Funeral in Berlin
The interrogation
lasted three days. Kafka didn’t even bother to erase it from
Pierce’s time line retroactively: clearly he was making a point
about the unwisdom of crossing Internal Affairs.
Afterward, Pierce
left the hotel and wandered the streets of Berlin in a neurasthenic
daze.
Does Kafka trust me? Or not? On balance, probably
not: the methodical, calm grilling he’d received, the interrogation
about the precise meaning of Yarrow’s love letters (faded memories
from decades ago, to Pierce’s mind), had been humiliating, an
emotional strip search. Knowing that Kafka understood his dalliance
with Yarrow as a youthful indiscretion, knowing that Kafka clearly
knew of (and tolerated) his increasingly desperate search for the
point at which his history with Xiri had been overwritten, only
made it worse. We can erase everything that
gives meaning to your life if we feel like it. Feeling
powerless was a new and shocking experience for Pierce, who had
known the freedom of the ages: a return to his pre-Stasis life,
half-starved and skulking frightened in the shadows of interesting
times.
And then there was
the incipient paranoia that any encounter with Internal Affairs
engendered. Am I being watched right
now? he wondered as he walked. A
ghost-me surveillance officer working for Internal Affairs, or
something else? Kafka would be mad not to assign him a
watcher, he decided. If Yarrow was under investigation, then he
himself must be under suspicion. Guilt by association was the first
rule of counterespionage, after all.
A soul-blighting
sense of depression settled into his bones. He’d had an inkling of
it for months, ever since his increasingly frantic search in the
Library, but Kafka’s quietly pedantic examination had somehow
catalyzed a growing certainty that he would never see Xiri, or
Magnus and Liann, ever again—that if he could ever find them,
shadows cast from his mind by the merciless inspection-lamp glare
of Internal Affairs would banish them farther into
unhistory.
Therefore, he
wandered.
Civilization lay like
a heavy blanket upon the land, rucked up in gray-faced five-story
apartment blocks and pompous stone-faced business establishments,
their pillars and porticoes and cornicework swollen with
self-importance like so many amorous street pigeons. The city
sweated in the summer heat, the stench and flies of horse manure in
the streets contributing a sour pungency to the sharp stink of
stove smoke.
Other people shared
the Strasse with him; here a peddler selling apples from a
handcart, there a couple taking the air together. Pierce walked
slowly along the sidewalk of a broad street, sweating in his suit
and taking what shelter he could from the merciless summer sun
beneath the awnings of shops, letting his phone’s navigation aid
guide his footsteps even as he wondered despondently if he would
ever find his way home. He could wander through the shadowy world
of historicity forever, never finding his feet—for though the
Stasis and their carefully cultivated tools of ubiquitous
monitoring had nailed down the sequence of events that comprised
history, history was a tangled weave, many threads superimposed and
redyed and snipped out of the final pattern . . .
The scent was his
first clue that he was not alone, floral and sweet and tickling the
edge of his nostrils with a half-remembered sense of illicit
excitement that made his heart hammer. The shifting sands of memory
gave way: I know that
smell—
His phone vibrated.
“Show no awareness,” someone whispered
inside his skull in Urem. “They are watching
you.” The voice was his own.
The strolling couple
taking the air arm in arm were ahead of him. It was her scent, the familiar bouquet, but—“Where are you?” he sent. “Show yourself.”
The phone buzzed
again like an angry wasp trapped inside his ribs. “Not with watchers. Go to this location and wait,”
said the traitor voice, as a spatial tag nudged the corner of his
mind. “We’ ll pick you up.” The
rendezvous was a couple of kilometers away, in a public park
notorious by night: a French-letter drop for a dead-letter
drop.
He tried not to
stare. It might be
her, he thought, trying to shake thirty-year-old jigsaw
memories into something that matched a glimpse of a receding back
in late-nineteenth-century dress and broad-brimmed hat. He turned a
corner in his head even as they turned aside into a residential
street: “Internal Affairs just interrogated me
about Yarrow.”
“ You told us already. Go now. Leave the rest to
us.”
Pierce’s phone fell
silent. He glanced sideways out of the corners of his eyes, but the
strolling couple were no longer visible. He sniffed, flaring his
nostrils in search of an echo of that familiar scent, but it, too,
was gone. Doubtless they’d never been here at all; they were
Stasis, after all. Weren’t they?
Guided by his phone’s
internal nudging, Pierce ambled slowly toward the park, shoulders
relaxed and hands clasped behind his back as if enjoying a quiet
afternoon stroll. But his heart was pounding and there was an
unquiet sensation in the pit of his stomach, as if he harbored a
live grenade in his belly. You told us
already. Go now. Leave the rest to us. His own traitor voice
implying lethally spiraling cyni cism. They
are watching you. The words of a self-crowned pervert god,
hubris trying to dam the flow of history; or the mysterious
Opposition that Kafka had warned him of? It was imponderable,
intolerable. I could be walking into a
trap, Pierce considered the idea, and immediately began to
activate a library of macros in his phone that he’d written for
such eventualities. As Superintendent-of-Scholars Manson had
ceaselessly reminded him, a healthy paranoia was key to avoiding
further encounters with cardiac leeches and less pleasant medical
interventions.
Pierce crossed the
street and walked beside a canal for a couple of blocks, then
across a bridge and toward the tree-lined gates of a park.
Possibilities hummed in the dappled shadows of the grass like a
myriad of butterfly wings broken underfoot, whispering on the edge
of actuality like distant thunder. This part of history, a century
and more before the emergence of the first universal-surveillance
society, before the beginning of the history to which the Stasis
laid claim, was mutable in small but significant ways. Nobody could
say for sure who might pass down any given street in any specified
minute, and deem it disruptive: the lack of determinism lent a
certain flexibility to his options.
Triggering one of his
macros as he stepped through the gate to the park, between one step
and the next Pierce walked through a storeroom in the basement of a
Stasis station that had been dust and ruins a billion years before
the ice sheets retreated from the North German plains. It had lain
disused for a century or so when he entered it, and nobody else
would use it for at least a decade thereafter—he’d set monitors,
patient trip wires to secure his safe time. He tarried there for
almost three hours, picking items from a well-stocked shelf and
sending out messages to order them from a factory on a continent
that didn’t yet exist, eating a cold meal from a long-storage
ration pack, and trying to regain his emotional balance in time for
the meeting that lay ahead.
An observer close on
his tail would have seen a flicker; when he completed the stride
his suit was heavier, the fabric stiffer to the touch, and his
shoulders slightly stooped beneath the weight concealed within.
There were other changes, some of them internal. Perhaps the
observers would see, but: Leave the rest to
us. He slipped his hands into his pockets, blinked until the
itching subsided and the heads-up display settled into place across
the landscape, scanning and amplifying. He had summoned watchers,
circling overland: invisible and silent, nerves connected to his
center. Fuck Kafka’s little game, he
thought furiously. Fuck them all. Three
hours in his unrecorded storeroom in the Cryptozoic had given him
time for his depression to ferment into anger. I want answers!
It was a hot day, and
the park was far from empty. There were young women, governesses or
maids, pushing the prams of their bourgeois employers; clerks or
office workers skipping work and some juvenile ne’er-do-wells
playing truant from the gymnasium; here a street sweeper and there
a dodgy character with a barrel organ and behind him a couple of
vagrants sharing a bottle of schnapps. At the center of a
well-manicured lawn, an ornate stone pedestal supported a clock
with four brass faces. Pierce, letting his phone drive his feet,
casually glanced around while his threat detector scanned through
the chaff. Nobody—His phone buzzed
again.
“What was the tavern where you fell for me called?”
An achingly familiar voice whispered in his ear.
“Something to do with wildfowl, in Carnegra, the Red Goose
or Red Duck or something like that—”
“Hard contact in three seconds,” his own voice
interrupted from nowhere. “Button up and hit
the ground on my word. Now.”
Pierce dived toward
the grassy strip beside the path as flaring crimson threat markers
appeared all around him. As he fell, his suit bloated and darkened:
rubbery cones expanded like a frightened hedgehog’s quills as his
collar expanded and rotated, hooding him. In the space of a second
the park’s population doubled, angular metallic figures flickering
into being all around. Time flickered and strobed as timegates
snapped open and shut, expelling sinister cargo. Pierce twitched
ghost muscles convulsively, triggering camouflage routines as the
incoming drones locked onto each other and spat missiles and laser
fire.
“What’s going on?”
“Palimpsest ambush! Hard . . .”
The signal stuttered
into silence, hammered flat by jammers and raw, random
interference. Pierce began to roll, rising to sit as his suit’s
countermeasures flared. This is crazy,
he thought, shocked by the violence of the attack. They can’t hope to conceal—
The sky turned
violet-white, the color of lightning: the grass around him began to
smoke.
The temperature rose
rapidly. His suit was just beginning to char from the prompt
radiation pulse as the ground opened under him, toppling him
backward into darkness.