Palimpsest Part 4

"Where am I?" he asked.

"You'll have to wait while we cut you out of that," said a stranger. Their voice sounded oddly m.u.f.fled, and he realized with surprise that it wasn't coming from inside him. "You took an EMP that fried your suit. You only just made it out in time-you took several sieverts. We've got a bed waiting for you."

Something pushed at his side, and he felt a strange tipping motion. "Am I in free fall?" he asked.

"Of course. Try not to move."

I'm not on Earth, he realized. It was strange; he'd effectively visited hundreds of planets with ever-s.h.i.+fting continents and biospheres, but he'd never been off Earth before. They were all aspects of Gaia, causally entangled slices through the set of all possible Earths that the Stasis called their own. he realized. It was strange; he'd effectively visited hundreds of planets with ever-s.h.i.+fting continents and biospheres, but he'd never been off Earth before. They were all aspects of Gaia, causally entangled slices through the set of all possible Earths that the Stasis called their own.

Someone tugged on his left foot, and he felt a chill of cold air against his skin. His toes twitched. "That's very good, keep doing that. Tell me if anything hurts." The voice was still m.u.f.fled by the remains of his hood, but he could place it now. Kari, a quiet woman, one of the trainees from the cla.s.s above him. He tensed, panic rising in a choking wave. "Hey-Yarrow! He's stressing out-"

"Hold still, Pierce." Yarrow's voice in his ears, also fuzzy. "Your phone's off-line, it took a hit too. Kari's with us. It's going to be all right."

You don't have any right to tell me that, he thought indignantly, but the sound of her voice had the desired effect. he thought indignantly, but the sound of her voice had the desired effect. So Kari's one of them too. So Kari's one of them too. Was there no end to the internal rot within the Stasis? In all honesty, considering his own concupiscence-possibly not. He tried to slow his breathing, but it was slowly getting stuffy and hot inside the wreckage of his survival suit. Was there no end to the internal rot within the Stasis? In all honesty, considering his own concupiscence-possibly not. He tried to slow his breathing, but it was slowly getting stuffy and hot inside the wreckage of his survival suit.

More parts detached themselves from his skin. He was beginning to itch furiously, and the lack of gravity seemed to be making him nauseous. Finally, the front of his hood cracked open and floated away. He blinked teary eyes against the glare, trying to make sense of what his eyes were telling him.

"Kari-"

The spherical drone floating before his face wore her face on its smartskin. A flock of gunmetal lampreys swam busily behind it, worrying at pieces of the dead and mildly radioactive suit. Some distance beyond, a wall of dull blue triangles curved around him, dish-like, holes piercing it in several places.

"Try not to speak," said Kari's drone. "You've taken a borderline-fatal dose, and we're going to have to get you to a sick bay right away."

His throat ached. "Is Yarrow there?"

Another spherical drone floated into view from somewhere behind him. It wore Xiri's face. "My love? I'll visit you as soon as you've cleared decontamination. The enemy are always trying to sneak bugs in: they wouldn't let me through to see you now. Be strong, my lord." She smiled, but the worry-wrinkles at the corners of her eyes betrayed her. "I'm very proud of you."

He tried to reply, but his stomach had other ideas and attempted to rebel. "Feel. Sick ..."

Someone kissed the back of his neck with lips of silver, and the world faded out.

Pierce regained consciousness with an abrupt sense of rupture, as if no time at all had pa.s.sed: someone had switched his sense of awareness off and on again, just as his parents might once have power-cycled a balky appliance.

"Love? Pierce?"

He opened his eyes and stared at her for a few seconds, then cleared his throat. It felt oddly normal: the aches had all evaporated. "We've got to stop meeting like this." The bed began to rise behind his back. "Xiri?"

Her clothing was outrageous to Hegemonic forms (not to say anachronistic or unrevealing), but she was definitely his Xiri; as she leaned forward and hugged him fiercely he felt something bend inside him, a dam of despair crumbling before a tidal wave of relief. "How did they find you?" he asked her shoulder, secure in her embrace. "Why did they reinstate-" did they reinstate-"

"Hush. Pierce. You were so ill-"

He hugged her back. "I was?"

"They kept me from you for half a moon! And the burns, when they cut that suit away from you. What did you do do?"

Pierce pondered the question. "I changed my mind about ... something I'd agreed to do ..."

They lay together on the bed until curiosity got the better of him. "Where are we? When are we?" Where did you get that jumpsuit? Where did you get that jumpsuit?

Xiri sighed, then snuggled closer to him. "It's a long story," she said quietly. "I'm still not sure it's true."

"It must be, now," he pointed out reasonably, "but perhaps it wasn't, for a while. But where are we?"

She eased back a little. "We're in orbit around Jupiter. But not for much longer."

"But I-" He stopped. "Really?"

"They disconnected your phone, or I could show you. The colony fleets, the s.h.i.+pyards."

He blinked at her, astonished. "How?"

"We all have phone implants, here." Her eyes sparkled with amus.e.m.e.nt. "This isn't the Stasis you know."

"I'd guessed." He swallowed. "How long has it been for you?"

"Since"-her breath caught, a little ragged-"two years. A little longer."

He gently trapped her right hand in his, ran his thumb across the smooth, plump skin on the back of her wrist. She let him. "Almost the same." He swallowed once more. "I thought I'd never see you again. Anyone would think they'd planned this."

"Oh, but they did." She gave a nervous little laugh. "He said they didn't want us to, to desynchronize. Get too far apart." Her fingers closed around his thumb, constricting and warm.

"Who is 'he'?" asked Pierce, although he thought he knew.

"He used to be you, once. That's what he told me." Her grip tightened suddenly. "He's not you, love, it's not the same. At all. At all."

"I must see him."

Pierce tried to sit up: Xiri clung to him, dragging him down. "No! Not yet," she hissed.

Pierce stopped struggling before he hurt her. His arms and his stomach muscles felt curiously strong, almost as if they'd never been damaged. "Why not?"

"Scholar Yarrow asked me to, to intercede. She said you'd want to confront him." She tensed when she spoke Yarrow's name. "She was right. About lots of things."

"What's her position here?"

"She's with him." Xiri hesitated. "It took much getting used to. I made a fool of myself once, early on."

He raised a hand to stroke her hair. "I can understand that." Pierce pondered his lack of reaction. "It's been years since I knew her, you know. And if he's who-what-I think he is, he was never married to you. Was he?"

"No." She lay against him in silence for a while. "What are you going to do?" she asked in a small voice.

Pierce smiled at the ceiling. (It was low, and bare of decoration: another sign, if he needed one, that he was not back in the Hegemony.) For the time being, the shock and joy of finding her again had left him giddy with relief. "Where are the children?" he asked, forcing himself: one last test.

"I left Liann with a nurse. Magnus is away, in the s.h.i.+p's scholasticos." Concern slowly percolated across her expression. "They've grown a lot: do you think-"

He breathed out slowly, relieved. "There will be time to get to know them again, yes." She reached over his chest and hugged him tight. He stroked her hair, content for the moment but sadly aware that everything was about to change. "But tell me one thing. What is it that you're so desperate to keep from me?"

Nation of Me "Good to see you, Pierce," said the man on the throne. He smiled pleasantly but distantly. "I gather you've been keeping well."

Pierce had already come to understand that the truly ancient were not like ordinary humans. "Do you remember being me?" he asked, staring.

The man on the throne raised an eyebrow. "Wouldn't you like to know?" He gestured at the bridge connecting his command dais to the far side of the room. "You may approach." Combat drones and uniformed retainers withdrew respectfully, giving Pierce a wide berth.

He tried not to look down as he walked across the bridge, with only partial success. The storms of Jupiter swirled madly beneath his feet. It had made him nauseous the first time he'd seen them, through a dumb-gla.s.s window aboard the low-gee shuttle that had brought him hence-evidently his captors wanted to leave him in no doubt that he was a long way from home. Occulting the view of the planet was the blue-tinged quicksilver disk of the largest timegate he'd ever seen, holding open in defiance of protocol with preposterous, scandalous persistence.

"Why am I here?" Pierce demanded.

A snort. "Why do you think?"

"You're me." Pierce shrugged. "Me with a whole lot more experience and age, and an att.i.tude problem." They'd dressed him in the formal parade robes of a Stasis agent rather than the black jumpsuits that seemed to be de rigueur around this place. It was a petty move, to enforce his alienation: and besides, it had no pockets. To fight back, he focused on the absurd. Black jumpsuits and s.h.i.+ny boots, on a s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p? Someone around here clearly harbored thespian fantasies. "And now you've got me."

His older self stiffened. "We need to talk alone." His eyes scanned the throne room. "You lot: dismissed."

Pierce glanced round just in time to see the last of the human audience flicker into unhistory. He looked back toward the throne. "I was hoping we could keep this civilized," he said mildly. "You've got all the leverage you need. I'm in your power." There There: it was out in the open. Not that there'd been any doubt about it, even from the beginning. This ruthless ancient with his well-known mirror-face and feigned bonhomie had made Pierce's position crystal clear with his choice of greeters. All that was left was for Pierce to politely bare his throat and hope for a favorable outcome.

"I didn't rescue you from those sc.u.m in order to throw you away again"-his older self seemed almost irritated-"though what you see in her her ..." He shook his head. "You're safe here." ..." He shook his head. "You're safe here."

Pierce rolled his eyes. "Oh, really. And I suppose if I decline to go along with whatever little proposition you're about to put to me, you'll just let me walk away, is that it? Rather than, oh, rewind the audience and try again with a clean-sheet me?" He met the even gaze of the man in the throne and suddenly felt finger high.

"No," said the man on the throne, after a momentary pause. "That won't be necessary. I'm not going to ask you to do anything you wouldn't ask me to let you do."

"Oh." Pierce considered this for a moment. "You're with the Opposition, though. Aren't you? And you know I'm not." Honesty made him add, "Yet."

"I told you he'd say that," said Yarrow, behind him. Pierce's head whipped round. She nodded at him, but kept her smile for the man on the throne. "He's young and naive. Go easy on him."

The man on the throne nodded. "He's not that that naive, my lady." He frowned. "Pierce, you slit the throat of your own double, separated from you by seconds. You joined the Stasis, after all. But do you really imagine it gets easier with age, when you've had time to meditate on what you've done? There's a reason why armies send the flower of their youth to do the killing and dying, not the aged and cynical. We have a name for those who find murder gets easier with experience: 'monsters.' " naive, my lady." He frowned. "Pierce, you slit the throat of your own double, separated from you by seconds. You joined the Stasis, after all. But do you really imagine it gets easier with age, when you've had time to meditate on what you've done? There's a reason why armies send the flower of their youth to do the killing and dying, not the aged and cynical. We have a name for those who find murder gets easier with experience: 'monsters.' "

He raised a hand. "Chairs all around." A pair of seats appeared on the dais, facing him: ghosts of carved diamond, fit for the lords of creation. "I think you should be the one to tell him the news," he suggested to Yarrow. "I'm not sure he'd believe me. He hasn't had time to recover from the trauma yet."

"All right." Yarrow slid gratefully into her own chair, then glanced at Pierce. "You'd better sit down."

"Why?" Pierce lowered himself into his seat expectantly.

"Because"-she nodded at Pierce's elder self, who returned the nod with a drily amused smile-"he's not just a member of the Opposition: he's our leader. That's why Internal Affairs have been all over you like ants. And that's why we had to extract you and bring you here."

"Rubbish." Pierce crossed his arms. "That's not why you had to grab me. You've already got him: I a.s.sume I'm a palimpsest or leftover from an a.s.sa.s.sination attempt. So what do you want with me me? In the here and now, I mean?"

Yarrow looked fl.u.s.tered. "Pierce-"

His older self placed a restraining hand on her knee as he leaned forward. "Allow me?" He looked Pierce in the eyes. "The Opposition is not-you probably already worked this out-external to the Stasis; we come from within. The Stasis is broken, Pierce, it's drifting rudderless toward the end of time. We've got a, an alternative plan for survival. Internal Affairs is tasked with maintaining internal standards; they're opposed to structural change at all costs. They overwrote your wife's epoch because they discovered possible evidence of our success."

The evidence of abandoned cities on an alien moon, the fleet of gigantic slower-than-light colony stars.h.i.+ps-was this all just internal politics within the Stasis hierarchy?

"Whatever would they want to do that for?" he asked. "They're not interested in deep s.p.a.ce." Except insofar as there were threats to the survival of humanity that had to be dealt with.

Yarrow shook her head. "We disagree. They're very very interested in deep s.p.a.ce-specifically, in keeping us out of it." She inhaled deeply. "Did you notice, when you were consulting the Library, any sign of histories that touched on extraterrestrial settlement? Even though we have reterraformed the Earth thousands of times over, strip-mined the sun, rearranged gas giants, built black holes, and ripped an entire star system from its native galactic cl.u.s.ter?" Pierce shook his head, uncertain. "We've built and destroyed thousands of biospheres, sculpted continents, we outnumber the stars in the cosmos-but we've never spread to other solar systems! Doesn't that strike you as a little odd?" interested in deep s.p.a.ce-specifically, in keeping us out of it." She inhaled deeply. "Did you notice, when you were consulting the Library, any sign of histories that touched on extraterrestrial settlement? Even though we have reterraformed the Earth thousands of times over, strip-mined the sun, rearranged gas giants, built black holes, and ripped an entire star system from its native galactic cl.u.s.ter?" Pierce shook his head, uncertain. "We've built and destroyed thousands of biospheres, sculpted continents, we outnumber the stars in the cosmos-but we've never spread to other solar systems! Doesn't that strike you as a little odd?"

"But we coevolved with our planet, we're not adapted to life elsewhere-" Pierce stopped. We can do terraforming, and timegates, We can do terraforming, and timegates, he realized. he realized. Even if we can only have one wormhole end open at any given time. We rebuilt Even if we can only have one wormhole end open at any given time. We rebuilt the sun the sun . We've mapped every planet within ten million light-years. . We've mapped every planet within ten million light-years. "Are we?" he asked, plaintively. "Are we?" he asked, plaintively.

"There's a Science Empire running down on Earth right now," said the man on the throne. "They've been studying that question for twelve thousand years. We brought them the probe fleet reports. They say it can be done, and they've been building and launching a colony s.h.i.+p a year for the past six centuries." He frowned. "We've had that big gate in place ever since the dawn of civilization, to block Internal Affairs from detecting and overwriting our operation here. Officially we're in the middle of a fallow epoch, and the system should be uninhabited and uninhabitable: we moved in ahead of the first scheduled Reseeding. But they never give up. Sooner or later they'll notice us and start looking for the other side of our barricade, the static drop we funneled you through."

"What happens when they find it?" asked Pierce.

"Six hundred inhabited worlds die, and that's just for starters," Yarrow said quietly. "Call it unhistory if you like euphemisms-but did your graduation kill feel unreal to you? Unlike your"-her nose wrinkled in the ghost of a sniff-"wife and children, the inhabitants of the colony worlds won't be retrievable through the Library."

"And those six hundred planets are just the seed corn," his older self chimed in. "The start of something vast."

"But why?" he asked. "Why would they ... ?" He stopped.

"The Stasis isn't about historicity," said Yarrow. "That might be the organization's raison d'etre, but the raw truth of the matter is that the Stasis is about power power. Like any organization, it lives and grows for itself, not for the task with which it is charged. The governing committee-it's very sad. But it's been like this as long as there's been a Stasis."

"We rescued you because we specifically want you-my first iteration, or as near to it as we've been able to get, give or take the a.s.sa.s.sination ambush in Carnegra," said the man on the throne. "We need your help to cut us free from the dead hand of history."

"But what-" Pierce lowered his hands to touch his belly. "My phone," he said slowly. "It's damaged, but you could have repaired it. It's not there anymore, is it?"

Yarrow nodded slowly. "Can you tell me why?" she asked.

RESEEDING.

A Brief Alternate History of the Universe.

SLIDE 1.

Our solar system under the Stasis, first epoch.

Continents slide and drift, scurrying and sc.r.a.ping across the surface of the mantle. Lights flicker around the coastlines, strobing on and off in kiloyear cycles as civilizations rise and fall. In s.p.a.ce, the swarm of orbital-momentum-transfer robots built from the bones of Ceres begin to cycle in and out, slowly pumping energy downwell to the Earth to drag it farther from the slowly brightening sun.

SLIDE 2.

Snapshot: something unusual is happening.

We zoom in on a ten-thousand-year slice, an eyeblink flicker of geological time. For millions of years beforehand, the Earth was quiet, its continents fallen dark in the wake of a huge burping hiccup of magma that flooded from the junction of the Cocos and Nazca continental plates. But now the lights are back, jewels sprinkled across the nighttime hemispheres of unfamiliar continents. Unusually, they aren't confined to the surface-three diamond necklaces ring the planet in glory, girdling the equator in geosynchronous...o...b..t. And floating beyond them, at the L1 Lagrange point betwixt Earth and Luna, sits the anomalous glowing maw of an unusually large timegate.

The natives appear to be restless ...

SLIDE 3.

A slow slide of viewpoint out to Jupiter orbit shows that the anomaly is spreading. Already some of the smaller Jovian moons are missing; Thebe and Amalthea have vanished, and something appears to be eating Himalea. A metallic cloud of smaller objects swarms in orbit around Europa, pinp.r.i.c.ks of light speckling their surface.

Meanwhile, the shoals of momentum-transfer bodies are thinning, their simple design replaced by numerous perversions of form and purpose. Still powered by light sails, the new vehicles carry exotic machines for harvesting energy from the solar wind and storing it as antimatter. Shuttles move among them like ants amidst an aphid farm, harvesting and storing their largesse as they swing out to Jupiter before dropping back in toward Mercury.

Some of the hundreds of metal moons that orbit Europa are glowing at infrared wavelengths, their temperature suspiciously close to three hundred degrees Kelvin. Against the planetary measure of the solar system they are tiny-little bigger than the moons of Mars. But they're among the largest engineered structures ever built by the dreaming apes; vaster than cities and more ma.s.sive than pyramids. And soon they will start to move.

SLIDE 4.

Three thousand years pa.s.s.

Earth lies dark and unpopulated once more, for humanity-as always-has gone extinct. Of the great works in Jupiter orbit few traces remain. The great s.h.i.+ps have gone, the s.h.i.+pyards have long since been deorbited into the swirling chaos of the gas giant's atmosphere, and the malformed, warped transfer bodies have been cannibalized and restored to their original purpose.