Analog Science Fiction and Fact - June 2013

een broken by an ill-timed surprise attack by
Nihon itself.
There is more. Much more. These finds will
do more than repair my reputation; they will
make my name.
But as exciting as the artifacts are, the matrix
in which they are embedded is equally recalcitrant—a
hard, fibrous mass that must be
painstakingly chipped and scraped from each
new find. This is the ship’s representation of a
powerful noise source that requires significant
computation to separate from the desired
signal.
I’m spending far too much time removing
the same encrusted junk from artifact after artifact.
I decide to take a moment to analyze it,
in hopes of determining its source and factoring
it out of the data at a low level.
Usually this type of interference comes
from a nearby pulsar or black hole. But as I examine
the noise I find it is too hard-edged, too
gritty, for any natural source.
How can this be? I’m thousands of years
from the nearest inhabited world. I look more
closely, run a correlation with a database of artificial
noise sources.
The result comes back quickly, but it takes
me a long moment to understand it. When I
do, I feel a disorienting rush of vertigo—as
though I’ve been staring out the window at a
craggy landscape and suddenly realize it’s a
micrograph of human skin.
My own skin.
For the source of the interfering signal is
myself.
I laugh out loud at the realization, the sound
echoing harsh and moist within my helmet.
I have placed myself at the single point of
intersection between the grand expanding
sphere of human history and a tiny bubble a
mere eight years in radius: the wavefront of
the weeks I and my partner-lover Aleá studied,
coupled, and fought together while digging in
this exact same electromagnetic midden eight
years earlier. Although my earlier ship was
well-shielded by the standards of the time,
even the tiny amount of electromagnetic radiation
that leaked out is inescapable to the new
detector at this close remove.
I consider moving the ship to avoid the interference
from my earlier self, but a quick regional
scan reveals the futility of such an
action. The spherical wavefront of noise from
WAVEFRONTS OF HISTORY AND MEMORY
JUNE 2013
my earlier ship, though minuscule by comparison
with the sphere of history, is expanding
at the same rate of one light-year per year;
from now on, any attempt to study this point
in Earth history from this area of clear seeing
will find the ancient signal entangled with this
later, stronger one. And eight years of searching
have failed to find a better location.
I have no alternative but to find a way to filter
it out.
From a little-used drawer in the ship’s mind
I pull other tools, hard and shiny, better suited
to the fine jittery signals of the modern world.
I step back to a higher level of abstraction and
apply the tools to the direct feed from the new
detector, seeking to identify and eliminate all
signs of my previous self.
The low hum of the engines and the whirr
of the navigational sensors are the first, most
obvious targets, and I begin by adjusting the
antenna parameters to filter them out. These
adjustments are as familiar as my own breathing;
I used to have to do this every time the engine
was serviced.
As I work, I remember the self I was then.
Excited, driven, full of ideas, yes. But also arrogant,
conceited, too convinced of my own
genius. It was Aleá who kept me sane, helped
me focus my energies on the work and not on
self-aggrandizement.
Beautiful, compassionate, brilliant Aleá. It’s
true we spent nine hours in bed together on
the day we met. But it was always more than
just sex—she was the other half of my heart,
the completion of my mind. The papers we
wrote together were far more than the sum of
our skills; they were the product, the exponent,
of two fine minds operating in perfect
harmony. After she left I couldn’t work at all
for six months, then spent two years more in
an angry, wasteful thrash. It’s only in the past
year that I’ve been able to do productive work
again.
And now this. She—and the previous me—
are getting in my way again.
Distracted, I manage to mess up the compensator
settings. I have to reset, start over.
Beneath the helmet I feel my teeth grind.
Our work, like our loving, had always been
full of violent passion. Whenever we worked
a site together we would argue vehemently,
screaming and throwing things before reuniting
in a mad rush of intellectual and sexual en-
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