The Time Traveler's Almanac

“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…?”