The Depths of Time (35 page)

But the man who appeared at his elbow was no waiter. Waiters weren
’
t that big and didn
’
t look that mean.
“
Get your stinking, dirt-farmer, shiftless, peasant butts out of those chairs,
”
the enforcer said.
“
This is a class joint for uppers, not the likes of you.
”

“
We got the same rights to be here as anyone,
”
Zak said, his voice angry, his eyes narrowing.

“
The hell you do, gluefoot,
”
the enforcer growled, leaning in closer.
“
This place is for station people, uppers with money, people who take baths and don
’
t smell. And none of that is you. Now beat it.
”

Everything went quiet.
“
No,
”
said Zak.
“
We stay.
”

“
Leave now,
”
said the enforcer,
“
or later you
’
ll wish you had.
”

Zak stood up slowly and shoved his chair out of the way. Somehow the discarded bottle was back in his hand, held by the neck. He stood in close to the enforcer, nose to nose.
“
We stay,
”
he said again, his voice hard and harsh.
“
Now tell someone to bring us all a drink.
”

The enforcer
’
s hand came up, but Zak was faster. The bottle got the enforcer square on the side of the head, hard.

The enforcer staggered back, then shook it off and propelled himself forward with a roar, slamming his fist into Zak
’
s gut.

And in the blink of an eye, the fight boiled over. Three more private enforcers and a whole squad of Station Security appeared from out of nowhere, and every gluefoot on the block was suddenly in the cafe, shouting and cheering and cursing, or else launching directly into the melee.

Every gluefoot but one. Elber slipped away out of the sidewalk cafe and back down the street toward the Ring Park entrance. He wanted no part in such things. His world had trouble enough already.

A siren began to wail, and Elber upped his pace to a jog, and then a run, back to the camp, back to Jassa and Zari, back to the two people who were all that was left of the life he used to have.

He got away clean, before the lockdown or the security sweeps got started.

It wasn
’
t until the next morning that they heard the riot had spread far enough to shut down all of the Long Boulevard.

A good twenty minutes after he had stepped into his cabin, Anton Koffield reemerged, carrying something, a framed 3-D photo or image of some sort.

“
Find what you were looking for?
”
Norla asked.

“
Yes,
”
Koffield said stiffly. He sat down on one side of the galley table, and Norla sat opposite him. He set the photo facedown on the table, giving Norla no chance to see what it was.

“
I
’
m surprised it took you this long to find it,
”
Norla said, trying to keep her tone of voice playful.
“
I didn
’
t think you had packed that much.
”

“
I packed very little,
”
Koffield said. He frowned for a moment, and shook his head.
“
Thinking on it for a moment, it occurs to me that I
own
very little. I can
’
t imagine that the items I put in storage before I set out on the
Upholder
are still there. And even if they hadn
’
t been discarded long ago, they can
’
t really be said to be in my possession, not all those light-years away. Really, I suppose, the only things I truly own are what
’
s in that secure container, and what
’
s in my travel bag in my room. And, of course, this,
”
he said, patting the back of the picture frame.
“
It took me all of thirty seconds to find it. The rest of the time, I must confess, I spent staring at it, thinking about it—and working up the courage to show it to you. Other people have seen it, of course. But I didn
’
t have to explain it to them.
You
need to understand.
”

He turned the photograph over and slid it across the table to her.

It was a perfectly ordinary full-depth photo of two men at a party, with other partygoers behind them. Both men were holding drinks and smiling at the camera. One of the men was Anton Koffield, in the full-dress uniform of a Chronologic Patrol rear admiral. His smile seemed forced, unconvincing, and he held his drink tightly, in both hands, as if frightened it would get away.

The other man was strikingly handsome. He wore a long, flowing academic robe. He held his drink casually, lifting it in salute at the camera, with his other hand on Koffield
’
s shoulder. His smile was as inviting as an oasis in the desert, as warm and honest as sunshine in the morning.

There was an inscription along the bottom of the photo, done in a firm, very legible hand.
Best wishes to Anton Koffield, Oskar DeSilvo.

“
Taken by his staff photographer, the night we met. It was delivered to me the next morning, signed and framed. No doubt he had his picture taken with dozens of other people that night. No doubt they got theirs delivered the next morning as well.

“
DeSilvo had a whole office whose sole job it was to handle distributing photos and sending out thank-you letters and so on. I knew all that at the time. But for all of that, getting this photo meant a lot. I hung it on the wall of my office as a memento of the night in question. After a while, when the bloom came off the rose, so to speak, I kept it more as a souvenir of times and feelings past.

“
Later still I kept it for other reasons. Back when I was running investigations for Patrol Intelligence, I did what a lot of cops and agents and detectives have always done. They hang up the best photo of their prime suspect dead center on the wall they look at most. A photo gives you a focus, reminds you that your suspect, your quarry, your enemy, is a real person, and not a stack of allegations and file entries. That one photo you
’
re holding became my rogues
’
gallery, all by itself.

“
But—and this is the part that I had to work up the nerve to explain to you—the other reason I
’
ve kept this photo was to remind me of my own foolishness. My capacity for being seduced, taken in. Oskar DeSilvo tricked me into liking him, respecting him, even loving him, at least for a while. To know that, to admit that to you, is deeply humiliating for me. Think of the loyal wife who would not believe all the evidence that her husband was philandering. Think of the confidence trickster
’
s victim, who can
’
t bear to go to the police because it would mean admitting to being a gullible fool. That
’
s what that photo
is to me. When I feel that I have been clever, or insightful, or think I have understood everything perfectly, seen through all deceptions—then I look at that photo for a while.
”

Norla stared at the picture for a moment longer, then put it down, shoved it to one side.
“
Tell me about it,
”
she said.
“
Tell me about meeting him.
”

Koffield nodded.
“
It happened when I was assigned to do general research at the Grand Library. When they asked me where I wanted to go, I think I chose it simply because it happened to be the first on the list of things they offered me. I was in bad shape, past caring about most things. So they packed me off to the Grand Library habitat, orbiting Neptune. It was a posting that kept me close to Earth, to home, so they could keep an eye on me. But it was also a post that didn
’
t make me
too
visible. Just right for the sort of message they were trying to send.
”

“
So you took the assignment. What then?
”

“
Then I met Oskar DeSilvo.
”
He stood up and looked across the cabin, over Norla
’
s shoulder, at nothing at all.
“
I
’
d heard of him, just as you had. That is—was—his great talent. Making sure people knew who he was, and thought they knew what he did.
”

“Thought
they knew?
”
Norla asked.
“
He was a terra-formist, right?
The
terraformist. He planned and oversaw the terraforming of planets.
”

“
That
’
s right. At least that
’
s what he did in theory.
”

“
I don
’
t follow. If he only did terraforming in theory, what did he do in practice?
”

Koffield shook his head sadly and sat down on the couch opposite Norla.
“
In my opinion? The one thing he was brilliant at was convincing people he was brilliant. In any event, DeSilvo had heard about me, and approached me at that party. He was the only one at the party who deigned to speak to me. It caused quite a stir in the crowd when he came over to me—and it touched something in me I didn
’
t even know was still there. The gesture of very obviously speaking with me in public hooked me in, as it was no doubt intended to do. Sending the photo to me was more of the same.
”
He
’
d donated his papers and files and so on to the Grand Library, and he was overseeing the cataloging of all the material. That sort of summed DeSilvo up, in a way. Breathing down the necks of all the specialists, making sure they did it his way, because only his way could be right, making sure that his work was noticed, acknowledged, honored.
”

“
DeSilvo was
’
better at claiming credit than doing work,
”
Norla suggested.

“
That
’
s what I have come to believe. To terraform a planet is to rebuild it completely, in all its myriad complexity. No one man can claim it as his own. Such a thing is too impossibly complicated for one man to be master of it all. The task is too great, and takes too long, for one man to oversee it all, or even comprehend it all. It is a task for generations, a job handed down from parent to child, again and again and again.
”

Koffield paused for a moment, and chuckled to himself.
“
And it was a job that DeSilvo himself had
never actually done
before Solace. He never thought of himself as an engineer, as a builder, as a doer. He was far too lofty for such things. He was a
thinker,
a theorizer, an idealizer. He was the one who saw how things ought to be. He put his finger square on all the crucial mistakes made in the past—right back to the beginning, to the disaster of the first Mars terra-forming attempt. He identified the precise points where all the great terraformists had gone wrong.

“
So he said
’
—and he said it often enough, in a grand enough way, that everyone believed him—and came to believe in him. Half a dozen terraforming projects called him in as a consultant, and listened to all he said, and believed him.

“
He had never worked, in any capacity, directly on a terraforming job. He had never held responsibility, never been forced to concern himself with the results of his actions—and yet, no one seemed to notice that glaring omission. He was handsome, he was refined, he was elegant. He was charming and had the knack of making his own words sound like wisdom.

“
And they all listened, and the more they listened, the
more he had to say. His opinion became doctrine. His vague notions became absolutes. His half-thought-out philosophies became unchallenged certitudes.

“
The people who actually did the work came to sit at the knee of the man who seemed to know their profession, their vocation, better than they did. They, who remade old worlds into new, listened to the words and took the advice of a man who had never turned over a spadeful of dirt.
”

“
In other words, he became the grand old man, and no one noticed there was no particular reason for it,
”
Norla said.
“
I can think of a few professors from my old school like that.
”

“
Exactly. I
’
m not saying he didn
’
t have skills. He could do the calculations. He did understand the incredibly complicated theory and practice of terraforming. Drop a stack of datapacks about some work in progress in front of him, and he
’
d master the material, tell you what was working, tell you what was wrong. But DeSilvo was no genius. He couldn
’
t do what had not been done before. What he could do was
find
geniuses, and make them feel useful—
_:
which only makes sense, as he used them relentlessly.

“
But some people started to notice, and even to whisper to each other, that he was all talk and no action: The Master Worldbuilder had never built a world. And some of the geniuses he hired and used started to mutter about him taking entirely too much credit.