House of Suns

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘I’ll move,’ Bartsia said, who happened to be sitting next to one of the empty positions. She made to stand, gathering the hem of her dress in preparation.

  ‘There’s no need,’ said Medick, with amused laughter in his voice. ‘I am sure Campion and Purslane will not mind sitting apart - any more than the rest of us would. Or am I missing something?’

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said to Bartsia. ‘You don’t have to get up. But thank you for offering.’

  I took my seat next to her, while Campion settled into the one between Henbane and Teasel.

  Betony, who was sitting at the equilateral position between us, lifted a glass of orange juice to his lips. ‘Did you sleep well, shatterlings?’ he asked between sips. ‘Was the accommodation to your tastes?’

  ‘We’ve no complaints,’ Campion said.

  Each of us had at least an entire floor of the tower to ourselves, subdivided into several high-ceilinged rooms with panoramic windows and curving, cave-like walls.

  ‘You presume to speak for Purslane as well?’ Betony asked, with exaggerated pleasantness.

  ‘Campion knows my tastes,’ I said. ‘He was right to speak for me. Anyway - we slept together. You all know it, or at least suspect it, so why the pretence?’

  ‘When the Line is in its darkest hour, you could at least attempt to abide by the traditions,’ Betony said.

  ‘So you’ve never screwed another shatterling,’ I said.

  ‘Over breakfast, Purslane? Please.’

  ‘You raised the matter, Betony, not me.’

  Aconite lifted a calming hand. ‘Let’s cut them some slack, shall we? We might not approve of every detail of their relationship, but the Line still owes them a considerable debt.’

  Betony looked disappointed, but said nothing.

  ‘If you’re going to censure us, now would be the time,’ Campion said. Nonchalantly he reached for a crust of bread and tore off a corner. He was so cool about it that I felt a shiver of almost indecent pride. ‘However, I think you’re all far too sensible for that. Yes, we broke the rules. But the rules don’t mean a damn now. Gentian Line as we know it is over. We might build something from the ruins, but let’s not pretend it’s going to have much to do with the institution Abigail created six million years ago.’

  ‘The Line still has legitimacy,’ Galingale said, without any particular rancour, ‘but I take your point. Campion and Purslane aren’t the only shatterlings to have flirted with the notion of consorting during circuits. They may have taken rule-bending further than most of us, but there have always been others.’

  ‘Nobody sitting around this table,’ Betony said.

  Galingale scratched at the metal border of his artificial eye. It was like an iron badge glued to his face, with a small red gem in the middle. ‘Perhaps not. But the time may still have come to let bygones be bygones. What’s so harmful about a little screwing around between friends?’

  ‘It’s not what Abigail wanted,’ Betony said. ‘A harmless fuck here and there, during the Thousand Nights - that’s different. The occasional orgy, yes. But we don’t consort. We don’t fall in love, have children, live happily ever after. That’s not what Abigail made us for.’

  ‘Abigail believed in flexibility as well,’ Galingale said. ‘If she were sitting at this table, she might very well have come around to Purslane and Campion’s line of thinking.’

  ‘That’s your opinion,’ Betony said.

  ‘If we hadn’t consorted,’ I said, ‘neither of us would have been late for the reunion. We’d most likely have been caught in the ambush and died along with all the others.’

  ‘She has a point,’ Galingale said. ‘Perhaps the sensible thing would be to put this little infringement behind us and move on. Without Purslane and Campion’s involvement, we wouldn’t have the five other shatterlings, or the prisoners.’ He brushed crumbs from his lips. ‘Speaking of which ... have we decided how we’re going to proceed? It should be straightforward to bring the three Gentians out of stasis, but we’ll need to be more cautious where the prisoners are concerned. Then there’s the question of what we do to them once they’re out.’ He looked sharply at Mezereon, who was sitting on the opposite side of the table from Aconite, as if the two of them had barely spoken.

  ‘With the sanction of the Line, I would like to lead the interrogation,’ Mezereon said. ‘Under due scrutiny, of course. But they’re our prisoners - we caught them and kept them intact until Campion came by. Rightly or wrongly, I feel a sense of unfinished business.’

  ‘I don’t think any of us will have a problem with you leading the inquiry,’ Betony said. ‘Under Line supervision, as you say. Do you have a plan?’

  ‘I’ll save Grilse for last - I think he’s the one we’ll get the most off, and the one most likely to survive re-emergence into normal time. If I can get him out in one piece, I’d like to press for extraordinary interrogation measures.’

  ‘Sectioning,’ said Charlock, disgustedly.

  ‘It’s another tool in the arsenal,’ Mezereon said, with an easy shrug.

  ‘Which we haven’t used for circuits,’ Charlock said. ‘Which is considered a barbaric throwback to the dark ages by a good many enlightened nascents.’

  ‘But not by the Commonality, which is all that counts. We won’t be breaking any applicable laws.’ Something wild flared in Mezereon’s eyes. ‘We were the ones who were ambushed and pushed to the brink of terminal attrition, not some other Lines or nascents. Let them get a taste of extinction and see how long their principles last. Do you imagine the Marcellins would even blink before using the same technique on one of us, if it came to that?’

  ‘Torturing Grilse won’t necessarily get the answers you’re looking for,’ Charlock said.

  ‘It isn’t torture. Torture involves pain. We won’t hurt him at all.’

  ‘Aside from the ethical issues, do we even have the means?’ Betony asked, steepling his fingers under his chin.

  ‘The apparatus can be constructed very easily,’ Merezeon said. ‘Any one of our troves should carry the maker templates. Judging by what I’ve seen of Ymir, we could do it even if we had to rely on local resources.’ She sprinkled sugar onto a piece of fruit on her plate. She had already sliced the fruit into translucent slivers, as if rehearsing the act of sectioning.

  ‘Let us agree that Mezereon will lead the interrogation,’ Betony said, looking around the table for signs of dissent. ‘Aconite - I presume you’ll wish to be involved. We’ll get the other three shatterlings out of abeyance as soon as possible, and give them the option of joining the interrogation party. The rest of us, meanwhile, will perform the necessary oversight and scrutiny. But we won’t place undue limits on Mezereon’s authority. Most of us either avoided the ambush entirely or escaped it at the time of the attack. Mezereon and the other survivors were there for years, surviving by the skin of their teeth. They’re owed a crack of the whip.’

  Anxious to turn the conversation away from torture and interrogation, I said, ‘Given what you’ve learned since arriving on Neume, have any of you come to any conclusions as to why we were ambushed?’

  ‘What can it be, other than a simple grudge?’ asked Betony. ‘We are not the strongest Line in the Commonality, and we have much less leverage over dominant nascents than some of the other Lines, so it can’t be that we were attacked out of jealousy, or because of some underlying political motive. For six million years we have been content to mind our own business, doing good works where appropriate, providing the occasional stardam here and there, but otherwise standing aloof from the nitty-gritty of turnover. We’ve seldom dirtied our hands with galactic affairs, preferring to witness and record rather than intercede. Any enemies we may have made have most likely been extinct for circuits.’

  ‘I’m hearing a lot of reasons why someone wouldn’t hold a grudge against us,’ Campion said.

  Betony looked sympathetic. ‘Then you misunderstand human nature, my dear fellow. People will hate us simply for be
ing what we are: a force for good, for benign non-interference. The mere fact that we haven’t dirtied our hands, that we’ve maintained an unblemished reputation - that’s enough to make someone detest us.’

  ‘Another Line?’ I asked.

  Betony nodded. ‘That may well be so, Purslane. Certainly, a Line might have the wherewithal to assemble the weapons that were used against us. The Marcellins in particular—’

  ‘The Marcellins have been our allies since the Golden Hour,’ I said. ‘We gave them cloning expertise, they gave us ships. In all that time, there’s never been a hint that they held anything against us.’

  ‘It’s often the close friend who’s the first to stick the dagger in,’ Betony said.

  ‘What if we were attacked for another reason entirely?’ Campion asked.

  ‘Nurturing a theory?’ Betony asked.

  Campion glanced at Aconite. ‘Maybe you should tell him, if you still think it’s relevant.’

  Aconite coughed and took a mouthful of water. ‘The only concrete thing we got out of Grilse before we had to dial him back up was that he claimed the ambush was somehow due to Campion.’

  Betony squinted. ‘Campion?’

  ‘That’s what the man said.’

  ‘He could have been lying.’

  Campion leaned forward. ‘We thought it over. The only thing that makes sense - given that I wasn’t at the reunion when it happened - is that there must have been something in my strand, the one I contributed a circuit ago.’

  Mezereon said, ‘No one thinks Campion was responsible - if they do, they can explain it to me after breakfast. But it’s quite possible he may have triggered it inadvertently. If there was something in his thread, something that led to the ambush at the next reunion, we must find out what it was.’

  Betony glared at Campion. ‘And you have no idea what this ... trigger might have been?’

  Campion explained his theory that his visit to the Vigilance might have drawn down the ambush, pointing out that Hesperus and the late Doctor Meninx had both been curious about the galactic archivists.

  ‘All of a sudden there’s a lot of interest in the Vigilance,’ Campion concluded. ‘The Machine People decide to send an envoy there - but he doesn’t make it before having his memory wiped. Something snags Doctor Meninx’s curiosity. And perhaps something I revealed about the Vigilance was sufficient to trigger the ambush.’

  ‘You found something of shattering importance, but you don’t remember what it was?’ Betony asked.

  ‘Someone may have seen something in my strand that I missed,’ Campion said, unfazed by the other shatterling’s amused scepticism. ‘We’ll need to look at my strand in detail, all of us. Something I revealed was damaging or threatening to someone - enough that they thought it worthwhile to try to annihilate all of us.’

  Galingale said, ‘Someone who was at the reunion, you mean? One of us?’

  ‘The H-guns arrived inside ships of the Line,’ I said. ‘There’s no other way they’d have got within shooting range of the reunion world before interception. Aconite and Mezereon will back me up on that one.’ I looked at Aconite and he held up his hand in a gesture of willing surrender. Mezereon nodded once.

  ‘Someone knew where the reunion was going to take place,’ Campion answered. ‘That already implies access to privileged information. And Fescue was convinced that the familial network had been broken into. Reading between the lines, I’m sure he already suspected one of us was responsible. If he was sitting here now, I’m certain he’d be asking the hard questions.’

  Cyphel spoke for the first time, brushing a strand of blue-white hair from her dark, dreamy eyes. I was seeing her through my eyes, but with Campion’s memories getting the way. ‘Most of us arrived at the reunion in time to be ambushed. But the threading hadn’t begun - we were still waiting for the last stragglers before beginning the Thousand Nights, which means that the strands died with the shatterlings. We’ll never know what they did during their final circuits.’

  We all looked at her, not quite sure what point she was making.

  ‘But we do know their intentions,’ Cyphel said. She had a voice like dark chocolate. ‘Before we departed for space, after the last reunion, we all filed our flight-plans. None of us was obliged to keep to them slavishly - we’re meant to change our plans as interesting data comes in. But we still know what most of us were planning to do.’

  ‘I don’t see—’ Betony started.

  ‘If the flight-plans are still on record,’ Cyphel said, ‘we can review them and see if any of us were intending to act on Campion’s strand.’

  ‘I’d have remembered if anyone else was going to the Vigilance,’ Campion said.

  ‘It won’t be that clear-cut,’ Cyphel replied. ‘But the Vigilance collates and studies information from across the galaxy, from many systems. You may have reported something that spurred someone else to make a follow-up investigation, without ever going anywhere near the Vigilance itself.’

  Aconite said, ‘It’s worth looking into.’

  ‘Very well,’ Betony said, his tone grudging. ‘Cyphel - can we entrust this one to you?’

  ‘I don’t mind. As long as I have the usual access privileges, I’m as capable of doing it as anyone else. I’ll need a clean copy of Campion’s strand, obviously.’ She turned her radiant features towards him. ‘Will that be a problem?’

  ‘It might,’ Campion said quietly.

  ‘I don’t follow,’ Betony said. ‘We all had free access to your strand a circuit ago. Why should it be a difficulty now?’

  ‘Because it doesn’t exist. I deleted it.’

  Aconite gaped. ‘But on the ship you told us—’

  ‘I was wrong, all right? I thought there might possibly be a working backup somewhere in the trove. There wasn’t. I screwed up.’

  ‘Why would anyone delete their own strand?’ Tansy asked, stupefied.

  ‘It was a mistake.’

  ‘An honest error. Happens to us all,’ Charlock said.

  ‘It wasn’t that kind of mistake,’ Campion said. ‘More of a misjudgement. I got rid of it because I was fed up hauling all that past around with me. I felt like a man dragging an endless chain of sacks behind him, each of them stuffed with enough experience for an entire lifetime.’ Seeing the expressions on the faces of many of the shatterlings, Campion reddened. ‘They were my memories - I did what I wanted with them. That’s my human right, above and beyond anything the Line tells me to do.’

  ‘Oh, Campion,’ I said, under my breath, because as much as I wanted to be on his side, I knew what he had done was almost unforgivable.

  ‘I didn’t think it really mattered,’ he went on. ‘I knew the threading apparatus would retain a clean copy, which would still be in its memory when we convened for the next reunion.’

  ‘The threading apparatus was destroyed by the H-guns,’ Betony said.

  ‘I wasn’t to know that.’

  ‘But you put us in a position where that was the only clean copy in existence.’

  ‘Hindsight’s a lovely thing,’ Campion said.

  ‘You were already skating very close to censure. This takes you well over the line.’

  ‘We were all smiles yesterday, Betony - what’s changed?’

  ‘You were owed a cordial welcome, like any survivors. But that doesn’t change the fact that you flouted Line traditions, took undue risks, treated your strand with cavalier disregard. Those weren’t your memories to erase, Campion - you were merely entrusted with them on behalf of Gentian Line.’

  ‘Well, whatever it is you want to do with me, you have my full permission. But can I just suggest that the punishment - whatever it is - waits until we’ve worked out who wants to kill us?’

  ‘Before we hang Campion out to dry,’ Cyphel said, ‘we should keep this in mind. We all received his strand. That means we still have fifty-odd copies of it between us, all of which will have been mnemonically tagged.’

  ‘But degraded by the passage of
time, and buried under new memories,’ Mezereon said, sounding as if she was making a reasonable point rather than trying to twist the knife.

  Cyphel nodded. ‘I know, but it isn’t irrecoverable. I’m not saying we can reassemble a clean copy, but I’m sure we can get very close if we pool our minds. If everyone is willing to submit to memory retrieval again, I can extract the individual versions of Campion’s strand and cross-correlate them until the holes are filled and the errors corrected.’

  ‘It’s worth a try,’ Aconite said.

  ‘That puts a lot of responsibility on your shoulders, Cyphel,’ said Betony.

  ‘I’ll cope.’

  Betony tapped a chunk of bread against his head, like a judge about to deliver a verdict. ‘So shall it be. Mezereon will lead the inquisition into the prisoners. Cyphel will handle the retrieval of the Campion strand, insofar as it can be recovered. Tansy - I believe you are on patrol duty today. And that, I think, is more than enough business for one breakfast.’

  ‘Might I say something?’ I asked.

  Betony smiled at me. ‘Naturally, Purslane.’

  ‘Are we to be censured or not? I’d like to get it out in the open, here and now.’

  ‘You’ve only just arrived. The nature of your censure is a complex one, with many factors. It can’t be decided instantly.’

  ‘As far as I’m concerned there’s only one factor. We consorted. The fact that we were late has nothing to do with it - it could have happened to anyone else. We brought the Line five survivors it wouldn’t otherwise have got back, and the prisoners, and Hesperus.’

  ‘To which we must also add Campion’s unfortunate treatment of his strand.’

  ‘Censure me for that, by all means, but leave Purslane out of it,’ Campion said.

  ‘Unfortunately, by consorting, by arriving together, by flaunting your feelings for each other, you have demonstrated your willingness to be censured as a couple. So shall it be.’