One Million A.D.

by Gardner Dozois

  “You have to trust me,” Burdock pleaded. “There isn’t much time left.”

  “He’s right,” Purslane said, gripping my hand. “There’s a risk, but there’s also a risk in doing nothing. We have to do this.”

  I nodded at Burdock. “Tell us.”

  “Prepare,” he whispered.

  An instant later I felt a kind of mental prickle as something touched my brain, groping its way in like an octopus seeking a way into a shell. Purslane tightened her hold, anchoring herself to me. There was a moment of resistance and then the intrusive thing was ensconced.

  My sense of being present in the room became attenuated, as if my body was suddenly at the far end of a long thread of nerve fibres, with my brain somewhere else entirely. I didn’t know how Burdock was doing it, but I could see at least two possibilities. The air in his ship might have been thick with machines, able to swim into neural spaces and tap into direct mental processes. Or the ship itself might been generating external magnetic fields of great precision, steering the foci into my skull and stimulating microscopic areas of my mind. I was only dimly aware of Grisha and Burdock looking on, half a universe away.

  Coldness seized me, electric with the crackle and fizz of subatomic radiation. I was somewhere dark beyond imagination. My point of view shifted and something awesome hoed into view. As my disembodied eyes adjusted to the darkness, the thing brightened and grew layers of dizzying detail.

  It was a spiral galaxy.

  I recognised it instantly as the Milky Way. I had crossed it enough times to know the kinked architecture of its stellar arms and dust lanes, a whorl as familiar and idiosyncratic as a fingerprint. The hundreds of billions of stars formed a blizzard of light, but through some trick of perception I felt that I recognised all the systems I had visited during my travels, as well as all those I had come to know through the shared memories of the Gentian Line. I made out the little yellow sun which we now orbited, and felt both inconsequential and godlike as I imagined myself on a watery world circling that star, a thing tiny beyond measure, yet with an entire galaxy wheeling inside my head.

  “You know this place, of course,” said Burdock’s disembodied voice. “As one facet of Abigail, you’ve crossed it ten or twelve times; tasted the air of a few hundred worlds. Enough for one lifetime, perhaps. But that was never enough for Abigail, for us. As Abigail’s shattered self, we’ve crossed it ten thousand times; known a million worlds. We’ve seen wonder and terror; heaven and hell. We’ve seen empires and dynasties pass like seasons. And still that isn’t enough. We’re still monkeys, you know. In terms of the deep structure of our minds, we’ve barely left the trees. There’s always a shinier, juicier piece of fruit just out of reach. We’ve reached for it across two million years and it’s brought to us this place, this moment. And now we reach again. We embark on our grandest scheme to date: the Great Work.”

  The view of the Milky Way did not change in any perceptible way, but I was suddenly aware of human traffic crossing between the stars. Ships much like those of the Gentian Line fanned out from points of reunion, made vast circuits across enormous swathes of the Galaxy, and converged back again two or three hundred thousand years later, ready to merge experiences. Cocooned in relativistic time, the journeys did not seem horrendously long for the pilots: mere years or decades of flight, with the rest of time (which might equal many centuries) spent soaking up planetary experience, harvesting memory and wisdom. But the true picture was of crushing slowness, even though the ships moved at the keen, sharp edge of lightspeed. Interesting star systems were thousands or tens of thousands of years of flight time apart. Planetary time moved much faster than that. Human events outpaced the voyagers, so that what they experienced was only glimpses of history, infuriatingly incomplete. Brief, bittersweet golden ages flourished for a handful of centuries while the ships were still moving between stars. Glories went unrecorded, unremembered.

  Something had to be done.

  “The lines have been gnawing at the lightspeed problem for half a million years,” Burdock said. “It won’t crack. It’s just the way the universe is. Faced with that, you have two other possibilities. You can reengineer human nature to slow history to a crawl, so that starfarers can keep pace with planetary time. Or you can consider the alternative. You can reengineer the Galaxy itself, to shrink it to a human scale.”

  In an eye blink of comprehension we understood the Great Work, and why it had been necessary for Grisha’s people to die. The Great Work concerned nothing less than the relocation of entire stars and all the worlds that orbited them.

  Moving stars was not actually as difficult as it sounded. The Priors had moved stars around many times, using many different methods. It had even taken place in the human era: demonstration projects designed to boost the prestige of whichever culture or line happened to be sponsoring it. But the Great Work was not about moving one or two stars a few light-years, impressive as such a feat undoubtedly was. The Great Work was about the herding of stars in numbers too large to comprehend: the movement of hundreds of millions of stars across distances of tens of thousands of light-years. The Advocates dreamed of nothing less than compactifying the Milky Way; taking nature’s work and remaking it into something more useful for human occupation. For quick-witted monkeys, it was no different than clearing a forest, or draining a swamp.

  Burdock told us that the Advocates had been covertly resurrecting Prior methods of stellar engineering, contesting them against each other to find the most efficient processes. The methods that worked best seemed to be those that employed some of the star’s own fusion power as the prime mover. They used mirrors to direct the star’s energy output in a single direction, in the manner of a rocket motor. If the star’s acceleration were sufficiently gentle, it would carry its entire family of worlds and rubble and dust with it.

  Of all the Prior methods tested so far, none were able to accelerate a sunlike star to anything faster that one percent of the speed of light. This was laughably slow compared to our oldest ships, but it didn’t matter to the Advocates. Even if it took two or three more million years to move all their target stars, this was still a price worth paying. Everything that had happened to date, they liked to say, was just a prologue to history. Real human affairs would not begin in earnest until the last star was dropped into its designed Galactic orbit. Set against the billions of years ahead of us (before the Galaxy itself began to wither, or suffered a damaging encounter with Andromeda) what was a mere handful of millions of years?

  It was like delaying a great voyage by a few hours.

  When they were done, the Galaxy would look very different. All life-bearing stars (cool and long-lived suns, for the most part) would have been shunted much closer to the core, until they fell within a volume only five thousand light-years across. Superhot blue stars—primed to explode as supernovae in mere millions of years—would be prematurely triggered, or shoved out of harm’s way. Unstable binaries would be dismantled like delicate time bombs. The unwieldy clockwork of the central black hole would be tamed and harnessed for human consumption. Stars that were already on the point of falling into the central engine would be mined for raw materials. New worlds would be forged, vast as stars themselves: the golden palaces and senates of this new galactic empire. With a light-crossing time of only fifty centuries, something like an empire was indeed possible. History would no longer outpace starfarers like Purslane and I. If we learned of something magical on the other side of human space, there would be every hope that it would still be there when we arrived. And most of humanity would be packed into a light-crossing time much less than fifty centuries.

  This was the Great Work. It was the culminative project of two million years of human advancement: the enterprise that would tax the ingenuity and resourcefulness of the most powerful lines. Where the lines squabbled now, they would come together in peaceful cooperation. And at the end of it (if any of us lived that long), we would have something wonderful to show for it. It would
be the ultimate human achievement, a spectacle of engineering visible across cosmological distance. A beacon to our bright monkey cleverness.

  It could not be allowed to happen.

  That was the message Grisha’s people had uncovered, in their archaeological enquiries into their planet’s Prior culture. It transpired that the Watchers had witnessed something like the Great Work once already, in the distant spiral galaxy that they had been monitoring. Perhaps it was a kind of recurrent pathology, destined to afflict civilisations once they reached a certain evolutionary state. They grew weary of the scale of their galaxy and sought to shrink it.

  In doing so they created the preconditions for their own extinction. Where once they had moved too slowly to threaten more than a handful of neighbouring systems, the compactification allowed war and disease to spread like wildfire. The inhuman scale of the colonised Galaxy was its strength as well as its weakness: time and distance were buffers against catastrophe. Spread out across tens of thousands of light-years, we were immune to extinction, at least by our own hands.

  Compactified, death could touch us all in less than five thousand years.

  “The Advocates knew this, I think,” Burdock said. “But they considered it to be a theoretical problem they would deal with when the time came. Surely, they rationalised, we would be wise enough to avoid such foolishness. But then they learned of the discovery made by the Watchers, and rediscovered by Grisha’s people. Another spiral culture that had gone down the same path—and ended up extinct; wiped out in a cosmological instant. Perhaps the fate was not so avoidable after all, no matter how wise you became. By rights, they should have viewed this data as an awful warning, and acted accordingly: abandoning the Great Work before a single star had moved an inch.”

  But it was never going to happen like that. The lines had already invested too much of themselves in the future success of the Work. Alliances had already been forged; hierarchies of influence and responsibility agreed upon. To back down now would involve crushing loss of face to the senior lines. Old wounds would be reopened; old rivalries would simmer to the fore. If the Great Work was the project that would bind the lines, its abandonment could very easily push some of them to war. That was why Grisha’s people had to be silenced, even if it meant their genocide. For what was the loss of one culture, against something so huge? If we were still living in the prologue to history, they would be doing well to merit a footnote.

  The vision ended then, and I felt my mind being sucked back to the body I had left (and nearly forgotten) aboard Burdock’s ship. There was a moment of unpleasant confinement, as if I was a being squeezed into a too-small bottle, and then I was back, still holding hands with Purslane, the two of us reeling as our inner ears adjusted to the return of gravity.

  Grisha stood by the couch, his gun still in his hand. “Did you learn all that you needed to know?” he asked.

  “I think so,” I started to say.

  “Good,” he said. “Because Burdock’s dead. He gave you the last minute of his life.”

  ###

  Purslane and I returned to the island as the sky lightened in anticipation of dawn. It was still midnight blue overhead, but the horizon was tinged with the softest tangerine orange, cut through by ribbons of cloud. As the box wheeled through the thicket of hanging ships toward the island, I began to see the crests of waves, stippled in brightening gold.

  I had seen many dawns, but in all my travels I had never tired of them. Even now, with the weight of all that had happened and all that we had learned, some part of me stood aside from the moment to acknowledge the simple beauty of sunrise on another world. I wondered what Burdock would have made of it. Would it have touched him with the same alchemical force, bypassing the rational mind to speak to that animal part from which we were separated by only an evolutionary heartbeat? Perhaps I’d find a clue in all the strands Burdock had submitted during his time among us. Now there would be no more.

  A death among the line was a terrible and rare thing. When it happened, one of us would be tasked to create a suitable memorial somewhere out in the stars. Such a memorial could take many forms. Long ago, the death of one of our number had been commemorated by the seeding of ferrite dust into the atmosphere of a dying star, just before the star expelled its outer envelope to create a nebula in the shape of a human head, sketched in lacy curves of blue green oxygen and red hydrogen, racing outward at sixty kilometres a second. Another memorial, no less heartfelt, had taken the form of a single stone kiln on an airless moon. Both had been appropriate.

  Burdock would surely receive his due, but his death had to remain a secret until Thousandth Night. Until then Purslane and I would have to walk among our fellow line members with that knowledge in our hearts, and not betray the slightest hint of it.

  We owed it to Burdock.

  “We’re in time,” I said, as the box neared the island. “That took longer than I’d hoped, but the threading is still taking place. No one will have missed us yet.”

  Purslane pressed a hand to her brow. “God, the threading. I’d forgotten all about that. Now I’ll have to spend all day telling lies. Please tell me this was a good idea, Campion.”

  “Wasn’t it? We know what happened to Burdock now. We know about Grisha and the Great Work. Of course it was worth it.”

  “Are you so sure? All we know now is that asking questions could get us into serious trouble. We’re still none the wiser about who’s actually behind this. I’m not sure I wasn’t happier in blissful ignorance.”

  “We have the data from Burdock’s ship,” I reminded her.

  “Have you looked at it yet, Campion?” I could tell from her tone that she wasn’t impressed. “My ship’s already sent me back a preliminary analysis. Burdock’s data is riddled with gaps.”

  “He warned us there were a few holes.”

  “What he didn’t say was that thirty percent of his records are missing. There may be something useful in the remaining data, but there’s still a good chance that the clues fell into the gaps.”

  “Why the gaps in the first place? Do you think he edited out something he didn’t want us to see?”

  Purslane shook her head. “Don’t think so. The gaps seem to be caused by his anti-collision screens going up, blinding his sensors. You saw how old that ship was: it probably has pretty ancient screen generators, or pretty ancient sensors, or both.”

  “Why the anti-collision screens?”

  “Debris,” Purslane said. “Grisha’s system had been turned into a cloud of radioactive rubble. Burdock’s approach never took him all that close to the main action, but there must still have been a lot of debris flying around. If he’d thought to turn up his triggering threshold, he might have given us more to work with . . .”

  I tried to sound optimistic. “We’ll just to have make the best of what’s left.”

  “My ship’s already made the obvious checks. I’ve seen the flame Burdock mentioned, but it really is too faint for an accurate match. If the murderers were hanging around the system before then, they must have been very well camouflaged.”

  “We can’t just . . . give up,” I said, thinking of the man we had left behind on Burdock’s ship. “We owe it to Burdock, and Grisha, and Grisha’s people.”

  “If there’s nothing there, there’s nothing there,” Purslane said.

  She was right. But it wasn’t what I wanted to hear.

  We landed on the island and reset our body clocks so that—to first approximation—we looked and felt as if we had just passed a restful, dream-filled night. That was the idea, at least. But when I conjured a mirror and examined my face in it I saw a quivering, ticlike tightness around the mouth. I tried a kinesic reset but it didn’t go away. When Purslane and I met alone on one of the high balconies, after breakfasting with a few other line members, I swear I saw the same tightness.

  “How did it go?” I asked.

  She kept her voice low. “It was as bad as I feared. They thought my strand was wonderfu
l, darling. They won’t stop asking me about it. They hate me.”

  “That’s sort of the reaction we were hoping for. The one thing no one will be wondering about is what you were up to last night. And we can be sure no one ducked out of the strand.”

  “What about Burdock’s impostor? We didn’t know about him when we hatched this plan.”

  “He still had to act like Burdock,” I said. “That means he’ll have needed to dream your strand.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “You only have to get through this one day. It’s Squill’s strand tonight. He always gives good dream.”

  Purslane looked at me pityingly. “Keep up, Campion. Squill’s been off-form for half a million years.”

  Unfortunately, she was right about Squill. His strand consisted of endless visits to planets and artifacts left over from the Interstitial Uprising, overlaid with tedious, self-serving monologues of historical analysis. It was not the hit of the Reunion, and it did little to take the heat off Purslane. The next night wasn’t much better: Mullein’s strand was a workmanlike trudge through thirty cultures that had collapsed back to pre-industrial feudalism. “Mud,” I heard someone say dispiritedly, the day after. “Lots of . . . mud.”

  The third night was a washout as well. That was when Asphodel would have delivered her strand, had she made it back to the Reunion. As was our custom, her contribution took the form of a compilation from her previous strands. It was all very worthy, but not enough to stop people talking about Purslane’s exploits.

  Thankfully, things picked up for her on the fourth night. Borage’s strand detailed his heroic exploits in rescuing an entire planet’s worth of people following the close approach of a star to their Oort cloud. Borage dropped replicators on their nearest moon and converted part of it into a toroidal defence screen, shielding their planet from the infall of dislodged comets. Then he put the moon back together again and (this was a touch of genius, we had to admit) he wrote his signature on the back of the tide-locked moon in a chain of craters. It was flashy, completely contrary to any number of Line strictures, but it got people talking about Borage, not Purslane.