Unhistory
One of the first
things that any agent of the Stasis learns is patience. It’s not as
if they are short of time; their long lives extend beyond the easy
reach of memory, and should they avoid death through violence or
accident or suicide, they can pursue projects that would exceed the
life expectancy of ordinary mortals. And that is how they live in
the absence of the principal aspect of their employment, the
ability to request access to the timegate.
Pierce thought at
first that the vice-chancellor’s request would be trivial, a matter
of taking a few hours or days to dig down into the stacks and
review the historical record. He’d return triumphant, a few minutes
upstream of his departure, and present his findings before the
council. Xiri would be appropriately adoring, and would doubtless
write a series of sonnets about his Library visit (for poetics were
in fashion as the densest rational format for sociological-academic
case studies in Leng): and his adoptive home time would be spared
the rigor and pity of a needless doctrinal war. That was his
plan.
It came unglued
roughly a week after his arrival, at the point when he stopped
flailing around in increasing panic and went for a long walk around
the paths of the biome, brooding darkly, trying to quantify the
task.
Memory diamond is an
astonishingly dense and durable data substrate. It’s a lattice of
carbon nuclei, like any other diamond save that it is synthetic,
and the position of atoms in the lattice represents data. By
convention, an atom of carbon 12 represents a zero, and an atom of
carbon 13 represents a one; and twelve-point-five grams of memory
diamond—one molar weight, a little under half an old-style
ounce—stores 6 × 1023 bits of data—or
1023 bytes, with
compression.
The continent the
reading room is situated on is fifteen kilometers thick and covers
an area of just under forty million square kilometers, comparable
to North and South America combined in the epoch of Pierce’s birth.
Half of it is memory diamond. There’s well over 1018tons of the stuff,
roughly 1023 molar weights. One molar
weight of memory diamond is sufficient to hold all the data ever
created and stored by the human species prior to Pierce’s birth, in
what was known at the time as the twenty-first
century.
The civilizations
over which the Stasis held sway for a trillion years stored a
lot more data. And when they collapsed,
the Stasis looted their Alexandrian archives, binged on stolen data
and vomited it back up at the far end of time.
Pierce’s problem was
this: more than 90 percent of the Library consisted of
lies.
He’d started out,
naturally enough, with two pieces of information: the waypoint in
his phone that identified the exact location of the porch of his
home in Leng, and the designation of the planetary system in M-33
that had aroused such controversy. It was true, as Xiri had said,
that the Hegemony was reveling in the feed from the robot
exploration fleet that had swept through the Triangulum galaxy tens
of millions of years ago. And he knew—he was certain!—that Xiri,
and the Hegemony, and the city of Leng with its Mediterranean airs
and absurdly scholastic customs existed. He had held her as his
wife and lover for nearly two decades-subjective, dwelt there and
followed their ways as an honored noble guest for more than ten of
those years: he could smell the hot, damp summer evening breeze in
his nostrils, the scent of the climbing blue rose vines on the
trellis behind his house—
The first time he
gave the Library his home address and the identities to search for,
it took him to a set of war grave records in the Autonomous
Directorate, two years before his first interview with Xiri. He was
unamused to note the names of his father- and mother-in-law
inscribed in the list of terrorist wreckers and resisters who had
been liquidated by the Truth Police in the wake of the liberation
of Leng by Directorate forces.
He tried again: this
time he was relieved to home in on his return from the field trip
to Constantinople—seen through the omnipresent eyes of Xiri’s own
cams—but was perplexed by her lack of excitement. He backtracked,
his search widening out until he discovered to his surprise that
according to the Library, the Hegemony was not, in fact,
investigating the Triangulum galaxy at all, but focusing on Maffei
1, seven million light-years farther out.
That night he ordered
up two bottles of a passable Syrah and drank himself into a
solitary stupor for the first time in some years. It was a childish
and shortsighted act, but the repeated failures were eating away at
his patience. The day after, wiser but somewhat irritable, he tried
again, entering his home coordinates into the desk and asking for a
view of his hall.
There was no hall,
and indeed no Leng, and no Hegemony either; but the angry
spear-wielding raccoons had discovered woad.
Pierce stood up,
shaking with frustration, and walked out of the reader’s cubicle.
He stood for a while on the damp green edge of the brook, staring
at the play of light across the running water. It wasn’t enough. He
shed his scholar’s robe heedlessly, turned to face the dirt trail
that had led him to this dead end, and began to run. Arriving at
the entrance airlock, he didn’t stop: his legs pounded on, taking
him out of the dome and then around it in a long loop, feet
thumping on the bony limestone pavement, each plate like the scale
of a monstrous fossilized lizard beneath his feet. He kept the
glowing dome to his left as he circled it, once, then twice. By the
end of the run he was flagging, his chest beginning to burn, the
hot, heavy lassitude building in his legs as the sweat dripped down
his face.
He slowed to a walk
as the airlock came into view again. When he was ready to speak, he
activated his phone. “Torque. Your fucking
Library is lying to me. Why is that?”
“Ah, you’ve just noticed.” Torque sounded amused.
“Come inside and we’ll discuss
it.”
I don’t want to discuss it; I want it to work,
Pierce fumed to himself as he trudged back to the airlock.
Overhead, three planets twinkled redly across the blind vault of
the nighttime sky.
Torque was waiting
for him in the clearing, holding a bottle and a pair of shot
glasses. “You’re going to need this,” he said, a twinkle in his
eyes. “Everybody does, the first time around.”
“Feh.” Pierce
shuffled stiffly past him, intending to return to the reading
cubicle. “What use is a Library full of lies?”
“They’re not lies.”
Torque’s response was uncharacteristically mild. “They’re
unhistory.”
“Un—” Pierce stopped
dead in his tracks. “There was no unhistory in the Branch Libraries
I used,” he said tonelessly.
“There wouldn’t be.
Have you given thought to what happens every time you step through
a timegate?”
“Not unduly. What
does that have to do with—”
“Everything.” Torque allowed a note of irritation
to creep into his voice. “You need to pay more attention to theory,
agent. Not all problems can be solved with a knife.”
“Huh. So the Library
is contaminated with unhistory, because . . . ?”
“Students. When you use a timegate, you enter a
wormhole, and when you exit from it—well, from the reference frame
of your point of emergence, a singularity briefly appears and emits
a large gobbet of information. You. The
information isn’t consistent with the time leading up to its sudden
appearance—causality may be violated, for one thing, and for
another, the information, the traveler, may remember or contain
data that wasn’t there before. You’re just a bundle of data spewed
out by a wormhole; you don’t have to be consistent with the
universe around you. That’s how you remember your upbringing and
your recruitment, even though nobody else does. Except for the
Library.”
They came to a
clearing and instead of taking the track to the reading room,
Torque took a different path.
“Let’s suppose you
visit a temporal sector—call it A-one—and while you’re there, you
do something that changes its historical pattern. You’re now in
sector A-two. A-one no longer exists, it’s been overwritten. If
there’s a Branch Library in A-one, it’s now in A-two, and it, too,
has changed, because it is consistent with its own history. But the
real Library—tell me, how does information enter the
Library?”
Pierce floundered. “I
thought that was an archival specialty? Every five seconds
throughout eternity a listener slot opens for a millisecond, and
anything of interest is sent forward to Control.”
“Not exactly.” Torque
stopped on the edge of another clearing in the domed jungle. “The
communication slots send data backward
in time, not forward. There’s an epoch almost a billion years long,
sitting in the Archaean and Proterozoic eras, where we run the
Library relays. The point is—back in the Cryptozoic-relay era,
there are no palimpsests. There’s no human history to contaminate,
nothing there but a bunch of store-and-forward relays. So reports
from sector A-one are relayed back to the Cryptozoic, as are
reports from sector A-two. And when they’re transmitted uptime to
the Final Library for compilation, we have two conflicting reports
from sector A.”
Pierce boggled. “Are
you telling me that we don’t destroy time lines when we change
things? That everything coexists? That’s heretical!”
“I’m not preaching
heresy.” Torque turned to face him. “The sector is indeed
overwritten with new history: the other events are unhistory now,
stuff that never happened. Plausible
lies. Raw data that pops out of a wormhole mediated by a
naked singularity, if you ask the theorists: causally unconnected
with reality. But all the lies end up in the Library. Not only does
the Library document all of recorded human history—and there is a
lot of it, for ubiquitous surveillance
technology is both cheap and easy to develop, it’s how we define
civilization after all—it documents all the possible routes through
history that end in the creation of the Final Library. That’s why
we have the Final Library as well as all the transient,
palimpsest-affected Branch Libraries.”
It was hard to
conceive of. “All right. So the Library is full of internally
contradictory time lines. Why can’t I find what I’m looking
for?”
“Well. If you’re
using your waypoints correctly, the usual reason why you get a
random selection of incorrect views is that someone has rewritten
that sector. It’s a palimpsest. Not only is the information you
came here to seek buried in a near-infinite stack of unhis tories,
it’s unlikely you’ll ever be able to return to it—unless you can
find the point where that sector’s history was altered and undo the
alteration.”