Thousandth Night (7 page)

The
Watchers had chosen to focus on a single, simple question. The universe had
already been in existence for more than eleven billion years by the time the
Watchers learned its age. And yet the study of the stellar populations in
spiral galaxies at different redshifts established that the preconditions for
the emergence of intelligent life had been in place for several billion years
before the Watchers had evolved, even in the most conservative of scenarios.

Were
they therefore the first intelligent culture in the universe, or had sentience
already arisen in one of those distant spirals?

To
answer this question, the Watchers had taken one of their worlds and shattered
it to molecular rubble. With the materials thus liberated, they had constructed
a swarm of miraculous eyes: a fleet of telescopes that outnumbered the stars in
the sky. They had wrapped this fleet around their system and quickened it to a
kind of slow, single-minded intelligence. The telescopes peered through the
hail of local stars out into intergalactic space. They shared data across a
baseline of tens of light hours, sharpening their acuity to the point where
they approximated a single all-seeing eye as wide as a solar system.

It
took time for light to reach the Eye from distant galaxies. The further out the
Eye looked, the further it looked back into the history of the universe.
Galaxies ten million light years away were glimpsed as they were ten million
years earlier; those a billion light years away offered a window into the
universe when it was a billion years younger than the present epoch.

The
Eye looked at a huge sample of spiral galaxies, scrutinising them for signs of
intelligent activity. It looked for signals across the entire electromagnetic spectrum;
it sifted the parallel data streams of neutrino and gravity waves. It hunted
for evidence of stellar engineering, of the kind that other Priors had already
indulged in: planets remade to increase their surface area, stars sheathed in
energy-trapping shells, entire star systems relocated from one galactic region
to another.

One
day it found what it was looking for.

At
a surprisingly high redshift, the Eye detected a single spiral galaxy that was
alive with intelligence. Judging by the signals emerging from the
galaxy—accidental or otherwise—the ancient spiral was home to a single
starfaring culture two or three million years into its dominion. The culture
might have begun life as several distinct emergent intelligences that had
amalgamated into one, or it might have arisen on a single world. At this
distance in time and space, it hardly mattered.

What
was clear was that the culture had reached a plateau of social and
technological development. They had colonised every useful rock in their
galaxy, to the point where their collective biomass exceeded that of a large
gas giant. They became expert in the art of stellar husbandry: tampering in the
nuclear burning processes of stars to prolong their lifetime, or to fan them to
hotter temperatures. They shattered worlds and remade them into artful,
energy-trapping forms.

They
played with matter and elemental force the way a child might play with sand and
water. There was nothing they couldn’t conquer, except time and distance and
the iron barrier of the speed of light.

At
this point in Grisha’s story, Purslane and I looked at each other in a moment
of dawning recognition.

“Like
us,” we both said.

Grisha
favoured this assessment with a nod. “They were like you in so very many ways.
They desired absolute omniscience. But the sheer scale of the galaxy always
crushed them. They could never know everything: only out of date snapshots.
Entire histories slipped through their fingers, unwitnessed, unmourned. Like
you, they evolved something like the great lines: flocks of cloned individuals
to serve as independent observers, gathering information and experience that
would later be merged into the collective whole. And like you, they discovered
that it was only half a victory.”

“And
then?” I asked.

“Then
. . . they did something about it.” Grisha opened his mouth as if to speak more
on the matter, then seemed to think better of it. “The Watchers continued to
study the spiral culture. They gathered data, and when the Watchers passed
away, that same data was entombed on the first world that my people settled. In
the course of our study, we found this data and eventually we learned how to
understand it. And for hundreds of thousands of years we thought no more of it:
just one observational curiosity among the many gathered by our Priors.”

“What
did the spiral culture do?” I asked.

“Burdock
can tell you that. It’ll be better coming from him.”

“You
were going to tell us how you ended up on his ship,” Purslane prompted.

Grisha
looked at the recumbent figure, trapped within those trembling fields. “I’m
here because Burdock saved me,” he said. “Our culture was murdered. Genocide
machines took apart our solar system world by world. We made evacuation plans,
of course; built ships so that some of us might cross space to another system.
We still knew nothing of relativistic starflight, so those ships were
necessarily slow and vulnerable. That was our one error. If there was one piece
of knowledge we should have allowed ourselves, it was how to build faster
ships. Then perhaps, I wouldn’t be speaking to you now. Too many of us would
have reached other systems for there to be any need for this subterfuge. But as
it is, I’m the only survivor.”

His
ship had crawled away from the butchered system with tens of thousands of
refugees aboard. They had stealthed the ship to the best of their ability, and
for a little while it looked as if they might make it into interstellar space
unmolested. Then an instability in their narrow, shielded fusion flame had sent
a clarion across tens of light hours.

The
machines were soon on them.

Most
had died immediately, but there had been enough warning for a handful of people
to abandon the ship in smaller vehicles. Most of those had been picked off, as
well. But Grisha had made it. He had fallen out of his system, engines dead,
systems powered down to a trickle of life-support. And still he hadn’t been
dark or silent enough to avoid detection.

But
this time it wasn’t the machines that found him. It was another ship—a Gentian
Line vessel that just happened to be passing by.

Burdock
had pulled him out of the escape craft, warmed him from the emergency
hibernation, and cracked the labyrinth of his ancient language.

Then
Burdock taught Grisha how to speak his own tongue.

“He
saved my life,” Grisha said. “We fled the system at maximum thrust, outracing
the machines. They tried to chase us, and for a little while it seemed that
they had the edge. But eventually we made it.”

Even
as I framed the question, I think I already had an inkling of the answer.
“These machines . . .  the ones that murdered your people?”

“Yes,”
Grisha said.

“Who
sent them?”

He
looked at both of us and said, very quietly, “You did.”

We
woke Burdock.

The
assassination toxin was eating him at a measurable rate; cubic centimetres per
hour at normal body temperatures. With Burdock cooled below consciousness, the
consumption was retarded to a glacially slow attack. But he would have to be
warmed to talk to us, and so his remaining allowance of conscious life could be
defined in a window of minutes, with the quality of that consciousness
degrading as the weapon gorged itself on his mind.

“I
was hoping someone would make it this far,” Burdock said, opening his eyes. He
didn’t turn his head to greet us—the consuming plaque would have made that all
but impossible even if he had the will—but I assumed that he had some other
means of identifying us. His lips barely moved, but something was amplifying
his words, or his intention to speak. “I know how you broke into my ship,” he
said, “and I presume Grisha’s told you something of his place in this whole
mess.”

“A
bit,” I said.

“That’s
good—no need to go over that again.” The words had their own erratic rhythm,
like slowly dripping water. “But what made you come out here in the first
place?”

“There
was a discrepancy in your strand,” Purslane said, approaching uncomfortably
close to the bedside screen. “It conflicted with Campion’s version of events.
One of you had to be lying.”

“You
said you’d been somewhere you hadn’t,” I said. “I happened to be there at the
same time, or else no one would ever have known.”

“Yes,”
he said. “I lied; submitted a false strand. Most of it was true—you probably
guessed that much—but I had to cover up my visit to Grisha’s system.”

I
nodded. “Because you knew who had destroyed Grisha’s people?”

“The
weapons were old: million-year-old relics from some ancient war. That should
have made them untraceable. But I found one of the weapons, adrift and
deactivated. New control systems had been grafted over the old machinery. These
control systems used line protocols.”

“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.”