This was the Great Work. It was the culminative project of two million years of human advancement: the enterprise that would tax the ingenuity and resourcefulness of the most powerful lines. Where the lines squabbled now, they would come together in peaceful cooperation. And at the end of it (if any of us lived that long), we would have something wonderful to show for it. It would be the ultimate human achievement, a spectacle of engineering visible across cosmological distance. A beacon to our bright monkey cleverness.
It could not be allowed to happen.
That was the message Grisha’s people had uncovered, in their archaeological enquiries into their planet’s Prior culture. It transpired that the Watchers had witnessed something like the Great Work once already, in the distant spiral galaxy that they had been monitoring. Perhaps it was a kind of recurrent pathology, destined to afflict civilisations once they reached a certain evolutionary state. They grew weary of the scale of their galaxy and sought to shrink it.
In doing so they created the preconditions for their own extinction. Where once they had moved too slowly to threaten more than a handful of neighbouring systems, the compactification allowed war and disease to spread like wildfire. The inhuman scale of the colonised Galaxy was its strength as well as its weakness: time and distance were buffers against catastrophe. Spread out across tens of thousands of light-years, we were immune to extinction, at least by our own hands.
Compactified, death could touch us all in less than five thousand years.
“The Advocates knew this, I think,” Burdock said. “But they considered it to be a theoretical problem they would deal with when the time came. Surely, they rationalised, we would be wise enough to avoid such foolishness. But then they learned of the discovery made by the Watchers, and rediscovered by Grisha’s people. Another spiral culture that had gone down the same path—and ended up extinct; wiped out in a cosmological instant. Perhaps the fate was not so avoidable after all, no matter how wise you became. By rights, they should have viewed this data as an awful warning, and acted accordingly: abandoning the Great Work before a single star had moved an inch.”
But it was never going to happen like that. The lines had already invested too much of themselves in the future success of the Work. Alliances had already been forged; hierarchies of influence and responsibility agreed upon. To back down now would involve crushing loss of face to the senior lines. Old wounds would be reopened; old rivalries would simmer to the fore. If the Great Work was the project that would bind the lines, its abandonment could very easily push some of them to war. That was why Grisha’s people had to be silenced, even if it meant their genocide. For what was the loss of one culture, against something so huge? If we were still living in the prologue to history, they would be doing well to merit a footnote.
The vision ended then, and I felt my mind being sucked back to the body I had left (and nearly forgotten) aboard Burdock’s ship. There was a moment of unpleasant confinement, as if I was a being squeezed into a too-small bottle, and then I was back, still holding hands with Purslane, the two of us reeling as our inner ears adjusted to the return of gravity.
Grisha stood by the couch, his gun still in his hand. “Did you learn all that you needed to know?” he asked.
“I think so,” I started to say.
“Good,” he said. “Because Burdock’s dead. He gave you the last minute of his life.”
Purslane and I returned to the island as the sky lightened in anticipation of dawn. It was still midnight blue overhead, but the horizon was tinged with the softest tangerine orange, cut through by ribbons of cloud. As the box wheeled through the thicket of hanging ships toward the island, I began to see the crests of waves, stippled in brightening gold.
I had seen many dawns, but in all my travels I had never tired of them. Even now, with the weight of all that had happened and all that we had learned, some part of me stood aside from the moment to acknowledge the simple beauty of sunrise on another world. I wondered what Burdock would have made of it. Would it have touched him with the same alchemical force, bypassing the rational mind to speak to that animal part from which we were separated by only an evolutionary heartbeat? Perhaps I’d find a clue in all the strands Burdock had submitted during his time among us. Now there would be no more.
A death among the line was a terrible and rare thing. When it happened, one of us would be tasked to create a suitable memorial somewhere out in the stars. Such a memorial could take many forms. Long ago, the death of one of our number had been commemorated by the seeding of ferrite dust into the atmosphere of a dying star, just before the star expelled its outer envelope to create a nebula in the shape of a human head, sketched in lacy curves of blue green oxygen and red hydrogen, racing outward at sixty kilometres a second. Another memorial, no less heartfelt, had taken the form of a single stone kiln on an airless moon. Both had been appropriate.
Burdock would surely receive his due, but his death had to remain a secret until Thousandth Night. Until then Purslane and I would have to walk among our fellow line members with that knowledge in our hearts, and not betray the slightest hint of it.
We owed it to Burdock.
“We’re in time,” I said, as the box neared the island. “That took longer than I’d hoped, but the threading is still taking place. No one will have missed us yet.”
Purslane pressed a hand to her brow. “God, the threading. I’d forgotten all about that. Now I’ll have to spend all day telling lies. Please tell me this was a good idea, Campion.”
“Wasn’t it? We know what happened to Burdock now. We know about Grisha and the Great Work. Of course it was worth it.”
“Are you so sure? All we know now is that asking questions could get us into serious trouble. We’re still none the wiser about who’s actually behind this. I’m not sure I wasn’t happier in blissful ignorance.”
“We have the data from Burdock’s ship,” I reminded her.
“Have you looked at it yet, Campion?” I could tell from her tone that she wasn’t impressed. “My ship’s already sent me back a preliminary analysis. Burdock’s data is riddled with gaps.”
“He warned us there were a few holes.”
“What he didn’t say was that thirty percent of his records are missing. There may be something useful in the remaining data, but there’s still a good chance that the clues fell into the gaps.”
“Why the gaps in the first place? Do you think he edited out something he didn’t want us to see?”
Purslane shook her head. “Don’t think so. The gaps seem to be caused by his anti-collision screens going up, blinding his sensors. You saw how old that ship was: it probably has pretty ancient screen generators, or pretty ancient sensors, or both.”
“Why the anti-collision screens?”
“Debris,” Purslane said. “Grisha’s system had been turned into a cloud of radioactive rubble. Burdock’s approach never took him all that close to the main action, but there must still have been a lot of debris flying around. If he’d thought to turn up his triggering threshold, he might have given us more to work with…”
I tried to sound optimistic. “We’ll just to have make the best of what’s left.”
“My ship’s already made the obvious checks. I’ve seen the flame Burdock mentioned, but it really is too faint for an accurate match. If the murderers were hanging around the system before then, they must have been very well camouflaged.”