“Yes,” I said, faltering.
“Then you must drop the two of us through the floor.”
They were standing only a few metres apart. It would only cost me a moment’s concentration to order that part of the floor to detach itself, falling free. But if I did that, I would be sending Fescue to his death.
“Do it!” he hissed.
“I can’t,” I said.
“Campion,” he said. “I know you and I have had our differences. I have always criticised you for lacking spine. Well, now is your chance to prove me wrong. Do this.
“Do it! For the sake of the line!”
I looked at the faces of the other line members. I saw their pain, but also their solemn consent. They were telling me that I had no choice. They were telling me to kill Fescue, and save us all.
I did it.
I willed the floor around the two figures to detach itself from the rest of the balcony. The tiny machines forming the fabric of the floor followed my will with dumb obedience, severing the molecular bonds that linked each machine to its neighbour.
For a heart-rending moment, the floor seemed to hover in place.
The field around Samphire quivered, beginning to lose integrity. Fescue’s generators were running out of power, Fescue running out of concentration…
He looked at me and nodded. “Good work, Campion.”
Then they dropped.
It was a long way down, and they were still falling when the revellers surged to the edge of the balcony to look down. The light from the explosion momentarily eclipsed the brightest impacts still raining down on the planet. I nodded at Fescue’s assessment: kilotonne range, easily. He had been right. It would have killed us all, and snapped the spire in two had the balcony not been flung so far out in space. It had been an accidental whim of design, but it had saved us all.
So had Fescue.
There was a great space battle that night, but this time it was for real, not staged in memory of some ancient, time-fogged conflict. The real Samphire had been on his ship, and when the construct failed to destroy the island, he made a run for orbit. From orbit, he must have planned to turn the ship’s own armaments on Reunion. But Fescue’s allies had anticipated him, and when his ship moved, so did a dozen others. They made interception above the lacerated atmosphere of my dying world and lit the sky with obscene energies. Samphire died, or at least that version of Samphire that had been sent to infiltrate our gathering. It may or may not have been the final one. It may or may not have been the only impostor in our midst.
After the battle, Vetchling, one of the other Advocates, took me aside and told me what she knew.
“Fescue supported the Great Work,” she said. “But not at any cost. When evidence reached him that an atrocity had been committed in the name of the Work… the murder of an entire human culture… he realised that not all of us shared his view.”
“Then Fescue knew all along,” I said, dismayed.
“No. He had shards of intelligence—hints, rumours, whisperings. He still had no idea who had committed the crime; how deeply they were tied to Gentian Line. He did not know whether the rest of the Advocates could be trusted.” She paused. “He trusted me, and a handful of others. But not everyone.”
“But Fescue spoke to me about the Great Work,” I said. “Of how we all had to bind together to bring it into being.”
“He believed it would be for the best. But more than likely he was sounding you out, seeing what you thought of it, goading you into an indiscretion.” Vetchling looked to the simmering sea, punctured by hundreds of volcanic vents that had reopened in the planet’s crust. We were looking down on the sea from a dizzy height now: the island had detached itself from Reunion, and was now climbing slowly into space, pushed by the vast motors I must have installed in its foundation rocks. The blast from Samphire’s weapon had shattered the outlying islands, crumbling them back into the sea. The water had rushed into the fill the caldera left after the main island’s departure, and now there was no trace that it had ever existed.
The party was over.
“He suspected Advocate involvement in the crime,” Vetchling continued. “But he could not rule out someone else being implicated: a sleeper, an agent no one would suspect.”
“He must have suspected Purslane and I,” I said.
“That’s possible. You did spend a lot of time associating, after all. If it’s any consolation, the two of you wouldn’t have been his only suspects. He may even have had his suspicions about Samphire.”
“What will happen to the Great Work now?”
“That’s not just a matter for Gentian Line,” Vetchling said. “But my guess is there’ll be pressure to put the whole thing on the back burner for a few hundred thousand years. A cooling-off period.” She sounded sad. “Fescue was respected. He had a lot of friends beyond our line.”
“I hated him,” I said.
“He wouldn’t have minded. All he really cared about was the line. You did the right thing, Campion.”
“I killed him.”
“You saved us all. You have Fescue’s gratitude.”
“How can you know?” I asked.
She touched a finger to her lips. “I know. Isn’t that enough for you?”
A little later, Purslane and I stood alone on the highest balcony of the island’s central spire. The island had climbed out of what would have been Reunion’s atmosphere, had the atmosphere remained.
Far below, viewed through the flickering curtain of the containment bubble, my planet writhed in the agonies of its death by stoning. The impacting asteroids struck her like fists, bludgeoning her in furious quick-time. At least two, sometimes three or four, arrived within every minute. Their impact fireballs had dispersed most of the atmosphere by now, and had elevated a goodly fraction of the crust into parabolas of molten rock, tongues of flame that arced thousands of kilometres before splashing down. They reminded me of the coronal arcs near the surface of a late-type star. The ocean was a memory: boiled into a dust-choked vapour. Concussion from the multiple impacts was already unhinging the delicate clockwork of the planet’s magnetohydrodynamic core. Had there been a spot on the planet where it was still night, the auroral storms would have been glorious. For a moment, I regretted that I had not arranged matters so that the aurorae had formed part of the show, somehow, someway.
But it was much too late for second thoughts now. It would be someone else’s turn next time.
Purslane took my hand. “Don’t look so sad, Campion. You did well. It was a fine end.”
“You think so?”
“They’ll be raving about this for a million years. What you did with those whales…” She shook her head in undisguised admiration.
“I couldn’t very well let them stay in the ocean.”
“It was lovely. Putting aside everyone else that happened… I think that was my favourite bit. Not that this is bad, either.”
We paused a while to watch a succession of major impacts: a long, sequenced string of them. Continent-sized fissures were beginning to open up deep into the planet’s mantle: wounds as bright as day.
“I created something and now I’m ruining it. Doesn’t that strike you as just the tiniest bit… infantile? Fescue certainly wouldn’t have approved.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s not as if that world ever had any chance of outlasting us. It was created to endure for a specific moment in time. Like a sandcastle, or an ice sculpture. Here, and then gone. In a way, that’s the beauty of it. Who’d marvel at a sandcastle, if sandcastles lasted forever?”
“Or sunsets, I suppose,” I said.