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 Grisha’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.”