The Depths of Time (43 page)

“
Very tedious,
”
Renblant agreed.

“
Boring as hell,
”
Phelby said, smiling back at his partner.
“
But we managed to flip a lot of the dominoes upright. Not all of them.
”

“
Please go on,
”
said Marquez.

“
Yes, sir,
”
said Renblant.
“
We recovered a great deal of the sabotage program. Cascade-recovery has its limits, and some parts of it were irretrievably lost. But we did get enough of it to tell us a great deal. And the news is good.
”

“
Good as it can be, under the circumstances,
”
said Phelby.

“
And that news would be?
”
Marquez asked.

“
We believe the ship is now clean. Once we had the sabotage program to examine, we were able to find several characteristic patterns to the way the programmer, the saboteur, did things. You could say we learned what his or her handwriting looked like. We
’
ve done a search for the same patterns in other elements of the ship
’
s systems, and they aren
’
t there. All the other systems give normal diagnostic results. There is no further sign of tampering.
”

“
So there are no further booby traps waiting for us?
”

Renblant raised one eyebrow very slightly and shrugged.
“
A timeshaft ship is extremely complex. There will always be some way to conceal something on board, especially for something as microscopic and invisible as a bit of hidden computer code. But we have established there are no computer programs in the system that display any of the characteristics found in the sabotage program. Besides, the saboteur would have no reason to plant other traps.
”

“
Why not?
”

“
The first one worked,
”
Phelby said.
“
It did what the saboteur wanted it to do. Why plant a second one? I have no idea why the saboteur would want us delivered here a century and a quarter late, but that
’
s what the program was intended to accomplish, and that
’
s what the program did. It
’
s gone now. We can start reloading the nav and propulsion control systems from the nonvolatile backups whenever you like.
”

Marquez nodded. He could see that logic. But all the same, he was not going to gamble his ship on the strength of it.
“
Very well,
”
he said.
“
Good work, to both of you. But we
’
ll work on the assumption that something else

 
might be waiting for us. We
’
ll continue with the full-ship diagnostic. Once it is complete, I still want full written reports from all sections—and a report from Koffield and Chandray about conditions in-system. Once I
’
ve had a chance to review all that material—we
’
ll start thinking about doing system reloads, and about what we do next. What you
’
ve told me is most reassuring—but I see no reason to take chances.
”

Renblant displayed no reaction, but Phelby cocked his head to one side arid shrugged.
“
We figured you
’
ve read it that way,
”
he said.
“
Can
’
t say as I
’
d disagree.
”
He grinned, but there was something sad, and lost, in his expression.
“
After all,
”
he said,
“
it
’
s not like we
’
re in a hurry anymore.
”

Norla should have been used to Koffield
’
s surprising her, considering all the times and all the ways he had done so.
“
Expect the unexpected
”
was a clever-sounding slogan, but Norla had never seen any way to actually do it.

She could have spent the whole afternoon and evening expecting the unexpected and still been astonished by the meal put together by Admiral Anton Koffield of the Chronologic Patrol. She had known he was capable of commanding troops in battle, but she had not expected him to be able to cook. He certainly had offered no evidence of such a talent during their journey.

The
Cruzeiro do
Swfs fold-away galley wasn
’
t much, and it had not been stocked with any great imagination, but even so, the meal he set before her smelled wonderful, even if she had not the faintest idea what it was. But even as she was seduced by the delightful smell, part of her was wondering why Koffield was doing it. Was it an attempt to distract her away from her questions? But Norla couldn
’
t believe that a strategist as intelligent as Anton Koffield would think for half a minute that such a gambit would work. He dressed for dinner in a formal tunic and kilt. Perhaps it was merely a sense of occasion that inspired him. Tomorrow they would meet with the Solacians, and who could know what their intentions would be? Perhaps it was merely a case of the condemned man eating a hearty meal.

Or perhaps—perhaps it was that Koffield felt that the end of a story, or at any rate the end of
this
story, deserved some sense of occasion.

They spoke of inconsequential things over dinner itself— technical aspects of the approach and docking, the two of them using the same hand gestures that pilots had used for millennia to describe planes and ships moving toward each other. They discussed SCO Station
’
s physical appearance, the new and the old jumbled together like pieces of a life raft cobbled together out of whatever came to hand.

The main course was done. Koffield served a sweet cake drawn from ship
’
s stores that tasted precisely as if it had been in cryostorage for a hundred years. At last the small talk petered out to nothing, and an expectant silence hung over the table.

“
Very well,
”
Koffield said, as if, instead of silence, the room had been filled with Norla
’
s badgering demands that he get on with it.
“
I suppose I
’
d better tell you the rest of what I know. On this subject, anyway. As you
’
ll recall, we left it with my discovery that someone had tampered with the Grand Library. That discovery hit me pretty hard, I can tell you. Even after everything I had seen, I still believed in DeSilvo.
”

Koffield thought for a moment and shook his head.
“
No. I have to go further than that. After—after Circum Central and Glister, I was still very close to low ebb. DeSilvo had been the one person willing to get near me, to have any faith in me, after that. It was desperately hard for me to stop believing in the one man who had at least seemed to believe in
me.

“
And yet I was already of two minds. I think, even then, I was starting to see, in the back of my mind, that he had seen in me a tool that he could get cheap, and get good use from. I have made use of many people in my life, and there are certainly worse things to be than useful—but I had always tried to be honest with the people I used, made sure they understood the transaction, and understood what was being given and taken by both sides.
”

Norla had to smile at that. She certainly felt that Koffield was getting use out of her, but she hadn
’
t the faintest idea what the terms of the transaction were.

Koffield went on.
“
But DeSilvo did none of that. He pretended I was his great friend, his treasure beyond price, his indispensable man. Puffery, and fraud, all of it—and pretty transparent, as well. It was oddly insulting that he didn
’
t even expect me to see through it.

“
I suppose the normal, sensible thing to do once I discovered the missing books would have been to turn to a librarian, or perhaps to one of DeSilvo
’
s archivists, or even to DeSilvo himself, and ask about them. But I realized that I could no longer believe that it would turn out to be some innocent mistake. It had gone past that point long before, about the time I noticed a pattern to what was missing.

“
Perhaps, after that, the next most normal thing would be to conduct a computer search myself. There is almost always a way to track something down in a computer system after it has been erased or moved. But I already knew that someone—and I had a pretty good idea who—was playing games with the Grand Library computer system. I knew how sophisticated and secure the GL system was. It would take someone with great skill and knowledge, and very powerful access, to manipulate that system.

“
Someone who could do that could also set up drop-traps and search monitors and other defense and detection systems in the computer system. I had to assume that, if I ran a search, DeSilvo would know about it almost at once. I didn
’
t want to tip my hand too early.

“
Besides, there was another thing I knew after my time in intelligence: A person who can manipulate a computer system that well tends to
think
in terms of computer systems and Artlnt operators. So much of what they know about the world comes to them through computer displays that they start to think that the world
is
what the computer and the Artlnt-ops tell them it is. If the computer records show that the book has been deleted, then it has been. That was something I could take advantage of—by doing a physical search. Not many people even realize that
such things are still possible. They don
’
t think of knowledge as having a physical location or existence. They think it
’
s a cloud of invisible data that can be anywhere it is needed. But knowledge is still real, and still can be—must be—enshrined in physical objects, in books.

“
There
’
s an important rule of thumb it took the record-keepers of the near-ancient era a long time to learn. It is this: The more technically sophisticated a data-storage system is, the sooner it will become difficult or impossible to read and retrieve that data, once the technology becomes obsolete. We can still read the Rosetta stone, because it was carved on a rock. We can still read the nineteenth-century translations and commentaries on the stone, because they were printed on paper, and the facsimile versions of those books that we have today were printed on archival-quality flex-sheets that should last for thousands more years. But we
can’t
read much of what was written about the Rosetta stone after the late twentieth century. We no longer know how to decipher the data in that era
’
s storage systems, and their data storage has degraded over time.

“
The obvious solution to this problem is to store vitally important documents in a way that will stay as legible as long as the Rosetta stone has, in the form of scrolls or bound books, or in permanent self-decoding systems.

“
Knowing all this, I reasoned that if someone, at some time, had thought that Ulan Baskaw
’
s work was important enough, and would have long-term importance, then Baskaw
’
s work would have been put in the Grand Library
’
s Permanent Physical Collection.

“
I decided to try looking there, though just getting to < the PPC was something of a challenge. There are actually two PPCs, one intended as a duplicate of the other— though of course it
’
s impossible to keep the two collections perfectly synchronized with each other. The Main PPC is in an old deep-space orbital habitat, orbiting Neptune, though in a completely different orbit than the Grand Library habitat. The reserve PPC is buried somewhere on the Lunar Farside, I believe. They keep the exact location quiet. The idea is that no one catastrophe, short of the Sun somehow going supernova, could knock out the Grand Library and both permanent collections.

“
I knew that I wanted to move carefully, and that it was important that I avoid arousing DeSilvo
’
s suspicions. For that reason, I couldn
’
t simply announce I was looking for Baskaw
’
s suppressed works and hop a lift on a shuttlecraft over to the PPC habitat. I didn
’
t want to do anything that would so much as remind DeSilvo that the Permanent Physical Collection even existed. To do so might remind him that he had failed to destroy any copies of Baskaw
’
s work that survived there, and inspire him to beat me to the prize. I had to come up with a plausible cover story, an acceptable reason for me leaving the Grand Library habitat long enough to search the PPC.
”

Koffield paused again, and he grimaced unhappily before going on.
“
So I did something I
’
m not proud of. I told my superiors I needed to take medical-disability leave. I was entitled to it, after Circum Central, and the—difficulties—of our flight back from there. They had even urged me to take it. The doctors had gone on and on about mental and emotional exhaustion, the danger of a nervous collapse. But I had refused.

“
Now I went back to them and told them they were right, that I needed a rest, a chance to get away. And it might have been true. Maybe I was about to snap. Maybe all my suspicions about DeSilvo were total raving paranoia. There
’
s the old joke—just because you
’
re paranoid, it doesn
’
t mean they
’
re not out to get you. It turns out that I was right about DeSilvo. But the fact that I was right does not prove I was sane. Especially as what he did, what I suspected him of, was at the very least something close to insanity.