Thousandth Night (9 page)

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 were 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
anticollision 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 anticollision 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, tic-like 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
wonderful, 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 artefacts 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.

I
could have kissed the egomaniacal bastard.

“I
think we got away with that one,” I told Purslane, when she was finally able to
move through the island without being pestered by an entourage of hangers-on.

“Good,”
she said. “But that doesn’t mean we’re any closer to finding out who killed
Grisha’s people.”

“Actually,”
I said, “I’ve been thinking about that. Maybe there’s something in that data
after all.”

“We’ve
been through it with a fine-toothed comb.”

“But
looking for the obvious signatures,” I said.

“There
are too many gaps.”

“But
maybe the gaps are telling us something. What caused the gaps?”

“Burdock
being too cautious, throwing up his screens every time a speck of dust came
within a light-second of his ship. His screens are sensor-opaque, at least in
all the useful bands.”

“Correct.
But some of those activations were probably necessary: there
was
a lot
of rubble, after all.”

“Go
on,” she said.

“Well,
if there was a lot of debris that far out, there must have been even more
closer to the action. Enough to trigger the screens of the other ship.”

“I
hadn’t thought of that.”

“Me
neither, until now. And the type of search we’ve been doing wouldn’t have
picked up screen signatures. We need to slice the data up into short time
windows and filter on narrow-band graviton pulses.
Then
we might find
something.”

“I’m
already on it,” Purslane said.

I
closed my eyes and directed a command at my own ship. “Me too. Want to take a
bet on who finds something first?”

“No
point, Campion. I’d thrash you.”

She
did, too. Her ship found something almost immediately, now that it had been
given the right search criteria. “It’s still at the limits of detection,” she
said. “They must have had their screens tuned right down, for just this reason.
But they couldn’t run with them turned off.”

“Is
this enough to narrow it down?”

“Enough
to improve matters. The resonant frequency of the graviton pulse is at the low
end: that means whoever’s doing this was throwing up a big screen.”

Like
blowing a low note in a big bottle, rather than a high note in a small bottle.

“Meaning
big ship,” I said.

“I’m
guessing fifty or sixty kilometres at the minimum.” She looked at the parade of
hanging ships. “That already narrows it down to less than a hundred.”

My
ship pushed a memory into my head: a girl seated in the lotus position, with a
golden, glowing cube rotating above her cupped palms. It meant that the ship
had a result.

“Mine’s
in,” I said, requesting a full summary. “My ship says seventy kilometres at the
low end, with a central estimate around ninety. See: slow, but she gets there
in the end.”

“My
ship’s refined its analysis and come to more or less the same conclusion,”
Purslane said. “That narrows it down even more. We’re talking about maybe
twenty ships.”