The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015 Edition

by Rich Horton

  The achievements of technological civilization had been incredible, and the modern world was still struggling to match them. But one thing those people, who had investigated the inner workings of atoms and the hearts of distant stars, had never thought about was their own past. The earth was torn apart with their deep mines, their excavated coal seams, their road cuts, their toxic waste disposal sites, but it was also covered with pristine archeological sites that no one seemed to have paid attention to.

  The more the archeologist thought about that, the less sense it made. But it did not affect his researches directly, so he saved it as a possible topic for a graduate student, a position that never got funded.

  Relative Dating

  Most of the remains of the technological age were toxic or radioactive. Researchers into that era tended to have short lifespans. Shaky and despairing, with haunted eyes, they rarely achieved high academic standing.

  So when the archeologist got a letter from a colleague in technological age studies who said he had come across some information reflecting on the Akaskids, he was at first dismissive.

  Still, the man had a reputation for some brilliance, albeit leavened with hostility and paranoia, and when the archeologist visited a nearby city for an academic conference a few years later, he arranged to stop by and see what the man had.

  By that point, the man had lost even the minor academic post he’d had when he wrote to the archeologist, and all of his research materials were now crammed into a basement storage unit, poorly lit and subject to floods and infestations of rodents.

  As the man, shaking and mumbling, dug through mildewed remnants of printed books and fabrics, the archeologist tried not to get too close. It was clear the man had lost whatever trace of sanity he had once had.

  Just as the archeologist was about to turn to leave, the man reached in and, with a triumphant grunt, pulled out a yellow porcelain cup, almost complete. It gleamed like sunlight in the dank storage unit. The archeologist instantly recognized it as a piece of Akaskid ceremonial tableware, suitable for a dinner with the gods.

  It had turned up in a late technological age stratum. A museum?

  No. Not a museum. Instead, some kind of manufacturing facility, with the remains of heating and annealing chambers. There had actually been a lot of other ceramic fragments there. This was the only one in recognizable shape. Then he tossed the cup to the archeologist, who caught it clumsily, almost dropping it. He responded with rage, maybe going too far because of the man’s low status. Later, he would regret this, though the researcher showed no signs of offense at the time.

  Instead he explained to the archeologist how the late technological age had seemed devoted to destroying every sign of themselves. Their remains were infested with bacteria that dissolved various materials such as plastic, metal, and cloth. He’d lost a lot of his own equipment to some still-living colonies of these. He hypothesized that they had also released small devices with long-lived power sources that had crawled endlessly through late technological strata, grinding every piece of evidence with comminuting teeth, until nothing was left but indistinguishable powder. He’d never found one of these mechanical rotifers, but was sure they had existed.

  The archeologist thought that absence of evidence was not evidence of the destruction of evidence. He saw no reason to say that, however. All historical researchers eventually found an excuse for why they found so little to support their theories.

  But those late technological wizards couldn’t have been perfect. They were human, after all. They must have made mistakes. The archeologist thought of the battery he had found. Was that a mistake? Had they really cut down to the Akaskid layers by removing one microscopic layer of soil after another, removed a cup, clumsily dropped a battery, and then replaced each layer in turn, so perfectly that there was no sign any of them had ever been moved?

  He even showed his colleague the battery. He had no explanation either. Instead, he wanted to go and get a drink. He was finished with the business of the past, and ready to go on to some more fruitful line of work.

  He never did. He died the next year during an excavation when a roof collapsed on him. Some thought he had encountered a late-technological-age booby trap, something intended to conceal a dark secret, others that he had become frustrated by unanswered and unanswerable questions and deliberately taken too many risks.

  The archeologist sometimes pulled that Akaskid cup out and looked at it. He never wrote about it, or mentioned it to anyone else. He told himself it was because it had no provenance, no way of proving what layer it had come from, or what it was evidence of.

  He just wished he’d had that drink with the man, instead of scuttling out the way he had.

  Epigraphic Evidence

  The late-technological-age researcher had made one idle remark that resonated with the archeologist. He said that he’d once seen the woman who was now the archeologist’s wife a year or two before the archeologist himself met her.

  It had been at an excavation in the mountains inland of the Teorman lands, and she had been in the company of a senior archeologist specializing in a much later era, the period when ships had come from the Americas and spread their short-lived but vital empires across the area. The archeologist knew him as a scholar who had made a few lucky discoveries early in his career and had coasted on them ever since. He was a man of some charm, and popular on lecture tours. His wife had never mentioned knowing him, not even in that exasperating list during their visit to the ruined gardens.

  He didn’t mention that conversation to his wife, but he did pick some fights over minor domestic matters after he came home from his conference. Several of these fights ballooned into much larger arguments. She could always tell when he was probing her about her sexual history, and always refused to give anything more up, usually in a taunting way that just increased his rage.

  Maybe she wanted children. He wasn’t sure. For one reason or another, they weren’t able to conceive. The technological age had had a variety of ways around such problems, if the stories were at all true. That knowledge had been lost along with everything else, and they were stuck with the plumbing they had been born with. It was no one’s fault.

  She told him that this was about what she would expect from someone who spent his days digging through other people’s trash. Eventually, every archeologist’s spouse made a similar slighting remark. It came with the territory. Still, it hurt. He’d thought she valued what he did.

  Eventually, their relationship settled down, and he thought they had gotten through their rough patch. Then she announced that she had a new hobby. She had joined a local group of those cultists sometimes called Obliviators.

  Depositional Unconformity

  Obliviators believed that something was being hidden from them, from everyone. The people of the technological age had worked titanium, flown to the Moon, replaced human limbs, watched entertainment on huge screens. How could those secrets have been lost so thoroughly?

  The answer was obvious, they thought. Because archeologists found those secrets, and then deliberately concealed them, to give themselves power. That archeologists had no real power, and often lived on small incomes, seemed not to interest them.

  The Obliviators were a constant problem at funding meetings, and sometimes picketed academic facilities, seemingly at random. Every once in a while an ardent young member would be arrested trying to break into the back areas of a museum, looking for a hidden nuclear reactor or handheld computation device recovered from that vanished age.

  Having a faculty wife join such a group was embarrassing in the extreme. It had to stop. The archeologist, for the first time in their marriage, attempted to enforce a decision that they had not reached mutually.

  It did not work, and he was faced with either backing down or ending his marriage. He backed down, but within his heart felt that his marriage had in fact ended. Not that his external life changed. He did not have an affair, either on campus or at the excavation. He
did not move out. He wasn’t even sure his wife noticed his pulling away. Perhaps he hadn’t been the most demonstrative of husbands, but, still, the fact that he was no longer emotionally present should have been significant.

  He continued to receive promotions and honors, and no longer did much field work. None of his books sold as well as that first one, about finding the snarling mask. Still, they provided a decent extra income, and he and his wife lived a comfortable life.

  The archeologist’s wife became a mainstay of the local Obliviator chapter, helping put together dinners and other events, and made a lot of new friends, none of whom the archeologist ever got to know. When he ran into them casually, they seemed like anyone else.

  One day, while he was working at home alone, putting together a paper on a certain aspect of Akaskid court ceremonial, he received a visitation from a man who announced himself with the title of Veil. He was apparently a high-ranking officer in the Obliviators. The archeologist’s wife had suggested he stop by.

  Despite himself, the archeologist felt a moment of primitive fear. It had happened, as rumor said it would. This man was here to uncover his secrets and would stop at nothing to do so. His wife would come home with the groceries to find his lifeless body stretched out on the red and black squares of the foyer. No one would be able to puzzle out what had happened to him. And his office would be oddly empty of any evidence of his recent work. . . .

  In the event, the Veil sat down in the living room, in the leather chair the archeologist himself preferred, and accepted a cup of coffee.

  The Veil started out by asking the archeologist his opinion about the last days of technological civilization. What had finally caused it to fall? Seas were high, but had been rising for a long time. They seemed to have adapted to that, and to the vast droughts. They had weapons that could sterilize the globe, but they had been nervously fiddling with those for centuries. It seemed that it had ended all of a sudden, in less than a single lifetime. What had happened? What new factor had entered the situation?

  The archeologist, feeling somewhat bored, gave the conventional explanations. Sudden transitions between habitations of a given area were sometimes real, but were often just artifacts of the removal of a layer, sometimes of centuries’ duration, which eliminated evidence of a steady slow change, an infiltration of new settlers, a modification of climate that affected lifeways, a growth or diminution of local power.

  As the archeologist looked down at the man’s bald spot, he wondered if the Veil and his wife were lovers. Surely that kind of thing happened in these intensely committed cult groups. The emotional intensity, the sense of sharing a meaning incomprehensible to your spouse . . . he looked back over what was now decades of what he had thought was a happy marriage. He could see no trace of it. Presumably it too had eroded day by day. But this was the day he realized what he had lost, and it seemed that it had all gone at once.

  Was he feeling poorly? The Veil said he could come back another day.

  The archeologist brusquely told him he was feeling fine.

  The Veil shrugged and asked him about the further past, the past that had led to the technological civilization. Why did technological civilization seem so poorly connected to everything that came before it? Why did it seem to emerge from nowhere, with no obvious precursors? Why were its beginnings as mysterious as its end?

  The archeologist asked him to get to the point, if he had one.

  The Veil said that it was because the past had a meaning. Those who dug into it saw it as a series of random events, a kingdom here, an expansion of population across some islands there. But he and his fellow Obliviators knew better. The past was a vast hieroglyph, a construction that had a deep and intimate meaning. It was something that could explain why life was the way it was.

  The past was speaking. Who better than the archeologist to interpret its message?

  Despite himself, the archeologist was startled. His wife had joined a group that interpreted his activities as obstructionist and devoted to concealing the truth, and he had been hurt. He had neglected the corollary: if you were concealing the truth, that implied that you knew what the truth was.

  He told the Veil that he had never concealed anything he had found out about the past. Every potsherd, every bit-worn horse’s tooth, every posthole had been documented, diagrammed, and published in freely accessible journals. He owed his academic reputation to revealing, not concealing.

  The Veil shook his head. The archeologist’s problem, he said, was precisely that focus on bits and pieces. He should look up and examine the vast landscape of the past, and see how it was put together. Then he could perhaps explain something of how it had all come to be.

  For a moment, the archeologist found something resonant in that assertion. It seemed to connect with something he almost understood. Then that feeling left. Like all such groups, Obliviators worked on a theory that was simultaneously insanely complex and utterly simple-minded.

  The archeologist fell silent and did not speak again. The Veil looked around for a refill of his coffee. When none was forthcoming, he politely took his leave.

  Debitage

  The rest of the archeologist’s professional career seemed a success. He no longer had to spend his summers at the excavation. He managed his department, promoted the careers of promising juniors, and published a lavish book on Akaskid court ceremonial.

  What he did not do, disappointing the few who paid attention to such things, was write a book explaining the deeper structure of his period of expertise. What had driven the Akaskid kings to their overextension? Did environmental degradation in the upper agricultural valleys contribute to the kingdom’s eventual weakness? It seemed that he had not fulfilled his early promise.

  This was the external view.

  For years, as he corresponded about details of excavations, of interpretation, of publication, he made small requests, innocuous in context. He asked for out-of-place objects, as indications of what stratum-disturbing events had occurred. He asked for any signs of deeper technological-age excavations, any place they might have had their own archeological investigations, few though those seemed to be. He requested the earliest excavation documentation of various sites, though those early workers had had terrible technique and had polluted their own sites.

  The most suspicious correspondent would not have suspected anything insane about his motivations.

  And, in the deepest privacy of his own inner office, the archeologist worked on his project. His collection of anomalies had started with the flat, circular battery, and he still returned to it. Its markings did not match any known symbology from the technological age.

  As people sent him the irrelevant detritus of their excavations, his collection grew. Objects recognizably from the technological age he set aside. That was most of them. But there were a few objects, with odd alphabets and notations on them, that did not fit. These objects seemed to come from a history other than the one he knew.

  He was still working on his project when he died.

  He was so private about it that even in clearing out his office, and putting his papers together for donation to the library, his colleagues did not see anything odd. But they had not known him well, though they would have said they did.

  The last day, after his funeral, and after she had packed up the house, prepared to return to the land by the sea she had left so many years before, the archeologist’s wife pulled open a narrow drawer, found a sheaf of papers, and read what he had written. There wasn’t that much of it, and it wasn’t that hard to figure out, if you were willing to take it at face value.

  One thing the archeologist had been sure of. There had been archeologists among the people of the technological age. It made no sense that there had not been. They had investigated every other aspect of existence. So an immense structure of academic research of their past must have existed. Teams had fanned out across the world, and excavated every likely place where human remains could be found. They had no
doubt traced human ancestry back to those forgotten times when humans had still been dissolved in their animal nature. Shelves had bulged with their journals and findings. Popular lecturers had traveled and shown provincials the wonders of ancient empires, of kings, saints, and warriors.

  Where, then, was this work? Why did the historical deposits all seem so completely undisturbed until the archeologist and his colleagues appeared? Why was this field of knowledge the one that was so thoroughly forgotten?

  The archeologist had become sure that the people of the last days of the technological age had destroyed their past. They had used their own archeological researches to identify and eliminate anything that told of earlier ages. Then, in the resulting blank spaces, they had redrawn a history that they felt they could live with. They were so precise that they buried it, in order, exactly as if it had happened. In fact, their technology, which enabled manipulation on scales from the individual atom up to entire mountain ranges, resulted in artifact deposition indistinguishable from reality.

  Archeologists of their own day might have had delicate machinery that enabled them to see the decay of various unstable nuclei, crystal structures in ceramic glazes, statistical anomalies in tooth wear patterns in skeletal teeth, but the archeologist certainly did not. Someday, perhaps, those techniques would exist again. But even if they did, they could not recover the real past that those people had so diligently destroyed.

  Maybe the archeologist had jumped the gun, even by centuries, by penetrating to the dark heart of their secret. It was to be culture-wide revelation that the entire past, every bit of it, from tiniest excavated fragment to the ancient epics like the Bruniad itself, had been created en masse as a comprehensive work of art.