Authors: Alastair Reynolds
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 anticollision 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.”
“Do
it! For the sake of the line!”
I
looked at the faces of the other line members. I saw their pain, but also their
solemn consent. They were telling me that I had no choice. They were telling me
to kill Fescue, and save us all.
I
did it.
I
willed the floor around the two figures to detach itself from the rest of the
balcony. The tiny machines forming the fabric of the floor followed my will
with dumb obedience, severing the molecular bonds that linked each machine to
its neighbour.
For
a heart-rending moment, the floor seemed to hover in place.
The
field around Samphire quivered, beginning to lose integrity. Fescue’s
generators were running out of power, Fescue running out of concentration . . .
He
looked at me and nodded. “Good work, Campion.”
Then
they dropped.
It
was a long way down, and they were still falling when the revellers surged to
the edge of the balcony to look down. The light from the explosion momentarily
eclipsed the brightest impacts still raining down on the planet. I nodded at
Fescue’s assessment: kilotonne range, easily. He had been right. It would have
killed us all, and snapped the spire in two had the balcony not been flung so
far out in space. It had been an accidental whim of design, but it had saved us
all.
So
had Fescue.
There
was a great space battle that night, but this time it was for real, not staged in
memory of some ancient, time-fogged conflict. The real Samphire had been on his
ship, and when the construct failed to destroy the island, he made a run for
orbit. From orbit, he must have planned to turn the ship’s own armaments on
Reunion. But Fescue’s allies had anticipated him, and when his ship moved, so
did a dozen others. They made interception above the lacerated atmosphere of my
dying world and lit the sky with obscene energies. Samphire died, or at least
that version of Samphire that had been sent to infiltrate our gathering. It may
or may not have been the final one. It may or may not have been the only
impostor in our midst.
After
the battle, Vetchling, one of the other Advocates, took me aside and told me
what she knew.
“Fescue
supported the Great Work,” she said. “But not at any cost. When evidence
reached him that an atrocity had been committed in the name of the Work . . . the
murder of an entire human culture . . . he realised that not all of us shared
his view.”
“Then
Fescue knew all along,” I said, dismayed.
“No.
He had shards of intelligence—hints, rumours, whisperings. He still had no idea
who had committed the crime; how deeply they were tied to Gentian Line. He did
not know whether the rest of the Advocates could be trusted.” She paused. “He
trusted me, and a handful of others. But not everyone.”
“But
Fescue spoke to me about the Great Work,” I said. “Of how we all had to bind
together to bring it into being.”
“He
believed it would be for the best. But more than likely he was sounding you
out, seeing what you thought of it, goading you into an indiscretion.”
Vetchling looked to the simmering sea, punctured by hundreds of volcanic vents
that had reopened in the planet’s crust. We were looking down on the sea from a
dizzy height now: the island had detached itself from Reunion, and was now
climbing slowly into space, pushed by the vast motors I must have installed in
its foundation rocks. The blast from Samphire’s weapon had shattered the
outlying islands, crumbling them back into the sea. The water had rushed into
the fill the caldera left after the main island’s departure, and now there was
no trace that it had ever existed.
The
party was over.
“He
suspected Advocate involvement in the crime,” Vetchling continued. “But he
could not rule out someone else being implicated: a sleeper, an agent no one
would suspect.”
“He
must have suspected Purslane and I,” I said.
“That’s
possible. You did spend a lot of time associating, after all. If it’s any
consolation, the two of you wouldn’t have been his only suspects. He may even
have had his suspicions about Samphire.”
“What
will happen to the Great Work now?”
“That’s
not just a matter for Gentian Line,” Vetchling said. “But my guess is there’ll
be pressure to put the whole thing on the back burner for a few hundred
thousand years. A cooling-off period.” She sounded sad. “Fescue was respected.
He had a lot of friends beyond our line.”
“I
hated him,” I said.
“He
wouldn’t have minded. All he really cared about was the line. You did the right
thing, Campion.”
“I
killed him.”
“You
saved us all. You have Fescue’s gratitude.”
“How
can you know?” I asked.
She
touched a finger to her lips. “I know. Isn’t that enough for you?”
A
little later, Purslane and I stood alone on the highest balcony of the island’s
central spire. The island had climbed out of what would have been Reunion’s
atmosphere, had the atmosphere remained.
Far
below, viewed through the flickering curtain of the containment bubble, my
planet writhed in the agonies of its death by stoning. The impacting asteroids
struck her like fists, bludgeoning her in furious quick-time. At least two,
sometimes three or four, arrived within every minute. Their impact fireballs
had dispersed most of the atmosphere by now, and had elevated a goodly fraction
of the crust into parabolas of molten rock, tongues of flame that arced
thousands of kilometres before splashing down. They reminded me of the coronal
arcs near the surface of a late-type star. The ocean was a memory: boiled into
a dust-choked vapour. Concussion from the multiple impacts was already
unhinging the delicate clockwork of the planet’s magnetohydrodynamic core. Had
there been a spot on the planet where it was still night, the auroral storms
would have been glorious. For a moment, I regretted that I had not arranged
matters so that the aurorae had formed part of the show, somehow, someway.
But
it was much too late for second thoughts now. It would be someone else’s turn
next time.
Purslane
took my hand. “Don’t look so sad, Campion. You did well. It was a fine end.”
“You
think so?”
“They’ll
be raving about this for a million years. What you did with those whales . . .”
She shook her head in undisguised admiration.
“I
couldn’t very well let them stay in the ocean.”
“It
was lovely. Putting aside everyone else that happened . . . I think that was
my favourite bit. Not that this is bad, either.”
We
paused a while to watch a succession of major impacts: a long, sequenced string
of them. Continent-sized fissures were beginning to open up deep into the
planet’s mantle: wounds as bright as day.
“I
created something and now I’m ruining it. Doesn’t that strike you as just the
tiniest bit. . . infantile? Fescue certainly wouldn’t have approved.”
“I
don’t know,” she said. “It’s not as if that world ever had any chance of
outlasting us. It was created to endure for a specific moment in time. Like a
sandcastle, or an ice sculpture. Here, and then gone. In a way, that’s the
beauty of it. Who’d marvel at a sandcastle, if sand-castles lasted forever?”
“Or
sunsets, I suppose,” I said.
“Oh,
no,” she said. “Don’t start talking about sunsets again. I thought you got that
safely out of your system last time.”
“I
have,” I said. “Completely and utterly. I’m thinking of a radically different
theme for my tour this time. Something as far removed from sunsets as
possible.”
“Oh,
good.”