Palimpsest

by Charles Stross

  “I’m not your lord. You can call me Pierce, if you like.”

  “Yes, my, ah. Pierce? My lord.”

  “What should I call you?” he asked after a pause.

  “Me? I am nobody, lord Pierce! I am a humble journal-keeper—”

  “Rubbish.” He looked directly at her, taking in everything: her flounced scholar-lady’s dress, the jeweled rings through her ears and nipples, her painstakingly knotted chignon. This was a high-energy civilization, but a very staid, conservative one with strict sumptuary laws: were she a commoner, she would risk a flogging for indecency, or worse, dressing above her station. “Who are you really? And why are you so interested in me?”

  “Oh! If you must know, I am doctor-postulant Xiri, daughter of doctor doctor professor archivist His Excellency Dean Imad of the College of History, and Her Ladyship doctor professor emeritus Leila of the faculty of hot super-Jovian moons”—she smiled coyly—“and I have been charged, by my duty and my honor as a scholar, to study you in absolute detail by my tutors. They have assigned you to me as the topic of my first dissertation. On the hero-guardians of time.”

  “Your first dissertation—” Her parents were a professor and a dean; she might as well have said sheikh or baron. “Do I have any choice in the matter?”

  “You can refuse, of course.” She shivered and tugged her filmy shawl back into position. “But I can’t.”

  “Why? What happens if you refuse?”

  She shivered. “I would forfeit my doctorate. The shame! My parents”—for a moment the bright-eyed optimism cracked—“would blame themselves. It would cast doubt on my commitment.”

  Was failure to make tenure track justification for an honor killing? Pierce shook his head, staring at her. “I’m just a trainee!” He reached for the bed’s control, stabbing the button to raise his back. The interview was out of control, heading for deep waters, and lying down gave him an unaccountable fear of drowning. “I’m the nobody around here!”

  “How do you know that, my lord? For all you know, you might be destined for glory.” She tugged at her shawl again and smiled, an ingenue trying to look mysterious.

  “But I don’t have any—” He switched off the bed lift once he was level with her, looked her in the eyes, and changed the subject in midsentence. “Have your people ever met me before?”

  The hardest part of arguing with her, he found, was avoiding staring at her chest. She was really very pretty, but her pedigree suggested he’d be wise to abandon that line of thought; she’d be about as safe to seduce as a rattlesnake.

  “No.” Her smile widened. “A handsome man of mystery and a time hero to boot: yes, they told us why you were here.” Her gaze briefly covered his chest.

  For the first time in many months, Pierce resorted to his native language. “Oh, hell.” He glanced at the window, then back at Xiri. “Everybody wants to study me,” he confessed. “I don’t know why, I really don’t …” He crossed his arms, looked at her. “Study away. I am at your disposal.” At least it promised to be a less harrowing experience than Kafka’s cross-examination.

  “Oh! Thank you, my lord!” She placed a proprietorial hand on the side of his bed. “I will do my utmost to make it an enjoyable experience.”

  “Really?” There was something about her tone of voice that took him aback, as if he’d answered a question that he didn’t remember being asked. The idea of being studied struck Pierce as marginally more enjoyable than banging his head on the wall, but on the upside, Xiri was high-quality eye candy. On the downside—Don’t go there, he reminded himself. “Where would you like to begin?”

  “Right here, I think,” she said, sliding her hand under the covers.

  “Hey! I! Huh.” Pierce found, to his mild alarm, that her busy hand was getting results. “Um. I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but we really shouldn’t—why are you—aren’t you going to shut off your cameras—”

  “I have read about your culture.” She sat down on the bed beside him with a rustle of silk. “In some ways, it sounded very familiar. Did they not record everything that happened to them? Did they not talk about people marrying their work? Well, that is just how we do that here.”

  “But that’s just a metaphor!” He tried to push her hand away, but his heart wasn’t in it.

  “Hush.” She responded by making him shudder. “You’re the subject of my dissertation! I’m going to find out all about you. It’s to be my life’s work! I’m so happy! Just relax, my lord, and everything will be wonderful. Don’t worry, I have studied the customs of your time, and they are not so very alien. We can talk about the wedding tomorrow, after you’ve met my father.”

  Empty Mansions

  Resistance was futile: nearly twenty years-subjective passed Pierce by with the eyeblink impact of another bullet, half of them shared with his new wife. Xiri, true to her word, wrapped her life around his twisted time line: at first as an adoring wife, and then, to his bemused and growing pride, mother to three small children and doctor-professor in her own right. Her dissertation was his life: merely glancing lightly off the skin of time was, it seemed, a passport to wealth and status in the Hegemony, and he found life as the consort of a beautiful noblewoman no less congenial than he might have expected.

  Xiri did not complain at Pierce’s eyeblink excursions from their family home (provided by the grace of her father the dean), which usually lasted only for seconds of subjective time. Nor did she complain about the inward-looking silences and moody introspection that followed, and were of altogether greater duration. On the contrary: they invariably provided additional data for her life’s work, once she delicately untangled the story from his memories of unhistory. Sometimes he would age an entire year in an hour’s working absence, but the medical privileges of the Stasis extended also to the Enlightened; there would be plenty of time to catch up, over the decades and centuries.

  Pierce, for his part, found it oddly easier to deal with the second half of his training with a stable family life to fall back on. The Stasis were spread surprisingly thin across their multitrillion-year empire. The defining characteristic of his job seemed to be that he was only called for in turbulent, interesting times. Between peak oil and Spanish flu, from Carthage to the Cold War, his three-thousand-year beat sometimes seemed no more than a vale of tears—and a thin, poor, nightmare of a world at that, far from the mannered, drowsy contentment of the ten-thousand-year-long Hegemony. Most of his fellow students seemed to prefer the hedonistic abandon proffered by the Pleasure Empires, but Pierce held his own counsel and congratulated himself on his discovery of a more profound source of satisfaction.

  On his first return to training after his convalescence, Pierce was surprised to be summoned to Superintendent-of-Scholars Manson’s chambers.

  “You have formed attachments while convalescing.” Manson fixed him with a watery stare. “That is inadvisable, as you will no doubt learn for yourself. However, Operations have noted that there is no permanent Resident in place within a millennium either side of your, ah, domestic anchor-point. It is a tranquil society, but not that tranquil; you are therefore instructed and permitted to maintain your attachment and develop your ability to work there. Purely as a secondary specialty, you understand.”

  Pierce had almost fallen over with shock. Once he regained his self-control, he asked, “To whom shall I report, master?”

  “To your wife, student. Tell her to write up everything. We read all such dissertations, in the end.”

  Manson looked away, dismissing him. Pierce nudged his phone, weak-kneed, not trusting his ability to make a dignified exit; after a brief routing delay, the timegate responded to his heartfelt wish, and the ground opened up and swallowed him.

  One day very late in his training, with perhaps half a year-subjective remaining until his graduation as a full-fledged agent of the Stasis, Pierce returned home from a week sampling the plague-pits of fourteenth-century Constantinople. He found Xiri in an unusually excited state, the househo
ld all abuzz around her. “It’s fantastic!” she exclaimed, hurrying to meet him across the atrium of their summer residence. “Did you know about it? Tell me you knew about it! This was why you came to our time, wasn’t it?”

  Pierce, greeting her with a fond smile, lifted young Magnus (who had been attempting to scale his back, with much snarling, presumably to slay the giant) and handed him to his nursemaid. “What’s happened?” he asked mildly, trying to give no sign of the frisson he’d momentarily felt (for their youngest son could have no idea of how his father had just spent a week taking tissue samples, carving chunks of mortal flesh from the bubo-stricken bodies of boys of an age to be his playmates in another era). “What’s got everyone so excited?”

  “It’s the probes! They’ve found something outrageous in Messier 33, six thousand light-years along the third arm!”

  Pierce—who could not imagine finding anything outrageous in a galaxy over a million light-years away, even if mapping it was the holy raison d’être of this Civilization—decided to humor his wife. “Indeed. And tell me, what precisely is there that brings forth such outrage? As opposed to mere excitement, or curiosity, or perplexity?”

  “Look!” Xiri gestured at the wall, which obligingly displayed a dizzying black void sprinkled with stars. “Let’s see. Wall, show me the anomaly I was discussing with the honorable doctor-professor Zun about two hours ago. Set magnification level plus forty, pan left and up five—there! You see it!”

  Pierce stared for a while. “Looks like just another rock to me,” he said. Racking his brains for the correct form: “an honorable sub-Earth, airless, of the third degree, predominantly siliceous. Yes?”

  “Oh!” Xiri, nobly raised, did nothing so undignified as to stamp her foot; nevertheless, Magnus’s nursemaid swept up her four-year-old charge and beat a hasty retreat. (Xiri, when excited, could be as dangerously prone to eruption as a Wolf-Rayet star.) “Is that all you can see? Wall, magnification plus ten, repeat step, step, step. There. Look at that, my lord, look!”

  The airless moon no longer filled the center of the wall; now it stretched across it from side to side, so close that there was barely any visible curvature to its horizon. Pierce squinted. Craters, rills, drab, irregular features and a scattering of straight-edged rectangular crystals. Crystals? He chewed on the thought, found it curiously lacking as an explanation for the agitation. Gradually, he began to feel a quiet echo of his wife’s excitement. “What are they?”

  “They’re buildings! Or they were, sixty-six million years ago, when the probes were passing through. And we didn’t put them there …”

  THE LIBRARY AT THE END OF TIME

  A Brief Alternate History of the Solar System: Part Two

  … And then the Stasis happened:

  SLIDE 7.

  After two hundred and fifty million years, the continents of Earth, strobe-lit by the mayfly flicker of empires, will have converged on a single equatorial supercontinent, Pangea Ultima. These will not be good times for humanity; the vast interior deserts are arid and the coastlines subject to vast hurricanes sweeping in from the world-ocean. As the sun brightens, so shall the verdant plains of the Earth; but the Stasis have long-laid plans to deflect the inevitable.

  Deep in the asteroid belt, their swarming robot cockroaches have dismantled Ceres, used its mass to build a myriad of solar-sail-powered flyers. Now a river of steerable rocks with the mass of a dwarf planet loops down through the inner system, converting solar energy into momentum and transferring it to the Earth through millions of repeated flybys.

  Already, Earth has migrated outward from the sun. Other adjustments are under way, subtle and far-reaching: the entire solar system is slowly changing shape, creaking and groaning, drifting toward a new and more useful configuration. Soon—in cosmological terms—it will be unrecognizable.

  SLIDE 8.

  A billion years later, the Earth lies frozen and fallow, its atmosphere packed down to snow and nitrogen vapor in the chilly wilderness beyond Neptune. This was never part of the natural destiny of the homeworld, but it is only a temporary state—for in another ten million years, the endlessly cycling momentum shuttles will crank Earth closer to the sun. Fifty million years after that, the Reseedings will recommence, from the prokaryotes and algae on up; but in this era, the Stasis want the Earth safely mothballed while their technicians from the Engineering Republics work their magic.

  For thirty million years the Stasis will devote their timegate to lifting mass from the heart of a burning star, channeling vast streams of blazing plasma into massive, gravitationally bound bunkers, reserves against a chilly future. The sun will gutter and fade to red, raging and flaring in angry outbursts as its internal convection systems collapse. As it shrinks and dims, they will inflict the final murderous insult, and inject an embryonic black hole into the stellar core. Eating mass faster than it can reradiate it through Hawking radiation, the hole will grow, gutting the stellar core.

  By the time the Earth drops back toward the frost line of the solar system, the technicians will have roused the zombie necrosun from its grave. Its accretion disk—fed with mass steadily siphoned from the brown dwarfs orbiting on the edges of the system—will cast a strange, harsh glare across Earth’s melting ice caps.

  Replacing the fusion core of the sun with a mass-crushing singularity is one of the most important tasks facing the Stasis; annihilation is orders of magnitude more efficient than fusion, not to say more controllable, and the mass they have so carefully husbanded is sufficient to keep the closely orbiting Earth lit and warm not for billions, but for trillions of years to come.

  But another, more difficult task remains …

  SLIDE 9.

  Four and a quarter billion years after the awakening of consciousness, and the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies will collide. The view from Earth’s crowded continents is magnificent, like a chaos of burning diamond dust strewn across the emptiness void. Shock waves thunder through the gas clouds, creating new stellar nurseries, igniting millions of massive, short-lived new stars; for a brief ten-million-year period, the nighttime sky will be lit by a monthly supernova fireworks display. The huge black holes at the heart of each galaxy have shed their robes of dust and gas and blaze naked in ghastly majesty as they streak past each other, ripping clusters of stars asunder and seeding more, in a starburst of cosmic fireworks that will be visible nearly halfway across the universe.

  But Earth is safe. Earth is serene. Earth is no longer in the firing line.

  The Long Burn is by far the largest program of the Stasis. Science Empires will rise and flourish, decay and gutter into extinction, to provide the numerical feedstock for the Navigators. The delicate task of ejecting a star system from its galaxy without setting the planets and moons adrift in their orbits is monstrously difficult. Planets are not bound to their stars by physical cords, and gravity is weak; innumerable adjustments to the orbits of all the significant planets will be required if they are to be carried along. The mass flow of Ceres alone will not suffice. Rocky Mercury has already been dismantled to provide the control mechanisms that keep the necrostar’s accretion disk burning steadily; it’s Venus’s turn to supply the swarming light-sail-driven mass tugs. A brown dwarf ten times the size of Jupiter will fuel the rocket, an entire stellar embryo pumped down to the blazing maw in the course of a million years.

  Galactic escape velocity is high, and escape velocity from the local group is even higher. The Long Burn will last ten thousand centuries. Each year that passes, the necrostar will be moving a meter per second faster. And when it comes to an end, the drastically redesigned solar system will be racing away from the local group of galaxies at almost a thousandth the speed of light—straight toward the Bootes Void.

  SLIDE 10.

  Over the next billion years, Starship Earth and its dead star will rendezvous with the other components of their lifeboat fleet; an even hundred brown dwarf stars, ten to fifty times as massive as Jupiter and every last one dislodged and sen
t tumbling from its home galaxy by the robot probes of the Engineering Empires.

  Their mass will be gratefully received. For Earth is going on a voyage of discovery, where no star has gone before, into the heart of darkness.

  Continent of Lies

  Nothing in his earlier life had prepared Pierce for what came next. It beggared belief: a series of synthetic aperture radar scans transmitted by a probe millions of years ago in another galaxy had triggered a diplomatic crisis, threatening world war and civilizational autocide.

  The Hegemony, despite being a Science Empire, was not the only nation in this age. (True world governments were rare, cumbersome dinosaurs notorious for their absolute top-down corruption and catastrophic-failure modes: the Stasis tended to discourage them.) The Hegemony shared their world with the Autonomous Directorate of Zan, a harshly abstemious land of puritanical library scientists (located on a continent which had once been attached to North America and Africa); sundry secular monarchies, republics, tyrannies, autarchies, and communes (who thought their superpower neighbors mildly insane for wasting so much of their wealth on academic institutions, rather than the usual aimless and undirected pursuit of human happiness); and the Kingdom of Blattaria (whose inhabitants obeyed the prehistoric prophet Haldane with fanatical zeal, studying the arthropoda in ecstatic devotional raptures).

  The Hegemony was geographically the largest of the great powers, unified by a set of common filing and monitoring protocols; but it was not a monolithic entity. The authorities of the western principality of Stongu (special area of study: the rocky moons of Hot Jupiters in M-33) had reacted to the discovery of Civilization on the moon of a water giant with a spectacular display of sour grapes, accusing the northeastern Zealantians of fabricating data in a desperate attempt to justify a hit-and-run raid on the Hegemony’s federal tax base. Quite what the academics of Leng were supposed to do with these funds was never specified, nor was it necessary to say any more in order to get the blood boiling in the seminaries and colleges. Fabricating data had a deadly ring to it in any Science Empire, much like the words crusade and jihad in the millennium prior to Pierce’s birth. Once the accusation had been raised, it could not be ignored—and this presented the Hegemony with a major internal problem.