Thousandth Night / Minla's Flowers

by Alastair Reynolds

  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 m
oney’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?”

  “That’s what I thought as well.”

  “Why would he go to the trouble of creating an alibi, when he could just as easily delete the offending memories from his strand?”

  “Risky,” Purslane said. “Safer to swap the system he did visit with one in the same neck of the woods, so that it didn’t throw his timings too far out, in case anyone dug too deeply into his strand.”

  “That doesn’t help us work out where he was, though—the same neck of the woods still means hundreds of light years, thousands of possible systems.”

  “It’s a big galaxy,” Purslane.

  There was an uneasy silence. Far above us, beyond layers of armoured metal, I heard the seismic groan as something colossal shifted and settled like a sleeping baby.

  “Have you spoken to Burdock?”

  “Not about this.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “Just you,” Purslane said. “I’m worried, Campion. What if Burdock did something?”

  “A crime?”

  “It’s not unthinkable.”

  But unthinkable was precisely what it was. Gentian Line was not the only one of its kind. When Abigail shattered herself, others had done likewise. Some of those lines had died out over the intervening time, but most had endured in some shape or form. Although customs varied, most of those lines had something similar to Reunion: a place where they convened and re-threaded memories.

  In the last two million years, there had been many instances of contact between those lines. Until recently, Gentian Line had been isolationist, but some of the others had formed loose associations. There had been treaties and feuds. One entire line had been murdered, when a rival line booby-trapped its equivalent of Reunion with an antimatter device left over from the War of the Local Bubble. Nowadays we were all a lot more careful. There were formal ties between many of the lines. There were agreed rules of behaviour. Feuds were out, marriages were in. There were plans for future collaboration, like the Great Work.

  The Great Work was a project—not yet initiated—which would require the active cooperation of many lines. Whatever it was was big. Beyond that I knew nothing about it. I wasn’t alone in my ignorance. Officially, no members of Gentian Line were privy to detailed knowledge about the Great Work. That information was held by an alliance of lines to which we hadn’t yet been granted full membership. The expectation, however, was that it wouldn’t be long before we were invited into the club. Among the guests on Reunion were ambassadors from other lines—some of which were in on the big secret. They were keeping an eye on us, sampling our strands, judging our wisdom and readiness.

  Unofficially, there were also Gentian members who seemed to know something. I remembered Fescue’s criticism of my strand: how there were turbulent times coming and how I’d have all the time in the world to loll around on beaches after the Great Work had been completed. Fescue—and a handful of other line members—had almost certainly been tipped off.

  We called them the Advocates.

  But while it seemed likely that we’d be invited to participate in the project before very long, we were also now at our most vulnerable. A single error could jeopardize our standing with the other lines. We’d all been mindful of this as we prepared our strands.

  But what if one of us had done something truly awful? A crime committed by one Gentian Line member would reflect badly upon all of us. Technically, we were different manifestations of the same individual. If one Gentian member had it in them to do something bad, then it could be presumed that we all did.

  If Burdock had indeed committed a crime, and if that crime came to light, then we might well be excluded from the Great Work.

  “This could be bad,” I said.

  It was very hard to behave normally in the days and weeks that followed. No matter where I went, I bumped into Burdock with unerring regularity. Our paths had hardly crossed during this latest carnival, but now he and I seemed doomed to meet each other every day. During these awkward encounters I kept fumbling for the right tone, hoping that I never gave away any hint of the suspicion Purslane and I felt. At the same time, my mind spun out of control with imagined crimes. Like any members of a starfaring society, those of Gentian Line had terrible powers at their disposal. One of our ships, used carelessly, could easily incinerate a world. Deliberate action was even more chilling to contemplate. Members of other lines had committed atrocities in the remote past. History was paved with genocides.

  But nothing about Burdock suggested a criminal streak. He wasn’t ambitious. His strands had always been unmemorable. He’d never attempted to influence Gentian policy. He had no obvious enemies.

  “Do you think anyone else knows?” I asked Purslane, during another covert meeting aboard her ship. “After all, the evidence is all out there in the public realm. Anyone else could spot those discrepancies if they paid enough attention.”

  “That’s the point, though: I don’t think anyone else will. You and I are friends. I probably paid more attention to your sunsets than anyone else did. And I’m a stickler for detail. I’ve been looking out for false threads during every carnival.”

  “Because you suspected one of us might lie?”

  “Because it made it more interesting.”

  “Maybe we’re making too much of this,” I said. “Maybe he just did something embarrassing that he wanted to cover up. Not a crime, but just something that would have made him look foolish.”

  “We’ve all done foolish things. That hasn’t stopped any of us including them in our strands when the mood suits us. Remember Orpine, during the third carnival?”

  Orpine had made a fool of herself near the Whipping Star, SS433, nearly crashing her ship in the process. But her honesty had endeared her to the rest of us. She had been chosen to forge the venue for the fourth carnival. Ever since then, including an embarrassing anecdote in a strand had almost become de rigueur.

  “Maybe we should talk to Burdock,” I said.

  “What if we’re wrong? If Burdock felt aggrieved, we could be ostracized by the entire line.”

  “It’s a risk,” I admitted. “But if he has done something bad, the line has to know about it. It would look very bad if one of the other lines discovered the truth before we did.”

  “Maybe we’re making a mountain out of a molehill.”

  “Or maybe we’re not. Could we force the issue out into the open somehow? What if you publicly accuse me of lying?”

  “Risky, Campion. What if they believe me?”

  “They won’t be able to find any chinks in my story because there aren’t any. After due process, the attention will shift to Burdock. If, as you said, there are other things in his strand that don’t check out. ..”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Me neither. But it’s not as if I can think of any other way of pursuing this.”

  “There might be one,” Purslane said, eyeing me cautiously. “You built these islands, after all.”

  “Yes,” I allowed.

  “Presumably it wouldn’t stretch your talents to spy on Burdock.”

  “Oh, no,” I said, shaking my head.

  She raised a calming hand. “I don’t mean putting a bug on him, following him to his ship, or anything like that. I just mean keeping a record of anything he does or says in public. Is your environment sophisticated enough to allow that?”

  I couldn’t lie. “Of course. It’s constantly monitoring everything we do in public anyway, for our own protection
. If someone has an accident. ..”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “The environment doesn’t report to me. It keeps this kind of thing to itself.”

  “But it could be programmed to report to you,” Purslane said.

  I squirmed. “Yes.”

  “I realise this is unorthodox, Campion. But I think we have to do it, given all that could be at stake.”

  “Burdock may say nothing.”

  “We won’t know unless we try. How long would it take you to arrange this?”

  “It’s trivial,” I admitted.

  “Then do it. Last night was the eight hundred and third threading. There are less than two hundred days before we all leave Reunion. If we don’t find out what Burdock’s up to now, we may never have another chance.” Purslane’s eyes gleamed thrillingly. “We haven’t a moment to lose.”

  Purslane and I agreed that we should keep our meetings to a minimum from then on, in case we began to draw attention to ourselves. Liaisons between line members were normal enough—even long-term relationships—but the fact that we insisted on meeting out of the public eye was bound to raise eyebrows. Even given the absence of a single Secure anywhere in the venue, there were plenty of places that were private enough for innocent assignations.

  But our assignation was anything but innocent.

  It wasn’t difficult to keep in touch, once we’d agreed a scheme. Since I had designed and constructed the venue, the machinery that handled the threading of the strands into our nightly dreams lay under my control. Each evening, I took the environment’s covert observations of Burdock over the last day, and ran a simple program to isolate those instances where Burdock was talking to someone else or accessing data from one of the public nodes I’d dotted around the venue. I then took those isolated sequences and slipped them into Purslane’s dreams, along with the allotted strand for that night. I did the same for myself: it meant that we had more to dream than everyone else, but that was a small price to pay.