One Million A.D.

by Gardner Dozois

  “Perhaps you ought to stand down,” Fescue said. “You’ve arranged a fine Reunion; we all agree on that. It would be a shame to ruin it now.”

  Fescue took a step toward me, presumably intending to help me from the plinth.

  “Wait,” I said, with all the dignity I could muster. “Wait and hear me out. All of you.”

  “You have an explanation for this travesty?” Fescue asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “I do.”

  He stopped in his tracks and folded his arms. “Then let’s hear it. Part of me would love to think that this is all part of your Thousandth Night plans, Campion.”

  “Something awful has happened,” I said. “There has been a conspiracy . . . a murder. One of us has been killed.”

  Fescue cocked his head. “One of us?”

  I scanned the crowd and pointed to Burdock’s duplicate. “That’s not Burdock,” I said. “That’s an impostor. The real Burdock is dead.”

  The duplicate Burdock pulled a startled face. He looked at the people surrounding him, and then back at me, aghast. He said something and the onlookers laughed.

  “The real Burdock is dead?” Fescue asked. “Are you quite sure of this, Campion?”

  “Yes. I know because I’ve seen his body. When we broke into his ship . . .”

  “When ‘we’ broke into his ship,” Fescue repeated, silencing me. “You mean there was someone else involved?”

  Purslane’s voice rang out clear and true. “It was me. Campion and I broke into the ship. Everything he’s told you is the truth. Burdock was murdered by proponents of the Great Work, because Burdock knew what they had done.”

  Fescue looked intrigued. “Which was?”

  “They destroyed an entire culture . . . Grisha’s people . . . a culture that had uncovered Prior data damaging to the Great Work. Wiped them out with Homunculus weapons. Burdock tried to cover up his discovery, for fear of what the Advocates would do to him. There was a discrepancy in Burdock’s dreams . . . an error.” Purslane’s control began to falter. “He said he’d been somewhere he hadn’t . . . somewhere Campion had been.”

  “So it was Burdock’s word against Campion’s?” Fescue turned to the impostor. “Does this make the slightest sense to you?”

  The impostor shrugged and looked at me with something between pity and spite.

  “Hear us out,” Purslane insisted. “All Campion was hoping to do was provoke the raising of anti-collision shields. The ship that destroyed Grisha’s people . . . we had data on its field resonance, but we needed to see our own fields before we could establish a match.” Purslane swallowed and regained some measure of calm. “I’m broadcasting the resonance data to all ships. See it for yourselves. See what those bastards did to Grisha’s people.”

  There was a moment, a lull, while the crowd assessed the data Purslane had just made public. She had taken a frightful risk in revealing the information, for now our enemies had every incentive to move against us, even if that meant killing everyone else on the island. But I agreed with what she had done. We were out of options.

  Except one.

  “Very impressive,” Fescue admitted. “But we’ve no evidence that you didn’t forge this data.”

  “The authentication stamp ties it to Burdock,” Purslane said.

  Fescue looked regretful. “Authentication can always be faked, with sufficient ingenuity. You’ve already admitted that you broke into his ship, after all. Disavow your involvement in this, Purslane, before it’s too late.”

  “No,” she said. “I won’t.”

  Fescue nodded at a number of the people around him, including a handful of senior Advocates.

  “Restrain the two of them,” he said.

  I fingered the metal shape under my flame-coloured costume. My hand closed on the haft and removed Grisha’s particle gun. The crowd silenced as the evil little thing glinted in the lantern light. Earlier, unwitnessed, I had primed the weapon onto Burdock. I squeezed a jewelled button and the gun moved as if in an invisible grip, nearly dragging itself from my fist. It swivelled onto Burdock and locked steady as a snake. Even if I released my hold on the gun, it would keep tracking its designated target.

  “Stand aside, please,” I said.

  “Don’t do anything silly,” Fescue said, even as the crowd parted around Burdock’s impostor.

  The moment closed around me like a vice. I had seen the real, dying Burdock aboard his ship—at least, I believed I had. When I squeezed the trigger, I would be killing a mindless automaton, a biomechanical construct programmed to duplicate Burdock’s responses with a high degree of accuracy . . . but not a living thing. Nothing with a sense of self.

  But what if the dying figure on the ship was the impostor, and this was still the real Burdock? What if the whole story about Grisha and the assassination agent had been the lie, and the real Burdock was standing in front of me? I had no idea why such an elaborate charade might have been staged . . . but I couldn’t rule it out, either. And there was one possibility that sprang to mind. What if Burdock had enemies among the line, and they wanted him dead, with someone else to pin the blame on? Suddenly I felt dizzy, lost in mazelike permutations of bluff and double bluff. I had to make a simple choice. I had to trust my intuitive sense of what was true and what was false.

  “If this is a mistake,” I said, “forgive me.”

  I squeezed the trigger. The particle beam sliced its way across space, piercing the figure in the chest.

  Burdock’s impostor touched a hand to the smoking wound, opened its mouth as it speak, and fell lifeless to the floor. The crowd screamed their horror, revolted at the idea that a member of the Gentian Line had murdered another.

  My work done, I let go of the particle gun. It remained floating before me, as if inviting me to take another shot. Burdock’s impostor lay on its side, with one dry hand open to the sky. He had touched the wound and there had been no blood. I allowed myself a moment of relief. The others would see that the thing I had killed was not a man, but a bloodless construct. But even as these thoughts formed, the body retched and coughed a mouthful of dark blood onto the perfect white marble of the terrace. Its face was a mask of fear and incomprehension. Then it was still.

  The crowd surged. They were on me in seconds, swatting aside the gun. They pulled me from the plinth and smothered me to the ground. The breath was knocked out of me. They began to pull at my clothing with animal fury. I heard shouts as some of the revellers tried to pull the others off me, but the collective anger—the collective repulsion—was too great to be resisted. I felt something crack in my chest, tasted my own blood as someone smashed a fist into my jaw. I thrashed out, survival instincts kicking in, but there were too many of them. Most of them were still wearing carnival masks.

  Then something happened. Just before I was about to go under, the attack calmed. Someone landed a final punch in my chest, sending a bolt of pain up my spine, and then pulled away. I received a desultory kick, and then they left me there, sprawled on the ground, my mouth wet, my body bruised. I knew they hadn’t finished with me. They were just leaving me alone while something else attracted their attention.

  In their hundreds, they were pressing against the low railing that encircled the balcony. They were looking out to sea, drawn by something going on beyond the island. I pushed myself to my feet and stumbled to the slumped form of Purslane. They had not hurt her as badly as me, but there was still a cut on her lip where someone had slapped her.

  “Are you all right?” I said, my mouth thick with blood.

  “Better than you,” she said.

  “I don’t think they’re done with us. There’s a distraction now . . . maybe we could reach our ships?”

  She shook her head and used her finger to wipe blood from my chin. “We started this, Campion. Let’s finish it.”

  “It’s Fescue,” I said. “He’s the one.”

  We followed the onlookers to the balcony. No one gave us a second glance, even as we pushed forward to t
he front. All round us the revellers were looking at the sea. Sleek dark forms were surfacing from the midnight waters, black as night themselves. They lolled and bellied in the waves, pushing great flukes and flippers into the sky, jetting white spouts of water from blowholes.

  Purslane asked me what was happening.

  “I don’t know,” I said truthfully.

  “You planned this, Campion. This has to be something to do with Thousandth Night.”

  “I know.” I winced at the pain in my chest, certain that the mob had broken a rib. “But I don’t remember what I planned. I thought the meteor shower was an end to it.”

  They were everywhere now, surfacing in multitudes. “It’s as if they’re gathering in readiness for something,” Purslane said. “Like the start of a migration.”

  “To where?”

  “You tell me, Campion.”

  But I didn’t have to tell her. It was soon obvious. In ones and twos they started leaving the ocean, rising into the air. Curtains of water drained off their flanks as they parted company with the sea. Ones and twos at first, then whole schools of them, rising into the sky between the hovering cliffs of our ships, as if they were born to fly.

  “This is . . . impossible,” I said. “They’re aquatics. They don’t . . . fly.”

  “Unless you made them that way. Unless you always planned this.”

  Pink-tinged aurorae flickered around the rising forms, hinting at the fields that allowed them to fly, and which would—I presumed—sustain them when the air thinned out, high above us. Some ghost of a memory now pushed its way into my consciousness. Had I truly engineered these aquatics for flight, equipping them with implanted field generators, and enough animal wisdom to use them? The memory beckoned, and then shrivelled under my attention.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Good,” Purslane said. “But now the next question: why?”

  But we didn’t have long to wonder about that. Suddenly the sky was cut in two by a brighter meteor than any we had seen during the earlier display. It boomed, reverberating down to the horizon and left a greenish aftertinge.

  Another followed it: brighter now.

  As if the meteor had triggered something, the sea erupted with a vast wave of departing aquatics. Thousands of them now, packed into huge and ponderous shoals or flocks, each aggregation moving with its own dim identity. The seas were emptying of life. Another meteor slashed the sky, bringing a temporary daylight to the scene. Over the horizon, an ominous false dawn signalled some terrible impact. Something large had smashed into my world. As more trails of light split the sky, I sensed that it would not be the last.

  The island shook beneath our feet. That made no sense at all: there surely hadn’t been enough time for Shockwaves to reach us yet, but none of us had imagined the vibration. I steadied myself on the handrail.

  “What . . .” Purslane began.

  The island shook again. That was a cue for the crowd to renew their interest in me, tearing their attention away from the departing aquatics. Purslane squeezed closer to me. I tightened my hold on her, while she redoubled her hold on me.

  The crowd advanced.

  “Stop,” boomed out a voice.

  Everyone halted and turned to look at the speaker. It was Fescue, and he was kneeling by the figure I had shot. He had a hand in the wound I had bored through the body, plunged deep to the wrist. Slowly he withdrew his hand, slick to the cuff with blood, but holding something between his fingers, something that wriggled in them like a little silver starfish.

  “This wasn’t Burdock,” he said, standing to his feet, while still holding the obscene, wriggling thing. “It was . . . a thing. Just like Campion and Purslane told us.” Fescue turned to look at me, his expression grave and forgiving. “You told the truth.”

  “Yes,” I said, with all the breath I could muster. I realised that I had been wrong about Fescue: utterly, utterly wrong.

  “Then it’s true,” he said. “One of us has committed a crime.”

  “Burdock’s body is still on his ship,” I said. “All of this can be proved . . . if you allow us.”

  The ground shook again. Overhead, the meteor assault had become continuous, and the horizon was aglow with fire. I had no sooner registered this than a small shard slammed out of the sky no more than fifteen kilometres from the island, punching a bright frothing wound into the sea. Sensing danger, the island’s screen came on, muting the impact blast to a salty roar. Another trail lanced down fifty kilometres away, raising a huge plume of superheated steam.

  The impacts were increasing in severity.

  Fescue spoke again. “We’ve all seen the evidence Purslane submitted. Given the truth about Burdock . . . I believe we should take the rest of the story seriously. Including the part about the murder of an entire culture.” He looked at the two of us. “You wanted to see our anti-collision fields, I believe.”

  “That’ll tell us who did it,” Purslane said.

  “I think you may shortly have your wish.”

  He was right. All around the island, the ships were raising their screens again, as protection against the bombardment. The smaller ships at first, then the larger ones—all the way up to the biggest craft of all, those that were already poking into space. The screens quivered and stabilised, and a hail of minor impacts glittered off them.

  “Well,” Fescue said, addressing Purslane. “Do you see a match?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I do.”

  Fescue nodded grimly. “Would you care to tell us who it is?”

  Purslane blinked, paralysed by the enormity of what she had to reveal. I held her hand, willing her to find the strength. “I thought it might be you,” she told Fescue. “Your ship matched the size profile . . . and when you ruined Campion’s ploy . . .”

  “I don’t think he meant to,” I said.

  “No, he didn’t,” Purslane said. “That’s obvious now. And in any case, his ship isn’t the best match. Samphire’s ship, on the other hand . . .”

  As one, the crowd’s attention locked onto Samphire. “No,” he said. “There’s been a mistake.”

  “Perhaps,” Fescue said. “But there is the matter of the weapons Purslane mentioned: the ones used against Grisha’s people. You’ve always had an interest in ancient weapons, Samphire . . . especially the weapons of the Homunculus wars.”

  Samphire looked astonished. “That was over a million years ago. It’s ancient history!”

  “But what’s a million years to the Gentian Line? You knew where those weapons were to be found, and you probably had more than an inkling of how they worked.”

  “No,” Samphire said. “This is preposterous.”

  “It may well be,” Fescue allowed. “In which case, you’ll be allowed all the time you need to make your case, before a jury of your peers. If you are innocent, we’ll prove it and ask your forgiveness—just as we did with Betony, all those years ago. If you are guilty, we will prove that instead—and uncover the rest of your collaborators. You’ve never struck me as the calculating kind, Samphire: I doubt that you put this together without assistance.”

  A wave of change overcame Samphire: his expression hardening. “You can prove what you like,” he said. “It will change nothing.”

  “That sounds suspiciously like an admission of guilt,” Fescue said. “Is it true? Did you really murder an entire culture, just to protect the Great Work?”

  Now his expression was full of disdain. There was an authority in his voice I had never heard before. “One culture,” Samphire said. “One pebble on the beach, against an ocean of possibility! Do you honestly think they mattered? Do you honestly think we’ll remember them, in a billion years?”

  Fescue turned to his Advocate friends. “Restrain him.”

  Three of the Advocates took purposeful steps toward Samphire. But they had only taken three or four paces when Samphire shook his head, more in sorrow than anger, and ripped open his tunic, exposing his smooth and hairless chest to the waist. He
plunged his fingers into his own skin and pulled it aside like two theatrical curtains, showing no pain. Instead of muscle and bone, we saw only an oozing clockwork of translucent pink machines, layered around a glowing blue core.

  “Homunculus machinery,” Fescue said, with an awesome calm. “He’s a weapon.”

  Samphire smiled. A white light curdled in his open chest. It brightened to hellfire, ramming from his mouth and eyes. The construct body writhed as the detonating weapon consumed its nervous system from within. The outer layers crisped and collapsed.

  But something was containing the blast. The white light—almost too bright to look at now—could not escape. It was being held back by a man-sized containment bubble, locked around Samphire.

  I looked at Fescue. He stood with his arms outstretched, like a sculptor visualising a composition. Thick metal jewellery glinted on his fingers. Not jewellery, I realised now, but miniature field generators. Fescue was holding the containment bubble around Samphire, preventing the blast from escaping and destroying us all. His face was etched with the strain of controlling the generators.

  “I’m not sure of the yield,” Fescue said to me, forcing each word out. “Sub-kilotonne range, I think, or else your systems would have detected the homunculus machinery. But it will still be enough to destroy this balcony. Can the island lock a screen around him?”

  “No,” I said. “I never allowed for . . . this.”

  “That’s as I thought. I can’t hold it much longer . . . twenty-five, thirty seconds.” Fescue’s eyes bored into me with iron determination. “You have complete control of the structure, Campion? You can reshape it according to your requirements?”

  “Yes,” I said, faltering.

  “Then you must drop the two of us through the floor.”

  They were standing only a few metres apart. It would only cost me a moment’s concentration to order that part of the floor to detach itself, falling free. But if I did that, I would be sending Fescue to his death.

  “Do it!” he hissed.

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “Campion,” he said. “I know you and I have had our differences. I have always criticised you for lacking spine. Well, now is your chance to prove me wrong. Do this.