Palimpsest

by Charles Stross

  Pierce chuckled weakly. The results were predictable: when the coughing fit subsided, and his vision began to clear again, he shook his head.

  “A pity.” Kafka rocked backward slightly, his shoulders hunched. “It would make things easier.”

  Pierce risked a question. “Does the Library have anything?”

  Kafka sniffed. “Of course not. Whoever set the trap knew enough to scrub the palimpsest clean before they embarked on their killing spree.”

  So it was a palimpsest. Pierce felt vaguely cheated. “They assassinated themselves first? To remove the evidence from the time sequence?”

  “You died three times, scholar-agent, not counting your present state.” He gestured at the dressing covering the cardiac assist leech clamped to the side of Pierce’s chest. It pulsed rhythmically, taking the load while the new heart grew to full size between his ribs. “Agent Yarrow died twice and Agent-Major Alizaid’s report states that he was forced to invoke Control Majeure to contain the palimpsest’s expansion. Someone”—Kafka leaned toward Pierce again, peering intently at his face with disturbingly dark eyes—“went to great lengths to kill you repeatedly.”

  “Uh.” Pierce stared at the ceiling of his hospital room, where plaster cherubs clutching overflowing cornucopiae cavorted with lecherous satyrs. “I suppose you want to know why?”

  “No. Having read your Branch Library file, there are any number of whys: what I want to know is why now.” Kafka smiled, his mouth widening until his alarmingly unhinged head seemed ready to topple from the plinth of his jaw. “You’re still in training, a green shoot. An interesting time to pick on you, don’t you think?”

  Fear made Pierce tense up. “If you’ve read my Library record, you must know I’m loyal …”

  “Peace.” Kafka made a placating gesture. “I know nothing of the kind; the Library can’t tell me what’s inside your head. But you’re not under suspicion of trying to assassinate yourself. What I do know is that so far your career has been notably mundane. The Library branches are as prone to overwrites as any other palimpsest; but we may be able to make deductions about your attacker by looking for inconsistencies between your memories and the version of your history documented locally.”

  Pierce lay back, drained. I’m not under suspicion. “What is to become of me?” he asked.

  Kafka’s smile vanished. “Nothing, for now: you may convalesce at your leisure, and sooner or later you will learn whatever it is that was so important to our enemies that they tried to erase you. When you do so, I would be grateful if you would call me.” He rose to leave. “You will see me again, eventually. Meanwhile, you should bear in mind that you have come to the attention of important persons. Consider yourself lucky—and try to make the best of it.”

  Three days after Kafka’s departure—summoned back, no doubt, to the vasty abyss of deep time in which Internal Affairs held their counsel—Pierce had another visitor.

  “I came to thank you,” she said haltingly. “You didn’t need to do that. To decoy, I mean. I’m very grateful.”

  It had the sound of a prepared speech, but Pierce didn’t mind. She was young and eye-wrenchingly desirable, even in the severe uniform of an Agent Initiate. “You would have died again,” he pointed out. “I was your backup. It’s bad form to let your primary die. And I owed you.”

  “You owed me? But we haven’t met! There’s nothing about you in my Library file.” Her pupils dilated.

  “It was an older you,” he said mildly. While the Stasis held a file on everyone, agents were only permitted to see—and annotate—those of their own details that lay in their past. After a pause, he admitted, “I was hoping we might meet again sometime.”

  “But I—” She hesitated, then stared at him, narrowing her eyes. “I’m not in the market. I have a partner.”

  “Funny, she didn’t tell me that.” He closed his eyes for a few seconds. “She said we had a history, though. And to tell her when I first met her that her first pet—a cat named Chloe—died when a wild dog took her.” Pierce opened his eyes to stare at the baroque ceiling again. “I’m sorry I asked, Ya—esteemed colleague. Please forgive me; I didn’t think you were for sale. My heart is simply in the wrong place.”

  After a second he heard a shocked, incongruous giggle.

  “I gather armor-piercing rounds usually have that effect,” he added.

  When she was able to speak again she shook her head. “I am sincere, Scholar-Agent—Pierce?—Pierced? Oh dear!” She managed to hold her dignity intact, this time, despite a gleam of amusement. “I’m sorry if I—I don’t mean to doubt you. But you must know, if you know me, I have never met you, yes?”

  “That thought has indeed occurred to me.” The leech pulsed warmly against his chest, squirting blood through the aortic shunt. “As you can see, right now I am not only heartless but harmless, insofar as I won’t even be able to get out of bed unaided for another ten days; you need not fear that I’m going to pursue you. I merely thought to introduce myself and let you know—as she did to me—that we could have a history, if you’re so inclined, someday. But not right now. Obviously.”

  “But obviously not—” She stood up. “This wasn’t what I was expecting.”

  “Me neither.” He smiled bitterly. “It never is, is it?”

  She paused in the doorway. “I’m not saying no, never, scholar-agent. But not now, obviously. Some other time … We’ll worry about that if we meet again, perhaps. History can wait a little longer. Oh, and thank you for saving my life some of the times! One out of three is good going, especially for a student.”

  ELITE

  A Brief Alternate History of the Solar System: Part One

  What has already happened:

  SLIDE 1.

  Our solar system, as an embryo. A vast disk of gas and infalling dust surrounds and obscures a newborn star, little more than a thickening knot of rapidly spinning matter that is rapidly sucking more mass down into its ever-steepening gravity well. The sun is glowing red-hot already with the heat liberated by its gravitational collapse, until …

  SLIDE 2.

  Ignition! The pressure and temperature at the core of the embryo star has risen so high that hydrogen nuclei floating in a degenerate soup of electrons are bumping close to one another. A complex reaction ensues, rapidly liberating gamma radiation and neutrinos, and the core begins to heat up. First deuterium, then the ordinary hydrogen nuclei begin to fuse. A flare of nuclear fire lashes through the inner layers of the star. It will take a million years for the gamma-ray pulse to work its way out through the choking, blanketing layers of degenerate hydrogen, but the neutrino pulse heralds the birth cry of a new star.

  SLIDE 3.

  A million years pass as the sun brightens, and the rotating cloud of gas and dust begins to partition. Out beyond the dew line, where ice particles can grow, a roiling knot of dirty ice is forming, and like the sun before it, it greedily sucks down dirt and gas and grows. As it plows through the cloud, it sprays dust outward. Meanwhile, at the balancing point between the star and the embryonic Jovian gravity well, other knots of dust are forming …

  SLIDE 4.

  A billion years have passed since the sun ignited, and the stellar nursery of gas and dust has been swept clean by a fleet of new-formed planets. There has been some bickering—in the late heavy bombardment triggered by the outward migration of Neptune, entire planetary surfaces were re-formed—but now the system has settled into long-term stability. The desert planet Mars is going through the first of its warm, wet interludes; Venus still has traces of water in its hot (but not yet red-hot) atmosphere. Earth is a chilly nitrogen-and-methane-shrouded enigma inhabited only by primitive purple bacteria, its vast oceans churned by hundred-meter tides dragged up every seven-hour day by a young moon that completes each orbit in little more than twenty-four hours.

  SLIDE 5.

  Another three billion years have passed. The solar system has completed almost sixteen orbits of the galactic core, and is now u
nimaginably distant from the stellar nursery which birthed it. Mars has dried, although occasional volcanic eruptions periodically blanket it in cloud. Venus is even hotter. But something strange is happening to Earth. Luna has drifted farther from its primary, the tides quieting; meanwhile, the atmosphere has acquired a strange bluish tinge, evident sign of contamination by a toxic haze of oxygen. The great landmass Rodina, which dominated the southern ocean beneath a cap of ice, has broken up and the shallow seas of the Panthalassic and Panafrican Oceans are hosting an astonishing proliferation of multicellular life.

  SLIDE 6.

  Six hundred and fifty million years later, the outlines of Earth’s new continents glow by night like a neon diadem against the darkness, shouting consciousness at the sky in a blare of radio-wavelength emissions as loud as a star.

  There have been five major epochs dominated by different families of land-based vertebrates in the time between slides 5 and 6. All the Earth’s coal and oil deposits were laid down in this time, different animal families developed flight at least four times, and the partial pressure of oxygen in the atmosphere rose from around 4 percent to well over 16 percent. At the very end, a strangely bipedal, tailless omnivore appeared on the plains of Africa—its brain turbocharged on a potent mixture of oxygen and readily available sugars—and erupted into sentience in a geological eyeblink.

  Here’s what isn’t going to happen:

  SLIDE 7.

  The continents of Earth, no longer lit by the afterglow of intelligence, will drift into strange new configurations. Two hundred and fifty million years after the sixth great extinction, the scattered continents will reconverge on a single equatorial supercontinent, Pangea Ultima, leaving only the conjoined landmass that was Antarctica and Australia adrift in the southern ocean. As the sun brightens, so shall the verdant plains of the Earth; oceanic algal blooms raise the atmospheric oxygen concentration close to 25 percent, and lightning-triggered wildfires rage across the continental interior. It will be an epoch characterized by rapid plant growth, but few animal life-forms can survive on land—in the heady air of aged Earth, even waterlogged flesh will burn. And the sun is still brightening …

  SLIDE 8.

  Seven hundred and fifty million years later. The brightening sun will glare down upon cloud-wreathed ancient continents, weathered and corroded to bedrock. Even the plant life has abandoned the land, for the equatorial daytime temperature is perilously close to the boiling point of water. What life there is retreats to the deep ocean waters, away from the searing ultraviolet light that splits apart the water molecules of the upper atmosphere. But there’s no escape: the oceans themselves are slowly acidifying and evaporating as the hydrogen liberated in the ionosphere is blasted into space by the solar wind. A runaway greenhouse effect is well under way, and in another billion years Earth will resemble parched, hell-hot Venus.

  SLIDE 9.

  Four-point-two billion years after the brief cosmic eyeblink of Earthly intelligence, the game is up. The dead Earth orbits alone, its moon a separate planet wandering in increasingly unstable ellipses around the sun. Glowing dull red beneath an atmosphere of carbon dioxide baked from its rocks, there will be no sign that this world ever harbored life. The sun it circles, a sullen-faced ruddy ogre, is nearing the end of its hydrogen reserves. Soon it will expand, engulfing the inner planets.

  But events on a larger scale are going to spare the Earth this fate. For billions of years, the galaxy in which this star orbits has been converging with another large starswarm, the M-31 Andromeda galaxy. Now the spiraling clouds of stars are interpenetrating and falling through each other, and the sun is in for a bumpy ride as galaxies collide.

  A binary system of red dwarfs is closing with the solar system at almost five hundred kilometers per second. They are going to pass within half a billion kilometers of the sun, a hairbreadth miss in cosmic terms: in the process they will wreak havoc on the tidy layout of the solar system. Jupiter, dragged a few million kilometers sunward, will enter an unstable elliptical orbit, and over the course of a few thousand years it will destabilize all the other planets. Luna departs first, catapulted out of the plane of the ecliptic; Earth, most massive of all, will spend almost five million years wobbling between the former orbits of Venus and Saturn before it finally caroms past Jupiter and drifts off into the eternal night, the tattered remnants of its atmosphere condensing and freezing in a shroud of dry ice.

  Slow Recovery

  Pierce was to remain on official convalescent leave for an entire year-subjective. His heart had been torn to shreds by a penetrator round; repairing the peripheral damage, growing a new organ in situ, and restoring him to physical condition was a nontrivial matter. Luckily for him, the fatal shooting had happened in the middle of a multiple-overwrite ambush that was finally shut down by Control Majeure using weapons of gross anachronism, and they’d whisked his bleeding wreckage out through a timegate before he’d finished drumming his heels.

  Nevertheless, organ regeneration—not to mention psychological recovery from a violent fatal injury—took time. So, rather than shipping him straight to the infirmary in the alpine monastery in Training Zone 25, he was sent to recover in the Rebirth Wing of the Chrysanthemum Clinic, on the Avenue of the Immortals of Medicine, in the city of Leng, on the northeastern seaboard of the continent of Nova Zealantis, more than four billion years after the time into which he had been born.

  The current Reseeding was Enlightened; not only were they aware of the existence of the Stasis, but they were a part of the greater transtemporal macroculture: speakers of Urem, obedient to the Stasis, even granted dispensation to petition for use of the timegate in extraordinary circumstances. In return, the Hegemony was altogether conscientious in observing their duties to the guardians of history, according Pierce honors that, in other ages, might have been accorded to a diplomat or minor scion of royalty. Unfortunately, this entailed rather more formality than Pierce was used to. The decor, for one thing: they’d clearly studied his epoch, but modeling his hospital suite on Louis XV’s bedroom at Versailles suggested they had strange ideas about his status.

  “If it pleases you, my lord, would you like to describe how you entered the celestial service?” The journalist, who his bowing and shuffling concierge explained had been sent by the city archive to document his life, was young, pretty, and shiny-eyed. She’d obviously studied his public records and the customs of his home civilization, and decided to go for the throat. Local fashion echoed the Minoan empire of antiquity, and her attire, though scholarly, was disconcerting: a flash of well-turned ankle, nipples rouged and ringed—Pierce realized he was staring and turned his face away, chagrined.

  “Please?” she repeated, her plump lower lip quivering. Her cameras flittered below the ceiling like lazy bluebottles, iridescent in the afternoon sunlight, logging her life for posterity.

  “I suppose so …” Pierce trailed off, staring through the open window at the lower slopes of the hillside on which the clinic nestled. “But there’s no secret, really, none at all. You don’t approach them—they approach you. A tap on the shoulder at the right time, an offer of a job, at first I didn’t think it was anything unusual.”

  “Was there anything leading up to that? My lord? What was your life like before the service?”

  Pierce frowned slightly as he forced his sullen memory to work. There were gaps. “I’m not sure; I think I was in a car crash, or maybe a war ...”

  His cardiac leech pulsed against his chest like a contented cat. Sunlight warmed the side of his face as he watched her sidelong, from the corner of his eye. How far will she go for a story? he wondered idly. Play your cards right and … well, maybe. His temporarily heartless condition had rendered amorous speculations—or anything else calculated to raise the blood pressure—purely academic for the time being.

  “My lord?” He pretended to miss the moue of annoyance that flitted across her face, but the very deliberate indrawn breath that followed it was so transparent that he n
early gave the game away by laughing.

  “I’m not your lord,” he said gently. “I’m just a scholar-agent, halfway through my twenty years of training. What I know about the Guardians of Time”—that was what the Hegemonites called the Stasis, those in power who had polite words for them—“and can tell you is mere trivia. I’m sure your Archive already has it all.”

  This was a formally declared Science Epoch, in which a whole series of consecutive Reseedings were dedicated to collating the mountain-sized chunks of data returned by the Von Neumann probes that had been launched during the last Science Epoch, a billion years earlier. They and their descendants had quietly fanned out throughout the local group of galaxies, traveling at barely a hundredth of the speed of light, visiting and mapping every star system and extrasolar planet within ten million light-years. There was a lot of material to collate; The Zealantian Hegemony’s army of elite astrocartographers, millions strong, would labor for tens of thousands of years to assemble just their one corner of the big picture. And their obsession with knowledge didn’t stop at the edge of the solar system.

  (“A civilization of obsessive-compulsive stamp collectors,” Wei had called them when he briefly visited his ex-student. “You’ve got to watch these Science Cults; sooner or later they’ll turn all the carbon in the deep biosphere into memory diamond, then where will we be?”)

  “The Archive doesn’t know everything, my lord. It’s not like the Library of Time.” There was a strangely reverent note in her voice, as if the Library was somehow different. “We don’t have permission to read the forbidden diaries, my lord. We have to accept whatever crusts of wisdom our honored guests choose to let fall from their trenchers.”