Onel remembered all this. We sat in the park under one of the crystalline willows and he paid court again. “I never forgot your kindness,” he said to me. “I swore I would repay it someday. If there’s anything I can do for you now, I will.” He sighed dramatically at this point.
“There is,” I replied.
“What is it?”
The opportunity had fallen into my lap with no effort. “I want you,” I went on, “to come to the Time Station with me and send me back to this park two hundred and forty years in the past. I want to see the scenes of my youth one last time.”
Onel seemed stunned. “You know I can’t,” he said. “The Portal can’t send you to any time you’ve already lived through. We’d have people bumping into themselves, or going back to give their earlier selves advice. It’s impossible.”
“The Portal can be overridden for emergencies,” I said. “You can override it, you know how. Send me through.”
“I can’t.”
“Onel, I don’t want to change anything. I don’t even want to talk to anybody.”
“If you changed the past—”
“I won’t. It would already have happened then, wouldn’t it? Besides, why should I? I had a happy life, Onel. I’ll go back to a day when I wasn’t in the park. It would just give me a little pleasure before I die to see things as they were. Is that asking too much?”
“I can’t,” he said. “Don’t ask this of me.”
In the end he gave in, as I knew he would. We went to the Station. Onel, his hands shaking, adjusted a Portal for me and sent me through.
Onel had given me four hours. I appeared in the park behind a large refreshment tent. Inside the tent, people sat at small round tables enjoying delicacies and occasionally rising to sample the pink wine that flowed from a fountain in the center. As a girl I had worked as a cook in that tent, removing raw foodstuffs from the transformer in the back and spending hours in the small kitchen making desserts, which were my specialty. I had almost forgotten the tents, which had been replaced later on by more elaborate structures.
I walked past the red tent toward the lake. It too was as I remembered it, surrounded by oaks and a few weeping willows. Biologists had not yet developed the silvery vines and glittering crystal trees that would be planted later. A peacock strutted past me as I headed for a nearby bench. I wanted only to sit for a while near the lake, then perhaps visit one of the tents before I had to return to my own time.
I watched my feet as I walked, being careful not to stumble. Most of those in the park ignored me rather pointedly, perhaps annoyed by an old woman who reminded them of their eventual fate. I had been the same, I thought, avoiding those who would so obviously be dead soon, uncomfortable around those who were dying when I had everything ahead of me.
Suddenly a blurred face was in front of me and I collided with a muscular young body. Unable to retain my balance, I fell.
A hand was held out to me and I grasped it as I struggled to my feet. “I’m terribly sorry,” said a voice, a voice I had come to know so well, and I looked up at the face with its wide cheekbones and clear blue eyes.
“Yuri,” I said.
He was startled. “Yuri Malenkov,” I said, trying to recover.
“Do I know you?” he asked.
“I attended one of your lectures,” I said quickly, “on holographic art.”
He seemed to relax a bit. “I’ve only given one,” he said. “Last week. I’m surprised you remember my name.”
“Do you think,” I said, anxious now to hang on to him for at least a few minutes, “you could help me over to that bench?”
“Certainly.”
I hobbled over to it, clinging to his arm. By the time we sat down, he was already expanding on points he had covered in the lecture. He was apparently unconcerned about my obvious aging and seemed happy to talk to me.
A thought struck me forcefully. I suddenly realized that Yuri had not yet met my past self. I had never attended that first lecture, having met him just before he was to do his second. Desperately, I tried to recall the date I had given Onel, what day it was in the past.
I had not counted on this. I was jumpy, worried that I would change something, that by meeting Yuri in the park like this I might somehow prevent his meeting me. I shuddered. I knew little of the circumstances that had brought him to my door. I could somehow be interfering with them.
Yuri finished what he had to say and waited for my reaction. “You certainly have some interesting insights,” I said. “I’m looking forward to your next lecture.” I smiled and nodded, hoping that he would now leave and go about his business.
Instead he looked at me thoughtfully. “I don’t know if I’ll give any more lectures.”
My stomach turned over. I knew he had given ten more. “Why not?” I asked as calmly as I could.
He shrugged. “A lot of reasons.”
“Maybe,” I said in desperation, “you should talk about it with somebody, it might help.” Hurriedly I dredged up all the techniques I had learned as a Counselor, carefully questioning him, until at last he opened up and flooded me with his sorrows and worries.
He became the Yuri I remembered, an intense person who concealed his emotions under a cold, business-like exterior. He had grown tired of the city’s superficiality, uncomfortable with those who grew annoyed at his seriousness and penetration. He was unsuited to the gaiety and playfulness that surrounded him, wanting to pursue whatever he did with single-minded devotion.
He looked embarrassed after telling me all this and began once more to withdraw behind his shield. “I have some tentative plans,” he said calmly, regaining control. “I may be leaving here in a couple of days with one of the scientific expeditions for Mars. I prefer the company of serious people and have been offered a place on the ship.”
My hands trembled. Neither of us had gone with an expedition until five years after our meeting. “I’m sorry for bothering you with my problems,” he went on. “I don’t usually do that to strangers, or anyone else for that matter. I’d better be on my way.”
“You’re not bothering me.”
“Anyway, I have a lot of things to do. I appreciate the time you took to listen to me.”
He stood up and prepared to walk away. No, I thought, you can’t, I can’t lose you like this. But then I realized something and was shocked that I hadn’t thought of it before. I knew what I had to do.
“Wait!” I said. “Wait a minute. Do you think you could humor an old lady, maybe take some advice? It’ll only be an hour or so of your time.”
“It depends,” he said stiffly.
“Before you go on that expedition, do you think you could visit a person I think might enjoy talking to you?”
He smiled. “I suppose,” he said. “But I don’t see what difference it makes.”
“She’s a lot like you. I think you’d find her sympathetic.” And I told him where I lived and gave him my name. “But don’t tell her an old woman sent you, she’ll think I’m meddling. Just tell her it was a friend.”
“I promise.” He turned to leave. “Thank you, friend.” I watched him as he ambled down the pebbled path that would lead him to my home.
PALIMPSEST
Charles Stross
Charles Stross is an English science fiction, fantasy, and horror writer. His first piece of fiction, “The Boys”, was published in Interzone in 1987 and he’s been writing steadily ever since, with several novels and many short stories to his name. His fiction has won the Hugo Award, the Locus Award and the Prometheus Award. This novella, “Palimpsest”, won the Hugo Award in 2010 and was first published in his collection Wireless in 2009.
FRESH MEAT
This will never happen:
You will flex your fingers as you stare at the back of the youth you are going to kill, father to the man who will never now become your grandfather; and as you trail him home through the snowy night, you’ll pray for your soul, alone in the darkness.
Me
mories are going to come to you unbidden even though you’ll try to focus on the task in hand. His life – that part of it which you arrived kicking and squalling in time to share with him before the end – will pass in front of your eyes. You will remember Gramps in his sixties, his hands a bunch of raisin-wrinkled grape joints as he holds your preteen wrists and shows you how to cast the fly across the water. And you’ll remember the shrunken husk of his seventies, standing speechless and numb by Gran’s graveside in his too-big suit, lying at last alone in the hospice bed, breath coming shallow and fast as he sleeps alone with the cancer. These won’t be good memories. But you know the rest of the story too, having heard it endlessly from your parents: young love and military service in a war as distant as faded sepia photographs from another generation’s front, a good job in the factory and a wife he will quietly adore who will in due course give him three children, from one of whose loins you in turn are drawn. Gramps will have a good, long life and live to see five grandchildren and a myriad of wonders, and this boy-man on the edge of adulthood who you are compelled to follow as he walks to the recruiting office holds the seeds of the man you will remember... But it’s him or you.
Gramps would have had a good life. You must hold on to that. It will make what’s coming easier.
You will track the youth who will never be your grandfather through the snow-spattered shrubbery and long grass along the side of the railroad tracks, and the wool-and-vegetable-fiber cloth that you wear – your costume will be entirely authentic – chafes your skin. By that point you won’t have bathed for a week, or shaved using hot water: you are a young thug, a vagrant, and a wholly bad sort. That is what the witnesses will see, the mad-eyed young killer in the sweat-stained suit with the knife and his victim, so vulnerable with his throat laid open almost to the bone. He’ll sprawl as if he is merely sleeping. And there will be outrage and alarm as the cops and concerned citizens turn out to hunt the monster that took young Gerry from his family’s arms, and him just barely a man: but they won’t find you, because you’ll push the button on the pebble-sized box and Stasis Control will open up a timegate and welcome you into their proud and lonely ranks.
When you wake up in your dorm two hundred years-objective from now, bathed in stinking fear-sweat, with the sheet sucking onto your skin like a death-chilled caul, there will be nobody to comfort you and nobody to hold you. The kindness of your mother’s hands and the strength of your father’s wrists will be phantoms of memory, ghosts that echo round your bones, wandering homeless through the mausoleum of your memories.
They’ll have no one to remember their lives but you; and all because you will believe the recruiters when they tell you that to join the organization you must kill your own grandfather, and that if you do not join the organization, you will die.
(It’s an antinepotism measure, they’ll tell you, nodding, not unkindly. And a test of your ruthlessness and determination. And besides, we all did it when it was our turn.)
Welcome to the Stasis, Agent Pierce! You’re rootless now, an orphan of the time stream, sprung from nowhere on a mission to eternity. And you’re going to have a remarkable career.
Yellowstone
“You’ve got to remember, humanity always goes extinct,” said Wei, staring disinterestedly at the line of women and children shuffling toward the slave station down by the river. “Always. A thousand years, a hundred thousand, a quarter million – doesn’t matter. Sooner or later, humans go extinct.” He was speaking Urem, the language the Stasis used among themselves.
“I thought that was why we were here? To try and prevent it?” Pierce asked, using the honorific form appropriate for a student questioning his tutor, although Wei was, in truth, merely a twelfth-year trainee himself: the required formality was merely one more reminder of the long road ahead of him.
“No.” Wei raised his spear and thumped its base on the dry, hard-packed mud of the observation mound. “We’re going to relocate a few seed groups, several tens of thousands. But the rest are still going to die.” He glanced away from the slaves: Pierce followed his gaze.
Along the horizon, the bright red sky darkened to the color of coagulated blood on a slaughterhouse floor. The volcano, two thousand kilometers farther around the curve of the planet, had been pumping ash and steam into the stratosphere for weeks. Every noon, in the badlands where once the Mississippi delta had writhed, the sky wept brackish tears.
“You’re from before the first extinction epoch, aren’t you? The pattern wasn’t established back then. That must be why you were sent on this field trip. You need to understand that this always happens. Why we do this. You need to know it in your guts. Why we take the savages and leave the civilized to die.”
Like Wei, and the other Stasis agents who had silently liquidated the camp guards and stolen their identities three nights before, Pierce was disguised as a Benzin warrior. He wore the war paint and beaten-aluminum armbands, bore the combat scars. He carried a spear tipped with a shard of synthetic diamond, mined from a deep seam of prehistoric automobile windshields. He even wore a Benzin face: the epicanthic folds and dark skin conferred by the phenotypic patches had given him food for thought, an unfamiliar departure from his white-bread origins. Gramps (he shied from the memory) would have died rather than wear this face.
Pierce was not yet even a twelve-year trainee: he’d been in the service for barely four years-subjective. But he was ready to be sent out under supervision, and this particular operation called for warm bodies rather than retrocausal subtlety.
Fifty years ago, the Benzin had swept around the eastern coastline of what was still North America, erupting from their heartland in the central isthmus to extend their tribute empire into the scattered tribal grounds of post-Neolithic nomads known to Stasis Control only by their code names: the Alabamae, the Floridae, and the Americae. The Benzin were intent on conquering the New World, unaware that it had been done at least seventeen times already since the start of the current Reseeding. They did not understand the significance of the redness in the western sky or the shaking of the ground, ascribing it to the anger of their tribal gods. They had no idea that these signs heralded the end of the current interglacial age, or that their extinction would be a side effect of the coming Yellowstone eruption – one of a series that occurred at six-hundred-thousand-year intervals during the early stages of the Lower First Anthropogenic epoch.
The Benzin didn’t take a long view of things, for although their priest-kings had a system of writing, most of them lived in the hazily defined ahistorical myth-world of the preliterate. Their time was running out all the same. Yellowstone was waking, and even the Stasis preferred to work around such brutal geological phenomena, rather than through them.
“Yes, but why take them?” Pierce nodded toward the silently trudging Alabamae women and children, their shoulders stooped beneath the burden of their terror. They’d been walking before the spear points of their captors for days; they were exhausted. The loud ones had already died, along with the lame. The raiders who had slain their men and stolen them away to a life of slavery sat proudly astride their camels, their enemies’ scalps dangling from their kotekas like bizarre pubic wigs. “The Benzin may be savages, but these people are losers – they came off worse.”
Wei shook his head minutely. “The adults are all female, and mostly pregnant at that. These are the healthy ones, the ones who survived the march. They’re gatherers, used to living off the land, and they’re all in one convenient spot.”
Pierce clenched his teeth, realizing his mistake. “You’re going to use them for Reseeding? Because there are fewer bodies, and they’re more primitive, more able to survive in a wilderness... ?”
“Yes. For a successful Reseeding we need at least twenty thousand bodies from as many diverse groups as possible, and even then we risk a genetic bottleneck. And they need to be able to survive in the total absence of civilization. If we dumped you in the middle of a Reseeding, you would probably not last a month. No
criticism intended; neither would I. Those warriors” – Wei raised his spear again, as if saluting the raiders – “require slaves and womenfolk and a hierarchy to function. The tip of your spear was fashioned by a slave in the royal armories, not by a warrior. Your moccasins and the cloth of your pants were made by Benzin slaves. They are halfway to reinventing civilization: given another five thousand years-subjunctive, their distant descendants might build steam engines and establish ubiquitous recording frameworks, bequeathing their memories to the absolute future. But for a Reseeding they’re as useless as we are.”
“But they don’t have half a deci—”
“Be still. They’re moving.”
The last of the slaves had been herded between the barbed hedges of the entrance passageway, and the gate guards lifted the heavy barrier back into position. Now the raiders kicked their mounts into motion, beating and poking them around the side of the spiny bamboo fence in a circuit of the guard posts. Wei and Pierce stood impassively as the camel riders spurred down on them. At the last moment, their leader pulled sideways, and his mount snorted and pawed at the ground angrily as he leaned toward Wei.
“Hai!” he shouted, in the tonal trade tongue of the northern Benzin. “I don’t remember you!”
“I am Hawk! Who in the seventh hell are you?”
Wei glared at the rider, but the intruder just laughed raucously and spat over the side of his saddle: it landed on the mud, sufficiently far from Wei to make it unclear whether it was a direct challenge.
Pierce tightened his grip on his spear, moving his index finger closer to the trigger discreetly printed on it. High above them, a vulturelike bird circled the zone of confrontation with unnatural precision, its fire-control systems locked on.
“I am Teuch,” said the rider, after a pause. “I captured these women! In the name of our Father I took them, and in the name of our Father I got them with children to work in the paddies! What have you done for our Father today?”
The Time Traveller's Almanac Page 145