Thousandth Night / Minla's Flowers

by Alastair Reynolds

  “Interfering with this ship doesn’t count as doing harm?” He spoke the Gentian tongue with scholarly precision, as if he had learned it for this occasion.

  “We were just after information,” Purslane said.

  “Were you, now? What kind?”

  Purslane flashed me a sidelong glance. “We may as well tell the truth, Campion,” she said quietly. “We won’t have very much to lose.”

  “We wanted to know where this ship had been,” I said, knowing she was right but not liking it either.

  The man jabbed the barrel of the particle gun in my direction. “Why? Why would you care?”

  “We care very much. Burdock—the rightful owner of this ship— seems not to have told the truth about what he was up to since the last reunion.”

  “That’s Burdock’s business, not yours.”

  “Do you know Burdock?” I asked, pushing my luck.

  “I know him very well,” the man told me. “Better than you, I reckon.”

  “I doubt it. He’s one of us. He’s Gentian flesh.”

  “That’s nothing to be proud of,” the man said. “Not where I come from. If Abigail Gentian was here now, I’d put a hole in her you could piss through.”

  The dead calm with which he made this statement erased any doubt that he meant exactly what he said. I felt an existential chill. The man would have gladly erased not just Abigail but her entire line.

  It was a strange thing to feel despised.

  “Who are you?” Purslane asked. “And how do you know Burdock?”

  “I’m Grisha,” the man said. “I’m a survivor.”

  “A survivor of what?” I asked. “And how did you come to be aboard Burdock’s ship?”

  The man looked at me, little in the way of expression troubling his rounded face. Then by some hidden process he seemed to arrive at a decision.

  “Wait here,” he said. “I’ll be back in a moment.”

  He let go of the particle gun. Instead of dropping to the floor the weapon simply hung exactly where he had left it, with its barrel still aimed in our general direction. Grisha stepped through the door and left the command deck.

  “I knew this was a mistake,” Purslane whispered. “Do you think that thing is really . . . ”

  I moved a tiny distance away from Purslane and the gun flicked its attention onto me. I drew breath and returned to my former spot, the gun following my motion.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I thought so.”

  Grisha returned soon enough. He closed his hand around the gun and lowered it a little. It was no longer trained on us, but we were still in Grisha’s power.

  “Come with me,” he said. “There’s someone you need to meet.”

  A windowless room lay near the core of the ship. It was, I realised, the sleeping chamber: the place where the ship’s occupants (even if they only amounted to a single person) would have entered metabolic stasis for the long hops between stars. Some craft had engines powerful enough to push them so close to the speed of light that time dilation squeezed all journeys into arbitrarily short intervals of subjective time, but this was not one of those. At the very least Burdock would have had to spend years between stars. For that reason the room was equipped with the medical systems needed to maintain, modify and rejuvenate a body many times over.

  And there was a body. A pale form, half eaten by some form of brittle, silvery calcification—a plaque that consumed his lower body to the waist, and which had begun to envelope the side of his chest, right shoulder and the right side of his face. A bustle of ivory machines attended the body, which trembled behind the distorting effect of a containment bubble.

  “You can look,” Grisha said.

  We looked. Purslane and I let out a joint gasp of disbelief. The body on the couch belonged to Burdock.

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” I said, studying the recumbent, damaged form. “The body he has on the island is intact. Why keep this failing one alive?”

  “That isn’t a duplicate body,” Grisha said, nodding at the half-consumed form. “That’s his only one. That is Burdock.”

  “No,” I said. “Burdock was still on the island when we left.”

  “That wasn’t Burdock,” Grisha said, with a weary sigh. He pointed the gun at a pair of seats next to the bed. “Sit down, and I’ll try and explain.”

  “What’s wrong with him?” Purslane asked, as we followed Gri-sha’s instruction.

  “He’s been poisoned. It’s some kind of assassination weapon: very subtle, very slow, very deadly.” Grisha leaned over and stroked the containment bubble, his fingertips pushing flickering pink dimples into the field. “This is more for your benefit than mine. If his contagion touched me, all I’d have to show for it is a nasty rash. It would kill you the same way it’s killing him.”

  “No,” I said. “He’s Gentian. We can’t be killed by an infection.”

  “It’s a line weapon. It’s made to kill the likes of you.”

  “Who did this to him?” Purslane asked. “You, Grisha?”

  The question seemed not to offend him. “No, I didn’t do this. It was one of you—an Advocate, he thought.”

  I frowned at the silver-ridden corpse. “Burdock told you who did it?”

  “Burdock had his suspicions. He couldn’t be sure who exactly had poisoned him.”

  “I don’t understand. What exactly happened? How can Burdock be sick here, if we’ve seen him running around on the island only a couple of hours ago?”

  Grisha smiled narrowly: the first hint of emotion to have troubled his face since our introduction. “That wasn’t Burdock that you saw. It was a construct, a mimic, created by his enemies. It replaced the real Burdock nearly three weeks ago. They poisoned him before he returned to his ship.”

  I looked at Purslane and nodded. “If Grisha’s telling the truth, that at least explains the change in Burdock’s behaviour. We thought he’d been scared off asking any more questions about the Great Work. Instead he’d been supplanted.”

  “So he did ask too many questions,” Purslane said. She creased her forehead prettily. “Wait, though. If he knew he’d been poisoned, why didn’t he tell the rest of us? And why did he stay aboard the ship, out of sight, when his impostor was running around on the island?”

  “He had no choice,” Grisha answered. “When he arrived here, the ship detected the contagion and refused to let him leave.”

  “Noble of it,” I said.

  “He’d programmed it that way. I think he had a suspicion his enemies might try something like this. If he was infected, he didn’t want to be allowed to return and spread it around. He was thinking of the rest of you.”

  Purslane and I were quiet for a few moments. I think we were both thinking the same rueful thoughts. We had never considered the possibility that Burdock might be acting honourably, even heroically. No matter what else I learned that evening, I knew that I had already misjudged someone who deserved better.

  “All the same,” I said, “that still doesn’t explain why he didn’t alert the rest of us. If he knew he’d been poisoned, and if he had half an idea as to who might have been behind it, there’d have been hell to pay.”

  “Doubtless there would have been,” Grisha said. “But Burdock knew the risk was too great.”

  “Risk of what?” asked Purslane.

  “My existence coming to light. If his enemies learned of my existence, learned of what I know, they’d do all in their power to silence me.”

  “You mean they’d kill you as well?” I asked.

  Grisha gave off a quick, henlike cluck of amusement. “Yes, they’d certainly kill me. But not just me. That wouldn’t be thorough enough. They wouldn’t stop at this ship, either. They’d destroy every ship parked around the island, and then the island, and then perhaps the world.”

  I absorbed what he had said with quiet horror. Again, there was no doubt as to the truth of his words.

  “You mean they’d murder all of us?”
/>   “This is about more than just Gentian Line,” Grisha said. “The loss of a single line would be a setback, but not a crippling one. The other lines would take up the slack. It wouldn’t stop the Great Work.”

  I looked at him. “What do you know about the Great Work?”

  “Everything,” he said.

  “Are you going to tell us?” Purslane asked.

  “No,” he said. “I’ll leave that to Burdock. He still has several minutes of effective consciousness left, and I think he’d rather tell you in person. Before I wake him, though, it might not hurt if I told you a thing or two about myself, and how I came to be here.”

  “We’ve got all evening,” I said.

  Grisha’s people were archaeologists. They had been living in the same system for two million years, ever since settling it by generation ark. They had no interest in wider galactic affairs, and seemed perfectly content with a mortal lifespan of a mere two hundred years. They occupied their days in the diligent, monkish study of the Prior culture that had inhabited their system before their own arrival, in the time when humanity was still a gleam in evolution’s eye.

  The Priors had no name for themselves except the Watchers. They had been hard-shelled, multi-limbed creatures that spent half their lives beneath water. Their biology and culture was alien enough for a lifetime of study: even a modern one. But although they differed from Grisha’s people in every superficial respect, there were points of similarity between the two cultures. They too were archaeologists, of a kind.

  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 eve
ntually 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.”