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 nearly 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.”
“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.”