and the short of it is that it is far easier to induce a Harmonic Gate pair to form a timeshaft when the two gates are distant in time from each other.”

“What’s the shortest practical interval?” Drayax asked. “And is there any upper limit on how far back or forward you can go?”

“So far as I am aware, the shortest time interval practical would be about twenty thousand years. The longest possible interval is somewhere in the range of two to three million years.”

There were sharp intakes of breath, some quiet exclamations, and a few curses in reaction to that news.

“Obviously, that is another reason this technology is not practical for use in a timeshaft transportation system,” DeSilvo went on. “There are others. For example, a gate draws power, a lot of it, while running. Therefore, it is not suited to continuous use. A wormhole, once established, remains after the power source used to form it is cut, though of course the nexuses and other equipment need to be powered up and maintained. Harmonic Gate timeshafts need to be turned on and off, at both ends—obviously, that requires coordination and timing.”

DeSilvo paused and looked around the room. They were all watching, listening, considering. Good. Good.

“There is one thing a Harmonic Gate can do that no wormhole ever could. It can establish a link with the pastwithout another gate at the other end. It requires vastly more power than a link anchored by gates at both ends, and it is massively inaccurate. Aim for a million years in the past on the first try, and you might hit 1.2 million, or 750,000. However, it should be possible to calibrate the gate to within about a 5 percent variance either way—which ought to be good enough for our purposes.

“There are a few other main points,” he said, “though the first is so general that I would almost be tempted to say it is philosophical rather than technical.

“Let me start with what is something of a shopping list.” He used his right hand to count on the fingers of his left, ticking off each item as he mentioned it. “Temporal confinement. Timeshaft wormholes. The artificial gravity generators that are so commonplace nowadays that we never think of them. The faster-than-light transportation and communications systems we have discussed already. And now, Harmonic Gate time travel. These wondrous technologies—andall of them are wondrous, it is just that we are more used to some than others—these technologies are not each off by itself, isolated one from the other. They are, instead, different aspects of the same thing, different facets of the same jewel, if you wish to be poetic.

“And it is not just the long-hidden wonders that have been distorted by the CP’s policy of technology suppression. The development of even the old familiar ones have likewise been crippled. Temporal confinement was held back for centuries, made much more expensive and difficult to operate and manipulate than it really had to be.

“You are, all of you, I am sure, justly proud of what you accomplished with the Ignition Project. But I tell you the planet-sized temporal confinement that made it possible need not have been a new and untried technique. I can show you evidence from the archives of the Dark Museum that demonstrates that procedures and technologies similar to what you used were known at least seven hundred years ago.”

“Just a moment, please,” said Captain Sotales. “Are you suggesting that the Chronologic Patrol, of all institutions, has been deliberately harming all of humanity by withholding and suppressing technology?”

“If I might answer that, Dr. DeSilvo?” asked Koffield.

“Please, yes, Admiral.” The answer would go down better coming from him.

Koffield turned to Sotales. “I dedicated decades of my life to the Chronologic Patrol, and I do not regret a moment of it,” he said. “The Patrol has done great good—and continues to do great good—for all of humanity. But that is a long way from saying the CP is incapable of doing harm, or of making mistakes. Tech suppression made sense, for a while. It still makes sense—if you assume there is no way out, no hope, and only failure and withdrawal to come—or if you believe the coming collapse will spare Earth.If they believe that Earth will survive, but no other world will, then a policy of managing the contraction of interstellar civilization—slowing the rate of expansion, reducing the overall population and thus reducing the eventual number of refugees—is a humane and civilized choice.

“But allour studies show that Earth, too, will die. We willall die. Then all we are balancing is life or death for some, now, against how soon death, extinction, will come for all. How you can make a moral or humane choice, how you can strike that balance, I have no idea.

“All the evidence points to universal death in about a thousand years if we go on as we are. Either the leaders of the Chronologic Patrol do not know that, or they cannot allow themselves to believe it, or they are hoping for some sort of miracle to solve the problem—or perhaps they do things as they do them because that is what they have always done. The Chronologic Patrol has survived longer than many civilizations. Perhaps that is simply too long.”

DeSilvo moved on. “Thank you, Admiral. There is another point concerning the relatedness of all this technology,” he said. “The project we have described today will require the skill and effort of many people. And, of course, it will require expertise in terraforming. Greenhouse has the expertise—and is importing the people, even as we speak.

“It will require expertise in large-scale generators similar to those used in temporal confinement. It will require the ability to manage a massive power source and experience in large-scale engineering. You have all of those things here, thanks to the Ignition Project, and in large part, those resources, built at great expense and used but once, are now simply gathering dust.

“You here, now, have all the tools you need to make this plan work. Much of what it would cost you, you have already spent. Most of what you need, you already have, and do not otherwise need.You can do this. I doubt very much whether anyone else can. Please,do this job . The future is in your hands—if only you will reach deep into space, and far into the past, and create the hope that all of humankind needs.”

The room was silent, and the faces around the table were blank. DeSilvo understood.This is no time for applause, for enthusiasm, for praise, he thought.Fair enough. But what does this silence mean?

“All right,” said Neshobe Kalzant, her voice striking that silence so hard it seemed to bounce off it and come back again, echoed and amplified. “Enough,” she said. She stood up, so suddenly that the rest of the gathering was caught off guard, everyone scrambling to get to their feet as she rose. “We’ll all meet again later.”

She turned to Sotales. “No one is to leave or enter this building until further notice. Confiscate or secure every comm device. There are to be no communications in or out, of any kind, except with my prior approval. I can think of about sixteen problems you’ll have in obeying that order, and I don’t care about any of them. Make it happen.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Right,” she said, and turned toward the door. “Admiral Koffield, you’re with me.” She walked out of the room without bothering to confirm that he was following.

 

She led him to an office down the hall—the director’s office, judging by the look of it. Koffield had a feeling that the director wouldn’t be seeing it for a while. Kalzant wouldn’t ease the lockdown she had just ordered until she felt very much in control of the situation, and that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.

Off to the left there was a big, fancy desk, with a very comfortable-looking chair behind it. A separate conversation area, with equally comfortable-looking armchairs, side tables, and a fully automated service system was off to the right. There were large windows in the wall behind the desk. They looked out into a small park. The lights came on and adjusted themselves as soon as they were in the room, and soft music began to play.

At the moment, the most noticeable features of the view from the windows were the security personnel who had been stationed at the entrances to the park and, no doubt, all around the perimeter of the research center.

How wide a cordon will Sotales throw around us?Koffield wondered.The research center? A surrounding two-block radius? The whole dome? All of Greenhouse? It occurred to him that he had once again more or less volunteered to become a prisoner.

He looked out the window behind the desk. He had walked in that park, with Norla—how long ago? Only a couple of years or so, judging by the calendar. A lifetime or more, judging by how much they had all been through. He remembered thinking then that his work was over, that he had done all he could, and could hand off the tasks in hand to those best able to deal with them. It hadn’t quite worked out that way.

Kalzant didn’t pay any of the room’s comforts the slightest attention. She walked to the far side of the room and slapped her hand down on the window opacifiers. All the windows turned a dull, solid silver. The room lights adjusted themselves. Kalzant turned around, but stayed standing where she was, back to the wall.

“So,” Kalzant began, “all you’re asking me for is a declaration of war against all the laws of our civilization, against causality, against our universal doom, against history, against the Chronologic Patrol and Earth if they find out. Is there anything or anyoneelse you want me to take on?”

There seemed no way to answer that, and Koffield did not try.

Kalzant was quiet for a time. “He’s not crazy,” she said, crossing her arms. “DeSilvo. At least you don’t think so, or you wouldn’t have brought him here. So I won’t bother asking your opinions on that score.”

“Agreed,” Koffield said. “You’ll just have to judge his sanity, and mine, for yourself.”

“Oh, good,” Kalzant said. “And don’t forget I’ll have to judge my own. It’s in question, you know, on the face of it. After all, I listened to all of that in there.” She leaned the back of her head against the wall and shut her eyes. “So we’ll skip ahead to the next question. Can it be done? Even if you and DeSilvo are both sane, you could simply be wrong—or the victims of some sort of huge fraud, or hoax. Maybe even part of some huge Chronologic Patrol front operation, a setup to test whether we would dare violate causality. Or some damn thing like that.”

“The best answer I can give is to say that I arrived here aboard a spacecraft, a starship, that traveled faster than light. The transit from the outer system, where our ship is, took nearly as long as the journey from Glister to the Solace system. I cannot imagine the Chronologic Patrol willingly setting an FTL ship loose just to entrap us, or you. The risks would be far too great.”

“Risks!” She laughed. “I’ve got nothing but risk all around me. In fact, I don’t haverisks, I have a certainty. No matter what I do, or don’t do, my planet is going to die, and my people will have no place to live. We can keep them here on Greenhouse, at least for a while, at least most of them. But not forever.”

“If your planet is going to die,” Koffield said, “perhaps it is time to find your people a new one. Or make one.”

Kalzant nodded toward the conference room, and DeSilvo. “Can it work?” she asked. “Is it evenpossible to build a habitable planet this way?”

“I’ve studied that question as carefully as I could, and yes, I believe it is. Of course, saying it can work is a vastly different thing from saying itwill work.”

“All right.Will it work?”

“I think the odds of producing a new Eden on the first try are, shall we say, limited. If we are not discouraged by failure, if we study our mistakes and profit from them—then, yes. I believe it will work—eventually. But—if we persevere, at the end of the day, we will have a living world. That, I suggest, is a prize worth a high price—and it is only part of the prize we will win.”

“I know,” Kalzant said wearily. “Hope. We will win for all of humanity, by showing that it can be done, and so on and so forth.” Kalzant started pacing the center of the room. Koffield sidled over to the desk and leaned against one corner of it, giving her room. “So we fail two or three times,” Kalzant said, “and then, maybe, we succeed. Then it’s a mere question of transporting our entire population—if they haven’t all died by then—across who knows how many light-years, to their new home.”

“The transport is doable,” Koffield said. “We know how to move a lot of people over long distances. Big transports, shuttling back and forth. If we put the passengers into temporal confinement, and use the FTL drive, we won’t have much in the way of life-support needs.”

“That’s a comfort, I suppose,” Kalzant muttered. “Next question: Can we get away with it? Can we keep the project secret long enough to terraform the world?”

“I don’t know,” Koffield admitted. “DeSilvo did a pretty fair job of making it look like we fought each other and killed each other at Glister—and let’s just say that it wouldn’t be too hard to believe that I might want to kill DeSilvo. I assume the Chrono Patrol will track us that far, sooner or later. How much farther they will get, I don’t know.”

“But if theydo catch us, and we’re lucky, it’s a one-way trip to a domed penal colony on a very unpleasant world for anyone who knows anything, or evenmight know something.”

“Yes.”

“Next question. The Chrono Patrol would want to stop us because we’d be going into the past to take action, and they equate that with doing harm, with endangering causality,” she said. “Are they right?Can we take adequate precautions? Can we be sure that we won’t accidentally set up some horrible paradox? Can we be absolutely certain that, for example, a deranged person couldn’t steal an FTL starship, go into the past, fly to the Solar System, and drop an asteroid on East Africa beforeHomo sapiens has evolved? Can we be sure we won’t make humanity extinct?”

Koffield shook his head. “No. We can set up layer after layer after layer of precaution, but nothing is ever foolproof. Any tool can be abused. But—wecan be sure humanity will be extinct. All we have to do is nothing, and the job will get done, in a thousand years or so.”

“Damn you!” Kalzant said, but her voice was cold, controlled. “Why thehell did you bring this to me?” She paced back and forth, back and forth, a time or two, then spoke again. “It’s like the balance you were talking about before. What the CP is doing—allowing this piece of technology, suppressing that insurrection, slowing down or speeding up those refugee flows is merely balancing present comfort against the time remaining until extinction. But for us to act might be the death of us all—might even prevent us, prevent all of us, from ever existing in the first place.”

Koffield let her pace, let her think, a moment longer before he replied. “You’re right, Madam Executive. The danger in acting, is that wemight, despite all precautions, go back and kill our grandparents. The certain result if we donot act is that we will be leaving all our grandchildren to die.”

She stopped pacing and looked at him sadly. She walked around behind the desk and turned off the opacifiers. Sunlight flooded the room, and the room lights dimmed down to nothing. She stood there, staring out at the lovely garden, one of thousands humanity had placed on the cold and barren world of Greenhouse. “That garden deserves a chance to live,” she said. “So did the people who made it.”

She turned, pulled out the director’s seat, and dropped heavily down into it. She pulled the chair into the desk and set her hands down flat on top of it. “People like to tell me that leadership is about choices. And yes, sometimes itis about choosing one action over the other. But you know what I know. Sometimes it’s in having the courage to see that you have no choice and pressing on, moving forward, no matter what. Gods and stars for my witness, I don’t know if Ihave that courage.” She looked up at him, and she was scared. Terrified. “But I’m going to try to find it,” she said, her voice close to breaking. “I’m sure as hell going to try.”

Anton Koffield felt almost ashamed to see her so exposed, with all defenses down, humbly accepting the nightmare he had thrust upon her. But he, too, had led. He, too, had been taking paths he had no choice but to take.

“Yes, Madam Executive,” he said at last. “We’re all of us going to try.”