Nothing about Burdock’s outward appearance had suggested that the air aboard his ship would be anything but a standard oxygen-nitrogen mix. It was still a relief when I gulped down a lungful and found it palatable. It would have been a chore to have to return to the island and remake my lungs to cope with something poisonous.
“I recognise this design of ship,” Purslane said, whispering. We were inside a red-lined antechamber, like a blocked throat. “It’s Third Intercessionary. I owned one like it once. I should be able to find my way around it quite easily, provided he hasn’t altered too many of the fittings.”
“Does the ship know we’re here?”
“Oh, yes. But it should regard us as friendly, once we’re inside.”
“Suddenly this doesn’t seem like quite the excellent idea it did ten days ago.”
“We’re committed now, Campion. Back on the island they’re dreaming my strand and wondering what the hell turned me into such an adventuress. I didn’t go to all that trouble to have you back out now.”
“All right,” I said. “Consider me suitably emboldened.”
But though I strove for a note of easy-going jocularity, I could not shake the sense that our adventure had taken a turn into something far more serious. Until this evening all we had done was indulge in harmless surveillance: an indulgence that had added spice to our days. Now we had falsified a strand and were trespassing on someone else’s ship. Both deeds were as close to crimes as anything perpetrated within the history of the Gentian Line. Discovery could easily mean expulsion from the line, or something worse. This was not a game anymore.
As we approached the end of the chamber, the constriction at the end eased open with an obscene sucking sound. It admitted warm, wet, pungent air.
We stooped through the low overhang into a much larger room. Like the airlock chamber, it was lit by randomly spaced light nodes, embedded in the fleshy walls like nuts wedged into the bark of a tree. Half a dozen corridors fed off in different directions, labelled with symbols in an obsolete language. I paused a moment while my brain retrieved the necessary reading skills from deep recall.
“This one is supposed to lead the command deck,” I said, as the symbols became suddenly meaningful. “Do you agree?”
“Yes,” Purslane said, but with the tiniest note of hesitation in her voice.
“Something wrong?”
“Maybe you’re right. Maybe this isn’t such a good idea after all.”
“What’s got you afraid all of a sudden?”
“This is too easy,” Purslane said.
“I thought it was meant to be easy. I thought that was the point of going to all that trouble with the access protocol.”
“I know,” she said. “But it just seems . . . I was expecting something to slow us down. Now I’m worried that we’re walking into a trap.”
“Burdock has no reason to set a trap,” I said. But I could not deny that I felt the same unease. “Burdock isn’t expecting us to visit. He isn’t aware that we’re onto him.”
“Let’s check out the command deck,” she said. “But let’s be quick about it, all right? The sooner we’re back on the island, the happier I’ll be.”
We took the corridor, following its rising, curving ramp through several rotations, obeying signs for the deck all the while. Around us the ship breathed and gurgled like a sleeping monster, digesting its last big meal. Biomechanical constructs were typical products of the Third Intercessionary period, but I had never taken to them myself. I preferred my machines hard-edged, the way nature intended.
But nothing impeded our progress to the command deck. The deck was spaciously laid out, with a crescent window let into one curve of wall. It looked back across the sea, to the island. A spray of golden lights betrayed the darkening sliver of the main spire. I thought of the dreamers ranged throughout that tower, and of the lies we were peddling them.
Mushroom-shaped consoles studded the floor, rising to waist height. Purslane moved from one to the next, conjuring a status readout with a pass of her hand.
“This all looks good so far,” she said. “Control architecture is much as I remember it from my ship. The navigations logs should be about . . . here.” She halted at one of the mushrooms and flexed her hands in the stiffly formal manner of a dancer. Text and graphics cascaded through the air in a flicker of primary colours. “No time to go through it all now,” she said. “I’ll just commit it to eidetic memory and review it later.” She increased the flow of data, until it blurred into whiteness.
I paced nervously up and down the crescent window. “Fine by me. Just out of interest, what are the chances we’ll find anything incriminating anyway?”
Purslane’s attention snapped onto me for a second. “Why not? We know for a fact that he lied.”
“But couldn’t he have doctored those logs as well? If he had something to hide . . . why leave the evidence aboard his ship?”
But Purslane did not answer me. She was looking beyond me, to the door where we had entered. Her mouth formed a silent exclamation of horror and surprise.
“Stop, please,” said a voice.
I looked around, all my fears confirmed. But I recognised neither the voice nor the person who had spoken.
It was a man, baseline human in morphology. Nothing about his face marked him as Gentian Line. His rounded skull lacked Abigail’s prominent cheekbones, and his eyes were pure matched blue of a deep shade, piercing even in the subdued light of the command deck.
“Who are you?” I asked. “You’re not one of us, and you don’t look like one of the guests.”
“He isn’t,” Purslane said.
“Step away from the console, please,” the man said. His voice was soft, unhurried. The device he held in his fist was all the encouragement we needed. It was a weapon: something unspeakably ancient and nasty. Its barrel glittered with inlaid treasure. His gloved finger caressed the delicate little trigger. Above the grip, defined by swirls of ruby, was the ammonite spiral of a miniature cyclotron. The weapon was a particle gun.
Its beam would slice through us as cleanly as it sliced through the hull of Burdock’s ship.
“I will use this,” the man said, “so please do as I say. Move to the middle of the room, away from any instruments.”
Purslane and I did as he said, joining each other side by side. I looked at the man, trying to fit him into the Burdock puzzle. By baseline standards his physiological age was mature. His face was lined, especially around the eyes, with flecks of grey in his hair and beard. Something about the way he deported himself led me to believe that he was just as old as he looked. He wore a costume of stiff, skin-tight fabric in a shade of fawn, interrupted here and there by metal plugs and sockets. A curious metal ring encircled his neck.
“We don’t know who you are,” I said. “But we haven’t come to do you any harm.”
“Interfering with this ship doesn’t count as doing harm?” He spoke the Gentian tongue with scholarly precision, as if he had learned it for this occasion.
“We were just after information,” Purslane said.
“Were you, now? What kind?”
Purslane flashed me a sidelong glance. “We may as well tell the truth, Campion,” she said quietly. “We won’t have very much to lose.”
“We wanted to know where this ship had been,” I said, knowing she was right but not liking it either.
The man jabbed the barrel of the particle gun in my direction. “Why? Why would you care?”
“We care very much. Burdock—the rightful owner of this ship—seems not to have told the truth about what he was up to since the last reunion.”
“That’s Burdock’s business, not yours.”
“Do you know Burdock?” I asked, pushing my luck.
“I know him very well,” the man told me. “Better than you, I reckon.”
“I doubt it. He’s one of us. He’s Gentian flesh.”
“That’s nothing to be proud of,” the man said. “Not where I
come from. If Abigail Gentian was here now, I’d put a hole in her you could piss through.”
The dead calm with which he made this statement erased any doubt that he meant exactly what he said. I felt an existential chill. The man would have gladly erased not just Abigail but her entire line.
It was a strange thing to feel despised.
“Who are you?” Purslane asked. “And how do you know Burdock?”
“I’m Grisha,” the man said. “I’m a survivor.”
“A survivor of what?” I asked. “And how did you come to be aboard Burdock’s ship?”
The man looked at me, little in the way of expression troubling his rounded face. Then by some hidden process he seemed to arrive at a decision.
“Wait here,” he said. “I’ll be back in a moment.”
He let go of the particle gun. Instead of dropping to the floor the weapon simply hung exactly where he had left it, with its barrel still aimed in our general direction. Grisha stepped through the door and left the command deck.
“I knew this was a mistake,” Purslane whispered. “Do you think that thing is really . . .”
I moved a tiny distance away from Purslane and the gun flicked its attention onto me. I drew breath and returned to my former spot, the gun following my motion.
“Yes,” I said.
“I thought so.”
Grisha returned soon enough. He closed his hand around the gun and lowered it a little. It was no longer trained on us, but we were still in Grisha’s power.
“Come with me,” he said. “There’s someone you need to meet.”
A windowless room lay near the core of the ship. It was, I realised, the sleeping chamber: the place where the ship’s occupants (even if they only amounted to a single person) would have entered metabolic stasis for the long hops between stars. Some craft had engines powerful enough to push them so close to the speed of light that time dilation squeezed all journeys into arbitrarily short intervals of subjective time, but this was not one of those. At the very least Burdock would have had to spend years between stars. For that reason the room was equipped with the medical systems needed to maintain, modify and rejuvenate a body many times over.
And there was a body. A pale form, half-eaten by some form of brittle, silvery calcification—a plaque that consumed his lower body to the waist, and which had begun to envelope the side of his chest, right shoulder and the right side of his face. A bustle of ivory machines attended the body, which trembled behind the distorting effect of a containment bubble.
“You can look,” Grisha said.
We looked. Purslane and I let out a joint gasp of disbelief. The body on the couch belonged to Burdock.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” I said, studying the recumbent, damaged form. “The body he has on the island is intact. Why keep this failing one alive?”
“That isn’t a duplicate body,” Grisha said, nodding at the half-consumed form. “That’s his only one. That is Burdock.”
“No,” I said. “Burdock was still on the island when we left.”
“That wasn’t Burdock,” Grisha said, with a weary sigh. He pointed the gun at a pair of seats next to the bed. “Sit down, and I’ll try and explain.”
“What’s wrong with him?” Purslane asked, as we followed Grisha’s instruction.
“He’s been poisoned. It’s some kind of assassination weapon: very subtle, very slow, very deadly.” Grisha leaned over and stroked the containment bubble, his fingertips pushing flickering pink dimples into the field. “This is more for your benefit than mine. If his contagion touched me, all I’d have to show for it is a nasty rash. It would kill you the same way it’s killing him.”
“No,” I said. “He’s Gentian. We can’t be killed by an infection.”
“It’s a line weapon. It’s made to kill the likes of you.”
“Who did this to him?” Purslane asked. “You, Grisha?”
The question seemed not to offend him. “No, I didn’t do this. It was one of you—an Advocate, he thought.”
I frowned at the silver-ridden corpse. “Burdock told you who did it?”
“Burdock had his suspicions. He couldn’t be sure who exactly had poisoned him.”
“I don’t understand. What exactly happened? How can Burdock be sick here, if we’ve seen him running around on the island only a couple of hours ago?”
Grisha smiled narrowly: the first hint of emotion to have troubled his face since our introduction. “That wasn’t Burdock that you saw. It was a construct, a mimic, created by his enemies. It replaced the real Burdock nearly three weeks ago. They poisoned him before he returned to his ship.”
I looked at Purslane and nodded. “If Grisha’s telling the truth, that at least explains the change in Burdock’s behaviour. We thought he’d been scared off asking any more questions about the Great Work. Instead he’d been supplanted.”
“So he did ask too many questions,” Purslane said. She creased her forehead prettily. “Wait, though. If he knew he’d been poisoned, why didn’t he tell the rest of us? And why did he stay aboard the ship, out of sight, when his impostor was running around on the island?”
“He had no choice,” Grisha answered. “When he arrived here, the ship detected the contagion and refused to let him leave.”
“Noble of it,” I said.
“He’d programmed it that way. I think he had a suspicion his enemies might try something like this. If he was infected, he didn’t want to be allowed to return and spread it around. He was thinking of the rest of you.”
Purslane and I were quiet for a few moments. I think we were both thinking the same rueful thoughts. We had never considered the possibility that Burdock might be acting honourably, even heroically. No matter what else I learned that evening, I knew that I had already misjudged someone who deserved better.
“All the same,” I said, “that still doesn’t explain why he didn’t alert the rest of us. If he knew he’d been poisoned, and if he had half an idea as to who might have been behind it, there’d have been hell to pay.”
“Doubtless there would have been,” Grisha said. “But Burdock knew the risk was too great.”
“Risk of what?” asked Purslane.
“My existence coming to light. If his enemies learned of my existence, learned of what I know, they’d do all in their power to silence me.”
“You mean they’d kill you as well?” I asked.
Grisha gave off a quick, henlike cluck of amusement. “Yes, they’d certainly kill me. But not just me. That wouldn’t be thorough enough. They wouldn’t stop at this ship, either. They’d destroy every ship parked around the island, and then the island, and then perhaps the world.”
I absorbed what he had said with quiet horror. Again, there was no doubt as to the truth of his words.
“You mean they’d murder all of us?”
“This is about more than just Gentian Line,” Grisha said. “The loss of a single line would be a setback, but not a crippling one. The other lines would take up the slack. It wouldn’t stop the Great Work.”
I looked at him. “What do you know about the Great Work?”
“Everything,” he said.
“Are you going to tell us?” Purslane asked.
“No,” he said. “I’ll leave that to Burdock. He still has several minutes of effective consciousness left, and I think he’d rather tell you in person. Before I wake him, though, it might not hurt if I told you a thing or two about myself, and how I came to be here.”
“We’ve got all evening,” I said.
###
Grisha’s people were archaeologists. They had been living in the same system for two million years, ever since settling it by generation ark. They had no interest in wider galactic affairs, and seemed perfectly content with a mortal lifespan of a mere two hundred years. They occupied their days in the diligent, monkish study of the Prior culture that had inhabited their system before their own arrival, in the time when humanity was still a gleam in evolu
tion’s eye.
The Priors had no name for themselves except the Watchers. They had been hard-shelled, multi-limbed creatures that spent half their lives beneath water. Their biology and culture were alien enough for a lifetime of study: even a modern one. But although they differed from Grisha’s people in every superficial respect, there were points of similarity between the two cultures. They too were archaeologists, of a kind.
The Watchers had chosen to focus on a single, simple question. The universe had already been in existence for more than eleven billion years by the time the Watchers learned its age. And yet the study of the stellar populations in spiral galaxies at different redshifts established that the preconditions for the emergence of intelligent life had been in place for several billion years before the Watchers had evolved, even in the most conservative of scenarios.
Were they therefore the first intelligent culture in the universe, or had sentience already arisen in one of those distant spirals?
To answer this question, the Watchers had taken one of their worlds and shattered it to molecular rubble. With the materials thus liberated, they had constructed a swarm of miraculous eyes: a fleet of telescopes that outnumbered the stars in the sky. They had wrapped this fleet around their system and quickened it to a kind of slow, single-minded intelligence. The telescopes peered through the hail of local stars out into intergalactic space. They shared data across a baseline of tens of light hours, sharpening their acuity to the point where they approximated a single all-seeing eye as wide as a solar system.
It took time for light to reach the Eye from distant galaxies. The further out the Eye looked, the further it looked back into the history of the universe. Galaxies ten million light-years away were glimpsed as they were ten million years earlier; those a billion light-years away offered a window into the universe when it was a billion years younger than the present epoch.
The Eye looked at a huge sample of spiral galaxies, scrutinising them for signs of intelligent activity. It looked for signals across the entire electromagnetic spectrum; it sifted the parallel data streams of neutrino and gravity waves. It hunted for evidence of stellar engineering, of the kind that other Priors had already indulged in: planets remade to increase their surface area, stars sheathed in energy-trapping shells, entire star systems relocated from one galactic region to another.
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