The Kindest Lies
They walked along a
twisting path between walls of shrubs and creepers, and a few short
trees, growing from mounds of damp-smelling soil. The path appeared
to be of old sandstone, shot through with seams of a milky rock
like calcite: appearances were deceptive.
“You played me like a
flute,” said Pierce. He held his hands behind his back, as was his
wont, keeping an arm’s reach aside from her.
“I did not!” Her
denial was more in hurt than in anger. “I didn’t know about this
until he, you, recruited me.” Her boot scuffed a rock leaning like
a rotten tooth from the side of a herbaceous border: tiny insects
scuttled from her toes, unnoticed. “I was still in training. Like
you, when you were tapped for, for other things.”
They walked in
silence for a minute, uphill and around a winding corner, then down
a flight of steps cut into the side of a low hill.
“If this is all
simply an internal adjustment, why doesn’t Internal Affairs shut
everything down?” he asked. “They must know who is involved . .
.”
“They don’t.” She
shook her head. “When you call in a request for a timegate, your
phone doesn’t say, ‘By the way, this iteration of Pierce is a
member of the Opposition.’ All of us were compliant—once. If they
catch us, they can backtrack along our history and undo the
circumstances that led to our descent into dissidence; and
sometimes we can catch and isolate them, put them in an environment where doubt
flourishes. If they started unmaking every agent suspected of
harboring disloyal thoughts, it would trigger a witch hunt that
would tear Stasis apart: we’re not the kind who’d go quietly. Hence
their insistence on control, alienation from family and other fixed
reference points, complicity in shared atrocity. They aim to stifle
disloyal thoughts before the first germination.”
“Huh.” They came to a
fork in the path. A stone bench, stained gray and gently eroded by
lichen, sat to one side. “Were you behind the assassination
attempt, then?”
“No.” She perched
tentatively at one side of the bench. “That was definitely Internal
Affairs. They were after him, not you.”
“Him—”
“The iteration of you
that never stayed in the Hegemony, never met Xiri, eventually
drifted into different thoughts and met Yarrow again under
favorable circumstances—”
Pierce slowly turned
around as she was speaking, but in every direction he looked there
was no horizon, just a neatly landscaped wall of mazes curving
gently toward the zenith. “It seems to me that they’re out of
control.”
“Yes.” She became
intent, focused, showing him her lecturer’s face. “All
organizations that are founded for a purpose rapidly fill with
people who see their role as an end in itself. Internal Affairs are
a secondary growth. If they ever succeed, there won’t be anything
left of the Stasis but Internal Affairs, everyone spying on
themselves for eternity and a day, trying to preserve a single
outcome without allowing anyone to ask why . . .”
Not everything added
up. Still thinking, Pierce sat down gingerly at the other side of
the bench. Not looking at her, he said: “I met Imad and Leila,
Xiri’s parents. How could they have survived? Everyone kills their
own grandparents, it’s the only way to get into the
Stasis.”
“How did you survive
your graduation?” She turned and looked at him, her eyes glistening
with unshed tears. “You can be very slow at times,
Pierce.”
“What—”
“You don’t have to
abide by what they made you do, my love. Corrupt practices, the use
of complicity in shared atrocities to bind new recruits to a cause:
it was a late addition to the training protocol, added at the
request of Internal Affairs. It may even be what sparked the first
muttering of Opposition. We’ve got the luxury of unmaking our
mistakes—even to go back, unmake the mistake, and not enter the Stasis, despite having graduated.
Agents do that, sometimes, when they’re too profoundly burned-out
to continue: they go underground, they run and cut themselves off.
That’s why there was no agent covering the Hegemony period you
landed in. They’d erased their history with the Stasis, going into
deep cover.”
“You say ‘they.’ Are
you by any chance trying to disown their action?” he asked
gently.
“No!” Now she sounded irritated. “I regret nothing.
She regrets nothing. Withholding the
truth from you for all those years—well, what would you have done
if you’d known that your adoring Xiri, the mother of your children,
was a deep-cover agent of the Opposition? What
would you have done? ” She reached across and seized his
elbow, staring at him, searching for some truth he couldn’t
articulate.
“I . . . don’t . . .
know.” His shoulders slumped.
“All those years, you
were under observation by other instances of yourself, sworn in
service to Internal Affairs, reporting to Kafka,” she pointed out.
“Honesty wasn’t an option. Not unless you can guarantee that
all of those ghost-instances would be
complicit in keeping the secret, from the moment you were recruited
by the Stasis.”
“That’s why, back in
college—” The moment of enlightenment was shocking. Yarrow’s mouth,
seen for the first time, wide and sensual, the pale lips, his
reaction. He looked across the bench, saw the brightness in her
eyes as she nodded. “I’d never betray her.”
“It happened more
than once, according to the Final Library. They can make you betray
anyone if they get their claws into you early enough. The only way
to prevent it is to make a palimpsest of your whole recruitment
into the Stasis—to replace your conscript youth with a disloyal
impostor from the outset, or to decline the invitation altogether,
and go underground.”
“But, I. Him. I’m not
him, exactly.”
She let go of his
elbow. “Not unless you want to be, my love.”
“Am I your love? Or is he?”
“That depends which
version of you you want to be.”
“You’re telling me
that essentially I can only be free of Internal Affairs if I undo
what they made me do.”
“There’s a protocol,”
she said, looking away. “We can reactivate your phone. You don’t
have to reenlist in the Stasis if you don’t want to. There are
berths waiting for all of us on the colony ships . .
.”
“But that’s just
exchanging one sort of reified destiny for another, isn’t it?
Expansion in space, instead of time. Why is that any better than,
say, freeing the machines, turning over all the available temporal
bandwidth to timelike computing to see if the wild-eyed prophets of
artificial intelligence and ghosts uploaded in the machines were
onto something after all?”
She looked at him
oddly. “Do you have any idea how weird you can be at
times?”
He snorted. “Don’t
worry, I’m not serious about that. I know my limits. If I don’t do
this thing we’re discussing, him upstairs will be annoyed. Because
Kafka will have all those naively loyal young potential me’s to
send on spy missions, won’t he?” Pierce took a deep breath. “I
don’t see that there’s any alternative,
really. And that’s what rankles. I had hoped that the Opposition
would be willing to give me a little more freedom of action than
Kafka, that’s all.” He felt the ghostly touch of a bunch of
raisin-wrinkled grape joints holding his preteen wrists, showing
him how to cast a line. He owed it to Grandpa, he felt: to leave
his own children a universe with elbow room unconstrained by the
thumbcuffs of absolute history. “Will you still be here when I get
back?”
She regarded him
gravely. “Will you still want to see me afterward?”
“Of
course.”
“See you later,
then.” She smiled as she stood up, then departed.
He stared at the spot
where she’d been sitting for what seemed like a long, long time.
But when he tried to remember her face all he could see was the two
of them, Xiri and Yarrow, superimposed.