The Trial
The day after he
murdered himself in cold blood, agent Pierce received an urgent
summons to attend a meeting in the late nineteenth
century.
It was, he thought
shakily, par for the course: pick an agent, any agent, as long as
their home territory was within a millennium or so of the dateline.
From Canada in the twenty-first to Germany in the nineteenth,
what’s the difference? If you were an inspector from the
umpty-millionth, it might not look like a lot, he supposed: they
were all exuberant egotists, these faceless teeming ur-people who
had lived and died before the technologies of total history rudely
dispelled the chaos and uncertainty of the pre-Stasis world. And
Pierce was a very junior agent. Best to
see what the inspector wanted.
Kaiserine Germany was
not one of Pierce’s areas of interest, so he took a subjective
month to study for the meeting in advance—basic conversational
German, European current events, and a sufficient grounding in
late-Victorian London to support his cover as a more than usually
adventuresome entrepreneur looking for new products to
import—before he stepped out of a timegate in the back of a stall
in a public toilet in Spittelmarkt.
Berlin before the
century of bombs was no picturesque ginger-bread confection:
outside the slaughterhouse miasma of the market, the suburbs were
dismal narrow-fronted apartment blocks as far as the eye could see,
soot-stained by a million brown-coal stoves, the principal
olfactory note one of horse shit rather than gasoline fumes
(although Rudolf Diesel was even now at work on his engines in a
more genteel neighborhood). Pierce departed the public toilet with
some alacrity—the elderly attendant seemed to take his emergence as
a personal insult—and hastily hailed a cab to the designated
meeting place, a hotel in Charlottenberg.
The hotel lobby was
close and humid in the summer heat; bluebottles droned around the
dark wooden paneling as Pierce looked around for his contact. His
phone tugged at his attention as he looked at the inner courtyard,
where a cluster of cast-iron chairs and circular tables hinted at
the availability of waiter service. Sure enough, a familiar face
nodded affably at him.
Pierce approached the
table with all the enthusiasm of a condemned man approaching the
gallows. “You wanted to see me,” he said. There were two goblets of
something foamy and green on the table, and two chairs. “Who
else?”
“The other drink’s
for you. Berliner Weiss with Waldmeistersirup. You’ll like it.
Guaranteed.” Kaf ka gestured at the empty chair. “Sit
down.”
“How do you know—”
Silly question. Pierce sat down. “You
know this isn’t my time?”
“Yes.” Kafka picked
up a tall, curved glass full of dark brown beer and took a
mouthful. “Doesn’t matter.” He peered at Pierce. “You’re a new
graduate. Damn, I don’t like this job.” He took another mouthful of
beer.
“What’s happened
now?” Pierce asked.
“I don’t know. That’s
why I want you here.”
“Is this to do with
the time someone tried to assassinate me?”
“No.” Kafka shook his
head. “It’s worse, I’m afraid. One of your tutors may have gone off
the reservation. Observation indicated. I’m putting you on the
case. You may need—you may need to terminate this
one.”
“A tutor.” Despite
himself, Pierce was intrigued. Kafka, the man from Internal Affairs
(but his role was unclear, for was it not the case that the Stasis
police their own past and future selves?) wanted him to investigate
a senior agent and tutor? Ordering him to bug his future self would
be understandable, but this—
“Yes.” Kafka put his
glass down with a curl of his lower lip that bespoke distaste. “We
have reason to believe she may be working for the
Opposition.”
“Opposition.” Pierce
raised an eyebrow. “There is no opposition—”
“Come, now: don’t be
naive. Every ideology in every recorded
history has an opposition. Why should we be any
different?”
“But we’re—” Pierce
paused, the phrase bigger than history
withering on the tip of his tongue. “Excuse me?”
“Work it through.”
Kafka was atwitch with barely concealed impatience. “You can’t
possibly not have thought about setting
yourself up as a pervert god, can you? Everybody thinks about it,
this we know; seed the universe with life, create your own Science
Empires, establish a rival interstellar civilization in the deep
Cryptozoic, and use it to invade or secede Earth before the Stasis
notices—that sort of thing. It’s not as if thinking about it is a crime: the problems start
when an agent far gone in solipsism starts thinking they can do it
for real. Or worse, when the Opposition raise their
snouts.”
“But I—” Pierce
stopped, collected his thoughts, and continued. “I thought that
never happened? That the self-policing thing was a, an adequate
safeguard?”
“Lad.” Kafka shook
his head. “You clearly mean well. And self-policing does indeed
work adequately most of the time. But don’t let the security
theater at your graduation deceive you: there are failure modes. We
set you a large number of surveillance assignments to muddy the
water—palimpsests all, of course, we overwrite them once they
deliver their reports so that future-you retains no memory of
them—but you can’t watch yourself all the time. And there are
administrative errors. You’re not only the best monitor of your own
behavior, but the best-placed individual to know how best to
corrupt you. We are human and imperfect, which is why we need an
external Internal Affairs department. Someone has to coordinate
things, especially when the Opposition are involved.”
“The Opposition?”
Pierce picked up his glass and drank deeply, studying Kafka. “Who
are they?” Who do you want me to rat
out? he wondered. Myself? Surely
Kafka couldn’t have overlooked his history with Xiri, now buried
beneath the dusty pages of a myriad of rewrites?
“You’ll know them
when you meet them.” Kafka emitted a little mirthless chuckle and
stood up. “Come upstairs to my office, and I’ll show you why I
requested you for this assignment.”
Kafka’s office
occupied the entire top floor of the building and was reached by
means of a creaking mesh-fronted elevator that rose laboriously
through the well of a wide staircase. It was warm, but not
obnoxiously so, as Pierce followed Kafka out of the elevator cage.
“The door is reactive,” Kafka warned, placing a protective hand on
the knob. Hidden glands were waiting beneath a patina of simulated
brass, ready to envenomate the palm of an unwary intruder. “Door:
accept agent Pierce. General defenses: accept Agent Pierce with
standard agent privilege set. You may follow me now.”
Kafka opened the door
wide. Beyond it, ranks of angled wooden writing desks spanned the
room from wall to wall. A dark-suited iteration of Kafka perched
atop a high stool behind each one of them, pens moving incessantly
across their ledgers. A primitive visitor (one not slain on the
spot by the door handle, or the floor, or the wallpaper) might have
gaped at the ever-changing handwriting and spidery diagrams that
flickered on the pages, mutating from moment to moment as the
history books redrew themselves, and speculated about digital
paper. Pierce, no longer a primitive, felt the hair under his
collar rise as he polled his phone, pulling up the number of
rewrites going on in the room. “You’re really working Control
hard,” he said in the direction of Kafka’s receding
back.
“This is the main
coordination node for prehistoric Germany.” Kafka tucked his hands
behind his back as he walked, stoop-shouldered, between desks.
“We’re close enough to the start of Stasis history to make meddling
tricky—we have to keep track of continuity, we can’t simply edit at
will.” Meddling with prehistory, before the establishment of the
ubiquitous monitoring and recording technologies that ultimately
fed the Library at the end of time, ought to be risk-free: if a
Neolithic barbarian froze to death on a glacier, unrecorded, the
implications for deep history were trivial. But the rules were
fluid, and interference was risky: if a time traveler were to shoot
the Kaiser, for example, or otherwise derail the ur-history line
leading up to the Stasis, it could turn the entire future into a
palimpsest. “The individual I am investigating is showing an
unhealthy interest in the phase boundary between Stasis and
prehistory.”
One of the deskbound
Kafkas looked up, his eyebrows furrowing with irritation. “Could
you take this somewhere else?” he asked.
“I’m sorry,” Pierce’s
Kafka replied with abrupt humility. “Agent Pierce, this
way.”
As Kafka led Pierce
into an office furnished like an actuary’s hermitage, Pierce asked,
“Aren’t you at risk of anachronism yourselves? Multitasking like
that, so close to the real Kafka’s datum?”
Kafka smiled
sepulchrally as he sat down behind the heavy oak desk. “I take
precautions. And the fewer individuals who know what’s in those
ledgers, the better.” He gestured at a small, hard seat in front of
it. “Be seated, Agent Pierce. Now, in your own words. Tell me about
your relationship with Agent-Scholar Yarrow. Everything , if you please.” He reached into his
desk drawer and withdrew a smart pad. “I have a transcript of your
written correspondence here. We’ll go through it line by line next
. . .”