Palimpsest (9 page)

SLIDE 7.

The crystal ball is clouded …

The Kindest Lies

They walked along a twisting path between walls of shrubs and creepers, and a few short trees, growing from mounds of damp-smelling soil. The path appeared to be of old sandstone, shot through with seams of a milky rock like calcite: appearances were deceptive.

“You played me like a flute,” said Pierce. He held his hands behind his back, as was his wont, keeping an arm’s reach aside from her.

“I did not!” Her denial was more in hurt than in anger. “I didn’t know about this until he, you, recruited me.” Her boot scuffed a rock leaning like a rotten tooth from the side of a herbaceous border: tiny insects scuttled from her toes, unnoticed. “I was still in training. Like you, when you were tapped for, for other things.”

They walked in silence for a minute, uphill and around a winding corner, then down a flight of steps cut into the side of a low hill.

“If this is all simply an internal adjustment, why doesn’t Internal Affairs shut everything down?” he asked. “They must know who is involved …”

“They don’t.” She shook her head. “When you call in a request for a timegate, your phone doesn’t say, ‘By the way, this iteration of Pierce is a member of the Opposition.’ All of us were compliant—once. If they catch us, they can backtrack along our history and undo the circumstances that led to our descent into dissidence; and sometimes we can catch and isolate
them
, put them in an environment where doubt flourishes. If they started unmaking every agent suspected of harboring disloyal thoughts, it would trigger a witch hunt that would tear Stasis apart: we’re not the kind who’d go quietly. Hence their insistence on control, alienation from family and other fixed reference points, complicity in shared atrocity. They aim to stifle disloyal thoughts before the first germination.”

“Huh.” They came to a fork in the path. A stone bench, stained gray and gently eroded by lichen, sat to one side. “Were you behind the assassination attempt, then?”

“No.” She perched tentatively at one side of the bench. “That was definitely Internal Affairs. They were after him, not you.”

“Him—”

“The iteration of you that never stayed in the Hegemony, never met Xiri, eventually drifted into different thoughts and met Yarrow again under favorable circumstances—”

Pierce slowly turned around as she was speaking, but in every direction he looked there was no horizon, just a neatly landscaped wall of mazes curving gently toward the zenith. “It seems to me that they’re out of control.”

“Yes.” She became intent, focused, showing him her lecturer’s face. “All organizations that are founded for a purpose rapidly fill with people who see their role as an end in itself. Internal Affairs are a secondary growth. If they ever succeed, there won’t be anything left of the Stasis but Internal Affairs, everyone spying on themselves for eternity and a day, trying to preserve a single outcome without allowing anyone to ask why …”

Not everything added up. Still thinking, Pierce sat down gingerly at the other side of the bench. Not looking at her, he said: “I met Imad and Leila, Xiri’s parents. How could they have survived? Everyone kills their own grandparents, it’s the only way to get into the Stasis.”

“How did you survive your graduation?” She turned and looked at him, her eyes glistening with unshed tears. “You can be very slow at times, Pierce.”

“What—”

“You don’t have to abide by what they made you do, my love. Corrupt practices, the use of complicity in shared atrocities to bind new recruits to a cause: it was a late addition to the training protocol, added at the request of Internal Affairs. It may even be what sparked the first muttering of Opposition. We’ve got the luxury of unmaking our mistakes—even to go back, unmake the mistake, and
not
enter the Stasis, despite having graduated. Agents do that, sometimes, when they’re too profoundly burned-out to continue: they go underground, they run and cut themselves off. That’s why there was no agent covering the Hegemony period you landed in. They’d erased their history with the Stasis, going into deep cover.”

“You say ‘they.’ Are you by any chance trying to disown their action?” he asked gently.

“No!”
Now
she sounded irritated. “I regret nothing.
She
regrets nothing. Withholding the truth from you for all those years—well, what would you have done if you’d known that your adoring Xiri, the mother of your children, was a deep-cover agent of the Opposition?
What would you have done?
” She reached across and seized his elbow, staring at him, searching for some truth he couldn’t articulate.

“I … don’t … know.” His shoulders slumped.

“All those years, you were under observation by other instances of yourself, sworn in service to Internal Affairs, reporting to Kafka,” she pointed out. “Honesty wasn’t an option. Not unless you can guarantee that
all
of those ghost-instances would be complicit in keeping the secret, from the moment you were recruited by the Stasis.”

“That’s why, back in college—” The moment of enlightenment was shocking. Yarrow’s mouth, seen for the first time, wide and sensual, the pale lips, his reaction. He looked across the bench, saw the brightness in her eyes as she nodded. “I’d never betray her.”

“It happened more than once, according to the Final Library. They can make you betray anyone if they get their claws into you early enough. The only way to prevent it is to make a palimpsest of your whole recruitment into the Stasis—to replace your conscript youth with a disloyal impostor from the outset, or to decline the invitation altogether, and go underground.”

“But, I. Him. I’m not him, exactly.”

She let go of his elbow. “Not unless you want to be, my love.”

“
Am
I your love? Or is he?”

“That depends which version of you you want to be.”

“You’re telling me that essentially I can only be free of Internal Affairs if I undo what they made me do.”

“There’s a protocol,” she said, looking away. “We can reactivate your phone. You don’t have to reenlist in the Stasis if you don’t want to. There are berths waiting for all of us on the colony ships …”

“But that’s just exchanging one sort of reified destiny for another, isn’t it? Expansion in space, instead of time. Why is that any better than, say, freeing the machines, turning over all the available temporal bandwidth to timelike computing to see if the wild-eyed prophets of artificial intelligence and ghosts uploaded in the machines were onto something after all?”

She looked at him oddly. “Do you have any idea how weird you can be at times?”

He snorted. “Don’t worry, I’m not serious about that. I know my limits. If I don’t do this thing we’re discussing, him upstairs will be annoyed. Because Kafka will have all those naively loyal young potential me’s to send on spy missions, won’t he?” Pierce took a deep breath. “I don’t see that there’s any
alternative
, really. And that’s what rankles. I had hoped that the Opposition would be willing to give me a little more freedom of action than Kafka, that’s all.” He felt the ghostly touch of a bunch of raisin-wrinkled grape joints holding his preteen wrists, showing him how to cast a line. He owed it to Grandpa, he felt: to leave his own children a universe with elbow room unconstrained by the thumbcuffs of absolute history. “Will you still be here when I get back?”

She regarded him gravely. “Will you still want to see me afterward?”

“Of course.”

“See you later, then.” She smiled as she stood up, then departed.

He stared at the spot where she’d been sitting for what seemed like a long, long time. But when he tried to remember her face all he could see was the two of them, Xiri and Yarrow, superimposed.

Saying Good-bye to Now

Twenty years in Stasis. Numerous deaths, many of them self-inflicted, ordered with the callous detachment of self-appointed gods. They feed into the unquiet conscience of a man who knows he could have been better, can
still
be better—if only he can untangle the Gordian knot of his destiny after it’s been tied up and handed to him by people he’s coming to despise.

That’s you in a nutshell, Pierce.

You’re at a bleak crossroads, surrounded by lovers and allies and oh, so isolated in your moment of destiny. Who are you going to be, really? Who do you
want
to be?

All the myriad ways will lie before you, all the roads not taken at your back: who do
you
want to be?

You have met your elder self, the man-machine at the center of an intrigue that might never exist if Kafka gets his way. And you’ll have mapped out the scope of the rift with Xiri, itself rooted in her despair at Stasis. You can examine your life with merciless, refreshing clarity, and find it wanting if you wish. You can even unmake your mistakes: let Grandpa flower, prune back your frightened teenage nightmare of murder. You can step off the murderous infinite roundabout whenever you please, resign the game or rejoin and play to win—but the question you’ve only recently begun to ask is, who writes the rules?

Who do you want to
be
?

The snow falls silently around you as you stand in darkness, knee-deep in the frosted weeds lining the ditch by the railroad tracks. Alone in the night, a young man walks between islands of light. A headhunter stalks him unseen, another young man with a heart full of fears and ears stuffed with lies. There’s a knife in his sleeve and a pebble-sized machine in his pocket, and you know what he means to do, and what will come of it. And you know what
you
need to do.

And now it’s your turn to start making history …

(THE END)