“What—”
“I want the truth,” she said flatly. “You’ve been lying to me. I want to know why.”
“Oh.” He tried not to cringe. Her expression was unnaturally controlled, the calm before a storm.
“You’ve got only one chance to tell the truth,” she said, pitching her voice in conversational tones that were belied by a brittle edge in it. “I don’t think they know you’re lying yet, but when we get back — well, they’re not dummies and you’re digging yourself in deeper. The Curator’s Office will be watching. If you act guilty, the boy wonder will draw the only available conclusion.” He sighed. “And what if the conclusion is right? What if I am guilty?” he asked.
“I trusted you,” she said flatly. “As yourself. Not as a player. I don’t like being lied to, Martin. In business or my personal life, whichever.”
“Well.” He contemplated the shiny jammer she’d placed on his pillow. It was easier than facing her anger and hurt. “If I said they told me they were the shipyard, would that satisfy you?”
“No.” She shook her head. “You’re not dumb enough to fall for a cover story, anyway.” She looked away. “I don’t like being lied to,” she said bitterly.
He looked at her. Rachel was an up-to-date professional, unlike the bumbling amateurs of the New Republic; she’d have speech analysis reflexes, lie detectors, any number of other gadgets trained on him, if this was business, and if she hadn’t completely lost it. If she had — well, he could hardly blame her for being mad at him. In her place, he’d be angry, too. And hurt. “I don’t like telling lies,” he said, which was true enough. “Not without an overriding reason,” he admitted.
She took a deep breath, visibly steeling herself. “I’m the nearest thing to a lawyer you’re going to get here, Martin. I’m the nearest representative of your government — what they think is your government — within four thousand years and a two-hundred-light-year radius. They have a legalistic system of government, for all that they’re medieval throwbacks, and they let me visit you as your advocate. I can plead your case if it comes up to a court-martial because you’re a civilian, and I might be able to deflect things short of that. But only if you tell me everything, so I know what I’m defending.”
“I can’t talk about it,” he said uncomfortably. He picked up his book, half trying to shelter his guilty conscience behind it. “I’m not allowed to. I thought you of all people would be able to understand that?”
“Listen.” Rachel glared at him. “Remember what I told you about trust? I’m really disappointed. Because I did trust you, and it seems to me that you betrayed that trust. As it is, I’m going to have to do a lot of fast talking if I’m going to try to get your ass off the hook you’re caught on, or at least get you out of here alive. And before I do that, I want to know what you’ve been lying to me about.” She stood up. “I’m a fool. And a damned fool for trusting you, and a worse fool for getting involved with you. Hell, I’m an unprofessional fool! But I’m going to ask you again, and you’d better answer truthfully.
There are a lot of lives at stake this time, Martin, because this is not a game. Who the fuck are you working for?”
Martin paused a moment, dizzy with a sense of events moving out of control. Can’t tell her, can’t not tell her—he looked up, meeting her eyes for the first time. It was the hurt expression that made his mind up for him: no amount of rationalization would help him sleep that night if he left her feeling like this.
Feeling betrayed by the only person she’d been able to trust within a radius of light-years. One moment of unprofessionalism deserved to be answered by another. His mouth felt dry and clumsy as he spoke: “I work for the Eschaton.”
Rachel sat down heavily, her eyes wide with disbelief. “What?” He shrugged. “You think the E’s only way of dealing with problems is to drop a rock on them?” he asked.
“Are you kidding?”
“Nope.” He could taste bile in the back of his throat. “And I believe in what I’m doing, else I wouldn’t be here now, would I? Because truly, the alternative is to drop a planet-buster on the problem. The Eschaton finds that easier. And it makes the appropriate noises. It scares people. But really— most of the time, the E likes to solve problems more quietly through people like me.”
“How long?”
“About twenty years.” He shrugged again. “That’s all there is to it.”
“Why?” She buried her hands between her knees, holding them together tightly, looking at him with a miserably confused expression on her face.
“Because—” He tried to drag his scattered thoughts together. “Believe me, the Eschaton prefers it when people like you do the job first. It saves a lot of pain all around. But once the fleet moved, and you lost the argument with them, there was no alternative. You didn’t really think they’d set up the prerequisites for a closed timelike path and not follow it through to the logical end?” He took a deep breath. “That’s the sort of job I do. I’m a plumber, for when the Eschaton wants to fix a leak quietly.”
“You’re an agent, you mean.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “Like you.”
“Like me.” She made a croaking noise that sounded as if it might have been intended as a laugh. “Shit, Martin, that is not what I was expecting to hear.”
“I wish this hadn’t happened. Especially with — well, us. In the middle.”
“Me too, with brass knobs on,” she said shakily. “Was that all there was?”
“All there was? That’s all I was holding out on you, honest.” A long pause. “Alright. It was, uh, purely professional?”
He nodded. “Yes.” He looked at her. “I don’t like lying. And I haven’t been lying, or withholding the truth, about anything else. I promise.”
“Oh. Okay.” She took a deep breath and grinned tiredly, simultaneously looking amused and relieved.
“It’s really been eating you, hasn’t it?” he asked.
“Oh, you could say that,” she said, with heavy irony.
“Um.” He held out a hand. “I’m sorry. Truly.”
“Apology accepted — conditionally.” She squeezed his hand, briefly, then let go. “Now, are you going to tell me what the Eschaton has in mind for us?”
Martin sighed. “Yes, inasmuch as I know. But I’ve got to warn you, it’s not good. If we can’t get off this ship before it arrives, we’re probably going to die …”
Time travel destabilises history.
History is a child of contingency; so many events depend on critical misunderstandings or transient encounters that even the apocryphal butterfly’s wing is apt to stir up a storm in short order. A single misunderstood telegram in June of 1917 permitted the Bolshevik revolution to become a possibility; a single spy in 1958 extended the Cold War by a decade. And without both such events, could a being like the Eschaton ever have come to exist?
Of course, in a universe which permits time travel, history itself becomes unstable — and the equilibrium can only be restored when the diabolical mechanism edits itself out of the picture. But that’s scant comfort for the trillions of entities who silently cease to exist in the wake of a full-blown time storm.
It’s hardly surprising that, whenever intelligent beings arise in such a universe, they will seek to use closed timelike curves to prevent their own extinction. Faster-than-light travel being possible, general relativity tells us that it is indistinguishable from time travel; and this similarity makes the technologies of total annihilation dreadfully accessible. In the small, stupid little organizations like the New Republic seek to gain advantage over their contemporaries and rivals. In the large, vast, cool intellects seek to stabilize their universe in the form most suitable to them. Their tampering may be as simple as preventing rivals from editing them out of the stable historical record — or it may be as sophisticated as meddling with the early epochs of the big bang, back before the Higgs field decayed into the separate fundamental forces that bind the universe together to ensure just the right ratio of physical constants to support life.