“Where am I?” he asked.
“You’ll have to wait while we cut you out of that,” said a stranger. Their voice sounded oddly muffled, and he realized with surprise that it wasn’t coming from inside him. “You took an EMP that fried your suit. You only just made it out in time – you took several sieverts. We’ve got a bed waiting for you.”
Something pushed at his side, and he felt a strange tipping motion. “Am I in free fall?” he asked.
“Of course. Try not to move.”
I’m not on Earth, he realized. It was strange; he’d effectively visited hundreds of planets with ever-shifting continents and biospheres, but he’d never been off Earth before. They were all aspects of Gaia, causally entangled slices through the set of all possible Earths that the Stasis called their own.
Someone tugged on his left foot, and he felt a chill of cold air against his skin. His toes twitched. “That’s very good, keep doing that. Tell me if anything hurts.” The voice was still muffled by the remains of his hood, but he could place it now. Kari, a quiet woman, one of the trainees from the class above him. He tensed, panic rising in a choking wave. “Hey – Yarrow! He’s stressing out—”
“Hold still, Pierce.” Yarrow’s voice in his ears, also fuzzy. “Your phone’s offline, it took a hit too. Kari’s with us. It’s going to be all right.”
You don’t have any right to tell me that, he thought indignantly, but the sound of her voice had the desired effect. So Kari’s one of them too. Was there no end to the internal rot within the Stasis? In all honesty, considering his own concupiscence – possibly not. He tried to slow his breathing, but it was slowly getting stuffy and hot inside the wreckage of his survival suit.
More parts detached themselves from his skin. He was beginning to itch furiously, and the lack of gravity seemed to be making him nauseous. Finally, the front of his hood cracked open and floated away. He blinked teary eyes against the glare, trying to make sense of what his eyes were telling him.
“Kari—”
The spherical drone floating before his face wore her face on its smartskin. A flock of gunmetal lampreys swam busily behind it, worrying at pieces of the dead and mildly radioactive suit. Some distance beyond, a wall of dull blue triangles curved around him, dish-like, holes piercing it in several places.
“Try not to speak,” said Kari’s drone. “You’ve taken a borderline-fatal dose, and we’re going to have to get you to a sick bay right away.”
His throat ached. “Is Yarrow there?”
Another spherical drone floated into view from somewhere behind him. It wore Xiri’s face. “My love? I’ll visit you as soon as you’ve cleared decontamination. The enemy are always trying to sneak bugs in: they wouldn’t let me through to see you now. Be strong, my lord.” She smiled, but the worry-wrinkles at the corners of her eyes betrayed her. “I’m very proud of you.”
He tried to reply, but his stomach had other ideas and attempted to rebel. “Feel. Sick…”
Someone kissed the back of his neck with lips of silver, and the world faded out.
Pierce regained consciousness with an abrupt sense of rupture, as if no time at all had passed: someone had switched his sense of awareness off and on again, just as his parents might once have power-cycled a balky appliance.
“Love? Pierce?”
He opened his eyes and stared at her for a few seconds, then cleared his throat. It felt oddly normaclass="underline" the aches had all evaporated. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.” The bed began to rise behind his back. “Xiri?”
Her clothing was outrageous to Hegemonic forms (not to say anachronistic or unrevealing), but she was definitely his Xiri; as she leaned forward and hugged him fiercely he felt something bend inside him, a dam of despair crumbling before a tidal wave of relief. “How did they find you?” he asked her shoulder, secure in her embrace. “Why did they reinstate—”
“Hush. Pierce. You were so ill—”
He hugged her back. “I was?”
“They kept me from you for half a moon! And the burns, when they cut that suit away from you. What did you do?”
Pierce pondered the question. “I changed my mind about … something I’d agreed to do…”
They lay together on the bed until curiosity got the better of him. “Where are we? When are we?” Where did you get that jumpsuit?
Xiri sighed, then snuggled closer to him. “It’s a long story,” she said quietly. “I’m still not sure it’s true.”
“It must be, now,” he pointed out reasonably, “but perhaps it wasn’t, for a while. But where are we?”
She eased back a little. “We’re in orbit around Jupiter. But not for much longer.”
“But I—” He stopped. “Really?”
“They disconnected your phone, or I could show you. The colony fleets, the shipyards.”
He blinked at her, astonished. “How?”
“We all have phone implants, here.” Her eyes sparkled with amusement. “This isn’t the Stasis you know.”
“I’d guessed.” He swallowed. “How long has it been for you?”
“Since” – her breath caught, a little ragged – “two years. A little longer.”
He gently trapped her right hand in his, ran his thumb across the smooth, plump skin on the back of her wrist. She let him. “Almost the same.” He swallowed once more. “I thought I’d never see you again. Anyone would think they’d planned this.”
“Oh, but they did.” She gave a nervous little laugh. “He said they didn’t want us to, to desynchronize. Get too far apart.” Her fingers closed around his thumb, constricting and warm.
“Who 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.