Palimpsest by Charles Stross Page A

is ‘he’?” asked Pierce, although he thought he knew.
    “He used to be you, once. That’s what he told me.” Her grip tightened suddenly. “He’s not you, love, it’s not the same. At all. ”
    “I must see him.”
    Pierce tried to sit up: Xiri clung to him, dragging him down. “No! Not yet,” she hissed.
    Pierce stopped struggling before he hurt her. His arms and his stomach muscles felt curiously strong, almost as if they’d never been damaged. “Why not?”
    “Scholar Yarrow asked me to, to intercede. She said you’d want to confront him.” She tensed when she spoke Yarrow’s name. “She was right. About lots of things.”
    “What’s her position here?”
    “She’s with him.” Xiri hesitated. “It took much getting used to. I made a fool of myself once, early on.”
    He raised a hand to stroke her hair. “I can understand that.” Pierce pondered his lack of reaction. “It’s been years since I knew her, you know. And if he’s who—what—I think he is, he was never married to you. Was he?”
    “No.” She lay against him in silence for a while. “What are you going to do?” she asked in a small voice.
    Pierce smiled at the ceiling. (It was low, and bare of decoration: another sign, if he needed one, that he was not back in the Hegemony.) For the time being, the shock and joy of finding her again had left him giddy with relief. “Where are the children?” he asked, forcing himself: one last test.
    “I left Liann with a nurse. Magnus is away, in the ship’s scholasticos.” Concern slowly percolated across her expression. “They’ve grown a lot: do you think—”
    He breathed out slowly, relieved. “There will be time to get to know them again, yes.” She reached over his chest and hugged him tight. He stroked her hair, content for the moment but sadly aware that everything was about to change. “But tell me one thing. What is it that you’re so desperate to keep from me?”
    Nation of Me
    “Good to see you, Pierce,” said the man on the throne. He smiled pleasantly but distantly. “I gather you’ve been keeping well.”
    Pierce had already come to understand that the truly ancient were not like ordinary humans. “Do you remember being me?” he asked, staring.
    The man on the throne raised an eyebrow. “Wouldn’t you like to know?” He gestured at the bridge connecting his command dais to the far side of the room. “You may approach.” Combat drones and uniformed retainers withdrew respectfully, giving Pierce a wide berth.
    He tried not to look down as he walked across the bridge, with only partial success. The storms of Jupiter swirled madly beneath his feet. It had made him nauseous the first time he’d seen them, through a dumb-glass window aboard the low-gee shuttle that had brought him hence—evidently his captors wanted to leave him in no doubt that he was a long way from home. Occulting the view of the planet was the blue-tinged quicksilver disk of the largest timegate he’d ever seen, holding open in defiance of protocol with preposterous, scandalous persistence.
    “Why am I here?” Pierce demanded.
    A snort. “Why do you think?”
    “You’re me.” Pierce shrugged. “Me with a whole lot more experience and age, and an attitude problem.” They’d dressed him in the formal parade robes of a Stasis agent rather than the black jumpsuits that seemed to be de rigueur around this place. It was a petty move, to enforce his alienation: and besides, it had no pockets. To fight back, he focused on the absurd. Black jumpsuits and shiny boots, on a spaceship? Someone around here clearly harbored thespian fantasies. “And now you’ve got me.”
    His older self stiffened. “We need to talk alone.” His eyes scanned the throne room. “You lot: dismissed.”
    Pierce glanced round just in time to see the last of the human audience flicker into unhistory. He looked back toward the throne. “I was hoping we could keep this civilized,” he said mildly.