Thousandth Night (2 page)

“Focus
yourself,” I said, turning away.

Things
began to improve in the afternoon, when interest shifted to the next evening’s
strand. Purslane found me again, attending to a whimsical redesign of one of
the outlying towers. She told me that she had heard about an orgy on the
fiftieth level of the main spire, very exclusive, and that I should join her
there in an hour. Still stinging from Fescue’s criticism, I told her that I was
in no mood for it, but Purslane won me over and I agreed to meet when I was
done with the tower.

When
I arrived, the only other person there was Purslane.

“Wrong
floor, I take it?”

“No,”
she said, standing on the perfectly transparent floor of an out-flung balcony,
so that she appeared to float two kilometres above the sea. “Right floor, right
time. I told you it was exclusive.”

“But
you didn’t tell me it was
this
exclusive,” I said.

Purslane
disrobed. As they stepped away, her clothes assumed the texture of weathered
stone and froze into sculptural forms from deep antiquity. “Are you
complaining?” she asked.

My
own clothes broke up into a cloud of cherry blossom petals and scudded away
across the floor. “Not exactly, no.”

Purslane
looked on approvingly. “I can tell.”

We
rolled around on the glass floor, which softened and hardened itself in perfect
consideration of our needs. As we made love, I tried to remember whether I’d
designed the glass floor to be transparent in both directions—and if so what
kind of entertainment we were providing to the line members who might be
looking up to the fiftieth floor from below. Then I decided that I didn’t care.
If we outraged them, so be it.

“You
were right,” Purslane said, when we were lying together afterwards.

“Right
about what?”

“The
sunsets. Every bit as . .. challenging . . .  as you said.”

“Go
on. Kick a man when he’s down.”

“Actually
I admire your nerve,” she said. “You had a plan and you stuck with it. And some
of the sunsets were actually quite nice.”

She’d
meant it as a compliment, but I couldn’t help looking wounded. “Quite nice.”

Purslane
conjured a grape and popped it into my mouth. “Sorry, Campion.”

“It’s
all right,” I said. “At least I won’t have people pestering me for the rest of
the carnival, trying to get at the memories I edited out of the strand. At
least they’ll know that’s precisely as exciting as it gets.”

It
was true: the pressure was off, and to my surprise, I actually started relaxing
and enjoying the remaining days and nights. The last time, my submitted strand
had been so well received that there’d been mutterings that I must have spiced things
up for effect. I hadn’t— those things really had happened to me—but I’d still
spent the rest of the reunion in a state of prickly self-defence.

It
was better now. I enjoyed feeling my mind filling with bright new experience;
multiple snapshots of a dizzying complex and teeming Galaxy. It was the
euphoria of drunkenness combined with an absolute, crystalline clarity of mind.
It was glorious and overwhelming: an avalanche of history.

At
the last count there were ten million settled solar systems out there. Fifty
million planet-class worlds. Entire upstart civilisations had risen and fallen
since the last reunion, several times over. With the passing of every reunion
it seemed impossible that the wilder fringes of humanity could become any
stranger, any less recognisable. Yet they always contrived to do so; oozing
into every cosmic niche like molten lava, and then carving out new niches that
no one had dared dreamed of before.

Two
million years of bioengineering and cyborg reshaping had equipped humankind for
any possible physical environment. Twenty thousand distinct branches of
humanity had returned to alien seas, each adopting a different solution to the
problem of aquatic life. Some were still more or less humanoid, but others had
sculpted themselves into sleek sharklike things, or dextrous multi-limbed
molluscs or hard-shelled arthropods. There were thirteen hundred distinct human
cultures in the atmospheres of gas giants. Ninety that swam in the metallic
hydrogen oceans under those atmospheres. There were vacuum dwellers and star
dwellers. There were people who lived in trees, and people who had, by some
definition, become trees themselves. There were people as large as small moons,
which fostered entire swarming communities within their bodies. There were
people who had encoded themselves into the nuclear structure of neutron stars,
although no one had heard much from
them
lately. Against all this
change, the nine hundred and ninety-three members of the Gentian Line must have
appeared laughably quaint and antique, with our stolid adherence to traditional
anatomy. But all this was just convention. Prior to arrival on the planet, we
were free to adopt whatever forms we chose. The only rule was that when we
emerged from our ships we must assume the forms of adult humans, and that we
must bring our minds with us. Minor matters such as gender, build, pigmentation
and sexual orientation were left to our discretion, but we were all obliged to
carry the facial characteristics of Abigail Gentian: her high cheekbones, her
strong jaw and the fact that her left eye was green and the other a wintery,
jackdaw blue.

Everything
else was up for grabs.

Perhaps
it was the stirring up of the past as each new thread was added, but we all
felt Abigail Gentian’s base memories looming large in our thoughts as
Thousandth Night approached. We remembered how it had felt to be just one
individual, in the centuries before Abigail shattered herself into pieces and
sent them roaming the Galaxy. We all remembered being Abigail.

Somewhere
near the seven-hundredth threading, I was again approached by Purslane. Her
hair was styled in stiff spiral arms, like the structure of our galaxy. They
twinkled with embedded gems: reds, yellows and hard blue-whites for different
stellar populations.

“Campion?”
she asked cautiously.

I
turned from the balcony. I was repairing one of the bridges after a storm,
knitting it back together with wizardlike hand movements, making the invisibly
small machines that composed the bridge dance to my commands. Matter flowed
like milk, and then hardened magically.

“Come
to torment me about sunsets?”

“Not
exactly. You and I need to talk.”

“We
could always go to one of those exclusive orgies,” I said teasingly.

“I
mean somewhere private.
Very
private.” She seemed distracted, quite
unlike her usual self. “Did you create a Secure on this island?”

“I
didn’t see the need. I can create one, if you think it’s worth it.”

“No:
that’ll just draw too much attention. We’ll have to make do with my ship.”

“I
really need to finish this bridge.”

“Finish
it. I’ll be on my ship whenever you’re ready.”

“What
is this about, Purslane?”

“Be
on my ship.”

She
turned away. A few moments later a square glass pane tumbled out of the sky and
lowered itself to the ground. Purslane stepped onto the pane. Its edges
expanded and then angled upward to form a box. The box rose into the air,
carrying Purslane, and then suddenly accelerated away from the island. I
watched it speed into the distance, the grey light occasionally flaring off one
of its flat sides. The box became tiny and then just a twinkling dot. It
vanished into the scarred, mountainous hull of an enormous waiting ship.

I
returned to my bridge-repair work, wondering.

“What
is all this about?”

“It’s
about your thread, among other things.” She looked at me astutely, reclining in
the lounge chair that her ship had provided. “You told us all the truth, didn’t
you? You really did spend two hundred thousand years watching sunsets?”

“If
I wanted to make something up, don’t you think I would have made it a tiny bit
more exciting?”

“That’s
what I thought.”

“Besides,”
I said. “I didn’t
want
to win this time. Creating this venue was a major
headache. You’ve no idea how much I agonised about the placement of these
islands, let alone whatever I’ve cooked up for Thousandth Night.”

“No,
I can believe it. And I believe
you.
I just had to ask.” She tugged down
one of the spiral arms in her hair and bit on it nervously. “Though you could
still be lying, I suppose.”

“I’m
not. Are you going to get to the point?”

My
travel box had brought me into Purslane’s hovering ship an hour after her
departure. My ship was modestly sized for an interstellar craft; only three
kilometres long, but Purslane’s was enormous. It was two hundred kilometres
from nose to tail, with a maximum width of twenty. The tail parts of her ship
projected above the atmosphere, into the vacuum of space. By night they
sparkled as anticollision fields intercepted and vaporised meteorites. Auroral
patterns played around the upper extremities like a lapping tide.

There
were many reasons why someone might need a ship this big. It might have been
constructed around some antique but valuable moon-sized engine, or some huge,
fabulously efficient prototype drive that no one else possessed. Any advance
that could get you slightly closer to the speed of light was to be treasured.
Or it might be that her ship carried some vast, secret cargo, like the entire
sentient population of an evacuated planet. Or it might be that the ship had
been made this big in a gesture of mad exuberance, simply because it was
possible to do so. Or it might be—and here my thoughts choked on bitter
alienness—that the ship had to be this big to contain its one living passenger.
Purslane was human-sized now, but who was to say what her true form was like
between our visits to Reunion?

I
didn’t want to know, and I didn’t ask.

“The
point is delicate,” Purslane said. “I could be wrong about it. I almost
certainly am. After all, no one else seems to have noticed anything unusual.
..”

“Anything
unusual about what?”

“Do
you remember Burdock’s thread?”

“Burdock?
Yes, of course.” It was a silly, if understandable question. None of us were
capable of forgetting any of the threaded strands unless we made a conscious
effort to delete them. “Not that there was much about it
worth
remembering.” Burdock was a quiet, low-profile line member who never went out
of his way to make a show of himself. He’d threaded his strand a few weeks
earlier. It had been uneventful, and I hadn’t paid much attention to it. “It
was almost as if he was trying to upstage me in the dullness stakes.”

“I
think he lied,” Purslane said. “I think Burdock’s thread was deliberately
altered.”

“By
Burdock himself?”

“Yes.”

“Why
would he do that, though? The strand still wasn’t very interesting.”

“I
think that was the point. I think he wanted to conceal something that did
happen. He used dullness as a deliberate camouflage.”

“Wait,”
I said. “How can you be sure things just weren’t that dull?”

“Because
of a contradiction,” Purslane said. “Look, when the last reunion ended we all
of us hared off into the Galaxy in different directions. As far as I’m aware,
none of us swapped plans or itineraries.”

“Forbidden,
anyway,” I said.

“Yes.
And the chances of any of us bumping into each other between then and now were
tiny.”

“But
it happened?”

“Not
exactly. But I think
something
happened to Burdock: something that had
him doctoring his thread to create a false alibi.”

I
shifted in my seat. These were serious allegations, far above the usual bitchy
speculation that attended any private discussion about other members of the
Gentian Line. “How can you know?”

“Because
his memories contradict yours. I know: I’ve checked. According to your mutual
strands, the two of you should have both been in the same system at the same
time.”

“Which
system?”

She
told me. It was an unremarkable place: just another star dipping into an alien
sea, as far as I was concerned. “I was there,” I said. “But I definitely didn’t
bump into Burdock.” I rummaged through my memories, digging through mnemonic
headers to those specific events. “He didn’t come nearby either. No
interstellar traffic came close to that world during my entire stay. His ship
might have been stealthed . . .”

“I
don’t think it was. Anyway, he doesn’t mention you either. Was your ship
stealthed?”

“No.”

“Then
he’d have seen you arriving or departing. The interstellar medium’s pretty
thick near there. Relativistic ships can’t help but carve a wake through it.
He’d surely have made some mention of that if the strand was real.”

She
was right. Accidental encounters were always celebrated: a triumph of
coincidence over the inhuman scale of the Galaxy.

“What
do you think happened?”

“I
think Burdock was unlucky,” Purslane said. “I think he picked that world out of
a hat, never imagining you’d visit it just when he claimed to be there.”

“But
his strand was threaded after mine. If he was going to lie . ..”

“I
don’t think he paid enough attention to your catalogue of sunsets,” Purslane
said. “Can’t blame him, though, can you?”

“It
could be me that’s lying,” I said.

“My
money’s still on Burdock. Anyway, that’s not the only problem with his story.
There are a couple of other glitches: nothing quite so egregious, but enough to
make me pick through the whole thing looking for anomalies. That’s when I
spotted the contradiction.”

I
looked at her wonderingly. “This is serious.”

“It
could be.”

“It
must be. Harmless exaggeration is one thing. Even outright lying is
understandable. But why would you replace the truth with something less
interesting, unless you had something to hide?”