Nation of Me
“Good to see you,
Pierce,” said the man on the throne. He smiled pleasantly but
distantly. “I gather you’ve been keeping well.”
Pierce had already
come to understand that the truly ancient were not like ordinary
humans. “Do you remember being me?” he asked, staring.
The man on the throne
raised an eyebrow. “Wouldn’t you like to know?” He gestured at the
bridge connecting his command dais to the far side of the room.
“You may approach.” Combat drones and uniformed retainers withdrew
respectfully, giving Pierce a wide berth.
He tried not to look
down as he walked across the bridge, with only partial success. The
storms of Jupiter swirled madly beneath his feet. It had made him
nauseous the first time he’d seen them, through a dumb-glass window
aboard the low-gee shuttle that had brought him hence—evidently his
captors wanted to leave him in no doubt that he was a long way from
home. Occulting the view of the planet was the blue-tinged
quicksilver disk of the largest timegate he’d ever seen, holding
open in defiance of protocol with preposterous, scandalous
persistence.
“Why am I here?”
Pierce demanded.
A snort. “Why do you
think?”
“You’re me.” Pierce
shrugged. “Me with a whole lot more experience and age, and an
attitude problem.” They’d dressed him in the formal parade robes of
a Stasis agent rather than the black jumpsuits that seemed to be de
rigueur around this place. It was a petty move, to enforce his
alienation: and besides, it had no pockets. To fight back, he
focused on the absurd. Black jumpsuits and shiny boots, on a
spaceship? Someone around here clearly harbored thespian fantasies.
“And now you’ve got me.”
His older self
stiffened. “We need to talk alone.” His eyes scanned the throne
room. “You lot: dismissed.”
Pierce glanced round
just in time to see the last of the human audience flicker into
unhistory. He looked back toward the throne. “I was hoping we could
keep this civilized,” he said mildly. “You’ve got all the leverage
you need. I’m in your power.” There: it
was out in the open. Not that there’d been any doubt about it, even
from the beginning. This ruthless ancient with his well-known
mirror-face and feigned bonhomie had made Pierce’s position crystal
clear with his choice of greeters. All that was left was for Pierce
to politely bare his throat and hope for a favorable
outcome.
“I didn’t rescue you
from those scum in order to throw you away again”—his older self
seemed almost irritated—“though what you see in her . . .” He shook his head. “You’re safe
here.”
Pierce rolled his
eyes. “Oh, really. And I suppose if I decline to go along with
whatever little proposition you’re about to put to me, you’ll just
let me walk away, is that it? Rather than, oh, rewind the audience
and try again with a clean-sheet me?” He met the even gaze of the
man in the throne and suddenly felt finger high.
“No,” said the man on
the throne, after a momentary pause. “That won’t be necessary. I’m
not going to ask you to do anything you wouldn’t ask me to let you
do.”
“Oh.” Pierce
considered this for a moment. “You’re with the Opposition, though.
Aren’t you? And you know I’m not.” Honesty made him add,
“Yet.”
“I told you he’d say
that,” said Yarrow, behind him. Pierce’s head whipped round. She
nodded at him, but kept her smile for the man on the throne. “He’s
young and naive. Go easy on him.”
The man on the throne
nodded. “He’s not that naive, my lady.”
He frowned. “Pierce, you slit the throat of your own double,
separated from you by seconds. You joined the Stasis, after all.
But do you really imagine it gets easier with age, when you’ve had
time to meditate on what you’ve done? There’s a reason why armies
send the flower of their youth to do the killing and dying, not the
aged and cynical. We have a name for those who find murder gets
easier with experience: ‘monsters.’ ”
He raised a hand.
“Chairs all around.” A pair of seats appeared on the dais, facing
him: ghosts of carved diamond, fit for the lords of creation. “I
think you should be the one to tell him the news,” he suggested to
Yarrow. “I’m not sure he’d believe me. He hasn’t had time to
recover from the trauma yet.”
“All right.” Yarrow
slid gratefully into her own chair, then glanced at Pierce. “You’d
better sit down.”
“Why?” Pierce lowered
himself into his seat expectantly.
“Because”—she nodded
at Pierce’s elder self, who returned the nod with a drily amused
smile—“he’s not just a member of the Opposition: he’s our leader.
That’s why Internal Affairs have been all over you like ants. And
that’s why we had to extract you and bring you here.”
“Rubbish.” Pierce
crossed his arms. “That’s not why you had to grab me. You’ve
already got him: I assume I’m a palimpsest or leftover from an
assassination attempt. So what do you want with me? In the here and now, I mean?”
Yarrow looked
flustered. “Pierce—”
His older self placed
a restraining hand on her knee as he leaned forward. “Allow me?” He
looked Pierce in the eyes. “The Opposition is not—you probably
already worked this out—external to the Stasis; we come from
within. The Stasis is broken, Pierce, it’s drifting rudderless
toward the end of time. We’ve got a, an alternative plan for
survival. Internal Affairs is tasked with maintaining internal
standards; they’re opposed to structural change at all costs. They
overwrote your wife’s epoch because they discovered possible
evidence of our success.”
The evidence of
abandoned cities on an alien moon, the fleet of gigantic
slower-than-light colony starships—was this all just internal
politics within the Stasis hierarchy?
“Whatever would they
want to do that for?” he asked. “They’re not interested in deep
space.” Except insofar as there were threats to the survival of
humanity that had to be dealt with.
Yarrow shook her
head. “We disagree. They’re very
interested in deep space—specifically, in keeping us out of it.”
She inhaled deeply. “Did you notice, when you were consulting the
Library, any sign of histories that touched on extraterrestrial
settlement? Even though we have reterraformed the Earth thousands
of times over, strip-mined the sun, rearranged gas giants, built
black holes, and ripped an entire star system from its native
galactic cluster?” Pierce shook his head, uncertain. “We’ve built
and destroyed thousands of biospheres, sculpted continents, we
outnumber the stars in the cosmos—but we’ve never spread to other
solar systems! Doesn’t that strike you as a little
odd?”
“But we coevolved
with our planet, we’re not adapted to life elsewhere—” Pierce
stopped. We can do terraforming, and
timegates, he realized. Even if we can
only have one wormhole end open at any given time. We
rebuilt the sun. We’ve mapped every
planet within ten million light-years. “Are we?” he asked,
plaintively.
“There’s a Science
Empire running down on Earth right now,” said the man on the
throne. “They’ve been studying that question for twelve thousand
years. We brought them the probe fleet reports. They say it can be
done, and they’ve been building and launching a colony ship a year
for the past six centuries.” He frowned. “We’ve had that big gate
in place ever since the dawn of civilization, to block Internal
Affairs from detecting and overwriting our operation here.
Officially we’re in the middle of a fallow epoch, and the system
should be uninhabited and uninhabitable: we moved in ahead of the
first scheduled Reseeding. But they never give up. Sooner or later
they’ll notice us and start looking for the other side of our
barricade, the static drop we funneled you through.”
“What happens when
they find it?” asked Pierce.
“Six hundred
inhabited worlds die, and that’s just for starters,” Yarrow said
quietly. “Call it unhistory if you like euphemisms—but did your
graduation kill feel unreal to you? Unlike your”—her nose wrinkled
in the ghost of a sniff—“wife and children, the inhabitants of the
colony worlds won’t be retrievable through the
Library.”
“And those six
hundred planets are just the seed corn,” his older self chimed in.
“The start of something vast.”
“But why?” he asked.
“Why would they . . . ?” He stopped.
“The Stasis isn’t
about historicity,” said Yarrow. “That might be the organization’s
raison d’être, but the raw truth of the matter is that the Stasis
is about power. Like any organization,
it lives and grows for itself, not for the task with which it is
charged. The governing committee—it’s very sad. But it’s been like
this as long as there’s been a Stasis.”
“We rescued you
because we specifically want you—my first iteration, or as near to
it as we’ve been able to get, give or take the assassination ambush
in Carnegra,” said the man on the throne. “We need your help to cut
us free from the dead hand of history.”
“But what—” Pierce
lowered his hands to touch his belly. “My phone,” he said slowly.
“It’s damaged, but you could have repaired it. It’s not there
anymore, is it?”
Yarrow nodded slowly.
“Can you tell me why?” she asked.