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 declen sions
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 1019 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
exhaustive 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 moun tainside. 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.