Palimpsest (7 page)

Funeral in Berlin

The interrogation lasted three days. Kafka didn’t even bother to erase it from Pierce’s time line retroactively: clearly he was making a point about the unwisdom of crossing Internal Affairs.

Afterward, Pierce left the hotel and wandered the streets of Berlin in a neurasthenic daze.

Does Kafka trust me? Or not?
On balance, probably not: the methodical, calm grilling he’d received, the interrogation about the precise meaning of Yarrow’s love letters (faded memories from decades ago, to Pierce’s mind), had been humiliating, an emotional strip search. Knowing that Kafka understood his dalliance with Yarrow as a youthful indiscretion, knowing that Kafka clearly knew of (and tolerated) his increasingly desperate search for the point at which his history with Xiri had been overwritten, only made it worse.
We can erase everything that gives meaning to your life if we feel like it.
Feeling powerless was a new and shocking experience for Pierce, who had known the freedom of the ages: a return to his pre-Stasis life, half-starved and skulking frightened in the shadows of interesting times.

And then there was the incipient paranoia that any encounter with Internal Affairs engendered.
Am I being watched right now?
he wondered as he walked.
A ghost-me surveillance officer working for Internal Affairs, or something else?
Kafka would be mad not to assign him a watcher, he decided. If Yarrow was under investigation, then he himself must be under suspicion. Guilt by association was the first rule of counterespionage, after all.

A soul-blighting sense of depression settled into his bones. He’d had an inkling of it for months, ever since his increasingly frantic search in the Library, but Kafka’s quietly pedantic examination had somehow catalyzed a growing certainty that he would never see Xiri, or Magnus and Liann, ever again—that if he could ever find them, shadows cast from his mind by the merciless inspection-lamp glare of Internal Affairs would banish them farther into unhistory.

Therefore, he wandered.

Civilization lay like a heavy blanket upon the land, rucked up in gray-faced five-story apartment blocks and pompous stone-faced business establishments, their pillars and porticoes and cornicework swollen with self-importance like so many amorous street pigeons. The city sweated in the summer heat, the stench and flies of horse manure in the streets contributing a sour pungency to the sharp stink of stove smoke.

Other people shared the Strasse with him; here a peddler selling apples from a handcart, there a couple taking the air together. Pierce walked slowly along the sidewalk of a broad street, sweating in his suit and taking what shelter he could from the merciless summer sun beneath the awnings of shops, letting his phone’s navigation aid guide his footsteps even as he wondered despondently if he would ever find his way home. He could wander through the shadowy world of historicity forever, never finding his feet—for though the Stasis and their carefully cultivated tools of ubiquitous monitoring had nailed down the sequence of events that comprised history, history was a tangled weave, many threads superimposed and redyed and snipped out of the final pattern …

The scent was his first clue that he was not alone, floral and sweet and tickling the edge of his nostrils with a half-remembered sense of illicit excitement that made his heart hammer. The shifting sands of memory gave way:
I know that smell
—

His phone vibrated.
“Show no awareness,”
someone whispered inside his skull in Urem.
“They are watching you.”
The voice was his own.

The strolling couple taking the air arm in arm were ahead of him. It was
her
scent, the familiar bouquet, but—
“Where are you?”
he sent.
“Show yourself.”

The phone buzzed again like an angry wasp trapped inside his ribs.
“Not with watchers. Go to this location and wait,”
said the traitor voice, as a spatial tag nudged the corner of his mind.
“We’ll pick you up.”
The rendezvous was a couple of kilometers away, in a public park notorious by night: a French-letter drop for a dead-letter drop.

He tried not to stare.
It
might
be her,
he thought, trying to shake thirty-year-old jigsaw memories into something that matched a glimpse of a receding back in late-nineteenth-century dress and broad-brimmed hat. He turned a corner in his head even as they turned aside into a residential street:
“Internal Affairs just interrogated me about Yarrow.”

“ You told us already. Go now. Leave the rest to us.”

Pierce’s phone fell silent. He glanced sideways out of the corners of his eyes, but the strolling couple were no longer visible. He sniffed, flaring his nostrils in search of an echo of that familiar scent, but it, too, was gone. Doubtless they’d never been here at all; they were Stasis, after all. Weren’t they?

Guided by his phone’s internal nudging, Pierce ambled slowly toward the park, shoulders relaxed and hands clasped behind his back as if enjoying a quiet afternoon stroll. But his heart was pounding and there was an unquiet sensation in the pit of his stomach, as if he harbored a live grenade in his belly.
You told us already. Go now. Leave the rest to us.
His own traitor voice implying lethally spiraling cynicism.
They are watching you.
The words of a self-crowned pervert god, hubris trying to dam the flow of history; or the mysterious Opposition that Kafka had warned him of? It was imponderable, intolerable.
I could be walking into a trap,
Pierce considered the idea, and immediately began to activate a library of macros in his phone that he’d written for such eventualities. As Superintendent-of-Scholars Manson had ceaselessly reminded him, a healthy paranoia was key to avoiding further encounters with cardiac leeches and less pleasant medical interventions.

Pierce crossed the street and walked beside a canal for a couple of blocks, then across a bridge and toward the tree-lined gates of a park. Possibilities hummed in the dappled shadows of the grass like a myriad of butterfly wings broken underfoot, whispering on the edge of actuality like distant thunder. This part of history, a century and more before the emergence of the first universal-surveillance society, before the beginning of the history to which the Stasis laid claim, was mutable in small but significant ways. Nobody could say for sure who might pass down any given street in any specified minute, and deem it disruptive: the lack of determinism lent a certain flexibility to his options.

Triggering one of his macros as he stepped through the gate to the park, between one step and the next Pierce walked through a storeroom in the basement of a Stasis station that had been dust and ruins a billion years before the ice sheets retreated from the North German plains. It had lain disused for a century or so when he entered it, and nobody else would use it for at least a decade thereafter—he’d set monitors, patient trip wires to secure his safe time. He tarried there for almost three hours, picking items from a well-stocked shelf and sending out messages to order them from a factory on a continent that didn’t yet exist, eating a cold meal from a long-storage ration pack, and trying to regain his emotional balance in time for the meeting that lay ahead.

An observer close on his tail would have seen a flicker; when he completed the stride his suit was heavier, the fabric stiffer to the touch, and his shoulders slightly stooped beneath the weight concealed within. There were other changes, some of them internal. Perhaps the observers would see, but:
Leave the rest to us.
He slipped his hands into his pockets, blinked until the itching subsided and the heads-up display settled into place across the landscape, scanning and amplifying. He had summoned watchers, circling overland: invisible and silent, nerves connected to his center.
Fuck Kafka’s little game,
he thought furiously.
Fuck them all.
Three hours in his unrecorded storeroom in the Cryptozoic had given him time for his depression to ferment into anger.
I want answers!

It was a hot day, and the park was far from empty. There were young women, governesses or maids, pushing the prams of their bourgeois employers; clerks or office workers skipping work and some juvenile ne’er-do-wells playing truant from the gymnasium; here a street sweeper and there a dodgy character with a barrel organ and behind him a couple of vagrants sharing a bottle of schnapps. At the center of a well-manicured lawn, an ornate stone pedestal supported a clock with four brass faces. Pierce, letting his phone drive his feet, casually glanced around while his threat detector scanned through the chaff.
Nobody
—His phone buzzed again.

“What was the tavern where you fell for me called?” An achingly familiar voice whispered in his ear.

“Something to do with wildfowl, in Carnegra, the Red Goose or Red Duck or something like that—”

“Hard contact in three seconds,” his own voice interrupted from nowhere.
“Button up and hit the ground on my word.
Now
.”

Pierce dived toward the grassy strip beside the path as flaring crimson threat markers appeared all around him. As he fell, his suit bloated and darkened: rubbery cones expanded like a frightened hedgehog’s quills as his collar expanded and rotated, hooding him. In the space of a second the park’s population doubled, angular metallic figures flickering into being all around. Time flickered and strobed as timegates snapped open and shut, expelling sinister cargo. Pierce twitched ghost muscles convulsively, triggering camouflage routines as the incoming drones locked onto each other and spat missiles and laser fire.

“What’s going on?”

“Palimpsest ambush! Hard …”

The signal stuttered into silence, hammered flat by jammers and raw, random interference. Pierce began to roll, rising to sit as his suit’s countermeasures flared.
This is crazy,
he thought, shocked by the violence of the attack.
They can’t hope to conceal—

The sky turned violet-white, the color of lightning: the grass around him began to smoke.

The temperature rose rapidly. His suit was just beginning to char from the prompt radiation pulse as the ground opened under him, toppling him backward into darkness.

REDUX
 

Army of You

When you see the ground swallow Pierce you will breathe a sigh of relief—you’ll finally have the luxury of knowing that one of your iterations has made it out of death ground. But the situation will be too deadly to give you respite. If Internal Affairs are willing to
start
with combat drones and orbital X-ray lasers, then escalate from there, where will they stop? How badly do they want you?

Very badly, it seems.

There’s going to be hell to pay when it’s time for the cleanup; ur-history doesn’t have room for a nuclear blitzkrieg on the capital of the Second Reich. The calcinated, rapidly skeletonizing remains of the governesses and the organ grinders contort and burst in the searing wind from the Hiroshima miscarriage, and the four faces of the clock glow cherry red and slump to the ground as a dozen more of you flicker into view, anonymous in their heat-flash-silvered battle armor. The echo-armies of your combat drones fan out all around, furiously dumping heat through transient timegates into the cryogenic depths of the far future as they exchange fire with the enemy’s soldiers.
“Extraction complete. Prepare to move out,”
says your phone; the iteration tag of that version of you is astronomical, in the millions. This isn’t just a palimpsest ambush: it’s an entire talmud of rewrites and commentaries and attempted paradoxes piled up in a threatening tsunami of unhistory and dumped on your heads.

You’ll grab your future self’s metadata and jump toward a timegate to a dispersal zone drifting high in orbit above ruddy Jupiter’s north pole, nearly a billion years in the future: the rocket motors at your suit’s shoulders and ankles kick hard, and as you loft, you’ll catch a flashing glimpse of the Mach wave from the first heat strike surging outward, lifting and crumpling schools and hospitals and churches and apartments and houses and shops in the iron name of Internal Affairs.

They won’t find this dispersal zone. They won’t uncover the truth about Control, either, or about the Opposition—you’ll be sure of that for as long as you continue to live and breathe.

You will look down, between your feet, at the swirling orange-and-cream chaos of Jupiter’s upper atmosphere. Your armor will ping and tick quietly as it cools, and you will wait while the star trackers get a fix on your position, your mind empty of everything but a quiet satisfaction, the reward for a job well-done: the extraction of your cardinal iterant from the grasp of Internal Affairs. Somewhere else in time—millions of years ago—the rewrite war is still going on, the virtual legions of you playing a desperate shell game with Kafka: but you’ve won. All that’s left to do is to deftly insert the zombie ringer into ur-history on his way into Kafka’s court, primed to tell Internal Affairs exactly what you want them to know, then to orchestrate a drawdown and withdrawal from the ruins of Berlin before Kafka overwrites the battle zone and restores the proper flow of history.

Your suit will beep quietly for attention. “Scan complete,” it announces. “Acceleration commencing.” The thrusters will push briefly, reorienting you, sliding Jupiter out of sight behind your back. And then the rockets will kick in again, pushing you toward the yard, and the fleet of thirty-kilometer-long starships a-building, and Yarrow.

He Got Your Girl

I’m alive,
thought Pierce, then did a double take.
I’m alive?
Everything was black, and he couldn’t tell which way was up. There was a metallic taste in his mouth, and he ached everywhere.

“Where am I?” he asked.

“You’ll have to wait while we cut you out of that,” said a stranger. Their voice sounded oddly muffled, 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-shifting 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 muffled by the remains of his hood, but he could place it now. Kari, a quiet woman, one of the trainees from the class 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.
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.

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 passed: 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—”

“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
?”

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?

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 shipyards.”

He blinked at her, astonished. “How?”

“We all have phone implants, here.” Her eyes sparkled with amusement. “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.
”

“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 ship’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?”