The Depths of Time (49 page)

And maybe that was what the station-dwellers hated most about them. Because the station-dwellers knew, Yuri knew, that the refugees were just like them,
were
human beings. The refugees showed the dwellers what they might become, if their luck went bad. If others could fall so low, then perhaps they could as well.

“
I
’
m sorry,
”
Yuri said.
“
It
’
s not the kindest thing to call a group of people. But, well, that
’
s the name they
’
ve gotten. The point I was trying to make, even if I did a bad job of it, is that for better or worse, you
’
re not like them.
”

Chandray looked at him, her expression hard and cold, before she returned her gaze to the shabby men on the street corner.
“
I can think of things we have in common,
”
she said.
“
They and we are both a long way from home— and neither they nor we can go back.
”

The traffic started moving again, and the free-runner rolled forward, leaving the little crowd of weary, defeated men behind.

Norla Chandray wanted to scream, wanted to cry. She had so long dreamed of seeing what people and places were like in other star systems. Now she knew. She knew the people on top were callous and angry at the helpless, and the ones down below had all life, all hope, crushed out of them. She knew this place was a bewildering, crowded, foul-smelling hell-maze. And she knew she was trapped here. She could see no likelihood of escaping this world, this future. Even if they did manage to repair the
Dom Pedro IV,
Norla doubted she could bring herself to set foot back in the cryo-can that had nearly killed her and had killed her two friends. Or perhaps risking cryodeath would be preferable to life in this nightmare. Norla shuddered. How had she come to be in a time and place where the choices were so few and so unpleasant?The free-runner rolled forward through the thickest of the traffic. The signs indicated they were getting closer to Ring Park, whatever that was. Road traffic was thinning out, but the crowds of refugees on the walkways were growing thicker. Up ahead, the sidewalls of the Boulevard opened out, and the overhead transit tubes split apart, one to either side of the Boulevard. Both angled down steeply and vanished below street level. The rows of shops and buildings stopped dead. A flat, featureless blue wall on either side of the road marked the end of the commercial area, but the road and the walkways passed through a wide circular opening in the wall. The way ahead was clear, straight into what had to be Ring Park.

The road itself pointed straight ahead, toward another circular opening at the far wall, and the aft end of the station visible beyond. A huge green space—or at least space that had once been green—opened up on all sides of them as they moved past the barrier. Ring Park wrapped itself entirely around the Perimeter Level of the station. Norla looked up at the sky-blue ceiling, and estimated that the park took up three or four levels of the station. Beyond that ceiling there had to be several more decks, and then the central access tunnel of the station, through which the
Cruzeiro do Sul
had traveled.

There had been no attempt to make the overhead bulkhead look like anything but a high, blue-painted ceiling. Stations with similar parks sometimes used holographic projections and other tricks to simulate cloudscapes and sunshine and so on. Better to do what they did here, Norla decided, and let a ceiling be a ceiling. Here and there, flying figures and sky scenes from legend and history had been painted onto the ceiling. A dragon breathed fire here, an impossibly rickety wood-and-paper airplane from the near-ancient period struggled into a patch of painted sky there, but these were mere decoration, not intended to fool anyone.

Before her and behind her, the forward and aft bulkheads were painted in an abstract pattern of browns and greens that gradually merged with the overhead blue. It was enough to suggest and evoke imaginary forests, but not so much that it was an attempt to make anyone think there were forests instead of metal bulkheads. Perfectly normal direct lighting illuminated the park—no optical illusions of a simulated sun, or overly clever indirect lighting systems. The one lighting effect she could not understand was a sudden, brief, and faint pulse of light every three minutes or so, coming from off to the right..

The grounds of the park were—or at least had been—a fairly conventional approximation of open parkland. Broad lawns with small pools of water here and there, and small stands of trees dotted about the place.

But things were not as they had been. What little grass was left was brown. The water in the decorative ponds was a most undecorative greasy grey-green. Someone was emptying a slop bucket into the closest pond as Norla watched, while someone else was drawing water from the same source. Nearly all the trees had been cut down, leaving only a collection of ragged stumps. In among all the other odors that clouded the air, Norla identified woodsmoke. She could see the glow of half a dozen campfires.

The air was hazy with smoke and laden with the smells of unwashed bodies, rancid food, decaying feces, stale urine, burned food, and a dozen other things Norla could not identify.

And, everywhere, in groups of five or ten or a dozen huddled around a fire, wandering aimlessly or sitting huddled by themselves, were the refugees. Sparten
’
s gluefeet. The people washed up on this noisome shore by a crisis that seemed to come out of nowhere.

The free-runner turned off the Long Boulevard onto a paved side path that led off to the right, toward the direction of the light pulses.
“
Vehicle command. Pause here,
”
said Yuri Sparten. The free-runner slowed, pulled itself off to the side of the road, and came to a halt.
“
Well, here we are, Second Officer Chandray,
”
said Sparten.
“
You wanted to see the scenic part of the scenic route. This is it.
”

“
Damnation,
”
Koffield said. It was hard to know if he meant it as a curse, or as a perfectly apt description of the
place. The three of them just sat and looked for a long moment, the scene overwhelming them all.

“
This is where you put them?
”
Norla asked.
“
In an open park?
”

“
The park is as closed-in as anything in the station,
”
Sparten said.
“
There
’
s no weather to speak of. We have guest quarters for two or three hundred to accommodate
visiting crews—and those quarters are virtually at full ca
pacity. Where else were we going to put two thousand people but here?
”

Norla desperately wanted to have an answer to that,
something she could throw back in his face, but she had
nothing.

“
I
’
m amazed your environment systems held together
as well as they have,
”
Koffield said.
“
With so many extra
people on board, you must have been near the ragged edge.
”

“
At it and over it. But we
’
re coming back, starting to recover. Believe it or not, it was a lot worse than this. For
one thing, the stink isn
’
t nearly as bad as it was,
”
Sparten
went on with a studiously matter-of-fact tone.
“
Most of
this is residual from when things were really bad. The air
scrubbers are finally starting to cut into the worst of it.
And we
’
re actually a lot closer to being on top of the sani
tation situation now. They were burying their dead here for a while, except the soil
’
s not deep enough to do it properly. We had corpses rotting under fifteen centimeters
of dirt in here. We
’
ve disinterred them and put a stop to
further burials. We think.
”

Norla stared at Sparten. He almost made it sound as if
the refugees buried their dead as some sort of sport, or
game, without realizing the nuisance it caused. She won
dered what had happened to the disinterred bodies, and
decided she didn
’
t want to know. Besides, Sparten was still talking.

“
The biggest problem we have now is getting them to
stop burning fires,
”
he was saying.
“
We can
’
t afford to
waste the oxy, and the smoke and soot are hell on the air
scrubbers.
”

“
Why are they burning fires?
”
Norla asked.

“
To keep warm,
”
Yuri said, as if it were obvious.
“
It gets cold here in the park during night shift. Most of the gluefeet are laboring class, not all that well educated, but still they should have had the sense not to set the fires in the first place. It was. worse than useless. The park was actually built over the outer hull
’
s thermal superconducting coils—the coils are right under the park surface. Heat-dumping was part of the idea designed into the park. The station air system drives warm air into the park. See that meter-high grey cube over there? There are lots of those all over the park, though most are better hidden by the landscaping. Some are air intakes, and the others are outlets. They connect to a convection pumping system that runs the air through the superconducting thermal coils, cools it, condenses water vapor out, then dumps it back out into the park.
”

“
If the people are that cold, can
’
t you shut down the coil coolers?
”

Yuri shook his head.
“
They
’
re an integral part of the station
’
s cooling system. We generate a lot of waste heat here in this station. If we didn
’
t dump the heat, the whole station would get above habitable temperatures in a few days and just keep going. We
’
d literally cook. We
have
to cool the station, and we use the park as a heat sink. So it gets cold in here, so the refugees cut down trees and light fires to stay warm, and pump more heat into the system right on top of the cooling system, so the system automatically compensates until we can correct manually, and then—well, I could go on, but it
’
s a hell of a mess. The one bright spot is that they
’
ve just about run out of things to burn.
”

“
So now they
’
ll freeze.
”

“
They
’
ll be cold, that
’
s all,
”
Yuri said sharply. He frowned and shrugged.
“
I know how harsh it all sounds, but there
’
s only so much we can do, and we
’
re doing it. We
’
re shifting machines off other work .to make blankets and warm clothes and portable heaters and so on, but we don
’
t have the manufacturing capacity or raw materials to do it very quickly. If we shifted enough resources to give them everything they need as quickly as possible, it would wreck the station. Probably kill all of us. That
’
s the tightrope we
’
re walking, in a dozen ways at least. Vehicle command. Drive on.
”
The free-runner pulled itself back onto the paved path and drove on.

The path ran roughly at right angles to the Long Boulevard, following the inner circumference of the station, driving along on the inside of the huge cylinder. Norla
’
s eyes insisted that they were constantly just about to start climbing a hill that grew steeper and steeper, while an equally steep hill was always just behind them.

What they had seen at first arrival repeated itself over and over again as they drove; the same destruction, the same huddled groups of people, the same dust and smoke and gloom.

At last the free-runner slowed down, and then turned onto a side path. There was what seemed to be another of the decorative ponds, a round dark hole in the lawn. But then Norla noticed one thing different about this pond— and then another, and another. The other ponds had all been artfully rounded abstract shapes. This one was perfectly and precisely circular. The others had no barriers between themselves and the surrounding lawns. This one had a quite substantial meter-high metal fence around it. And none of the other ponds had anyone watching over them. Norla counted six rifle-toting guards around the perimeter of this
“
pond.
”

And then came another of those pulses of light—flaring up out of the pond. It was increasingly clear that it was no pond at all—though what the devil it might be, Norla had no idea.

“
What is this place?
”
Norla asked as the free-runner came to a halt by a footpath that led toward the whatever-it-was.

“
DeSilvo Tower,
”
Yuri said.
“
Come along.
”
He stepped out of the free-runner and gestured for his two guests to do the same.