“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 were 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 star-faring 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.”