The Time Traveller's Almanac

by Ann VanderMeer

  “I stand here,” Wei said, lifting the butt of his spear. “I guard our Father’s flock while assholes like you are out having fun.”

  “Hai!” The rider’s face split in a broad, dust-stained grin. “I see you, too!” He raised his right fist and for an instant Pierce had an icy vision of his guts unraveling around a barbarian’s spear; but the camel lifted its head and brayed as Teuch nudged it in a surprisingly delicate sidestep away from Wei, away from the hedge of thorns, away from the slave station. And away from the site of the timegate through which the evacuation team would drive the camp inmates in two days’ time. The prisoners would be deposited at the start of the next Reseeding. But none of the Benzin would live to see that day, a hundred thousand years-objective or more in the future.

  Perhaps their camels would leave their footprints in the choking, hot rain of ash that would roll across the continent with tomorrow’s sunset. Perhaps some of those footprints would fossilize, so that the descendants of the Alabamae slaves would uncover them and marvel at their antiquity in the age to come. But immortality, Pierce thought, was a poor substitute for not dying.

  Paying Attention in Class

  It was a bright and chilly day on the roof of the world. Pierce, his bare head shaved like the rest of the green-robed trainees, sat on a low stool in a courtyard beneath the open sky, waiting for the tutorial to begin. Riding high above the ancient stone causeway and the spiral minarets of the Library Annex, the moon bared her knife-slashed cheeks at Pierce, as if to remind him of how far he’d come.

  “Good afternoon, Honorable Students.”

  The training camp nestled in a valley among the lower peaks of the Mediterranean Alps. Looming over the verdant lowlands of the Sahara basin, in this epoch they rose higher than the stumps of the time-weathered Himalayas.

  “Good afternoon, Honorable Scholar Yarrow,” chanted the dozen students of the sixth-year class.

  Urem, like Japanese before it, paid considerable attention to the relative status of speaker and audience. Many of the cultures the Stasis interacted with were sensitive to matters of gender, caste, and other signifiers of rank, so the designers of Urem had added declensions to reflect these matters. New recruits were expected to practice the formalities diligently, for a mastery of Urem was important to their future – and none of them were native speakers.

  “I speak to you today of the structure of human history and the ways in which we may interact with it.”

  Yarrow, the Honorable Scholar, was of indeterminate age: robed in black, her hair a stubble-short golden halo, she could have been anywhere from thirty to three hundred. Given the epigenetic overhaul the Stasis provided for their own, the latter was likelier – but not three thousand. Attrition in the line of duty took its toll over the centuries. Yarrow’s gaze, when it fell on Pierce, was clear, her eyes the same blue as the distant horizon. This was the first time she had lectured Pierce’s class – not surprising, for the college had many tutors, and the path to graduation was long enough to tax the most disciplined. She was, he understood, an expert on what was termed the Big Picture. He hadn’t looked her up in the local Library Annex ahead of time. (In his experience it was generally better to approach these lessons with an open mind. And in any case, students had only patchy access to the records of their seniors.)

  “As a species, we are highly unstable, prone to Malthusian crises and self-destructive wars. This apparent weakness is also our strength – when reduced to a rump of a few thousand illiterate hunter-gatherers, we can spread out and tame a planet in mere centuries, and build high civilizations in a handful of millennia.

  “Let me give you some numbers. Over the two and a half million epochs accessible to us – each of which lasts for a million years – we shall have reseeded starter populations nearly twenty-one million times, with an average extinction period of sixty-nine thousand years. Each Reseeding event produces an average of eleven-point-six planet-spanning empires, thirty-two continental empires, nine hundred and sixty-odd languages spoken by more than one million people, and a total population of one-point-seven trillion individuals. Summed over the entire life span of this planet – which has been vastly extended by the cosmological engineering program you see above you every night – there are nearly twenty billion billion of us. We are not merely legion – we rival in our numbers the stars of the observable universe in the current epoch.

  “Our species is legion. And throughout the vast span of our history, ever since the beginning of the first panopticon empire during our first flowering, we have committed to permanent storage a record of everything that has touched us – everything but those events that have definitively unhappened.”

  Pierce focused on Yarrow’s lips. They quirked slightly as she spoke, as if the flavor of her words was bitter – or as if she was suppressing an unbidden humor, intent on maintaining her gravitas before the class. Her mouth was wide and sensual, and her lips curiously pale, as if they were waiting to be warmed by another’s touch. Despite his training, Pierce was as easily distracted as any other twentysomething male, and try as he might, he found it difficult to focus on her words: he came from an age of hypertext and canned presentations and found that these archaic, linear tutorials challenged his concentration. The outward austerity of her delivery inflamed his imagination, blossoming in a sensuous daydream in which the wry taste of her lips blended with the measured cadences of her speech to burn like fire in his mind.

  “Uncontrolled civilization is a terminal consumptive state, as the victims of the first extinction discovered the hard way. We have left their history intact and untouched, that we might remember our origins and study them as a warning; some of you in this cohort have been recruited from that era. In other epochs we work to prevent wild efflorescences of resource-depleting overindustrialization, to suppress competing abhuman intelligences, and to prevent the pointless resource drain of attempts to colonize other star systems. By shepherding this planet’s resources and manipulating its star and neighboring planets to maximize its inhabitable duration, we can achieve Stasis – a system that supports human life for a thousand times the life of the unmodified sun, and that remembers the time line of every human life that ever happened.”

  Yarrow’s facts and figures slid past Pierce’s attention like warm syrup. He paid little heed to them, focusing instead on her intonation, the little twitches of the muscles in her cheeks as she framed each word, the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed in and out. She was impossibly magnetic: a puritan sex icon, ascetic and unaware, attractive but untouchable. It was foolish in the extreme, he knew, but for some combination of tiny interlocking reasons he found her unaccountably exciting.

  “All of this would be impossible without our continued ownership of the timegate. You already know the essentials. What you may not be aware of is that it is a unique, easily depleted resource. The timegate allows us to open wormholes connecting two openings in four-dimensional space-time. But the exclusion principle prevents two such openings from overlapping in time. Tear-up and tear-down is on the order of seven milliseconds, a seemingly tiny increment when you compare it to the trillion-year span that falls within our custody. But when you slice a period of interest into fourteen-millisecond chunks, you run out of time fast. Each such span can only ever be touched by us once, connected to one other place and time of our choosing.

  “Stasis Control thus has access to a theoretical maximum of 5.6 times 1021 slots across the totality of our history – but our legion of humanity comes perilously close, with a total of 2 times 10 19 people. Many of the total available slots are reserved for data, relaying the totality of recorded human history to the Library – fully ninety-six percent of humanity lives in eras where ubiquitous surveillance or personal life-logging technologies have made the recording of absolute history possible, and we obviously need to archive their lifelines. Only the ur-historical prelude to Stasis, and periods of complete civilizational collapse and Reseeding, are not being monitored in exhaustiv
e detail.

  “To make matters worse: in practice there are far fewer slots available for actual traffic, because we are not, as a species, well equipped for reacting in spans of less than a second. The seven-millisecond latency of a timegate is shorter by an order of magnitude than the usual duration of a gate used for transport.

  “We dare not use gates for iterated computational processes, or to open permanent synchronous links between epochs, and while we could in theory use it to enable a single faster-than-light starship, that would be horribly wasteful. So we are limited to blink-and-it’s-gone wormholes connecting time slices of interest. And we must conclude that the slots we allocate to temporal traffic are a scarce resource because—”

  Yarrow paused and glanced across her audience. Pierce shifted slightly on his stool, a growing tension in his crotch giving his distraction a focus. Her gaze lingered on him a moment too long, as if she sensed his inattention: the slight hint of amusement, imperceptible microexpressions barely glimpsed at the corners of her mouth, sent a panicky shiver up his spine. She’s going to ask questions, he realized, as she opened her lips. “What applications of the timegate are ruled out by the slot latency period, class? Does anyone know? Student Pierce? What do you know?” She looked at him directly, expectantly. The half smile nibbled at her cheeks, but her eyes were cool.

  “I, um, I don’t—” Pierce flailed for words, dragged back to the embarrassing present from his sensual daydream. “The latency period?”

  “You don’t what?” Honorable Scholar Yarrow raised one perfect eyebrow in feigned disbelief at his fluster. “But of course, Student Pierce. You don’t. That has always been your besetting weakness: you’re easily distracted. Too curious for your own good.” Her smile finally broke, icy amusement crinkling around her eyes. “See me in my office after the tutorial,” she said, then turned her attention back to the rest of the class, leaving him to stew in fearful anticipation. “I do hope you have been paying more attention—”

  The rest of Yarrow’s lecture slid past Pierce in a delirium of embarrassment as she spoke of deep time, of salami-sliced vistas of continental drift and re-formation, of megayears devoted to starlifting and the frozen, lifeless gigayears during which the Earth had been dislodged from its celestial track, to drift far from the sun while certain necessary restructuring was carried out. She knows me, he realized sickly, watching the pale lips curl around words that meant nothing and everything. She’s met me before. These things happened in the Stasis; the formal etiquette was deliberate padding to break the soul-shaking impact of such collisions with the consequences of your own future. She must think I’m an idiot—

  The lecture ended in a flurry of bowing and dismissals. Confused, Pierce found himself standing before the Scholar on the roof of the world, beneath the watching moon. She was very beautiful, and he was utterly mortified. “Honorable Scholar, I don’t know how to explain, I—”

  “Silence.” Yarrow touched one index finger to his lips. His nostrils flared at the scent of her, floral and strange. “I told you to see me in my office. Are you coming?”

  Pierce gaped at her. “But Honorable Scholar, I—”

  “—Forgot that, as your tutor, I am authorized to review your Library record.” She smiled secretively. “But I didn’t need to: You – your future self – told me why you were distracted, many years-subjective ago. There is a long history between us.” Her humor dispersed like mist before a hot wind. “Will you come with me now? And not make an unhappening of our life together?”

  “But I—” For the first time he noticed she was using the honorific form of “you,” in its most intimate and personal case. “What do you mean, our life?”

  She began to walk toward the steps leading down to the Northern Courtyard. “Our life?” He called after her, dawning anger at the way he’d been manipulated lending his voice an edge. “What do you mean, our life?”

  She glanced back at him, her expression peculiar – almost wistful. “You’ll never know if you don’t get over your pride, will you?” Then she looked back at the two hundred stone steps that lay before her, inanimate and treacherous, and began to descend the mountainside. Her gait was as steady and dignified as any matron turning her back on young love and false memories.

  He watched her recede for almost a minute before his injured dignity gave way, and he ran after her, stumbling recklessly from step to stone, desperate to discover his future.

  HACKING HISTORY

  Pleasure Empires

  They will welcome you as a prince among princes, and they will worship you as a god among gods. They will wipe the sweat from your brow and the dust of the road from your feet, and they will offer to you their sons and daughters and the wine of their vineyards. Their world exists only to please the angels of the celestial court, and we have granted you this leave to dwell among our worshippers, with all the rights and honors of a god made flesh.

  They will bring wine unto you, and the fruit of the dream poppy. They will clothe you in silk and gold, and lie naked beneath your feet, and abase themselves before your every whim. They are the people of the Pleasure Empires, established from time to time by the decree of the lords of Stasis to serve their loyal servants, and it is their honor and their duty to obey you and demonstrate their love for you in any way that you desire, for all their days and lifetimes upon the Earth. And you will dwell among them in a palace of alabaster, surrounded by gardens of delight, and you shall want for nothing.

  Your days of pleasure will number one thousand and one; your lovers will number a thousand or one as you please; your pleasures will be without number; and the number of tomorrow’s parties shall be beyond measure. You need not leave until the pleasures of flesh and mind pale, and the novelty of infinite luxury becomes a weight on your soul. Then and only then, you will yearn for the duty which lends meaning to life; energized, you will return to service with serenity and enthusiasm. And your colleagues will turn aside from their tasks and wonder at your eagerness: for though you may have spent a century in the Pleasure Empires, your absence from your duty will have lasted barely a heartbeat. You are a loyal servant of the Stasis: and you may return to paradise whenever it pleases you, because we want you to be happy in your work.

  Palimpsest Ambush

  Almost a hundred kiloyears had passed since the Yellowstone eruption that wiped out the Benzin and the hunter-gatherer tribes of the Gulf Coast. The new Reseeding was twelve thousand years old; civilization had taken root again, spreading around the planet with the efflorescent enthusiasm of a parasitic vine. It was currently going through an expansionist-mercantilist phase, scattered city-states and tribute empires gradually coalescing and moving toward a tentative enlightenment. Eventually they’d rediscover electronics and, with the institution of a ubiquitous surveillance program, finally reconquer the heights of true civilization. Nobody looking at the flourishing cities and the white-sailed trade ships could imagine that the people who built them were destined for anything but glory.

  Pierce stumbled along a twisty cobbled lane off the Chandler’s Street in Carnegra, doing his faux-drunken best to look like part of the scenery. Sailors fresh ashore from Ipsolian League boats weren’t a rarity here, and it’d certainly explain his lack of fluency in Imagra, the local creole. It was another training assignment, but with six more years-subjective of training and a Stasis phone implant, Pierce now had some degree of independence. He was trusted to work away from the watchful eyes of his supervisor, on assignments deemed safe for a probationer-agent.

  “Proceed to the Red Duck on Margrave Way at the third hour of Korsday. Take your detox first, and stay on the small beer. You’re there as a level-one observer and level-zero exit decoy to cover our other agent’s departure. There’s going to be a fight, and you need to be ready to look after yourself; but remember, you’re meant to be a drunken sailor, so you need to look the part until things kick off. Once your target is out of the picture, you’re free to leave. If it turns hot, escalate it to me,
and I’ll untangle things retroactively.”

  It was all straightforward stuff, although normally Pierce wouldn’t be assigned to a job in Carnegra, or indeed to any job in this epoch. Training to blend in seamlessly with an alien culture was difficult enough that Stasis agents usually worked in their home era, or as close to it as possible, where their local knowledge was most useful. As it was, two months of full-time study had given him just enough background to masquerade as a foreign sailor – in an archipelagean society that was still three centuries away from reinventing the telegraph. It’s a personalized test, he’d realized with a jittery shudder of alertness, as if he’d just downed a mug of maté. Someone up the line in Operational Analysis would be watching his performance, judging his flexibility. He determined to give it his all.

  It took him two months of hard training, in language and cultural studies and local field procedures – all for less than six hours on the ground in Carnegra. And the reason he was certain it was a test: Supervisor Hark had changed the subject when he’d asked who he was there to cover for.

  Margrave Way was a cobblestoned alley, stepped every few meters to allow for the slope of the hillside, lined on either side with the single-story bamboo shopfronts of fishmongers and chandlers. Pierce threaded his wobbly way around servants out shopping for the daily catch, water carriers, fruit and vegetable sellers, and beggars; dodged a rice merchant’s train of dwarf dromedaries loaded with sacks; and avoided a pair of black-robed scholars from one of the seminaries that straggled around the flanks of the hill like the thinning hair on the pate of an elderly priest. Banners rippled in the weak onshore breeze; paper skull-lanterns with mirror-polished eyes to repel evil spirits bounced gaudily beneath the eaves as he entered the inn.