Thousandth Night (8 page)

“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 who-ever’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 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 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 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 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.