The Time Traveler's Almanac

He tried again: this time he was relieved to home in on his return from the field trip to Constantinople – seen through the omnipresent eyes of Xiri’s own cams – but was perplexed by her lack of excitement. He backtracked, his search widening out until he discovered to his surprise that according to the Library, the Hegemony was not, in fact, investigating the Triangulum galaxy at all, but focusing on Maffei 1, seven million light-years farther out.

That night he ordered up two bottles of a passable Syrah and drank himself into a solitary stupor for the first time in some years. It was a childish and shortsighted act, but the repeated failures were eating away at his patience. The day after, wiser but somewhat irritable, he tried again, entering his home coordinates into the desk and asking for a view of his hall.

There was no hall, and indeed no Leng, and no Hegemony either; but the angry spear-wielding raccoons had discovered woad.

Pierce stood up, shaking with frustration, and walked out of the reader’s cubicle. He stood for a while on the damp green edge of the brook, staring at the play of light across the running water. It wasn’t enough. He shed his scholar’s robe heedlessly, turned to face the dirt trail that had led him to this dead end, and began to run. Arriving at the entrance airlock, he didn’t stop: his legs pounded on, taking him out of the dome and then around it in a long loop, feet thumping on the bony limestone pavement, each plate like the scale of a monstrous fossilized lizard beneath his feet. He kept the glowing dome to his left as he circled it, once, then twice. By the end of the run he was flagging, his chest beginning to burn, the hot, heavy lassitude building in his legs as the sweat dripped down his face.

He slowed to a walk as the airlock came into view again. When he was ready to speak, he activated his phone. “Torque. Your fucking Library is lying to me. Why is that?”

“Ah, you’ve just noticed.” Torque sounded amused. “Come inside and we’ll discuss it.”

I don’t want to discuss it; I want it to work, Pierce fumed to himself as he trudged back to the airlock. Overhead, three planets twinkled redly across the blind vault of the nighttime sky.

Torque was waiting for him in the clearing, holding a bottle and a pair of shot glasses. “You’re going to need this,” he said, a twinkle in his eyes. “Everybody does, the first time around.”

“Feh.” Pierce shuffled stiffly past him, intending to return to the reading cubicle. “What use is a Library full of lies?”

“They’re not lies.” Torque’s response was uncharacteristically mild. “They’re unhistory.”

“Un—” Pierce stopped dead in his tracks. “There was no unhistory in the Branch Libraries I used,” he said tonelessly.

“There wouldn’t be. Have you given thought to what happens every time you step through a timegate?”

“Not unduly. What does that have to do with—”

“Everything.” Torque allowed a note of irritation to creep into his voice. “You need to pay more attention to theory, agent. Not all problems can be solved with a knife.”

“Huh. So the Library is contaminated with unhistory, because…?”

“Students. When you use a timegate, you enter a wormhole, and when you exit from it – well, from the reference frame of your point of emergence, a singularity briefly appears and emits a large gobbet of information. You. The information isn’t consistent with the time leading up to its sudden appearance – causality may be violated, for one thing, and for another, the information, the traveler, may remember or contain data that wasn’t there before. You’re just a bundle of data spewed out by a wormhole; you don’t have to be consistent with the universe around you. That’s how you remember your upbringing and your recruitment, even though nobody else does. Except for the Library.”

They came to a clearing and instead of taking the track to the reading room, Torque took a different path.

“Let’s suppose you visit a temporal sector – call it A-one – and while you’re there, you do something that changes its historical pattern. You’re now in sector A-two. A-one no longer exists, it’s been overwritten. If there’s a Branch Library in A-one, it’s now in A-two, and it, too, has changed, because it is consistent with its own history. But the real Library – tell me, how does information enter the Library?”

Pierce floundered. “I thought that was an archival specialty? Every five seconds throughout eternity a listener slot opens for a millisecond, and anything of interest is sent forward to Control.”