Chapter Twenty-nine

THE OCEAN OF YEARS

THEBELLEBOYDXI
DEPARTINGSTARSHINESTATIONWORMHOLE
DOWNTIMESIDE

TheBelle Boyd XI was a good half billion kilometers from the Starshine Station timeshaft, but even from that distance, the explosion was clearly visible—and both of those aboard theBB-XI were in the command center, at their posts, watching for it, waiting for it.

“Well,” said Burl, “I think we can look forward to a very interesting joint court-martial. Or do you think my odds would be better if I requested separate trials?”

“I have no idea,” Kalani said calmly. “I can give you fair warning, though. I’m planning to mount a most unusual defense strategy.”

“Yeah? Such as?”

“The truth. The full, unadorned, everything-we-did-and-found truth.”

Burl looked over at her and shook his head as theatrically as possible. “Oh, boy,” he said. “Definitelyseparate trials.I’m going to split hairs and hide behind technicalities as much as I can. For starters, I’m gonna make sure they knowwe didn’t blow all the timeshaft wormholes leading to Solace.” He pointed back at the timeshaft and the Solacians. “Theydid it.”

“Yeah. All we did was know all about it ahead of time and not shoot down the sabot drone that followed us to the wormhole, waited until we got through, and did the job for us.”

“Technicalities,” said Burl. “Mere technicalities.”

They sat there, in silence, watching the blast front expand outward, fading away into darkness as it bloomed.

“How many ships are you showing?” Burl asked.

Kalani checked her displays. “Two, count ’em two, Chrono Patrol ships. It looks like the phony recall of the uptime ship did the trick.”

Koffield had worked out that part—managing to program the robotic sabot ship to beam a crash-alert emergency recall signal into the message traffic transmitted to the uptime ship.

Obviously, the uptime guard ship had acted on the alert and gone through the wormhole just before it was blown. Koffield, of all people, would not have been party to deliberately stranding a CP ship on the uptime side of a timeshaft. “Good,” said Burl. “Let’s hope they can pull the same stunt on the other two timeshafts.”

“They will,” Kalani said. They sat there, watching the last of the blast cloud fade away. They remained there some time after, looking at the stars. There was a lot to think about.

“Speaking just a bit more seriously,” Kalani said, “arethey going to court-martial us?”

“I don’t know,” Burl said. “I think we could make a pretty good case that we were sent on this mission without a whole lot of guidance. The brass back home will have to decide if we established new and wise policies—or committed twelve kinds of treason.”

“That’s really going to be up to our new friends in the Solace system, isn’t it?” Kalani said. “Ifthey manage to build a new world, and we saved humanity from extinction when we decided not to arrest them—who knows? Maybe the court will go easy on us.”

“The trouble is the court won’t know, one way or another, for quite a while. No one will.”

“Maybe they should just throw us into temporal confinement until they know, one way or another—then decide whether or not to hold the court-martial.”

“That’s not such a crazy idea,” Burl said. He stabbed a finger toward the ruined timeshaft. “Collusion in the unwarranted destruction of timeshafts. That’s going to be the charge theyreally care about. The Chrono Patrol loves its timeshafts.”

“A lot of good that’ll do them if FTL travel gets loose,” said Kalani. “I think you’re right, though. Let’s hope they take a good hard look at that wordunwarranted . With a little luck, they’ll realize they can’t afford to let the chance go by for Solace to try its little experiment—and maybe they’ll even realize they don’t want Solace too close while it’s happening. They mightlike the quarantine.” She stared out at the stars a while longer. “I wonder when—or if—we’ll find out if they pulled it off,” she said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Ask me in twenty years.”

“I’ll do that,” she said.

“Won’t be hard to find me,” he said. “I’ll be in the next cell down from yours.”

Kalani laughed, stood up, and stretched. “I’m headed aft,” she said. “You coming?”

“In a bit. I’m gonna get something to eat first.”

She smiled. “I should have known,” she said.

Kalani took one last long look at the timeshaft that wasn’t there anymore. She thought of all the wonders lost in the Dark Museum of Mars and how some small handful of them had been found once more, only to be hidden away again on Glister—to protect them from the Chrono Patrol, because the Chrono Patrol knew progress would only get more people killed faster and bring the final collapse sooner.

But if the Solacians managed to change all the rules, out there in the darkness—would all those wonders be free at last? And what would be happen to the Chronologic Patrol in a universe where FTL travel was allowed to happen?

The Chronologic Patrol had started out, long ago, with the laudable goal of defending causality, of protecting the past from the future. From there it was not such a long journey to protecting the present, the status quo, from hazardous change. Later, in effect, the CP had determined toprevent the future, to hold back change and innovation, to drag history itself to a halt, to do nothing more than let the end come with as little pain as possible.

But even that had not been the last phase. The end of all was forgetfulness. The Chronologic Patrol did not even remember why it had to prevent the future. The CP just did it, because that was what it had always done. Every day, every year, must be like the one before it.

The Chrono Patrol was a senile giant, without the slightest hope of adapting to new days and new ways. Change would kill it. Kalani felt damned bad and guilty about that.

But if thingsdidn’t change, that would kill all of them. It wasn’t so hard a choice, even if she had regrets.

“Good luck to you out there,” she said, and headed aft, to the temporal-confinement chamber, to home, and to whatever fate awaited her.

SOLACECITYSPACEPORT
SOLACECITY
THEPLANETSOLACE

Five Years On

Norla Chandray cut power to theTerra Nova ’s thrusters, and let the little ship drop gently down on the landing pad.

That was the last of it. The touchdown of theTerra Nova marked the absolute dead end of interstellar travel to and from the Solace system for the duration. The last of the last of the last. No more delays, no more extensions or exceptions.

She glanced over at Marquez in the pilot’s seat, and saw that he felt it as well. For all that he knew it was necessary, he didn’t have to like it. It was a sign of his mood that he had let her land theTerra Nova .

On the other hand, Marquez must have been thoroughly tired of the run back and forth to Glister. He plainly had not been happy when they had asked him to do it again.

“Powering down nav and propulsion,” she announced. As of this moment, theTerra Nova was no longer an auxiliary ship, for theDom Pedro IV was no longer in service. There would be plenty of work for her in the years to come, and for theNova Sol, and theCruzeiro do Sul, and for every other ship they could lay their hands on. But they weren’t going to need starships for a while.

At least part of her was glad the trip was over. Solace was home, now, and would be, for at least a little while longer, before they all moved on to Greenhouse, along with everyone else. She sat there a minute, shut her eyes, and let the tiredness flow over her. At times she felt as if she couldn’t remember when shedidn’t feel tired. But these days, the exhaustion seemed worthwhile, a fair exchange for work accomplished. They were getting there.

“Cross-check,” Marquez said, examining his own displays. “Confirming power-down. Switch all systems to groundside standby status.”

“Switching to groundside standby.” Time for theTerra Nova to go to sleep too—even if she would only get a quick nap of a few hours or so. No doubt three other crews were scheduled to fly her on as many missions in the next few days.

They had gotten the last of the high-priority gear from Glister four years before, but then other things had come up, and kept coming up. Whenever it seemed they were just about to go out and get the last of the gear, some new crisis would boil up.

But, at long last, there had been enough of a break in the schedule to allow them to finish the job, make one last run. Norla had half expected to discover that Jay Verlant and his friends at Canyon City had finally gotten there, or that the Chronologic Patrol had finally converted DeSilvo City into a smoking crater, but instead they had found the base intact—and begun the tedious job of shuttling the last of the gear from the surface to theDom Pedro, loading it, hauling it back to the Solace system—and going back for more, run after run.

But now it was done. The last of the cargo had been removed from DeSilvo City, and theDom Pedro IV ’s labors were at an end, at least for the present. They had left her asleep, out in the comforting cold and dark. The big ship was in free orbit of Lodestar, out beyond Comfort, all major systems powered down, the FTL drive deliberately disabled, just to keep any would-be pirates from getting ideas. She would stay that way until the job was over.

Quite often, these days, Norla thought back to her last-ever flight on a timeshaft ship years before. Trawling, ever so slowly, back and forth across the sky, sliding down the timeshafts, and in and out of years—a hundred-year journey just to get anywhere at all.

Somehow, you came out of a timeshaft shipknowing how long the trip had truly taken. You knew, even if you never spoke about it, that every flight was a heroic, dangerous voyage across the vastness of space, across the storm-tossed ocean of years.

Direct interstellar passage via FTL just seemed tooeasy. It reallydid take only a week between Glister and Solace. No tricks, no illusion. You didn’t step out of a ship, having aged only a month or two, while the ship had endured a hundred years between the stars. FTL almost seemeddisrespectful of interstellar distances, as if it trivialized the effort, the untold saga, that had once been required to traverse between the stars.

Maybe it was a good thing they were stopping FTL flights altogether, closing the last way out of the quarantine. When they started again, FTL flights would seem special, exciting to those who had never traveled the hard way, and to those who had had time enough to forget the old ways.

She set the last of her switches, confirmed the entry in the autolog, and undid her seat restraints. “So much for that,” she muttered.

“What?” Marquez asked.

“That’s the end of that for the Glister run,” she said, choosing to put a positive spin on things.

“Amen to that,” he said. “Let’s go do something else.”

They climbed down out of the flight deck and onto the cargo deck. Marquez punched the buttons on the airlock controls to match pressure with the outside world, the hatches came open, and they stepped out onto the waiting mobile stairs and into the strangely blue-sky world of Solace City.

The locals still used the phrase “Sure as rain in Solace City” to mean something was utterly reliable and definite—but the phrase was not entirely accurate anymore. The seemingly permanent rain shield over the city had been becoming less and less reliable over the past few years—a pleasant side effect of the more unpleasant effects of the climate collapse. It only rained about every other day or so now—positively drought conditions, compared to what it used to be.

Norla paused at the top of the stairs for a moment and looked up into the sky, to the south and east. There it was, already plainly visible even in daylight. A bright white streak, like a chalk line drawn across the sky. The first sections of the Grand Harmonic Gate, seen nearly edge on, from the inside. The start of Grand Gate construction had been the last nail in the coffin of secrecy surrounding the project. It just wasn’t possible to keep a ring around the planet secret.

PlanEx Kalzant, in a series of carefully planned addresses to the public, had come clean and told them that the planet could not be saved by conventional means, and that the “temporary” and “partial” evacuations to Greenhouse and the orbiting habitats would in fact be permanent and complete. But the plain fact was that people already knew it, in large part because of a series of leaks masterfully orchestrated by Olar Sotales, who thus demonstrated that intelligence work and propaganda were not so far different from each other.

But the real factors that kept panic and disorder from spreading was the demonstrable fact that the government was managing to settle the evacuees, and the knowledge that the government had a long-range plan. That a large majority of the population thought the plan was, to put it mildly, far-fetched, almost didn’t matter.

“It gets me nervous,” Marquez said, “seeing that thing up there already when they haven’t even cleared the satellites yet.”

“They can’t, until the evacuations are a lot further along.” Another one of the thousand tasks made necessary by the Grand Gate Project, one of many jobs that would have been considered a major effort, all by itself, in any other age. Every habitat and facility orbiting the planet was going to have to be towed completely out of planetary orbit and placed in free orbit around Lodestar, well away from the planet itself. But those habitats—most especially SCO Station—were urgently needed as way stations for the constant stream of evacuees headed for Greenhouse. They couldn’t be moved just yet.

“I know, I know,” Marquez growled. “But it still gets me nervous. Suppose SCO Station crashes into it when the time comes to boost it into free orbit?”

“They’ve got the vectors worked out,” she said.

“Right,” he said. “Nothing can go wrong.”

Norla laughed and shook her head. Everything else might change, but Marquez stayed the same.

They went down the mobile stairs, hooked a ride on a passing runcar, and were in the main terminal five minutes later. They detoured around the jostling crowds in the departures area—and got a surprise in the arrivals hall—two surprises, in fact.

Yuri Sparten was there, just down from orbit, and still wearing his SCO Station Service uniform. Norla hadn’t seen him in years. But she got a greater shock when she recognized his companion. She let out a low whistle and nudged Marquez in the ribs. “Talk about strange bedfellows,” she said, nodding toward Yuri.

Marquez looked, spotted Yuri—and then realized who he was with. “Well I’ll be damned,” he said.

“Probably,” Norla said smoothly, and called out, “Yuri! Yuri, over here!”

Sparten turned at the sound of his name, then grinned and waved. Norla and Marquez walked over to him. “Norla! Captain Marquez. Good to see you both.” The three of them greeted each other and Sparten introduced his companion—though he no doubt knew full well no introduction was needed.

Dapper, well coiffed, elegantly dressed, Zak Destan grinned and offered Norla his well-manicured hand. The rabble-rouser turned reiver turned bush captain had transformed himself once again, into a smooth and polished politician. He read the surprise in both their eyes and tugged at the lapel of his tunic. “I know, I know,” he said. “I’ve heard it all before. But you’ve got to give the people what they need to see. I gotta look sharp, these days.” Norla couldn’t help but think it wasn’t all that much of a burden for him.

“What are the two of you doing here, of all places?” Norla asked.

“And what are you doingtogether ?” Marquez asked, far more bluntly.

Sparten blushed, but Destan just laughed out loud. “We’ve just come in for another propaganda tour. Fourth or fifth one we’ve done. People see a station man and a transplanted lowdown who’s done well, traveling together, talking up evacuation, answering questions. It helps. But most of the message gets across the moment we show up, side by side. Proves you can do all right, and that the orbit-side uppers will treat you all right.”

Not exactly,Norla thought.It just proves one particular transplanted lowdown did all right . But it wasn’t the time or place to make such observations. “I see,” she said.

“We go around from town to town in the areas scheduled next for evacuation,” Sparten said. “It helps,” he added, echoing Destan. Norla had the feeling he did that a lot.

“I’ll bet it does,” Marquez said.

They all had enough time for a quick drink together at the spaceport tavern—just enough time to remember a few of the good old days without dredging up all the old fights and disagreements and personality clashes.

Almost inevitably, Marquez and Destan got off onto the subject of politics, and how the Grand Gate Projectought to be run. Their conversation became so animated that she found herself effectively alone with Sparten, for the first time since Glister.

“You know,” she said, “there’s something I’ve always meant to ask you, Yuri. But I never had the chance, somehow. What’s itfeel like to have changed the course of human history?”

“Huh? What are you talking about?”

“Back on Glister,” she said. “Temblar told us she had gotten damned close to giving up on finding us. Chalmers was pressuring her to accept the evidence they had—the evidence DeSilvo planted—and head for home. But they didn’t, because you had to go look for Canyon City.”

“I still don’t follow.”

“Think it through,” she said. “She was near to giving up. All the evidence pointed toward the decoy cache being real. But there was one, just one, bit of evidence that didn’t fit. Our overflight gave herjust enough reason to look in the direction of the real DeSilvo City—in the long run, just enough to find it, break in, read the files, find out what we were planning, get to Solace system in time to blow up the Test Article, shut down the project, and get us all arrested.

“If allthat hadn’t happened, we’d probably still all be working on terraforming a planet we hadn’t found yet a million years in the past. I don’t know for sure if that would work better, but it sure as hell would bedifferent. Everything would change. Who lives and who dies? What sort of world their descendants will have? And maybe the fate of the human race, of all Earth-based life, depends on our making this work. It could be you saved us all when you insisted on looking for the diehards—or maybe thanks to you, humanity will go extinct.”

Yuri Sparten could do nothing but open and shut his mouth and stare at her, goggle-eyed. Marquez and Destan both checked the time and started making preparations to leave, but Sparten just sat there.

Norla stood, gathered up her own belongings, and made ready to go. But having plunged the knife in that deep, she couldn’t resist giving it one last, almost-deserved twist. “The hell of it is,” she said, “if the Grand Gate works, you’ll never know for sure if youreally made a difference. But if it fails—well. I’ll know how we got to that point. Andyou’ll know. Our little secret,” she said as she adjusted her jacket. “Bye now!”

He didn’t reply, which did not surprise Norla. Yuri was not going to be much for conversation for a while.

 

“Glad Sparten’s doing all right as a station man—or playing the part of one,” Marquez muttered as he walked off with Norla. “He never was much as a ship’s officer.”

“No argument from me, on either point,” said Norla, already feeling guilty about having tweaked Sparten that hard. Well, she could have done worse. Shecould have asked Yuri while Marquez was listening.

Not long after, Norla said her good-byes to Marquez, hailed an aircab, climbed in, and told it to take her home. She shut her eyes, happy to let the aircab’s ArtInt do the work.Tired, she thought, then she thought again about Yuri and Destan. Oddly enough, the sight of the two of them together offered the proof of another point the propagandists were forever pounding away at. The Grand Gate Project was huge—and everyone had a part to play. Maybe having Zak Destan wandering the landscape looking prosperous—and being friendly and cooperative with an SCO Station Service official—wasn’t such a bad idea at that. Anton had told her, not so long ago, that half the reason the evacuation was going so well was that they could afford to keep opening domes and habitats quickly, because they weren’t even pretending to repair the Solacian climate anymore. The lowdowns still out on the farms must be in pretty poor shape. Seeing a sleek, stylish, well-fed Zak Destan just down from Greenhouse would be a powerful argument in a lot of ways.

She smiled to herself, eyes still shut, and snuggled back deeper into the cab’s very comfortable seat.

She was actually starting to get the feeling they were going to pull this thing off.

FREEORBITTRANSITGATESTATIONY1

Ten Years On

Dr. Oskar DeSilvo sealed the hatch of the transit pod behind him, strapped himself into the travel chair, and set to work at the task of waiting impatiently.

He had already been bumped twice by rush loads of revised soil bacteria that were behind schedule for deployment and had just come in from Greenhouse. The last time DeSilvo had been on Greenhouse, he had concluded it was a wonder there was still room to do any terraforming-support biology at all. The domes, all of them, seemed filled to bursting. Still, only two domes had failed in the last year, and disturbances were surprisingly rare. There hadn’t been a riot for eighteen months. Considering the austere conditions in the domes, that was a major accomplishment.

The transit pod boosted itself away from the station proper and across the five kilometers of empty space that separated it from the Transit Gate itself, then braked itself to a smooth and perfect stop in the precise center of the gate, leaving DeSilvo to fret and fume through another extremely brief delay.

At long last, so far as he was concerned, the concentric rings of the gate began to spin up to transition velocity. Almost fast enough to satisfy even DeSilvo, the rings got up to speed, and the gate’s angular momentum rotator field generator activated, instantly forcing the inner and outer rings to convert their rotational energy by ninety degrees, which in turn forced a harmonic temporal field to form. A femtosecond later, DeSilvo and the transit pod were gone—

—and one hundred thousand years into the future, they appeared again, as DeSilvo watched the rings of the receiving gate spin themselves down to standby mode.

The transit pod boosted itself away from the Harmonic Gate, and toward the Y100K Station. Y100K was the fourth station so far, and the prefab parts for its eventual replacements were already in place, back at what everyone still called Y1 Station, even if it was already in Year 10. DeSilvo didn’t care what they called it. Such points seemed like hairsplitting from the lofty vantage point of Year 100,000.

At long last the transit pod docked with the station, and DeSilvo hurried aboard as soon as the hatch was open, as blasé as any commuter who rode the same overtram route back and forth every day.

Twenty minutes—plus a hundred thousand years—after his departure, he was in the control center. Berana Drayax greeted him with a cheerful smile.

“How’s the patient?” he asked.

She nodded toward the main displays. “Better and better,” she said. “But see for yourself.”

The Solace of his dreams hung in the display—but this was no simulation, no projection. It was the real world, seventy-five thousand years into areal job of terraforming.

Solace was lovely, cool, a blue-green jewel set in the darkness of space. “The patient is responding—magnificently,” DeSilvo said.

Given the inability of Harmonic Gates to bridge short spans of time, and also given the need to allow for a margin of error, they had only really made a start at terraforming in Y25K—twenty-five thousand years after the first death of Solace. Even allowing for the loss of twenty-five thousand years, that was still seventy-five thousand years of carefully controlled species introduction, regulated comet-ice delivery, intensive soil generation, and all the rest of it.

Those twenty-five thousand years also allowed for margin of error on the forward transition of Solace planned for Year 20 of the project. They would have to do that transition with no calibration, in effect shooting blind. But that was a worry to face years later. DeSilvo was no longer in the least taken aback by the fact that the Year 20 was in the effective future as seen from Year 100,000 Station.

“All well and good,” Drayax agreed, standing up from her console to stand beside him. “But at this point, we can barely take credit for her recovery.”

“The less we fix things, the less they break,” DeSilvo said, his eyes flitting from one status screen to the next. Oxygen levels, water temperatures, air pressure gradient, gross biomass, diversity index—all of them were strong, far stronger than even the best ever achieved on the best-terraformed worlds.

DeSilvo gloried in the images of the planet, in the sensor readings, in thehope that seemed to be shining down from the display screens “I know what you’ll say, of course, but I must admit I’m tempted to go early. We could transit this Solace back now and be ahead of the game.”

“‘No rush jobs, no crash programs,’ ” Drayax said. “You should never have written that memo. I can only imagine how many times it’s been quoted back at you.”

“Point taken,” he said. “But even so. Look at that planet. How much better can it get?”

Drayax laughed. “Why not wait and find out?” she asked.

THEDIAMONDROOM
PLANETARYEXECUTIVEMANSION
SOLACECITY
THEPLANETSOLACE

Fifteen Years On

Neshobe Kalzant checked the time and sighed. It was really time to go. She stopped work on her speech. She could finish it on the trip to SCO Station for the farewell ceremonies. The station had been gradually raising and shifting its orbit for the last two years, until now it rode in a highly elongated polar elliptical orbit. Tomorrow, after the ceremonies were done, and Neshobe’s ship had safely departed—Olar Sotales had insisted on that point—SCO Station would reach its apopoint and make the final high-power burn that would break it free of the planet.

That it was the station itself bidding farewell to the planet made the occasion somewhat unusual, but the journey itself was one she had made many times—though this would be the last time, at least for a long while.

The last time . . . nearly everything one did these days was the last, or almost the last time. The whole planet was getting its affairs in order. She stood up, stretched, and walked over to the south-facing windows and their spectacular view of Solace City.

Ever since the rains had stopped, for good and all, a few years back, you could actuallysee the city from here—what there still was of it. The dust blown in by the wind was definitely starting to accumulate, but there was not much point in clearing it away from most sections of the half-depopulated city. There was no one left to be inconvenienced by it. “Will the last person to leave the planet please turn out the lights,” Neshobe muttered to herself. The joke had gotten old so long ago that it had turned into a catchphrase.

She looked up. The spectacular dark blue skies of the past few years were likewise at an end. The airborne dust saw to that—and also reflected away enough sunlight to reduce the average temperature significantly. The same dust that was burying the city and masking the sky had turned the waters off the shores of Landing Bay a murky brown.

Neshobe turned away from the desk, packed up her work, put on her air mask, bundled into a warm old overcoat that would have been considered far too worn and shabby for the Planetary Executive back in the old days, and headed out of her office.

Moments later she stepped out of the pressure-sealed confines of the Executive Mansion, across a few meters of bitterly cold exterior courtyard, and to her waiting aircar.

But even as cold as it was, she could not resist the temptations to look up again, high in the southern sky, for another look at the Grand Gate. They had finished the basic structure only about a year ago. There was still a great deal of work to do, of course—but no one could look at the sky and doubt that progress had been made. The three pure white arcs of the inner, center, and outer rings would have reached from horizon to horizon, but for the dust that turned all the edges of the sky a muddy, murky brown. But never mind the dusty horizons. She looked straight up and gloried in the view.

Her solitary pilot-guard waited patiently for her to finish—and even sneaked a peek himself. Every human being in the Solace system had a stake in the Grand Gate—and nearly every one of them had played some part, however small or remotely connected, in building it.

At last she got in. The pilot-guard checked her safety restraints and the door locks, then climbed into the forward compartment to tell the ArtInt that did most of the actual piloting to get moving.

One guard, where once there had been a small army. In its way, that was another pleasant side effect of hard times. The threat had diminished, both as the on-planet population had dropped and as the general sense of frustration and despair had given way to a sense that something was beingdone. On the other side of the ledger, the government was frantically trying to cut costs wherever possible—and trained personnel of any sort were in permanently short supply. If the trend continued much further, she’d have to start flying her own car.

Neshobe liked the sound of that. It was something a regular person would do. But she was not going to be a regular person again—not for a while, yet. The Grand Council had more or less insisted on extending her term. She had agreed, most reluctantly, to continue in office until thirty days after Reception. She sighed. That translated into another five years or so of making decisions and delivering speeches.

Which reminded her. It was time to get back to work on what she would say at SCO Station. She pulled a datapad out and returned to the task of writing.

THELODESTARVII

Twenty Years On

Before the new world could arrive, it was necessary for the old world to depart. It ought to be quite a show—and Villjae Benzen was going to have a front-row seat.

The twenty years since the Ignition Project had been kind to Villjae Benzen. They had given him a lot: interesting work, challenging assignments, a sense of truly contributing. He had not so much aged gracefully as matured well. Berana Drayax had given him a good start, way back when—and he had made good use of it.

Was there some other director of operations out there, right now, calming down some other scared-to-death second-assistant-in-charge-of-nothing-much who just got the whole job dropped inhis lap? Who was out there, right now, battling to fight back exhaustion, sweat, hunger, hysteria, and the voices on the headphone, all while trying to refrebulate a disconkelized uberlewhatzit with a worn-out trammis that barely frebbed at all anymore? Therehad to be. There always was. “Good luck to you, wherever you are,” Villjae muttered, and lifted his glass in salute to his imaginary comrade in arms.

All the fixtures from the Ignition Project days—the overblown observation platform, the needlessly elegant control consoles—had been stripped out long ago. Dents and dings and paint scrapes and well-used hold-down clamps were ample evidence that the cargo hold had been put to endless uses ever since. No one had let the fact that theLodestar VII was officially the Planetary Executive’s personal long-range spacecraft stand in the way of getting use out of a big, powerful vehicle with a capacious cargo bay—and a fair-sized hangar deck, as well.

He looked toward the hatch that led to the hangar deck and thought back to the frantic days and nights he and the others had spent locked up in there, working around the clock to come up with the basic plan that was, at long last, about to be put into operation.

He strolled about, enjoying his drink and the thrill of rubbing elbows with the greats and near greats. DeSilvo, Koffield, and their crowd were going to watch the show from someplace else—but Kalzant was here, and Drayax, and quite a few others.

A tone sounded. Villjae half expected to hear someone announce “This is the voice of Departure Control” or some such in dramatic tones, but, thankfully, they weren’t inflictingthat particular torture on the guests here today. Instead, a gentle voice said, “We are approaching the final countdown. Please take your assigned seats.”

The hum of conversation in the room grew louder, and the tension grew almost palpable. From here on in, everything had to go right. The stakes could not possibly be higher. Villjae felt his stomach tighten, his pulse quicken as he moved toward his seat. He apologized to the owlish-looking woman already sitting in the seat next to his. He passed in front of her, and sat down. “Villjae,” a voice beside him said. “You made it. Good.”

He turned to the woman next to him—and was astonished to recognize Beseda Mahrlin. “Hello, Beseda,” he said faintly. Well, whyshouldn’t she be invited here? He was, after all. Come to think of it, the last he had heard, she had been doing some of the theoretical work for the Grand Gate Project. “Nice to see you,” he said, not quite sure if it was.

“Sure,” she said, and left it at that. She glanced at the time display at the top of the big screen. “Not long now,” she said.

“No,” he agreed. He had forgotten what talking with her could be like.

The old, tired, dead world of Solace floated in the darkness, the three rings of the Grand Gate encircling it, three gleaming white bands set around a terribly flawed ruin, a parody of Saturn and his rings. Or, perhaps, more accurately, a parody of Uranus andhis rings, for the Gate Rings were at right angles to the equator of Solace, face on to Lodestar, the local sun. The sunward sides of the rings were covered in accumulator panels, far more advanced than the old Groundside Power receptors. The three rings exposed a surface area almost as great as that of Solace itself to Lodestar.

Between the high efficiency of the panels, and the massive surface area devoted to them, the Grand Harmonic Gate could, given time, easily absorb enough power to perform the Dispatch operation. Reception would be another matter altogether—but there were plans in hand to deal with that.

The sun-opposite, or spaceward, side of all three rings of the gate sported geometric patterns, set at regular intervals around their circumference, placed there to allow easier visual confirmation of their spin. The varied checkerboard patterns let the people who had paid for the gate, who had sacrificed all to build it, truly see for themselves that something was happening.

The rings were spinning at standby speed already, the inner and outer rotating clockwise, and the center ring in the opposite direction.

Villjae had read the popular accounts of what was going to happen next, and had the training and expertise to understand them, and even go at least a bit beyond. They needed to make room for Solace-R. “R” for Solace Reborn or Renewed, or Reterraformed, as it had come to be called. Officially, the “R” stood for Reception, to indicate it was the instance of Solace that was to arrive. Villjae, for one, was glad the name Solace Y1000K had never caught on.

But if Solace-R was to arrive, that meant Solace-D—and no matter how often people were told it stood for Dispatch, or Departure, everyone knew “D” stood for nothing but Dead—first had to go someplace. Or rather, somewhen.

At the same time, they needed to ensure that Solace-R and Solace-D were neverin the same timeat the same time. The solution to both problems was to knock Solace-D into the future, at the Grand Gate’s minimum range, nineteen thousand to twenty-four thousand years ahead.

They would be sending Solace-D forward without benefit of a receiving gate on the other end. The physicists all said they couldn’t predict with any great accuracy when in time the planet would arrive—and they strongly advised that no one try to find out. There was no point in leaning harder on the Uncertainty Principle than they had to.

When—rather if—Solace-R was pulled in from the future, she would be received directly into the gate that had propelled Solace-D forward. Solace-R would thus arrive at the start of a stretch of twenty thousand years, more or less, in which they could be quite certain there was no other instance of Solace to be found.

Which begged the next and obvious question. Villjae had heard the answer—or rather, the various answers—many times. It occurred to him that Beseda, of all people, might be better equipped than most to set him straight.

“Make me feel better,” he said to her. “Tell me what happens in twenty thousand years when Solace-D pops into existence, right in Solace-R’s lap?”

“It won’t,” she said, never once taking her eyes off the display as she spoke. “It can’t.Hasn’t. We’ve modeled it,tested it with smaller masses, hundreds, thousands of times—every time we’ve used the Transit Gates to send people or equipment forward or back.”

That hadn’t occurred to Villjae. “That tells you enough?” he asked. “Doesn’t it matter that the masses are bigger, or something?”

“Course not,” Beseda said. “One atom, one planet—the mass is irrelevant so far as immediate temporal effects go. Every time you do a time-gate jump, you are forming or collapsing a world line. You’re spawning a new universe, identical to the one you were in, except for the effect you’ve imposed.”

“But what’s to keep us from accidentally producing a universe where Solace-Ddoes pop up right next to a future Solace-R in twenty thousand years?”

“It can’t,” Beseda said. “Except of course, for universes where it does—but we won’t be in those. By deleting Solace-D from the current time line, we are imposing a major effect, and that spawns a new universe—lots of new universes, in fact. When we activate the gate and launch Solace-D, we’re not producingtwo choices, but trillions of them.Every possible variance in the conditions causes a slightly alternate outcome. If a particular component is a microdegree cooler or warmer, so that more or fewer electrons flow through it, that’s enough. A difference of one electron more or less moving through a circuit is enough to spawn a universe, just as much as a planet’s being there or not.

“Then, in each ofthose trillions of new universes, each one will have very slightly different initial conditions for the reentry of Solace-D. Mostly those will cause it to arrive a bit earlier, a bit later. Trivial. In some universes, it won’t arrive at all, or it will appear very late, or in the wrong place—inside Lodestar, or something. Inthose universes, of course, when the terraformers go to look for Solace-D, it isn’t there, so they can’t reterraform it.”

“Go on,” he said.

“It’s a cascade effect, more and more universes forming with each event. Every action in every universe with more than one possible outcome spawns a new universe. What we want to have happen is for Solace-D to be kicked twenty thousand years ahead, spend just under a million years being terraformed into Solace-R, then get kicked back to about now, about a week after Solace-D left. Then Solace-R proceeds forward in time.Every one of those major events, and all of the minor ones, spawns a new world line. By the time Solace-R gets to the twenty-thousand-year mark, it is on a time line that’s diverged completely from the one in which Solace-D first appeared in that era.”

“And nothing goes wrong in any of those universes?”

“Of course things go wrong. In all those trillions of trillions of spawned universes, all of whichwill happen—yes, there will be world lines where everything goes utterly wrong and, somehow, Solace-D drops into a line with a Solace-R. Such events will make all such universes evaporate spontaneously. Solace-D and -R don’t have to strike each other, or even be physically near each other. Two instances of the same body—again, electron or planet or galaxy, size and complexity don’t enter into it—two instances from the same root body from the same root world linecannot exist simultaneously. That’s fundamental. It’s what makes time travel possible. Ithas to be that way. I could show you the math.”

“No, no, that’s all right,” he said hurriedly, for fear she’d pull a datapad out then and there. “But wait a second,” Villjae objected. “What about the timeshaft wormholes? They throw—what did you call them—instances—of the same object back and forth all the time. There are timeshaft ships that have crossed through the same set of years dozens and dozens of times.”

“Apples and oranges,” Beseda said dismissively. “Yes, that’s time travel, but it’s a totally differenttype of time travel. Nuclear fission and nuclear fusion are both nuclear power reactions, but they’re still completely different from each other. Those repeated timeshaft shipsaren’t different instances, as the word is defined in chronophysics. They are continuous and contiguous portions ofone instance of the same object moving forward and backward through time. Passage through a timeshaft wormhole doesn’t span universes, outside of the normal actions of probability—it merely moves you through a fold in space-time, from one point to a contiguous point, with the connection through the singularity. Completely different process.”

“I thought wormholes were singularities, outside our universe,” Villjae objected.

“Better to think of them as singularities, outside the universe as we perceive it, but enclosedwithin the chronouniverse that also contains our perceptible universe,” she said.

“All right, I’ll take your word for it. Both ways seem to work. But, getting back to the waythis thing works”—he gestured toward the image of the Grand Gate—“it seems soextravagant . How could therebe that many universes? And do we have the moral right to create them, when it seems inevitable that some of them will turn out very badly, if not for us, then for analogues of us?”

“We can’t help but do it. Watch this,” said Beseda. She lifted one hand up in front of her face, wiggled her fingers, then dropped her hand back in her lap. “I just created a few thousand universes distinguishable from each other above the quantum level. Some universes where I wiggled faster, some universes where I wiggled slower, or with the other hand, and some where I didn’t do it at all. That’s the action of normal probability I was talking about a second ago.But most of those universes are already remerging with each other, as the differences between them are worn down by the passage of time. Whatever air molecules I moved would have been moved by something else by now.

“That’s harmonics. Once a difference doesn’t make a difference anymore, the universes produced by the creation of those differences coalesce back together. Universes aren’t merely being created and split off constantly—they’re being destroyed and merging together as well. A difference creates dissonance, which produces a universe to split off. Once the difference fades away, later in the world line, harmony is reestablished, and the split between the two is healed. It’s not universes spawning endlessly out of control, more and more and more every femtosecond. It’s occasional eruptions of significantly different universes against a background of continuous spontaneous splittingand merging, along with self-destruction of any universes that generate effects that render the universe in question impossible.

“In the present case,not to act will leave undisturbed a world line where humanity is extinct in a thousand years. How isnot acting a morally superior choice? In any event,” she concluded, nodding toward the big display, with just the barest hint of a smile on her face, “it’s a little late to worry about itnow .”

He looked up and was startled to see that the countdown had only a few seconds left to run. Only Beseda could have calmly delivered a lecture on chronophysics at such a time without being flustered. It was almost as remarkable as Beseda making an effort, however feeble, at humor. Villjae was willing to bet there were a great many universes wherethat hadn’t just happened. But there were greater wonders yet to behold than Beseda making a joke.

The clock reached zero, and the Grand Harmonic Gate began its work. The three rings began to spin themselves up, gaining rotational velocity with remarkable rapidity. The rings werebig, and it simply took time to get them up to speed. Furthermore, they couldn’t take any risks of damaging the rings. After all, they would need them again—to pull in Solace-R. So they did the power-up, and the spin-up, as gently as possible.

There had been no possible way to conduct a complete test of the Grand Gate. It had, out of necessity, been builtaround the planet and could not be activated without sending the planet somewhere—or rather, somewhen. It had to work the first time.

There was something hypnotic in watching the rings spinning faster and faster, moment by moment, until the checkerboard patterns began to blur and smear, then become lost to sight altogether.

The room was silent, all conversation at an end, as the moment,the moment, grew closer. It wasn’t hard to imagine all the people of the Solace system silent, watching, holding their breath.

The activation sequence moved on, everything happening as it should, all according to plan. Time seemed to slow down, drag to a halt altogether, yet seemed to rocket forward at blinding speed as they all drew closer to the precipice, gathering speed for the jump across, already moving too fast to stop, with no choice but to press on, move forward, go faster, and pray.

“One minute,” Beseda whispered. “Momentum translation in one minute.”

Come on,Villjae told the ring, the universe, the laws of physics.Hang on just a little while longer. Just a few more impossible things. Hang on.

Thirty seconds, and they’d find out if the engineers were as good as they thought they were, if they could truly build materials strong enough for what was needed.But it’s not the grand plan that fails, Villjae reminded himself.It’s the stuck switch, the plus sign that should have been a minus, the spilled drink shorting out a control panel. He knew that, better than anyone.If it fails, it won’t be big, or structural. It’ll be that someone spilled lunch sauce onto a momentum damper six years ago. Whatever the cause, failure would almost inevitably be catastrophic. The Solace system simply did not have the resources to try again. All, or nothing.

Ten seconds.

Villjae found himself wanting to shout, wanting to scream, but somehow he could not. He was as frozen as the moment, unable to do anything but let it all crash into him.

Suddenly the inner and outer rings were gone, leaving only the center ring, spinning by itself. For one gut-freezing moment, Villjae thought the other two had simply disintegrated—but then he realized they were there, and doing exactly what was intended. In a process no less miraculous than inertial damping, the angular momentum of both rings had been instantaneously rotated through ninety degrees, sending both rings revolving about, end over end, their axes of rotation perpendicular to each other and to the unchanged center ring.

Now that he looked harder, Villjae could see the inner and outer rings, or rather a pair of translucent spheres that marked their spinning paths, one inside the other, the center ring between them, and Solace-D in the center of all. The temporal field strengths started to climb as steadily as the spinning masses, and the field generators built into them, began to interact. Suddenly there were flashes of light, massive lightning discharges arcing between the rings—but even those massively powerful energy surges were inconsequential compared to what came next. For it was not when the temporal fields formed that mattered so much—it was when they collapsed.

The process was beyond any control now, human or ArtInt, and only the laws of physics could govern what happened next. The fields moved toward the intended temporal phase harmonic state, but without a gate on the other side of the temporal jump to modulate and stabilize the fields, there was no way to govern that movement, to retard it or speed it up. The energies had been loosed, and the Grand Harmonic Gate was, for a brief time at least, its own master.

Suddenly, all the telemetry screens went blank, and the lightning discharges resumed with a thousand times their previous ferocity. Solace-D was all but lost to view inside that violent, seething cauldron, unspeakable powers unleashed and out of control—

And then it was over. The fields collapsed and the rings discharged their angular momentum, there was a flash of strange blue light—and suddenly there were simply three rings floating motionless, lined up neatly in one plane—and an empty space inside, where once the planet Solace-D had been. The telemetry screens came back to life, showing all peaceful, all quiet, all systems green and at standby.

The room was silent with shock for a moment. Then it erupted in cheers, shouts, screams, backslapping, people surging into the aisles—and there was Villjae, standing next to Beseda Mahrlin, who had been calm as could be throughout the whole affair—but was plainly now scared to death by the tumult all around her.

Villjae felt he ought to do something for Beseda, but couldn’t for the life of him think what—until he thought of the hangar deck. It ought to be quiet down there. He waited until things settled down a bit, then led her away, threading her along through the shouting and the dancing.

It was not until long after that it occurred to Villjae that he should have been annoyed with her for forcing him into the role of nursemaid and handholder at such a moment. He had earned his chance to celebrate as well. But then he thought he understood why. After all, Beseda Mahrlin had watchedhis back, on that long-ago day back in Groundside Power.She had kept him going, back then, and gotten him what he needed when he needed it. If she had not done that, he had not the slightest doubt that Ignition would have failed. No NovaSpot. No Greenhouse as lifeboat. No place for the refugees of Solace. No experience in running vast projects. Without her help that day,this day—the new cloud of universes they had, according to Beseda, just created—would never have come to pass.

All in all, repaying a bit ofthat debt seemed a fair exchange for missing the rest of the party.

 

Sure enough, the hangar deck was cool, and quiet—if not anywhere near empty. Villjae should have thought of that. With the number of big shots on board, of course the hangar deck would be filled to capacity with shuttle pods.

But even so, it was room enough to move around and quiet enough for Beseda to recover her wits. Better still, from her point of view, she managed to pull up repeater screens, showing the telemetry results. The numbers meant nothing to Villjae, and he took another swallow from the bottle of wine he had liberated on the way down while waiting for her to look them over.

“Good,” she said at last, and shut off the display, looking and sounding very pleased—and more animated than he had ever seen her. “Short of actually jumping forward and looking at Solace-D, that’s the best data we’ll get. And it’s good. It worked. Phase One worked like a charm.”

Beseda gave Villjae another surprise when she reached for the bottle herself, took a healthy-sized gulp herself, and did so with obvious pleasure.

She held on to the bottle for a moment, and took another swig from it. “’Course,” she said, “we won’t do itthat way that many more times,” she said. “Glister, maybe. That’s the next one. After that, we’ll know enough about temporal confinement to reverse the effect, large-scale.That’s the way to go.”

“What are you talking about?”

She gave Villjae a puzzled look, plainly surprised that he hadn’t understood what she had thought was a perfectly clear explanation. “So far we’ve only used temporal confinements to slowdown time inside a confinement. Theory says there’s no reason we couldn’t flip the sign from neg to pos, and use tempo confinement tospeed up time flow inside the confinement. Make the inside of the confinement experience a million years while the universe ages by a decade or two.”

“So, what, we do what we did with Greenhouse? Throw a confinement around a whole planet?”

“Nah. That’s small-time,” she said, and it seemed to Villjae her voice was a little blurry. “Wouldn’t work, anyway. Planet needs sunlight, for one thing. And remember, TC power has to come from theinside . We couldn’t store the power to run the thing for more than a few minutes of objective time, unless we melted the planet.”

“Okay, so what instead?” Villjae asked.

“Throw the confinement around the wholestar system. Planet and star inside it together, aging together. Inner system, anyway. Gravity would still work—the outer planets wouldn’t go flying off—just get way cold and dark when the confinement shut off their sunlight. Configure the temporal confinement to double as radiation shielding, heat dump. Hang collectors around the star, and useit for the power source. Suck up every watt that’s not going to the planets and dump it into the confinement. Set up your first phase of terraforming, switch it on. Wait a few minutes, switch it off. Bam! Five thousand years gone by inside. Set up the next phase, and do it again. Bam! Big. Powerful. Elegant. No chance for time-travel headaches. Pain in the neck, time travel. Best thing is to avoid it whenever you can.”

Villjae had the distinct sensation that his head was spinning. How many leaps of faith, of imagination, would it require before such a technique was even remotely possible? And yet, there was Beseda Mahrlin, of all people, describing it almost as an accomplished fact, a foregone conclusion.

Maybe success does that,he thought.Maybe it lets you consider what comes next, not just what to do when things go wrong. It makes you look forward. “I like it,” he said. “I like it very much.”

But, he reminded himself, success was not yet assured. Just as Beseda had so happily confirmed, there was still the small matter of a planet to be retrieved from the future.

They were, all of them, in the position of a lunatic thrill seeker who had jumped from an aircar without a parachute, in the hopes of finding one on the way down.

And the ground was coming up fast.