One Million A.D.

by Gardner Dozois

  Unofficially, there were also Gentian members who seemed to know something. I remembered Fescue’s criticism of my strand: how there were turbulent times coming and how I’d have all the time in the world to loll around on beaches after the Great Work had been completed. Fescue—and a handful of other line members—had almost certainly been tipped off.

  We called them the Advocates.

  But while it seemed likely that we’d be invited to participate in the project before very long, we were also now at our most vulnerable. A single error could jeopardize our standing with the other lines. We’d all been mindful of this as we prepared our strands.

  But what if one of us had done something truly awful? A crime committed by one Gentian Line member would reflect badly upon all of us. Technically, we were different manifestations of the same individual. If one Gentian member had it in them to do something bad, then it could be presumed that we all did.

  If Burdock had indeed committed a crime, and if that crime came to light, then we might well be excluded from the Great Work.

  “This could be bad,” I said.

  ###

  It was very hard to behave normally in the days and weeks that followed. No matter where I went, I bumped into Burdock with unerring regularity. Our paths had hardly crossed during this latest carnival, but now he and I seemed doomed to meet each other every day. During these awkward encounters I kept fumbling for the right tone, hoping that I never gave away any hint of the suspicion Purslane and I felt. At the same time, my mind spun out of control with imagined crimes. Like any members of a star-faring society, those of Gentian Line had terrible powers at their disposal. One of our ships, used carelessly, could easily incinerate a world. Deliberate action was even more chilling to contemplate. Members of other lines had committed atrocities in the remote past. History was paved with genocides.

  But nothing about Burdock suggested a criminal streak. He wasn’t ambitious. His strands had always been unmemorable. He’d never attempted to influence Gentian policy. He had no obvious enemies.

  “Do you think anyone else knows?” I asked Purslane, during another covert meeting aboard her ship. “After all, the evidence is all out there in the public realm. Anyone else could spot those discrepancies if they paid enough attention.”

  “That’s the point, though: I don’t think anyone else will. You and I are friends. I probably paid more attention to your sunsets than anyone else did. And I’m a stickler for detail. I’ve been looking out for false threads during every carnival.”

  “Because you suspected one of us might lie?”

  “Because it made it more interesting.”

  “Maybe we’re making too much of this,” I said. “Maybe he just did something embarrassing that he wanted to cover up. Not a crime, but just something that would have made him look foolish.”

  “We’ve all done foolish things. That hasn’t stopped any of us including them in our strands when the mood suits us. Remember Orpine, during the third carnival?”

  Orpine had made a fool of herself near the Whipping Star, SS433, nearly crashing her ship in the process. But her honesty had endeared her to the rest of us. She had been chosen to forge the venue for the fourth carnival. Ever since then, including an embarrassing anecdote in a strand had almost become de rigueur.

  “Maybe we should talk to Burdock,” I said.

  “What if we’re wrong? If Burdock felt aggrieved, we could be ostracized by the entire line.”

  “It’s a risk,” I admitted. “But if he has done something bad, the line has to know about it. It would look very bad if one of the other lines discovered the truth before we did.”

  “Maybe we’re making a mountain out of a molehill.”

  “Or maybe we’re not. Could we force the issue out into the open somehow? What if you publicly accuse me of lying?”

  “Risky, Campion. What if they believe me?”

  “They won’t be able to find any chinks in my story because there aren’t any. After due process, the attention will shift to Burdock. If, as you said, there are other things in his strand that don’t check out . . .”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Me neither. But it’s not as if I can think of any other way of pursuing this.”

  “There might be one,” Purslane said, eyeing me cautiously. “You built these islands, after all.”

  “Yes,” I allowed.

  “Presumably it wouldn’t stretch your talents to spy on Burdock.”

  “Oh, no,” I said, shaking my head.

  She raised a calming hand. “I don’t mean putting a bug on him, following him to his ship, or anything like that. I just mean keeping a record of anything he does or says in public. Is your environment sophisticated enough to allow that?”

  I couldn’t lie. “Of course. It’s constantly monitoring everything we do in public anyway, for our own protection. If someone has an accident . . .”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “The environment doesn’t report to me. It keeps this kind of thing to itself.”

  “But it could be programmed to report to you,” Purslane said.

  I squirmed. “Yes.”

  “I realise this is unorthodox, Campion. But I think we have to do it, given all that could be at stake.”

  “Burdock may say nothing.”

  “We won’t know unless we try. How long would it take you to arrange this?”

  “It’s trivial,” I admitted.

  “Then do it. Last night was the eight hundred and third threading. There are less than two hundred days before we all leave Reunion. If we don’t find out what Burdock’s up to now, we may never have another chance.” Purslane’s eyes gleamed thrillingly. “We haven’t a moment to lose.”

  ###

  Purslane and I agreed that we should keep our meetings to a minimum from then on, in case we began to draw attention to ourselves. Liaisons between line members were normal enough—even long-term relationships—but the fact that we insisted on meeting out of the public eye was bound to raise eyebrows. Even given the absence of a single Secure anywhere in the venue, there were plenty of places that were private enough for innocent assignations.

  But our assignation was anything but innocent.

  It wasn’t difficult to keep in touch, once we’d agreed a scheme. Since I had designed and constructed the venue, the machinery that handled the threading of the strands into our nightly dreams lay under my control. Each evening, I took the environment’s covert observations of Burdock over the last day, and ran a simple program to isolate those instances where Burdock was talking to someone else or accessing data from one of the public nodes I’d dotted around the venue. I then took those isolated sequences and slipped them into Purslane’s dreams, along with the allotted strand for that night. I did the same for myself: it meant that we had more to dream than everyone else, but that was a small price to pay.

  By day, as we fulfilled our social obligations, we reviewed the Burdock data independently. The agreement was that if either of us noticed something unusual, we should leave a signal for the other party. Since I ran the venue, my signal consisted of a change to the patterning of the floor tiles on the thirtieth-level terrazzo, cunningly encoding the time of the unusual event in the Burdock data. I’d been fiddling around with the patterns long before the Burdock affair, so there was nothing odd about my actions as far as anyone else was concerned. As for Purslane, she’d agreed to stand at noon at a certain position on one of my spray-lashed suspension bridges. By counting the number of wires between her and land, I could isolate the anomaly to within a few tens of minutes.

  We’d agreed that we wouldn’t meet in person until we’d had time to review each other’s observations. If we agreed that there was something worth talking about, then we’d “accidentally” meet each other within the next few days. Then we’d judge the right moment to slip away to Purslane’s ship. In practise, days and weeks would go by without Burdock doing anything that we both agreed was note
worthy or odd. Now and then he’d do or say something that hinted at a dark personal secret—but under that level of scrutiny, it was difficult to think of anyone who wouldn’t. And who among us didn’t have some secrets, anyway?

  But by turns we noticed something that we couldn’t dismiss.

  “This is the third time that he’s fished for information about the Great Work,” Purslane said.

  I nodded. On three occasions, Burdock had steered his conversations with other line members around to the subject of the Great Work. “He’s very discreet about it,” I said. “But you can tell he’s itching to know more about it. But don’t we all?”

  “Not to that degree,” she said. “I’m curious. I’d like to know what it is that has the lines so stirred up. But at the same time it doesn’t keep me awake at night. I know that the secret will eventually be revealed. I’m patient enough to wait until then.”

  “Really?” I asked.

  “Yes. And besides—I’ve heard enough rumours to think that I know half the answer already.”

  That was news to me. “Go on.”

  “It’s about knitting the worlds of the lines into a cohesive entity—a Galactic Empire, if you like. At the moment such a thing clearly isn’t practical. It takes us two hundred thousand years just to make one sweep through the Galaxy. That’s much too long on a human scale. We might not experience much time passing in our ships, but that doesn’t apply to the people living on planets. Entire cultures wax and wane while we’re making course adjustments. Some of the people down on those planets have various forms of immortality, but that doesn’t make history pass any less quickly. And it’s history that keeps destroying things. It’s history that stops us reaching our full potential.”

  “I’m not sure I follow you,” I said.

  “Think of all those myriad human cultures,” Purslane said. “To all extents and purposes, they exist independently of each other. Those within a few light-years of each other can exchange ideas and perhaps even enjoy a degree of trade. Most are too far apart from that: at best they might have some vague knowledge of each other’s existence, based on transmissions and data passed on by the likes of you and me. But what can two cultures on either side of the Galaxy know of each other? By the time one gets to hear about the other, the other probably doesn’t exist anymore. There’s no possibility of mutual cooperation; the sharing of intellectual resources and knowledge.” Purslane shrugged. “So those cultures stumble through the dark, making the same mistakes over and over again, constantly reinventing the wheel. At best they have some knowledge of galactic history, so they can avoid repeating the worst mistakes. At worst they’re evolving in near-total ignorance. Some of them don’t even remember how they got where they are.”

  I echoed Purslane’s shrug. “But that’s the way things must be. It’s human nature for us to keep changing, to keep experimenting with new societies, new technologies, new modes of thought . . .”

  “The very experiments that rip societies apart, and keep the wheel of history turning.”

  “But if we weren’t like that, we wouldn’t be human. Every culture in the Galaxy has the means to engineer itself into social stasis tomorrow, if the will were there. Some of them have probably tried it. But what’s the point? We might stop the wheel of history turning, but we wouldn’t be human anymore.”

  “I agree,” Purslane said. “Meddling in human nature isn’t the solution. But imagine if the intellectual capacity of the entire human Diaspora could somehow be tapped. At the moment those cultures are bumping around like random atoms in a gas. What if they could be brought into a state of coherence, like the atoms in a laser? Then there’d be real progress, with each achievement leading to the next. Then we could really start doing something.”

  I almost laughed. “We’re immortal superbeings who’ve lived longer than some star-faring civilisations, including many Priors. If we choose, we can cross the Galaxy in the gap between thoughts. We can make worlds and shatter suns for our amusement. We can sip from the dreams and nightmares of fifty million billion sentient beings. Isn’t that enough for you?”

  “It might be enough for you and I, Campion. But then we’ve always had modest ambitions.”

  “But what about Burdock?” I asked. “He isn’t linked to the Advocates, as far as I’m aware. I don’t think he’s been actively frozen out, but he certainly hasn’t spent any time cultivating the right connections.”

  “I’ll have to review the recordings again,” Purslane said. “But I’m pretty sure none of his enquiries were directed at known Advocates. He was targeting people on the fringe: line members who might know something, without being directly privy to the big secret.”

  “Why wouldn’t he just ask the Advocates directly?”

  “Good question,” Purslane said. “Of course, we could always ask him.”

  “Not until we know a bit more about what he’s involved in.”

  “You know,” Purslane said. “There’s something else we could consider.”

  The tone of her voice prickled the hairs on the back of my neck. “I’m not going to like this, am I?”

  “We could examine the records on his ship and find out what he was really up to.”

  “He’s hardly likely to give us permission to do that.”

  “I wasn’t talking about asking his permission.” Purslane’s smile was wicked and thrilling: she was actually enjoying our little adventure. “I was talking about going aboard and finding out for ourselves.”

  “Just like that, without so much as a by-your-leave?”

  “I’m not saying it would be easy. But you did make this venue, Campion. Surely it isn’t beyond your immense capabilities to engineer a distraction.”

  “Flattery,” I said, “will get you almost anywhere. But what about breaking into his ship? That won’t exactly be child’s play.”

  Purslane pressed a dainty finger to my lip. “I’ll worry about the ship. You worry about the distraction.”

  We maintained our vigil on Burdock over the coming weeks, as our dangerous, delicious plan slowly came together. Burdock kept up the pattern of behaviour we had already noted, asking questions that probed the nature of the Great Work, but never directing his queries to known Advocates. More and more it seemed to us that there was something about the Work that had alarmed him; something too sensitive to bring to the attention of those who had a vested interest in the thing itself. But since Purslane and I were none the wiser about what the Great Work actually entailed, we could only guess about what it was that had unnerved Burdock. We both agreed that we needed to know more, but our suspicions about Burdock (and, by implication, Burdock’s own suspicions) meant that we were just as incapable of putting direct questions to the Advocates. Day by day, therefore, I found myself making surreptitious enquires much like those made by Burdock himself. I endeavoured to target my questioning at different people than the ones Burdock had buttonholed, not wanting to spark anyone else’s curiosity. Purslane did likewise, and—even as we planned our utterly illegal raid on Burdock’s ship—we pieced together the tidbits of information we had gathered.

  None of it was very illuminating, but by the same token little of it contradicted Purslane’s conviction that the Great Work was related to the emergence of a single, Galaxy-spanning Supercivilisation. There were dark, glamorous rumours concerning the covert development of technologies that would bring this state of affairs into being.

  “It must be related to the slowness of interstellar communication,” I mused. “That’s the fundamental objection, no matter which way you look at it. No signals or ships can cross the Galaxy quickly enough to make any kind of orthodox political system possible. And the lines are too independent to tolerate the kind of social engineering we talked about before. They won’t accept any kind of system that imposes limits on human creativity.”

  “No one takes faster than light travel seriously, Campion.”

  “It doesn’t have to involve travel. A signalling mechanism would
be just as useful. We could all stay at home, and communicate via clones or robots. Instead of sending my body to another planet, I’d piggyback a host body that was already there.” I shrugged. “Or use sensory stimulation to create a perfect simulation of the other planet and all its inhabitants. Either way, I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Why would I care?”

  “But in two million years,” Purslane said, “no culture in the Galaxy has come close to developing faster-than-light communication or travel.”

  “Lots of people have tried, though. What if some of them succeeded, but kept their breakthrough secret?”

  “Or were wiped out to protect the status quo? We can play this game forever. The fact is, faster than light travel—or signalling, for that matter, looks even less likely now than it did a million years ago.

  The universe simply isn’t wired to permit it. It’s like trying to play chequers on a chess board.”

  “You’re right of course,” I said, sighing. “I studied the mathematics once, for a century. It looks pretty watertight, once you get your head around it. But if that’s not the answer . . .”

  “I don’t think it is. We should keep open minds, of course . . . but I think the Great Work has to be something else. What, though, I can’t imagine.”

  “That’s as far as you’ve got?”

  “I’m afraid so. But don’t look so disappointed, Campion. It really doesn’t become you.”

  ###

  Then something odd happened to Burdock. The first hint of it was his flawless navigation of the Mood Maze.