One Million A.D.

by Gardner Dozois

  If Fescue had heard my whispered remark, he kept it to himself. “I saw you with Purslane earlier,” he said.

  “It’s not against the law.”

  “You spend a lot of time with her.”

  “Again . . . whose business is it? Just because she turned her nose up at your elitist little club.”

  “Careful, Campion. You’ve done well with this venue, but don’t overestimate your standing. Purslane is a troublemaker—a thorn in the line.”

  “She’s my friend.”

  “That’s clear enough.”

  I bristled. “Meaning what?”

  “I didn’t see either of you at the orgy this morning. You spend a lot of time together, just the two of you. You sleep together, yet you disdain sexual relationships with the rest of your fellows. That isn’t how we like to do things in Gentian Line.”

  “You Advocates keep yourselves to yourselves.”

  “That’s different. We have duties . . . obligations. Purslane wouldn’t understand that. She had her chance to join us.”

  “If you’ve got something to say, why not say it to her face?”

  He looked away, to the brush-thin line of the horizon. “You did well with the aquatics,” he said absently. “Nice touch. Mammals. They’re from . . . the old place, aren’t they?”

  “I forget. What is this little pep talk about, Fescue? Are you telling me to keep away from Purslane?”

  “I’m telling you to buck up your ideas. Start showing some spine, Campion. Turbulent times are coming. Admiring sunsets is all very well, but what we need now is hard data on emergent cultures across the entire Galaxy. We need to know who’s with us and who isn’t. There’ll be all the time in the world for lolling around on beaches after we’ve completed the Great Work.” Fescue poured the remains of his wine into my ocean. “Until then we need a degree of focus.”

  “Focus yourself,” I said, turning away.

  ###

  Things began to improve in the afternoon, when interest shifted to the next evening’s strand. Purslane found me again, attending to a whimsical redesign of one of the outlying towers. She told me that she had heard about an orgy on the fiftieth level of the main spire, very exclusive, and that I should join her there in an hour. Still stinging from Fescue’s criticism, I told her that I was in no mood for it, but Purslane won me over and I agreed to meet when I was done with the tower.

  When I arrived, the only other person there was Purslane.

  “Wrong floor, I take it?”

  “No,” she said, standing on the perfectly transparent floor of an outflung balcony, so that she appeared to float two kilometres above the sea. “Right floor, right time. I told you it was exclusive.”

  “But you didn’t tell me it was this exclusive,” I said.

  Purslane disrobed. As they stepped away, her clothes assumed the texture of weathered stone and froze into sculptural forms from deep antiquity. “Are you complaining?” she asked.

  My own clothes broke up into a cloud of cherry blossom petals and scudded away across the door. “Not exactly, no.”

  Purslane looked on approvingly. “I can tell.”

  We rolled around on the glass floor, which softened and hardened itself in perfect consideration of our needs. As we made love, I tried to remember whether I’d designed the glass floor to be transparent in both directions—and if so what kind of entertainment we were providing to the line members who might be looking up to the fiftieth floor from below. Then I decided that I didn’t care. If we outraged them, so be it.

  “You were right,” Purslane said, when we were lying together afterwards.

  “Right about what?”

  “The sunsets. Every bit as . . . challenging . . . as you said.”

  “Go on. Kick a man when he’s down.”

  “Actually I admire your nerve,” she said. “You had a plan and you stuck with it. And some of the sunsets were actually quite nice.”

  She’d meant it as a compliment, but I couldn’t help looking wounded. “Quite nice.”

  Purslane conjured a grape and popped it into my mouth. “Sorry. Campion.”

  “It’s all right.” I said. “At least I won’t have people pestering me for the rest of the carnival, trying to get at the memories I edited out of the strand. At least they’ll know that’s precisely as exciting as it gets.”

  It was true: the pressure was off, and to my surprise, I actually started relaxing and enjoying the remaining days and nights. The last time, my submitted strand had been so well received that there’d been mutterings that I must have spiced things up for effect. I hadn’t— those things really had happened to me—but I’d still spent the rest of the reunion in a state of prickly self-defence.

  It was better now. I enjoyed feeling my mind filling with bright new experience; multiple snapshots of a dizzying complex and teeming Galaxy. It was the euphoria of drunkenness combined with an absolute, crystalline clarity of mind. It was glorious and overwhelming: an avalanche of history.

  At the last count there were ten million settled solar systems out there. Fifty million planet-class worlds. Entire upstart civilisations had risen and fallen since the last reunion, several times over. With the passing of every reunion it seemed impossible that the wilder fringes of humanity could become any stranger, any less recognisable. Yet they always contrived to do so; oozing into every cosmic niche like molten lava, and then carving out new niches that no one had dared dreamed of before.

  Two million years of bioengineering and cyborg reshaping had equipped humankind for any possible physical environment. Twenty thousand distinct branches of humanity had returned to alien seas, each adopting a different solution to the problem of aquatic life. Some were still more or less humanoid, but others had sculpted themselves into sleek sharklike things, or dextrous multi-limbed mollusks or hard-shelled arthropods. There were thirteen hundred distinct human cultures in the atmospheres of gas giants. Ninety that swam in the metallic hydrogen oceans under those atmospheres. There were vacuum dwellers and star dwellers. There were people who lived in trees, and people who had, by some definition, become trees themselves. There were people as large as small moons, which fostered entire swarming communities within their bodies. There were people who had encoded themselves into the nuclear structure of neutron stars, although no one had heard much from them lately. Against all this change, the nine hundred and ninety-three members of the Gentian Line must have appeared laughably quaint and antique, with our stolid adherence to traditional anatomy. But all this was just convention. Prior to arrival on the planet, we were free to adopt whatever forms we chose. The only rule was that when we emerged from our ships we must assume the forms of adult humans, and that we must bring our minds with us. Minor matters such as gender, build, pigmentation and sexual orientation were left to our discretion, but we were all obliged to carry the facial characteristics of Abigail Gentian: her high cheekbones, her strong jaw and the fact that her left eye was green and the other a wintery, jackdaw blue.

  Everything else was up for grabs.

  Perhaps it was the stirring up of the past as each new thread was added, but we all felt Abigail Gentian’s base memories looming large in our thoughts as Thousandth Night approached. We remembered how it had felt to be just one individual, in the centuries before Abigail shattered herself into pieces and sent them roaming the Galaxy. We all remembered being Abigail.

  Somewhere near the seven-hundredth threading, I was again approached by Purslane. Her hair was styled in stiff spiral arms, like the structure of our galaxy. They twinkled with embedded gems: reds, yellows and hard blue-whites for different stellar populations.

  “Campion?” she asked cautiously.

  I turned from the balcony. I was repairing one of the bridges after a storm, knitting it back together with wizardlike hand movements, making the invisibly small machines that composed the bridge dance to my commands. Matter flowed like milk, and then hardened magically.

  “Come to torment me about s
unsets?”

  “Not exactly. You and I need to talk.”

  “We could always go to one of those exclusive orgies,” I said teasingly.

  “I mean somewhere private. Very private.” She seemed distracted, quite unlike her usual self. “Did you create a Secure on this island?”

  “I didn’t see the need. I can create one, if you think it’s worth it.”

  “No: that’ll just draw too much attention. We’ll have to make do with my ship.”

  “I really need to finish this bridge.”

  “Finish it. I’ll be on my ship whenever you’re ready.”

  “What is this about, Purslane?”

  “Be on my ship.”

  She turned away. A few moments later a square glass pane tumbled out of the sky and lowered itself to the ground. Purslane stepped onto the pane. Its edges expanded and then angled upward to form a box. The box rose into the air, carrying Purslane, and then suddenly accelerated away from the island. I watched it speed into the distance, the grey light occasionally flaring off one of its flat sides. The box became tiny and then just a twinkling dot. It vanished into the scarred, mountainous hull of an enormous waiting ship.

  I returned to my bridge-repair work, wondering.

  ###

  “What is all this about?”

  “It’s about your thread, among other things.” She looked at me astutely, reclining in the lounge chair that her ship had provided. “You told us all the truth, didn’t you? You really did spend two hundred thousand years watching sunsets?”

  “If I wanted to make something up, don’t you think I would have made it a tiny bit more exciting?”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Besides,” I said. “I didn’t want to win this time. Creating this venue was a major headache. You’ve no idea how much I agonised about the placement of these islands, let alone whatever I’ve cooked up for Thousandth Night.”

  “No, I can believe it. And I believe you. I just had to ask.” She tugged down one of the spiral arms in her hair and bit on it nervously. “Though you could still be lying, I suppose.”

  “I’m not. Are you going to get to the point?”

  My travel box had brought me into Purslane’s hovering ship an hour after her departure. My ship was modestly sized for an interstellar craft; only three kilometres long, but Purslane’s was enormous. It was two hundred kilometres from nose to tail, with a maximum width of twenty. The tail parts of her ship projected above the atmosphere, into the vacuum of space. By night they sparkled as anti-collision fields intercepted and vaporised meteorites. Auroral patterns played around the upper extremities like a lapping tide.

  There were many reasons why someone might need a ship this big. It might have been constructed around some antique but valuable moon-sized engine, or some huge, fabulously efficient prototype drive that no one else possessed. Any advance that could get you slightly closer to the speed of light was to be treasured. Or it might be that her ship carried some vast, secret cargo, like the entire sentient population of an evacuated planet. Or it might be that the ship had been made this big in a gesture of mad exuberance, simply because it was possible to do so. Or it might be—and here my thoughts choked on bitter alienness—that the ship had to be this big to contain its one living passenger. Purslane was human-sized now, but who was to say what her true form was like between our visits to Reunion?

  I didn’t want to know, and I didn’t ask.

  “The point is delicate,” Purslane said. “I could be wrong about it. I almost certainly am. After all, no one else seems to have noticed anything unusual . . .”

  “Anything unusual about what?”

  “Do you remember Burdock’s thread?”

  “Burdock? Yes, of course.” It was a silly, if understandable question. None of us were capable of forgetting any of the threaded strands unless we made a conscious effort to delete them. “Not that there was much about it worth remembering.” Burdock was a quiet, low-profile line member who never went out of his way to make a show of himself. He’d threaded his strand a few weeks earlier. It had been uneventful, and I hadn’t paid much attention to it. “It was almost as if he was trying to upstage me in the dullness stakes.”

  “I think he lied,” Purslane said. “I think Burdock’s thread was deliberately altered.”

  “By Burdock himself?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why would he do that, though? The strand still wasn’t very interesting.”

  “I think that was the point. I think he wanted to conceal something that did happen. He used dullness as a deliberate camouflage.”

  “Wait,” I said. “How can you be sure things just weren’t that dull?”

  “Because of a contradiction,” Purslane said. “Look, when the last Reunion ended we all of us hared off into the Galaxy in different directions. As far as I’m aware, none of us swapped plans or itineraries.”

  “Forbidden, anyway,” I said.

  “Yes. And the chances of any of us bumping into each other between then and now were tiny.”

  “But it happened?”

  “Not exactly. But I think something happened to Burdock: something that had him doctoring his thread to create a false alibi.”

  I shifted in my seat. These were serious allegations, far above the usual bitchy speculation that attended any private discussion about other members of the Gentian Line. “How can you know?”

  “Because his memories contradict yours. I know: I’ve checked. According to your mutual strands, the two of you should have both been in the same system at the same time.”

  “Which system?”

  She told me. It was an unremarkable place: just another star dipping into an alien sea, as far as I was concerned. “I was there,” I said. “But I definitely didn’t bump into Burdock.” I rummaged through my memories, digging through mnemonic headers to those specific events. “He didn’t come nearby either. No interstellar traffic came close to that world during my entire stay. His ship might have been stealthed . . .”

  “I don’t think it was. Anyway, he doesn’t mention you either. Was your ship stealthed?”

  “No.”

  “Then he’d have seen you arriving or departing. The interstellar medium’s pretty thick near there. Relativistic ships can’t help but carve a wake through it. He’d surely have made some mention of that if the strand was real.”

  She was right. Accidental encounters were always celebrated: a triumph of coincidence over the inhuman scale of the Galaxy.

  “What do you think happened?”

  “I think Burdock was unlucky,” Purslane said. “I think he picked that world out of a hat, never imagining you’d visit it just when he claimed to be there.”

  “But his strand was threaded after mine. If he was going to lie . . .”

  “I don’t think he paid enough attention to your catalogue of sunsets,” Purslane said. “Can’t blame him, though, can you?”

  “It could be me that’s lying,” I said.

  “My money’s still on Burdock. Anyway, that’s not the only problem with his story. There are a couple of other glitches: nothing quite so egregious, but enough to make me pick through the whole thing looking for anomalies. That’s when I spotted the contradiction.”

  I looked at her wonderingly. “This is serious.”

  “It could be.”

  “It must be. Harmless exaggeration is one thing. Even outright lying is understandable. But why would you replace the truth with something less interesting, unless you had something to hide?”

  “That’s what I thought as well.”

  “Why would he go to the trouble of creating an alibi, when he could just as easily delete the offending memories from his strand?”

  “Risky,” Purslane said. “Safer to swap the system he did visit with one in the same neck of the woods, so that it didn’t throw his timings too far out, in case anyone dug too deeply into his strand.”

  “That doesn’t help us work out where h
e was, though—the same neck of the woods still means hundreds of light-years, thousands of possible systems.”

  “It’s a big galaxy,” Purslane.

  There was an uneasy silence. Far above us, beyond layers of armoured metal, I heard the seismic groan as something colossal shifted and settled like a sleeping baby.

  “Have you spoken to Burdock?”

  “Not about this.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “Just you,” Purslane said. “I’m worried, Campion. What if Burdock did something?”

  “A crime?”

  “It’s not unthinkable.”

  But unthinkable was precisely what it was. Gentian Line was not the only one of its kind. When Abigail shattered herself, others had done likewise. Some of those lines had died out over the intervening time, but most had endured in some shape or form. Although customs varied, most of those lines had something similar to Reunion: a place where they convened and re-threaded memories.

  In the last two million years, there had been many instances of contact between those lines. Until recently, Gentian Line had been isolationist, but some of the others had formed loose associations. There had been treaties and feuds. One entire line had been murdered, when a rival line booby-trapped its equivalent of Reunion with an anti-matter device left over from the War of the Local Bubble. Nowadays we were all a lot more careful. There were formal ties between many of the lines. There were agreed rules of behaviour. Feuds were out, marriages were in. There were plans for future collaboration, like the Great Work.

  The Great Work was a project—not yet initiated—which would require the active cooperation of many lines. Whatever it was was big. Beyond that I knew nothing about it. I wasn’t alone in my ignorance. Officially, no members of Gentian Line were privy to detailed knowledge about the Great Work. That information was held by an alliance of lines to which we hadn’t yet been granted full membership. The expectation, however, was that it wouldn’t be long before we were invited into the club. Among the guests on Reunion were ambassadors from other lines—some of which were in on the big secret. They were keeping an eye on us, sampling our strands, judging our wisdom and readiness.