The Time Traveler's Almanac

“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.”