Palimpsest (8 page)

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-glass 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 attitude 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 shiny boots, on a spaceship? 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
: 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 scum in order to throw you away again”—his older self seemed almost irritated—“though what you see in
her
…” 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
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 assume I’m a palimpsest or leftover from an assassination attempt. So what do you want with
me
? In the here and now, I mean?”

Yarrow looked flustered. “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 starships—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 space.” 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
interested in deep space—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 cluster?” 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,
he realized.
Even if we can only have one wormhole end open at any given time. We rebuilt
the sun
. We’ve mapped every planet within ten million light-years.
“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 ship 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’être, but the raw truth of the matter is that the Stasis is about
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 assassination 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 scraping across the surface of the mantle. Lights flicker around the coastlines, strobing on and off in kiloyear cycles as civilizations rise and fall. In space, 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 orbit. 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, pinpricks 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 massive than pyramids. And soon they will start to move.

SLIDE 4.

Three thousand years pass.

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 ships have gone, the shipyards 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.

Five small moons have disappeared, and slowly healing gouges show the sites of huge mining works on Io and Europa, but by the time the Stasis reseed Earth (two-thirds of a million years hence) even the slow resurfacing of Europa’s icy caul will have obscured the signs of industry. It may be thousands of years after that before anybody notices.

SLIDE 5.

Twenty million years pass, and the galaxy slowly lights up with a glare of coherent light, waste energy from the communications traffic between the inhabited worlds.

The first generation colonies have long since guttered into senescence and extinction; so have the third and fourth generations. Of the first generation, barely one in five prospered—but that was sufficient. Those that live spawn prolifically. Planets are common, rocky terrestrial bodies far from rare, and even some of the more exotic types (water giants, tide-locked rocky giants in orbit around red dwarfs, and others) are amenable to human purpose. Where no planets are available, life is harder, prone to sudden extinction events: nobody survives the collapse of civilization aboard a space colony. But the tools and technologies of terraforming are well-known, and best practice, of a kind, develops. Many of the dwellers have adapted to their new habitats so well that they’re barely recognizable as primates anymore, or even mammals.

SLIDE 6.

Three billion years pass.

Two huge, glittering clouds of sentience fall through each other, a magnificently coordinated flypast of fleets of worlds meshing across the endless void. Shock waves thunder through the gas clouds, and millions of massive, short-lived new stars ignite and detonate like firecrackers. The starburst is indeed enormous. But for the most part, the inhabited worlds are safe: swarms of momentum-transfer robots, their numbers uncountable, work for millions of years ahead of and behind the event to direct the closest encounters. Emergent flocking rules and careful plans laid far in advance have steered colonies clear of the high-risk territories, marshaling brown dwarfs as dampers and buffers to redirect the tearaway suns—and both galaxies are talking to each other, for the expanding sphere of sentience now encompasses the entire Local Group.

Earth is no longer inhabited in this epoch; but the precious timegate remains, an oracular hub embedded in a cluster of exotic artificial worlds, conducting and orchestrating the dance of worlds.

There are now a hundred million civilizations within the expanding bubble of intelligence, each with an average population of billions. They are already within an order of magnitude of the Stasis’s ultimate population, and they are barely a thousandth of its age. The universe, it appears, has started to wake up.