Thousandth Night by Reynolds Alastair

Author:Reynolds, Alastair [Reynolds, Alastair]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi
Tags: House of Suns, Alastair Reynolds, science fiction, space opera, far-future
Publisher: Subterranean Press
Published: 2013-04-04T16:00:00+00:00

We woke Burdock.

The assassination toxin was eating him at a measurable rate; cubic centimeters 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.”

“Gentian?”

“Gentian, or one of our allies. I had witnessed a terrible crime, a genocide worse than anything recorded in our history.”

“Why did you cover it up?” Purslane asked.

“The knowledge frightened me. But that wasn’t the reason I altered my strand. I did it because I needed time: time to identify those responsible, and protect Grisha from them until I had enough evidence to bring them to justice. If the perpetrators were among us—and I had reason to think they were—they would have killed Grisha to silence him. And if killing Grisha meant killing the rest of us, I don’t think they’d have blinked at that.” He managed a despairing laugh. “When you’ve just wiped out a two-million-year-old civilisation, what do a thousand clones matter?”

I tried not to sound too disbelieving. “The murder of an entire line? You think they’d go that far, just to cover up an earlier crime?”

“And more,” Burdock said gravely. “This is about more than our piddling little line, Campion.”

“The Great Work,” Purslane said, voicing my own thoughts. “A project bigger than any single line.

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