The Depths of Time (37 page)

At last he spoke.
“
What happened? I was a fool, that
’
s what happened. I was a fool, and DeSilvo seduced me just as he seduced everyone else. Except with me he did it not by flattering me, or making a fuss over me, or making it seem like I was special and important. He did it by not knowing—or perhaps simply not caring—who I was.

“
There was a grand reception for DeSilvo one night. Not the first in his honor, and not the last. I received a courtesy invitation, on account of my rank. There were a great number of receptions and parties and conferences and dinners held in the Grand Library habitat. Some for fun, or for private socializing, but most with some sort of agenda for someone. And I did not fit most agendas. As you might imagine, therefore, I didn
’
t receive many invitations, and most of the ones I did get seemed to be the sort where I was supposed to have the good taste to understand that
_#
it would be awkward indeed if I actually accepted or showed up. I knew well enough when I was supposed to send my regrets and thus avoid causing a scene. What I didn
’
t know about reading between the lines, I learned pretty quickly.

“
But the invitation to the party for DeSilvo wasn
’
t like that. No one called me two hours after it arrived to ask me to take a duty shift so he could go to the same event. None of my fellow officers just happened to stop by to say that this or that politician would be there, broadly hinting that it would be unpleasant if anyone caused a scene.

“
So I went. It was the first time I had really been out to that sort of event since—well, since before Circum Central. There were speeches. Some functionary or other got up and told us how wonderful DeSilvo was, then handed DeSilvo whatever trinket it was—a plaque, a medal, whatever. Something he could hang in his trophy case. DeSilvo got up and accepted the award, then made his own speech—and it was a very good speech, a very compelling and moving and clever speech, all about how the new terraforming methods were going to revolutionize everything, turn the status quo around, get humanity back on the move. Now we
’
d be able to expand ten times as fast, to ten times as many worlds. Loud cheers and applause for that remark, and no one stopped to ask if establishing ten times as many underpopulated, isolated, expensive backwaters was such a grand idea.

“
I didn
’
t think of any such questions myself, not that night. DeSilvo was a good speaker, and I got swept up in his words, the same as everyone else there.

“
After the speeches, DeSilvo worked the room, smooth and thorough as any politician, making sure everyone there got a special hello, a personal greeting. And it so happened he came to me, and it so happened that, for whatever reason, it seemed as if he took a special interest in me.
”

Koffield went silent again, but Norla did nothing, said nothing, to urge him on. Somehow she knew that she could only reinforce this silence, that came at the exact moment when Koffield himself entered the story. She had to wait it out, let the time go by until he had no choice but to speak. This man had built a wall of silence around himself, and only he could pull it down. Never had he revealed the slightest detail about himself. Now he had no choice but to do so.

At last Koffield went on.

“
For whatever reason,
”
he said,
“
DeSilvo singled me out that night. Maybe he wanted something that he thought I could get for him. Maybe it was that he was a good talent spotter, and sensed, somehow, he could make use of me.

“
If that last was it, the man
’
s intuition was right. He used me, all right. He invited me to tour the suite of offices he was using in the Grand Library, and I went there first thing the next morning. After giving me the full tour of his operation—all the archives, all the info-storage nodes, the retrieval systems—he explained in detail what he wanted.

The details of it don
’
t matter so much. What it boiled down to was that DeSilvo was trying to produce an absolutely complete record of the terraformation of Solace, and the Chronologic Patrol
’
s archives had information he wanted, about the initial discovery of the planet by telescopes from thirty light-years away, about the first probes sent to Solace, and about transport services provided by the CP during the project.

“
It was something to do, it was research, and it was, perhaps useful. I could imagine some Solacian child one day sitting down to learn about the founding of her world and reading about the information I had tracked down. I liked that idea. I set to work finding the references and getting the clearances. Because I was CP, it only took a few days for me to do the job. It would have taken a civilian months or years to track through all the red tape.

“
That
’
s how I got started. I found the history of the Solacian terraforming project fascinating—and, naturally enough, that pleased DeSilvo no end. I decided to write a history of the Solace project, something for the average reader, rather than for the scholar. It seemed the perfect project for me. It was a complex enough job to keep me busy for a good long while, and it would keep me quietly out of the way in the meantime. I
’
m sure it was just the sort of thing CP HQ had hoped I would decide to do.

“
As it happened, starting my book project meant I would be the first person to use the archive DeSilvo was preparing, before it was even complete, and that, needless to say, appealed to his vanity.

“
He wanted to assist me in as many ways as possible, but I did my best to keep him at arm
’
s length: The truth be told, I didn
’
t want him too close, because I wanted my book to be something a bit more objective than DeSilvo
’
s version.

“
I don
’
t want to give myself too much credit. I hadn
’
t yet started to notice the errors and inaccuracies in the official version, let alone the pattern behind those not-so-innocent mistakes. But there was something else I
had
spotted. Nothing that was terribly dramatic or underhanded. But, after all, the archive workers had all worked on the Solace terra-forming job, most of them directly under DeSilvo. They were, understandably enough, putting together an archive, a historical source, that reflected DeSilvo
’
s agenda.

“
I didn
’
t go
looking
for the gaps, the hidden files, the things swept under the rug. But I had served for years as a CP intelligence officer. It was second nature, an automatic reflex, for me to find the holes.

“
It was subtle stuff. I
’
ll just give you one example of the sort of thing they were doing, and leave it at that. The cross-reference links—the archive
’
s main index—had a lot more reference links to the successes of the project than links to the failures and mistakes. Any historian who relied on that index to locate information on a given subject, instead of searching the source material directly, would be getting very biased information without even realizing it. There were dozens of such subtle manipulations.

“
At the time, I didn
’
t think much of it. At the time I put it down to optimism and pride, an unconscious impulse to remember the good and forget the bad. The other researchers simply weren
’
t objective. But I soon came to doubt it was anything so undeliberate or benign. I think DeSilvo was quite deliberately reshaping the record and steering his assistants to do the same, to the full extent that he could, in order to make the Solace Archive a more fitting monument to himself.

“
As I got further along in my research for my book, I noticed more and more such holes and gaps and omissions. I found myself half-consciously tracking them back, for no better reason than that it was habit. It was automatic in me to want to know what a person was hiding. So I ran down the missing references, read the texts myself, and compared the indexes against them. When I found out how incomplete the indexes were, I set to work building my own cross-references. And don
’
t think that is a small job either, no matter how intelligent your automated assistants are. They invariably find too much or too little.

“
I found myself spending more time filling in the holes in the official history than I spent writing my own. And
then I found it—found the key to it all, the hinge that everything else turned on. I found a cross-reference to a book by someone named Ulan Baskaw, a reference they had failed to expunge. The name meant nothing to me— and that in itself was remarkable, considering the amount of time I had spent reading through the archive files. By that time, I had become so distrustful of the archive project that I would have double-checked a reference to Earth
’
s sun rising in the east.

“
It should have taken no time at all to track down any and all references to Ulan Baskaw. The Grand Library
’
s search system should have popped up a full set of information and cross-references to that name, and to variants on it, in the time between two heartbeats. But it didn
’
t. It quite literally drew a blank. Nothing. Nothing at all. But I knew from the cross-reference number I had stumbled across that there had been at least one Grand Library reference to that name at some point in the past. The fact that it had turned up missing was, in and of itself, prima facie evidence, if not hard-edged proof, of a crime.
Nothing
is ever supposed to go out of the Grand Library. It is supposed to be the ultimate repository, the safe refuge for all knowledge. Once an item has a GL reference number, it is
not
supposed to go away.
”

Koffield frowned deeply.
“
But it did go away. DeSilvo erased it. That might not seem like much of a crime, but in the world of academia, in his world, altering or tampering with the Grand Library is—well, is sacrilege. Profaning the holy places. I couldn
’
t even imagine a motive strong enough to make a man like DeSilvo do such a thing. But he had a reason. A reason more than big enough to make library-tampering worthwhile.
”

A beeper went off on Norla
’
s control panel. The sound was not an alarm warning, not even an alert, but Koffield
’
s mood, and the tone of his story, had put her on edge, and she was halfway across the deck before she was even consciously aware of the sound. She dropped into the pilot
’
s chair and checked her board, then looked up to where she had expected Koffield to be, hovering over her shoulder, seeing the codes for himself. But he wasn
’
t there. She looked across the deck to see that he hadn
’
t made the slightest move. He was still in the wardroom.

Damn the man. What was it he had in his veins besides ice?
“
They
’
ve spotted us,
”
she announced, raising her voice so it would carry across the cabin.
“
Solace Central Orbital Traffic Control is querying us for identity and flight plan. Looks like an automated transmission.
”

“
Answer it,
”
Koffield said, his voice already more distant and distracted than it had been.
“
But don
’
t answer too thoroughly. If we go into any detail about who we are and how we got here, we
’
ll spend the rest of the flight giving our life story over and over again to every office and section and department head. Just give ship
’
s name and registry, and request a flight plan to Solace Central Orbital. See if that
’
s enough to get us clearance. If it isn
’
t, and they want more information, work on the same principle. Don
’
t give them more than they ask for.
”

“
Yes, sir,
”
. Norla said.
“
Setting up my reply now.
”
Secretive sort of a fellow, that was for sure. What did it matter if they had to tell their story a dozen times as they worked up the chain of command? What else did they have to do?

Koffield stood up, crossed back to the table, and collected the photo of two smiling men, of Anton Koffield and Oskar DeSilvo. He looked out the wardroom porthole.
“
I
’
ll be in my cabin for the remainder of the evening,
”
he said, and turned toward his cabin door.

Norla finished feeding her reply to the comm system and looked up.
“
But, ah, sir—you haven
’
t finished telling me about—about the ...
”
Koffield stopped and looked toward her. The expression on his face made her give up before she had even fairly begun. His jaw was set, and his eyes, normally so warm and kind-looking, were suddenly cold and hard as blast-proof glass.

“
I don
’
t wish to speak about that matter anymore at present,
”
he said in a voice as hard as his expression. Then his tone of speech softened just a trifle.
“
Another time, Officer Chandray,
”
he said.
“
If they have found us, things might well start happening rather quickly. There is a lot for me to think about, to have worked out, before we meet the Solacians. It would be best for all concerned if I concentrated on what might happen next, rather than being distracted by things that happened quite some time ago.
”