The Time Traveler's Almanac

The current Reseeding was Enlightened; not only were they aware of the existence of the Stasis, but they were a part of the greater transtemporal macroculture: speakers of Urem, obedient to the Stasis, even granted dispensation to petition for use of the timegate in extraordinary circumstances. In return, the Hegemony was altogether conscientious in observing their duties to the guardians of history, according Pierce honors that, in other ages, might have been accorded to a diplomat or minor scion of royalty. Unfortunately, this entailed rather more formality than Pierce was used to. The decor, for one thing: they’d clearly studied his epoch, but modeling his hospital suite on Louis XV’s bedroom at Versailles suggested they had strange ideas about his status.

“If it pleases you, my lord, would you like to describe how you entered the celestial service?” The journalist, who his bowing and shuffling concierge explained had been sent by the city archive to document his life, was young, pretty, and shiny-eyed. She’d obviously studied his public records and the customs of his home civilization, and decided to go for the throat. Local fashion echoed the Minoan empire of antiquity, and her attire, though scholarly, was disconcerting: a flash of well-turned ankle, nipples rouged and ringed – Pierce realized he was staring and turned his face away, chagrined.

“Please?” she repeated, her plump lower lip quivering. Her cameras flittered below the ceiling like lazy bluebottles, iridescent in the afternoon sunlight, logging her life for posterity.

“I suppose so…” Pierce trailed off, staring through the open window at the lower slopes of the hillside on which the clinic nestled. “But there’s no secret, really, none at all. You don’t approach them – they approach you. A tap on the shoulder at the right time, an offer of a job, at first I didn’t think it was anything unusual.”

“Was there anything leading up to that? My lord? What was your life like before the service?”

Pierce frowned slightly as he forced his sullen memory to work. There were gaps. “I’m not sure; I think I was in a car crash, or maybe a war…”

His cardiac leech pulsed against his chest like a contented cat. Sunlight warmed the side of his face as he watched her sidelong, from the corner of his eye. How far will she go for a story? he wondered idly. Play your cards right and … well, maybe. His temporarily heartless condition had rendered amorous speculations – or anything else calculated to raise the blood pressure – purely academic for the time being.

“My lord?” He pretended to miss the moue of annoyance that flitted across her face, but the very deliberate indrawn breath that followed it was so transparent that he nearly gave the game away by laughing.

“I’m not your lord,” he said gently. “I’m just a scholar-agent, halfway through my twenty years of training. What I know about the Guardians of Time” – that was what the Hegemonites called the Stasis, those in power who had polite words for them – “and can tell you is mere trivia. I’m sure your Archive already has it all.”

This was a formally declared Science Epoch, in which a whole series of consecutive Reseedings were dedicated to collating the mountain-sized chunks of data returned by the Von Neumann probes that had been launched during the last Science Epoch, a billion years earlier. They and their descendants had quietly fanned out throughout the local group of galaxies, traveling at barely a hundredth of the speed of light, visiting and mapping every star system and extrasolar planet within ten million light-years. There was a lot of material to collate; The Zealantian Hegemony’s army of elite astrocartographers, millions strong, would labor for tens of thousands of years to assemble just their one corner of the big picture. And their obsession with knowledge didn’t stop at the edge of the solar system.

(“A civilization of obsessive-compulsive stamp collectors,” Wei had called them when he briefly visited his ex-student. “You’ve got to watch these Science Cults; sooner or later they’ll turn all the carbon in the deep biosphere into memory diamond, then where will we be?”)

“The Archive doesn’t know everything, my lord. It’s not like the Library of Time.” There was a strangely reverent note in her voice, as if the Library was somehow different. “We don’t have permission to read the forbidden diaries, my lord. We have to accept whatever crusts of wisdom our honored guests choose to let fall from their trenchers.”

“I’m not your lord. You can call me Pierce, if you like.”

“Yes, my, ah. Pierce? My lord.”

“What should I call you?” he asked after a pause.

“Me? I am nobody, lord Pierce! I am a humble journal-keeper—”