The Depths of Time (42 page)

Norla managed all of those on her own, but she knew not to try drawing her own blood if she didn
’
t have to. It would seem Koffield
’
s experiences had taught him the same lesson, and he was more than happy to trade help with the chore.

There was a peculiar sort of intimacy to the moment, each of them rolling up a shirtsleeve and baring flesh for the other to stab, however carefully and gently, with a needle.

Norla felt strange, and a trifle uncomfortable, to have Koffield
’
s hands on her arm, expertly massaging the flesh to bring out a vein. Neither of them had touched the other since the day he had revived her from cryosleep. There was something
dangerous
in the sensation of feeling his hands on her skin. The jab of the needle was merely cold, sharp, precise, rather than truly painful. The blood welling up in the sampling reservoir as he drew back the plunger looked redder than it should have.

To Norla, it looked too perfect and archetypal to be real. It looked like pretend blood, ghoulish makeup, rather than the genuine article. But blood and steel did not worry her. It was, some deep part of her knew, Anton Koffield who was dangerous.

Koffield cleaned and bandaged the needle mark on her arm, then undipped the sampling reservoir from the needle. The needle went down the trash chute, and the reservoir into its carefully labeled niche in the sampling kit, ready to be set in the airlock for the service robot to collect.

“
Now do me,
”
Koffield said, rolling up his own sleeve. In the most literal way possible, he was placing himself in her hands, opening himself up to her, and she wanted to show herself worthy of that trust. It was the work of but a minute to draw his blood and pack the sampling reservoir into his sample case. It took not much longer to seal up the two cases, confirm they were labeled properly, and set them in the airlock. Norla sealed the airlock hatch and pushed the buttons to start the lock cycle.
“
That should do it,
”
she said.
“
I wonder what they
’
re afraid of catching from us.
”

“
Or what it is they
’
re afraid we
’
ll catch from them,
”
he said.
“
Disease vectors are two-way streets.
”

“
I hadn
’
t thought of that,
”
she admitted.
“
And I can
’
t blame them for being careful around people who could be carrying last century
’
s plague, and definitely aren
’
t carrying the antibodies to this century
’
s. But I don
’
t like being stuck here, waiting while they check.
”
Nor do I,
”
Koffield said.
“
All things considered, we
’
ve done all the waiting we should be expected to do, don
’
t you think?
”

Norla smiled at the small joke, then glanced down at the secured container that was still this side of the lock. The container Koffield had guarded so carefully still sat on the deck, ready to be moved out the airlock the moment they were allowed off the ship.

“
There
’
s some other waiting I
’
ve been doing,
”
she said.
“
I
’
ve been waiting to hear the end of your story. What
’
s in that Pandora
’
s box of yours? What
’
s it all about?
”

“
I read that story about Pandora, read all the myths I could, back when I was a boy,
”
Koffield said. It was hard not to notice he wasn
’
t actually answering her question.
“
The way I remember the story, all the evils of the world flew out of the box the moment she opened it,
”
Koffield said.
“
Once the evils had escaped, she looked inside the box, and saw that the only thing still there was hope. That always bothered me. I couldn
’
t help but wonder—who
’
d put evil and hope in the same box, and why? And why did hope hide in the bottom of the box, afraid to come out, when the evils were brave enough to rush out the first moment they could?
”

“
I assume you wouldn
’
t pack a case full of evil and bring it all this way,
”
Norla said.
Or would you?
she wondered.
Anyone from Glister would believe you capable of doing just that.
But she wanted answers to her questions, and she was damned well going to get them.
“
So if not evil, what is in your box? Is it hope?
”

Koffield frowned, then shrugged his shoulders. It was strange to see any such sign of uncertainty from the man.
“
Perhaps,
”
he said.
“
Hope, maybe, for some, anyway. Knowledge, certainly. And a warning, if anyone will listen.
”

“
You said you
’
d tell me the rest of it,
”
Norla said, tven to herself, she sounded like a petulant child demanding another bedtime story.
“
You said you
’
d tell me everything before I needed to know it. Once they give us med clearance and we open that hatch again, things are going to start happening. I don
’
t think there will be time later on. I have to know
before
that hatch opens. Tell me.
”

Koffield looked down at his secured container, and then
back at Norla. He nodded, in a way that seemed to signal,
if not willing agreement, at least acceptance.

But the last of the barriers was yet to come down.
“
It
’
s
not the sort of thing I can tell in two minutes standing by an airlock,
”
he said.
“
They
’
ll need at least several hours
before they clear us. Tonight. Tonight, over dinner, I
’
ll tell you the last of it.
”

Norla looked him in the eye and nodded back at him, she herself accepting, if not agreeing. She wanted to push
harder, to make him get it all out in the open, once and for
all—but she could sense that asking for more would likely
bring her less.
“
All right,
”
she said.
“
Tonight.
”

Koffield smiled stiffly to her.
“
Until dinner then,
”
he said, turned, went back into his cabin, and closed the door.

Norla stood there staring at the closed door. It seemed as good a symbol as any for time spent with Anton
Koffield.
“
Until dinner,
”
she said to the door.

It was not a meal she was expecting to enjoy all that much.

“
This, sir, is what did it,
”
said Hues Renblant. He held up a standard-issue ten-centimeter archival program storage cube at shoulder height so Captain Marquez could see it. He held it the way a security officer might display his identity plaque, as a way of displaying his bona fides, his authority.
“
Or rather, the person who reprogrammed this cube did it.
”

Captain Felipe Henrique Marquez was sitting in the main command chair on the command level of the
Dotn Pedro IV,
but there was very little commanding he could do at the moment. Half the ship
’
s systems were down as the crew ran through exhaustive diagnostic tests on everything they could think of. It was no idle expression to say that they were working as if their lives depended on it.

Marquez held out his hand for the cube, and First Officer Renblant gave it to him, though both men knew perfectly well a naked-eye examination of the cube couldn
’
t tell anyone anything. But Marquez wanted to touch the thing that had wrecked his ship, wanted to hold it in his hand and get a good, long, close-up look at the device that had betrayed him.

Not that it did him much good. It was a datacube just like any other. He set it down on the command console and looked at the two men, Hues Renblant and Dixon Phelby, who stood before him.
“
How?
”
he asked.

“
Superbly,
”
said Renblant.

Marquez looked at Renblant sharply. Up until that
moment, he would have said that the propulsion and guidance specialist had no detectable sense of humor—and he still wasn
’
t sure. The man might have made a joke, but it was more likely he was offering an honest opinion of the skills of whoever had sabotaged the cube.
“
Could you be a trifle more specific?
”
he asked.

“
Of course, sir,
”
Renblant said.
“
Timeshaft ships use the most archivally stable memory and data systems possible. They have to have working lives measured in the thousands, or tens of thousands, of years, and they are built with a great deal of internal redundancy and designed to make it easy to recover from an accidental erasure.
”

“
What of it? Everything was erased in any event,
”
Marquez asked impatiently. After all, he knew the systems on his own ship.

“
Yes, sir. But not accidentally. We
’
ve established beyond any doubt that it was done deliberately.
”

“
Then why does the ability to survive accidental erasure matter?
”

“
Because our saboteur was unable to overcome those features completely. The cube there was the one that contained the entire program for retargeting the ship, and flying direct to Solace through normal space without benefit of a wormhole transit. But it had more than that on it. Once the ship had arrived, the cube activated a series of housekeeping commands—though housewrecking might be a better term.
”

“
Then all the ship
’
s memories and logs were intact up until arrival?
”

“
Yes, sir.
”

“
I see,
”
Marquez said, working hard to retain his composure in the face of such maddening news. For a hundred twenty-seven years the ship—
his
ship—had been methodically logging in a detailed and clear report of everything that happened to it, of what had happened, of what had gone wrong. And then, minutes, perhaps seconds, .before he was revived, it had all been wiped clean. To say it was adding insult to injury was to understate the case by orders of magnitude. It was a slap to the face of a mortally wounded man.
“
Please go on.
”“
The last four commands in the housekeeping sequence were to erase the event-logging system, and all backups for it, to erase the main retargeting program, to set up a timed command to zero out the clocks, and then to erase the housekeeping series itself. The important point is that the clock-zero command had to run
after
everything else had been blanked, or else there would be a datestamp left on the event log, telling the exact time the clock was zeroed. Since the clocks restarted from zero, having a datestamp would be as good as knowing the exact time. All you
’
d have to do is add the two numbers. So the clock-zero command had to run last, direct from the main system sequencer.
”

“
And that
’
s where the housekeeping wasn
’
t as thorough as it might have been,
”
Phelby said cheerfully, speaking for the first time.

Renblant looked at the cargo specialist with quite obvious irritation. The two men might have turned out to be a good work team, but it was in spite of, and not because of, their personal relationship.
“
Yes,
”
Renblant said.
“
Cargomaster Phelby located the one trace left by the sabotage.
”

“
Well, Phelby?
”

“
Yes, sir. The whole ship-control system is designed to make it easy to recover from errors. It was built to make it impossible for any command or sequence or program to erase itself, and also built with the capacity for cascade-recovery. Sort of like running a line of falling dominoes backwards. You put the last fallen domino back upright, and it pushes the one behind it upright.
That
pushes up the one before
it,
and so on. So I—we—knew that
something
— probably the zero-out-all-clocks command—still had to be in the system somewhere.
”
Phelby glanced at his companion.
“
Our saboteur hid his work pretty well, but we knew it had to be there. We were both looking, and either one of us could have found it,
”
he said.
“
It happened to be me. Once we found the clock-zero sequence, the rest was pretty straightforward.
”