Thousandth Night (6 page)

“This
is too easy,” Purslane said.

“I
thought it was meant to be easy. I thought that was the point of going to all
that trouble with the access protocol.”

“I
know,” she said. “But it just seems . . .  I was expecting something to slow us
down. Now I’m worried that we’re walking into a trap.”

“Burdock
has no reason to set a trap,” I said. But I could not deny that I felt the same
unease. “Burdock isn’t expecting us to visit. He isn’t aware that we’re onto
him.”

“Let’s
check out the command deck,” she said. “But let’s be quick about it, all right?
The sooner we’re back on the island, the happier I’ll be.”

We
took the corridor, following its rising, curving ramp through several
rotations, obeying signs for the deck all the while. Around us the ship
breathed and gurgled like a sleeping monster, digesting its last big meal.
Biomechanical constructs were typical products of the Third Intercessionary
period, but I had never taken to them myself. I preferred my machines
hard-edged, the way nature intended.

But
nothing impeded our progress to the command deck. The deck was spaciously
laid-out, with a crescent window let into one curve of wall. It looked back
across the sea, to the island. A spray of golden lights betrayed the darkening
sliver of the main spire. I thought of the dreamers ranged throughout that
tower, and of the lies we were peddling them.

Mushroom-shaped
consoles studded the floor, rising to waist height. Purslane moved from one to
the next, conjuring a status readout with a pass of her hand.

“This
all looks good so far,” she said. “Control architecture is much as I remember
it from my ship. The navigations logs should be about. .. here.” She halted at
one of the mushrooms and flexed her hands in the stiffly formal manner of a
dancer. Text and graphics cascaded through the air in a flicker of primary
colours. “No time to go through it all now,” she said. “I’ll just commit it to
eidetic memory and review it later.” She increased the flow of data, until it
blurred into whiteness.

I
paced nervously up and down the crescent window. “Fine by me. Just out of
interest, what are the chances we’ll find anything incriminating anyway?”

Purslane’s
attention snapped onto me for a second. “Why not? We know for a fact that he
lied.”

“But
couldn’t he have doctored those logs as well? If he had something to hide . . .
why leave the evidence aboard his ship?”

But
Purslane did not answer me. She was looking beyond me, to the door where we had
entered. Her mouth formed a silent exclamation of horror and surprise.

“Stop,
please,” said a voice.

I
looked around, all my fears confirmed. But I recognised neither the voice nor
the person who had spoken.

It
was a man, baseline human in morphology. Nothing about his face marked him as
Gentian Line. His rounded skull lacked Abigail’s prominent cheekbones, and his
eyes were pure matched blue of a deep shade, piercing even in the subdued light
of the command deck.

“Who
are you?” I asked. “You’re not one of us, and you don’t look like one of the
guests.”

“He
isn’t,” Purslane said.

“Step
away from the console, please,” the man said. His voice was soft, unhurried.
The device he held in his fist was all the encouragement we needed. It was a
weapon: something unspeakably ancient and nasty. Its barrel glittered with
inlaid treasure. His gloved finger caressed the delicate little trigger. Above
the grip, defined by swirls of ruby, was the ammonite spiral of a miniature
cyclotron. The weapon was a particle gun.

Its
beam would slice through us as cleanly as it sliced through the hull of
Burdock’s ship.

“I
will use this,” the man said, “so please do as I say. Move to the middle of the
room, away from any instruments.”

Purslane
and I did as he said, joining each other side by side. I looked at the man,
trying to fit him into the Burdock puzzle. By baseline standards his
physiological age was mature. His face was lined, especially around the eyes,
with flecks of grey in his hair and beard. Something about the way he deported
himself led me to believe that he was just as old as he looked. He wore a
costume of stiff, skin-tight fabric in a shade of fawn, interrupted here and
there by metal plugs and sockets. A curious metal ring encircled his neck.

“We
don’t know who you are,” I said. “But we haven’t come to do you any harm.”

“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.