Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds

by Alastair Reynolds

  “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.”

  “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 c
aught 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 another.”

  “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.

  “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 hoved 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 recognized 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 recognized 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 us to 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 star
s in numbers too large to comprehend: the movement of hundreds of millions of stars across distances of tens of thousand 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.