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 household 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 . . .”