One Million A.D.

by Gardner Dozois

  One day it found what it was looking for.

  At a surprisingly high redshift, the Eye detected a single spiral galaxy that was alive with intelligence. Judging by the signals emerging from the galaxy—accidental or otherwise—the ancient spiral was home to a single star-faring culture two or three million years into its dominion. The culture might have begun life as several distinct emergent intelligences that had amalgamated into one, or it might have arisen on a single world. At this distance in time and space, it hardly mattered.

  What was clear was that the culture had reached a plateau of social and technological development. They had colonised every useful rock in their galaxy, to the point where their collective biomass exceeded that of a large gas giant. They became expert in the art of stellar husbandry: tampering in the nuclear burning processes of stars to prolong their lifetime, or to fan them to hotter temperatures. They shattered worlds and remade them into artful, energy-trapping forms.

  They played with matter and elemental force the way a child might play with sand and water. There was nothing they couldn’t conquer, except time and distance and the iron barrier of the speed of light.

  At this point in Grisha’s story, Purslane and I looked at each other in a moment of dawning recognition.

  “Like us,” we both said.

  Grisha favoured this assessment with a nod. “They were like you in so very many ways. They desired absolute omniscience. But the sheer scale of the galaxy always crushed them. They could never know everything: only out of date snapshots. Entire histories slipped through their fingers, unwitnessed, unmourned. Like you, they evolved something like the great lines: flocks of cloned individuals to serve as independent observers, gathering information and experience that would later be merged into the collective whole. And like you, they discovered that it was only half a victory.”

  “And then?” I asked.

  “Then . . . they did something about it.” Grisha opened his mouth as if to speak more on the matter, then seemed to think better of it. “The Watchers continued to study the spiral culture. They gathered data, and when the Watchers passed away, that same data was entombed on the first world that my people settled. In the course of our study, we found this data and eventually we learned how to understand it. And for hundreds of thousands of years we thought no more of it: just one observational curiosity among the many gathered by our Priors.”

  “What did the spiral culture do?” I asked.

  “Burdock can tell you that. It’ll be better coming from him.”

  “You were going to tell us how you ended up on his ship,” Purslane prompted.

  Grisha looked at the recumbent figure, trapped within those trembling fields. “I’m here because Burdock saved me,” he said. “Our culture was murdered. Genocide machines took apart our solar system world by world. We made evacuation plans, of course; built ships so that some of us might cross space to another system. We still knew nothing of relativistic starflight, so those ships were necessarily slow and vulnerable. That was our one error. If there was one piece of knowledge we should have allowed ourselves, it was how to build faster ships. Then perhaps, I wouldn’t be speaking to you now. Too many of us would have reached other systems for there to be any need for this subterfuge. But as it is, I’m the only survivor.”

  His ship had crawled away from the butchered system with tens of thousands of refugees aboard. They had stealthed the ship to the best of their ability, and for a little while it looked as if they might make it into interstellar space unmolested. Then an instability in their narrow, shielded fusion flame had sent a clarion across tens of light hours. The machines were soon on them.

  Most had died immediately, but there had been enough warning for a handful of people to abandon the ship in smaller vehicles. Most of those had been picked off, as well. But Grisha had made it. He had fallen out of his system, engines dead, systems powered down to a trickle of life support. And still he hadn’t been dark or silent enough to avoid detection. But this time it wasn’t the machines that found him. It was another ship—a Gentian Line vessel that just happened to be passing by.

  Burdock had pulled him out of the escape craft, warmed him from the emergency hibernation, and cracked the labyrinth of his ancient language. Then Burdock taught Grisha how to speak his own tongue.

  “He saved my life,” Grisha said. “We fled the system at maximum thrust, outracing the machines. They tried to chase us, and for a little while it seemed that they had the edge. But eventually we made it.”

  Even as I framed the question, I think I already had an inkling of the answer. “These machines . . . the ones that murdered your people?”

  “Yes,” Grisha said.

  “Who sent them?”

  He looked at both of us and said, very quietly, “You did.”

  ###

  We woke Burdock.

  The assassination toxin was eating him at a measurable rate; cubic centimetres per hour at normal body temperatures. With Burdock cooled below consciousness, the consumption was retarded to a glacially slow attack. But he would have to be warmed to talk to us, and so his remaining allowance of conscious life could be defined in a window of minutes, with the quality of that consciousness degrading as the weapon gorged itself on his mind.

  “I was hoping someone would make it this far,” Burdock said, opening his eyes. He didn’t turn his head to greet us—the consuming plaque would have made that all but impossible even if he had the will—but I assumed that he had some other means of identifying us. His lips barely moved, but something was amplifying his words, or his intention to speak. “I know how you broke into my ship,” he said, “and I presume Grisha’s told you something of his place in this whole mess.”

  “A bit,” I said.

  “That’s good—no need to go over that again.” The words had their own erratic rhythm, like slowly dripping water. “But what made you come out here in the first place?”

  “There was a discrepancy in your strand,” Purslane said, approaching uncomfortably close to the bedside screen. “It conflicted with Campion’s version of events. One of you had to be lying.”

  “You said you’d been somewhere you hadn’t,” I said. “I happened to be there at the same time, or else no one would ever have known.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I lied; submitted a false strand. Most of it was true—you probably guessed that much—but I had to cover up my visit to Grisha’s system.”

  I nodded. “Because you knew who had destroyed Grisha’s people?”

  “The weapons were old: million-year-old relics from some ancient war. That should have made them untraceable. But I found one of the weapons, adrift and deactivated. New control systems had been grafted over the old machinery. These control systems used line protocols.”

  “Gentian?”

  “Gentian, or one of our allies. I had witnessed a terrible crime, a genocide worse than anything recorded in our history.”

  “Why did you cover it up?” Purslane asked.

  “The knowledge frightened me. But that wasn’t the reason I altered my strand. I did it because I needed time: time to identify those responsible, and protect Grisha from them until I had enough evidence to bring them to justice. If the perpetrators were among us—and I had reason to think they were—they would have killed Grisha to silence him. And if killing Grisha meant killing the rest of us, I don’t think they’d have blinked at that.” He managed a despairing laugh. “When you’ve just wiped out a two-million-year-old civilisation, what do a thousand clones matter?”

  I tried not to sound too disbelieving. “The murder of an entire line? You think they’d go that far, just to cover up an earlier crime?”

  “And more,” Burdock said gravely. “This is about more than our piddling little line, Campion.”

  “The Great Work,” Purslane said, voicing my own thoughts. “A project bigger than any single line. That’s what they killed for, isn’t it. And that’s what they’ll kill for again.”

&nbs
p; “You’re good,” Burdock said. “I couldn’t have asked for a better pair of amateur sleuths.”

  “We still don’t know anything about the Great Work itself,” I told him. “Or why Grisha’s people had to die.”

  “I’ll tell you about the Work in good time. First we need to talk about the people who want Grisha dead.”

  Purslane looked at the other man, and then returned her attention to Burdock. “Do you know their names?”

  “It was names I was after,” he said. “I had a suspicion—little more than a hunch—that the genocide had something to do with the Work.”

  “Quite a hunch,” I commented.

  “Not really. Whoever was behind this had murdered those people because of something big, and the only big thing I could think of was the Work. What else do the Advocates talk about, Campion—other than their own inflated sense of self-worth?”

  “You have a point.”

  “Anyway, the more I dug, the more it looked like I was right about that hunch. It did tie in with the Work. But I still didn’t have any names. I thought if I could at least isolate the line members who had the strongest ties to the Work, then I could start looking for flaws in their strands . . .”

  “Flaws?” Purslane asked.

  “Yes. At least one of them had to have been near Grisha’s system at the same time as me. They won’t have used intermediaries for that kind of thing.”

  But it was only good luck that we had found the flaw in Burdock’s strand in the first place, I thought. Even if someone else had fabricated all or part of their strand, there was no reason to assume they had made the same kind of mistake.

  “Did you narrow it down to anyone?” Purslane asked.

  “A handful of plausible suspects . . . conspicuous Advocates, for the most part. I’m sure you could draw up the same shortlist with little effort.”

  I thought of the Advocates I knew, and the one in particular I had never liked. “Was Fescue among them?”

  “Yes,” Burdock said. “He was one of them. No love lost there, I see.”

  “Fescue is a senior Advocate,” Purslane said. “He’s tried to keep Campion and I apart. It could easily be that he knows we’re onto something. If anyone has the means . . .”

  “There are others besides Fescue. I needed to know who it was. That was why I started asking questions, nosing around, trying to goad someone into an indiscretion.”

  “We noticed,” I said.

  “Obviously my idea of subtle wasn’t their idea of subtle. Well, it proves I was onto something, I suppose. At least one of our line has to be involved.”

  I tapped a finger against my nose. “Why didn’t they just kill you on the island, and be done with it?”

  “It was your island, Campion. How would they have killed me without you noticing it? Administering a poisonous agent was simpler—at least that way they didn’t have a body to dispose of.”

  “Do you know about the impostor?” I asked.

  “My ship kept a watch on the island. More than once I saw myself strolling on the high promenades.”

  “You could have signalled us,” Purslane said. “Made your ship malfunction, or something like that.”

  “No. I thought of that, of course. But if my enemies had the slightest suspicion I was still alive, they might have attacked the ship. Remember: they poisoned me not because I knew what had happened, but simply because I was asking too many questions. It’s entirely possible that they’ve done this to other line members in the past. There might be other impostors on your island, Campion.”

  “I’d know,” I said automatically.

  “Would you? Would you really?”

  When he put it like that, I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t in the habit of looking inside the skulls of other line members, just to make sure they were really who I assumed them to be. Mental architecture was a private thing at the best of times. And a strand was a strand, whether it was delivered by a thinking person or a mindless duplicate.

  “You could have sent a message to one of us,” Purslane said.

  “How would I have known you were to be trusted? From where I was sitting, hardly anyone wasn’t a possible suspect.”

  “Do you trust us now?” I asked.

  “I suppose so,” Burdock said, with not quite the conviction I might have hoped for. “Does it look like I have a great deal of choice?”

  “We’re not implicated,” Purslane said soothingly. “But we are concerned to expose the truth.”

  “It’s dangerous. Everything I said still holds. They’ll take this world apart to safeguard the Great Work. Unless you can organise a significant number of allies and move against them quickly . . . I fear they’ll gain the upper hand.”

  “Then we’ll just have to outplay them, so that they never get a chance.” Easier said than done, I thought. We had no more idea who we could trust than Burdock himself.

  “Whatever we do,” Purslane said, “it’ll have to happen before Thousandth Night. If there’s any evidence pointing to a crime now, it’ll be lost forever by the time we return here.”

  “She’s right,” I said. “If Gentian Line is implicated, then whoever’s involved is on the island now. That gives us something. We’ve at least got them in one place.”

  “Thousandth Night would be a good time to move,” Purslane mused. “If we leave it until then—the last possible moment—they’ll probably have assumed nothing’s going to happen.”

  “Risky,” I said.

  “It’s all risky. At least that way we stand a chance of catching them off guard. There’s only one thing anyone ever thinks about on Thousandth Night.”

  “Purslane may have a point,” Burdock said. “Whoever the perpetrators are, they’re still part of the line. They’ll be waiting to see who wins best strand, just like the rest of you.”

  I noticed that he said “you” rather than “us.” On his deathbed, Burdock had already begun the process of abdication from Gentian affairs. Knowing he would not see Thousandth Night, let alone another reunion, he was turning away from the line.

  Abigail valued death as much as she valued life. Though we were all technically immortal, that immortality only extended to our cellular processes. If we destroyed our bodies, we died. Gentian protocol forbade backups, or last-minute neural scans. She wanted her memories to burn bright with the knowledge that life—even a life spanning hundreds of thousands of years—was only a sliver of light between two immensities of darkness.

  Burdock would die. Nothing in the universe could stop that now.

  “When you witnessed the crime,” I said, “did you see anything that could tell us who was responsible?”

  “I’ve been through my memories of my passage through Grisha’s system a thousand times,” he said. “After I rescued Grisha, I caught a trace of a drive flame exiting the system in the opposite direction. Presumably whoever deployed the machines was still around until then, making sure that the job was done.”

  “We should be able to match the drive signature to one of the ships parked here,” I said.

  “I’ve tried, but the detection was too faint. There’s nothing that narrows down my list of suspects.”

  “Maybe a fresh pair of eyes might help, though,” Purslane said. “Or even two pairs.”

  “Direct exchange of memories is forbidden outside of threading,” Burdock said heavily.

  “Add it to the list of Gentian rules we’ve already broken tonight,” I said. “Falsification of Purslane’s strand, absence from the island during a threading, breaking into someone else’s ship . . . why don’t you let me worry about the rules, Burdock? My neck’s already on the line.”

  “I suppose one more wrong won’t make much difference,” he said, resignedly. “The sensor records of my passage through Grisha’s system are still in my ship files—will they be enough?”

  “You had no other means of witnessing events?”

  “No. Everything I saw came through the ship’s eyes and ears in one form or anot
her.”

  “That should be good enough Can you pass those records to my ship?”

  “Mine as well,” Purslane said.

  Burdock waited a moment. “It’s done. I’m afraid you’ll still have some compatibility issues to deal with.”

  A coded memory flash—a bee landing on a flower—told me that my ship had just received a transmission from another craft, in an unfamiliar file format. I sent another command to my ship to tell it to start working on the format conversion. I had faith that it would get there in the end: I often set it the task of interpreting Prior languages, just to keep its mental muscles in shape.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Make what you will of it. I’m afraid there are many gaps in the sensor data. You’ll just have to fill in the holes.”

  “We’ll do what we can,” Purslane said. “But if we’re to bring anyone to justice, we have to know what this is all about. You must tell us what you’ve learned of the Great Work.”

  “I only know parts. I’ve guessed most of it.”

  “That’s still more than Campion and I know.”

  “All right,” he said, with something like relief. “I’ll tell you. But there isn’t time to do this the civilised way. Will you give me permission to push imagery into your heads?”

  Purslane and I looked at each other uneasily. Rationally, we had nothing to fear: if Burdock had the means to tamper with our heads, he could have already forced hallucinations on us by now, or killed us effortlessly. We willingly opened our memories during each threading, but that was within the solemn parameters of age-old ceremony, when we were all equally vulnerable. We already knew Burdock had lied once. What if the rest of his story was a lie as well? We had no evidence that Grisha was authentic, and not just a figment created by the ship.