Thousandth Night

Thousandth Night by Alastair Reynolds

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Authors: Alastair Reynolds
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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

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