The Time Traveller's Almanac

by Ann VanderMeer

  “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 Jupi
ter 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.

  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, somet
imes, 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.”