Palimpsest (4 page)

Empty Mansions

Resistance was futile: nearly twenty years-subjective passed Pierce by with the eyeblink impact of another bullet, half of them shared with his new wife. Xiri, true to her word, wrapped her life around his twisted time line: at first as an adoring wife, and then, to his bemused and growing pride, mother to three small children and doctor-professor in her own right. Her dissertation was his life: merely glancing lightly off the skin of time was, it seemed, a passport to wealth and status in the Hegemony, and he found life as the consort of a beautiful noblewoman no less congenial than he might have expected.

Xiri did not complain at Pierce’s eyeblink excursions from their family home (provided by the grace of her father the dean), which usually lasted only for seconds of subjective time. Nor did she complain about the inward-looking silences and moody introspection that followed, and were of altogether greater duration. On the contrary: they invariably provided additional data for her life’s work, once she delicately untangled the story from his memories of unhistory. Sometimes he would age an entire year in an hour’s working absence, but the medical privileges of the Stasis extended also to the Enlightened; there would be plenty of time to catch up, over the decades and centuries.

Pierce, for his part, found it oddly easier to deal with the second half of his training with a stable family life to fall back on. The Stasis were spread surprisingly thin across their multitrillion-year empire. The defining characteristic of his job seemed to be that he was only called for in turbulent, interesting times. Between peak oil and Spanish flu, from Carthage to the Cold War, his three-thousand-year beat sometimes seemed no more than a vale of tears—and a thin, poor, nightmare of a world at that, far from the mannered, drowsy contentment of the ten-thousand-year-long Hegemony. Most of his fellow students seemed to prefer the hedonistic abandon proffered by the Pleasure Empires, but Pierce held his own counsel and congratulated himself on his discovery of a more profound source of satisfaction.

On his first return to training after his convalescence, Pierce was surprised to be summoned to Superintendent-of-Scholars Manson’s chambers.

“You have formed attachments while convalescing.” Manson fixed him with a watery stare. “That is inadvisable, as you will no doubt learn for yourself. However, Operations have noted that there is no permanent Resident in place within a millennium either side of your, ah, domestic anchor-point. It is a tranquil society, but not
that
tranquil; you are therefore instructed and permitted to maintain your attachment and develop your ability to work there. Purely as a secondary specialty, you understand.”

Pierce had almost fallen over with shock. Once he regained his self-control, he asked, “To whom shall I report, master?”

“To your wife, student. Tell her to write up everything. We read all such dissertations, in the end.”

Manson looked away, dismissing him. Pierce nudged his phone, weak-kneed, not trusting his ability to make a dignified exit; after a brief routing delay, the timegate responded to his heartfelt wish, and the ground opened up and swallowed him.

One day very late in his training, with perhaps half a year-subjective remaining until his graduation as a full-fledged agent of the Stasis, Pierce returned home from a week sampling the plague-pits of fourteenth-century Constantinople. He found Xiri in an unusually excited state, the household all abuzz around her. “It’s fantastic!” she exclaimed, hurrying to meet him across the atrium of their summer residence. “Did you know about it? Tell me you knew about it!
This
was why you came to our time, wasn’t it?”

Pierce, greeting her with a fond smile, lifted young Magnus (who had been attempting to scale his back, with much snarling, presumably to slay the giant) and handed him to his nursemaid. “What’s happened?” he asked mildly, trying to give no sign of the frisson he’d momentarily felt (for their youngest son could have no idea of how his father had just spent a week taking tissue samples, carving chunks of mortal flesh from the bubo-stricken bodies of boys of an age to be his playmates in another era). “What’s got everyone so excited?”

“It’s the probes! They’ve found something outrageous in Messier 33, six thousand light-years along the third arm!”

Pierce—who could not imagine finding anything outrageous in a galaxy over a million light-years away, even if mapping it
was
the holy raison d’être of this Civilization—decided to humor his wife. “Indeed. And tell me, what precisely is there that brings forth such outrage? As opposed to mere excitement, or curiosity, or perplexity?”

“Look!” Xiri gestured at the wall, which obligingly displayed a dizzying black void sprinkled with stars. “Let’s see. Wall, show me the anomaly I was discussing with the honorable doctor-professor Zun about two hours ago. Set magnification level plus forty, pan left and up five—there! You see it!”

Pierce stared for a while. “Looks like just another rock to me,” he said. Racking his brains for the correct form: “an honorable sub-Earth, airless, of the third degree, predominantly siliceous. Yes?”

“Oh!” Xiri, nobly raised, did nothing so undignified as to stamp her foot; nevertheless, Magnus’s nursemaid swept up her four-year-old charge and beat a hasty retreat. (Xiri, when excited, could be as dangerously prone to eruption as a Wolf-Rayet star.) “Is that all you can see? Wall, magnification plus ten, repeat step, step, step.
There.
Look at that, my lord, look!”

The airless moon no longer filled the center of the wall; now it stretched across it from side to side, so close that there was barely any visible curvature to its horizon. Pierce squinted. Craters, rills, drab, irregular features and a scattering of straight-edged rectangular crystals.
Crystals?
He chewed on the thought, found it curiously lacking as an explanation for the agitation. Gradually, he began to feel a quiet echo of his wife’s excitement. “What are they?”

“They’re buildings! Or they were, sixty-six million years ago, when the probes were passing through. And we didn’t put them there …”

THE LIBRARY AT THE END OF TIME
 

A Brief Alternate History of the Solar System: Part Two

… And then the Stasis happened:

SLIDE 7.

After two hundred and fifty million years, the continents of Earth, strobe-lit by the mayfly flicker of empires, will have converged on a single equatorial supercontinent, Pangea Ultima. These will not be good times for humanity; the vast interior deserts are arid and the coastlines subject to vast hurricanes sweeping in from the world-ocean. As the sun brightens, so shall the verdant plains of the Earth; but the Stasis have long-laid plans to deflect the inevitable.

Deep in the asteroid belt, their swarming robot cockroaches have dismantled Ceres, used its mass to build a myriad of solar-sail-powered flyers. Now a river of steerable rocks with the mass of a dwarf planet loops down through the inner system, converting solar energy into momentum and transferring it to the Earth through millions of repeated flybys.

Already, Earth has migrated outward from the sun. Other adjustments are under way, subtle and far-reaching: the entire solar system is slowly changing shape, creaking and groaning, drifting toward a new and more useful configuration. Soon—in cosmological terms—it will be unrecognizable.

SLIDE 8.

A billion years later, the Earth lies frozen and fallow, its atmosphere packed down to snow and nitrogen vapor in the chilly wilderness beyond Neptune.
This
was never part of the natural destiny of the homeworld, but it is only a temporary state—for in another ten million years, the endlessly cycling momentum shuttles will crank Earth closer to the sun. Fifty million years after that, the Reseedings will recommence, from the prokaryotes and algae on up; but in this era, the Stasis want the Earth safely mothballed while their technicians from the Engineering Republics work their magic.

For thirty million years the Stasis will devote their timegate to lifting mass from the heart of a burning star, channeling vast streams of blazing plasma into massive, gravitationally bound bunkers, reserves against a chilly future. The sun will gutter and fade to red, raging and flaring in angry outbursts as its internal convection systems collapse. As it shrinks and dims, they will inflict the final murderous insult, and inject an embryonic black hole into the stellar core. Eating mass faster than it can reradiate it through Hawking radiation, the hole will grow, gutting the stellar core.

By the time the Earth drops back toward the frost line of the solar system, the technicians will have roused the zombie necrosun from its grave. Its accretion disk—fed with mass steadily siphoned from the brown dwarfs orbiting on the edges of the system—will cast a strange, harsh glare across Earth’s melting ice caps.

Replacing the fusion core of the sun with a mass-crushing singularity is one of the most important tasks facing the Stasis; annihilation is orders of magnitude more efficient than fusion, not to say more controllable, and the mass they have so carefully husbanded is sufficient to keep the closely orbiting Earth lit and warm not for billions, but for trillions of years to come.

But another, more difficult task remains …

SLIDE 9.

Four and a quarter billion years after the awakening of consciousness, and the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies will collide. The view from Earth’s crowded continents is magnificent, like a chaos of burning diamond dust strewn across the emptiness void. Shock waves thunder through the gas clouds, creating new stellar nurseries, igniting millions of massive, short-lived new stars; for a brief ten-million-year period, the nighttime sky will be lit by a monthly supernova fireworks display. The huge black holes at the heart of each galaxy have shed their robes of dust and gas and blaze naked in ghastly majesty as they streak past each other, ripping clusters of stars asunder and seeding more, in a starburst of cosmic fireworks that will be visible nearly halfway across the universe.

But Earth is safe. Earth is serene. Earth is no longer in the firing line.

The Long Burn is by far the largest program of the Stasis. Science Empires will rise and flourish, decay and gutter into extinction, to provide the numerical feedstock for the Navigators. The delicate task of ejecting a star system from its galaxy without setting the planets and moons adrift in their orbits is monstrously difficult. Planets are not bound to their stars by physical cords, and gravity is weak; innumerable adjustments to the orbits of all the significant planets will be required if they are to be carried along. The mass flow of Ceres alone will not suffice. Rocky Mercury has already been dismantled to provide the control mechanisms that keep the necrostar’s accretion disk burning steadily; it’s Venus’s turn to supply the swarming light-sail-driven mass tugs. A brown dwarf ten times the size of Jupiter will fuel the rocket, an entire stellar embryo pumped down to the blazing maw in the course of a million years.

Galactic escape velocity is high, and escape velocity from the local group is even higher. The Long Burn will last ten thousand centuries. Each year that passes, the necrostar will be moving a meter per second faster. And when it comes to an end, the drastically redesigned solar system will be racing away from the local group of galaxies at almost a thousandth the speed of light—straight toward the Bootes Void.

SLIDE 10.

Over the next billion years, Starship Earth and its dead star will rendezvous with the other components of their lifeboat fleet; an even hundred brown dwarf stars, ten to fifty times as massive as Jupiter and every last one dislodged and sent tumbling from its home galaxy by the robot probes of the Engineering Empires.

Their mass will be gratefully received. For Earth is going on a voyage of discovery, where no star has gone before, into the heart of darkness.

Continent of Lies

Nothing in his earlier life had prepared Pierce for what came next. It beggared belief: a series of synthetic aperture radar scans transmitted by a probe millions of years ago in another galaxy had triggered a diplomatic crisis, threatening world war and civilizational autocide.

The Hegemony, despite being a Science Empire, was not the only nation in this age. (True world governments were rare, cumbersome dinosaurs notorious for their absolute top-down corruption and catastrophic-failure modes: the Stasis tended to discourage them.) The Hegemony shared their world with the Autonomous Directorate of Zan, a harshly abstemious land of puritanical library scientists (located on a continent which had once been attached to North America and Africa); sundry secular monarchies, republics, tyrannies, autarchies, and communes (who thought their superpower neighbors mildly insane for wasting so much of their wealth on academic institutions, rather than the usual aimless and undirected pursuit of human happiness); and the Kingdom of Blattaria (whose inhabitants obeyed the prehistoric prophet Haldane with fanatical zeal, studying the
arthropoda
in ecstatic devotional raptures).

The Hegemony was geographically the largest of the great powers, unified by a set of common filing and monitoring protocols; but it was not a monolithic entity. The authorities of the western principality of Stongu (special area of study: the rocky moons of Hot Jupiters in M-33) had reacted to the discovery of Civilization on the moon of a water giant with a spectacular display of sour grapes, accusing the northeastern Zealantians of
fabricating data
in a desperate attempt to justify a hit-and-run raid on the Hegemony’s federal tax base. Quite what the academics of Leng were supposed to do with these funds was never specified, nor was it necessary to say any more in order to get the blood boiling in the seminaries and colleges.
Fabricating data
had a deadly ring to it in any Science Empire, much like the words
crusade
and
jihad
in the millennium prior to Pierce’s birth. Once the accusation had been raised, it could not be ignored—and this presented the Hegemony with a major internal problem.

“Honored soldier of the Guardians of Time, our gratitude would be unbounded were you to choose to intercede for us,” said the speaker for the delegation from the Dean’s Lodge that called on his household barely two days after the discovery. “We would not normally dream of petitioning your eminence, but the geopolitical implications are alarming.”

And indeed, they were; for the Hegemony supplied information to the Autonomous Directorate, in return for the boundless supplies of energy harvested by the solar collectors that blanketed the Directorate’s inland deserts. Allegations of
fabricating data
could damage the value of the Hegemony’s currency; indeed, the aggressive and intolerant Zanfolk might consider it grounds for war (and an excuse for yet another of their tiresome attempts to obtain the vineyards and breadbasket islands of the Outer Nesh archipelago).

“I will do what I can.” Pierce bowed deeply to the delegates, who numbered no less than a round dozen deans and even a vice-chancellor or two: he studiously avoided making eye contact with his father-in-law, who stood at the back. “If you are absolutely sure of the merits of your case, I can consult the Library, then testify publicly, insofar as I am authorized to do so. Would that be acceptable?”

The vice-chancellor of the Old College of Leng—an institution with a history of over six thousand years at this point—bowed in return, his face stiff with gratitude. “We are certain of our case, and consequently willing to abide by the word of the Library of the Guardians of Time. Please permit me to express my gratitude once more—”

After half an hour of formalities, the delegation finally departed. Xiri reemerged from her seclusion to direct the servants and robots in setting the receiving room of their mansion aright; the boys also emerged, showing no sign of understanding what had just happened. “Xiri, I need to go to the Final Library,” Pierce told her, taking her hands in his and watching for signs of understanding.

“Why, that’s wonderful, is it not? My lord? Pierce?” She stared into his eyes. “Why are you worried?”

Pierce swallowed bitter saliva. “The Library is not a place, Xiri, it’s a
time
. It contains the sum total of all recorded human knowledge, after the end of humanity. I’m near to graduation, I’m allowed to go there to use it, but it’s not, it’s not
safe
. Sometimes people who go to the Library disappear and don’t come back. And sometimes they come back changed. It’s not just a passive archive.”

Xiri nodded, but looked skeptical. “But what kind of danger can it pose, given the question you’re going to put to it? You’re just asking for confirmation that we’ve been honoring our sources. That’s not like asking for the place and time of your own death, is it?”

“I hope you’re right, but I don’t know for sure.” Pierce paused. “That’s the problem.” He raised her hands to his lips and kissed the backs of her fingers.
If it must be done, best do it fast.
“I’ll go and find out. I’ll be back soon …”

He stepped back a pace and activated his phone.
“Agent-trainee Pierce, requesting a Library slot.”

There was a brief pause while the relays stored his message, awaited a transmission slot, then fired them through the timegate to Control. Then he felt the telltale buzzing in the vicinity of his left kidney that warned of an incoming wormhole. It opened around him, spinning out and engulfing him in scant milliseconds, almost too fast to see: then he was no longer standing in the hall of his own mansion but on a dark plain of artificial limestone, facing a doorway set into the edge of a vast geodesic dome made from some translucent material: the Final Library.