Thousandth Night / Minla's Flowers

by Alastair Reynolds

  This was the Great Work. It was the culminative project of two million years of human advancement: the enterprise that would tax the ingenuity and resourcefulness of the most powerful lines. Where the lines squabbled now, they would come together in peaceful cooperation. And at the end of it (if any of us lived that long), we would have something wonderful to show for it. It would be the ultimate human achievement, a spectacle of engineering visible across cosmological distance. A beacon to our bright monkey cleverness.

  It could not be allowed to happen.

  That was the message Grisha’s people had uncovered, in their archaeological enquiries into their planet’s Prior culture. It transpired that the Watchers had witnessed something like the Great Work once already, in the distant spiral galaxy that they had been monitoring. Perhaps it was a kind of recurrent pathology, destined to afflict civilisations once they reached a certain evolutionary state. They grew weary of the scale of their galaxy and sought to shrink it.

  In doing so they created the preconditions for their own extinction. Where once they had moved too slowly to threaten more than a handful of neighbouring systems, the compactification allowed war and disease to spread like wildfire. The inhuman scale of the colonised Galaxy was its strength as well as its weakness: time and distance were buffers against catastrophe. Spread out across tens of thousands of light years, we were immune to extinction, at least by our own hands.

  Compactified, death could touch us all in less than five thousand years.

  “The Advocates knew this, I think,” Burdock said. “But they considered it to be a theoretical problem they would deal with when the time came. Surely, they rationalised, we would be wise enough to avoid such foolishness. But then they learned of the discovery made by the Watchers, and rediscovered by Grisha’s people. Another spiral culture that had gone down the same path—and ended up extinct; wiped out in a cosmological instant. Perhaps the fate was not so avoidable after all, no matter how wise you became. By rights, they should have viewed this data as an awful warning, and acted accordingly: abandoning the Great Work before a single star had moved an inch.”

  But it was never going to happen like that. The lines had already invested too much of themselves in the future success of the Work. Alliances had already been forged; hierarchies of influence and responsibility agreed upon. To back down now would involve crushing loss of face to the senior lines. Old wounds would be reopened; old rivalries would simmer to the fore. If the Great Work was the project that would bind the lines, its abandonment could very easily push some of them to war. That was why Grisha’s people had to be silenced, even if it meant their genocide. For what was the loss of one culture, against something so huge? If we were still living in the prologue to history, they would be doing well to merit a footnote.

  The vision ended then, and I felt my mind being sucked back to the body I had left (and nearly forgotten) aboard Burdock’s ship. There was a moment of unpleasant confinement, as if I was a being squeezed into a too-small bottle, and then I was back, still holding hands with Purslane, the two of us reeling as our inner ears adjusted to the return of gravity.

  Grisha stood by the couch, his gun still in his hand. “Did you learn all that you needed to know?” he asked.

  “I think so,” I started to say.

  “Good,” he said. “Because Burdock’s dead. He gave you the last minute of his life.”

  Purslane and I returned to the island as the sky lightened in anticipation of dawn. It was still midnight blue overhead, but the horizon was tinged with the softest tangerine orange, cut through by ribbons of cloud. As the box wheeled through the thicket of hanging ships toward the island, I began to see the crests of waves, stippled in brightening gold.

  I had seen many dawns, but in all my travels I had never tired of them. Even now, with the weight of all that had happened and all that we had learned, some part of me stood aside from the moment to acknowledge the simple beauty of sunrise on another world. I wondered what Burdock would have made of it. Would it have touched him with the same alchemical force, bypassing the rational mind to speak to that animal part from which we were separated by only an evolutionary heartbeat? Perhaps I’d find a clue in all the strands Burdock had submitted during his time among us. Now there would be no more.

  A death among the line was a terrible and rare thing. When it happened, one of us would be tasked to create a suitable memorial somewhere out in the stars. Such a memorial could take many forms. Long ago, the death of one of our number had been commemorated by the seeding of ferrite dust into the atmosphere of a dying star, just before the star expelled its outer envelope to create a nebula in the shape of a human head, sketched in lacy curves of blue green oxygen and red hydrogen, racing outward at sixty kilometres a second. Another memorial, no less heartfelt, had taken the form of a single stone kiln on an airless moon. Both had been appropriate.

  Burdock would surely receive his due, but his death had to remain a secret until Thousandth Night. Until then Purslane and I would have to walk among our fellow line members with that knowledge in our hearts, and not betray the slightest hint of it.

  We owed it to Burdock.

  “We’re in time,” I said, as the box neared the island. “That took longer than I’d hoped, but the threading is still taking place. No one will have missed us yet.”

  Purslane pressed a hand to her brow. “God, the threading. I’d forgotten all about that. Now I’ll have to spend all day telling lies. Please tell me this was a good idea, Campion.”

  “Wasn’t it? We know what happened to Burdock now. We know about Grisha and the Great Work. Of course it was worth it.”

  “Are you so sure? All we know now is that asking questions could get us into serious trouble. We’re still none the wiser about who’s actually behind this. I’m not sure I wasn’t happier in blissful ignorance.”

  “We have the data from Burdock’s ship,” I reminded her.

  “Have you looked at it yet, Campion?” I could tell from her tone that she wasn’t impressed. “My ship’s already sent me back a preliminary analysis. Burdock’s data is riddled with gaps.”

  “He warned us there were a few holes.”

  “What he didn’t say was that thirty percent of his records were missing. There may be something useful in the remaining data, but there’s still a good chance that the clues fell into the gaps.”

  “Why the gaps in the first place? Do you think he edited out something he didn’t want us to see?”

  Purslane shook her head. “Don’t think so. The gaps seem to be caused by his anticollision screens going up, blinding his sensors. You saw how old that ship was: it probably has pretty ancient screen generators, or pretty ancient sensors, or both.”

  “Why the anticollision screens?”

  “Debris,” Purslane said. “Grisha’s system had been turned into a cloud of radioactive rubble. Burdock’s approach never took him all that close to the main action, but there must still have been a lot of debris flying around. If he’d thought to turn up his triggering threshold, he might have given us more to work with . . . ”

  I tried to sound optimistic. “We’ll just to have make the best of what’s left.”

  “My ship’s already made the obvious checks. I’ve seen the flame Burdock mentioned, but it really is too faint for an accurate match. If the murderers were hanging around the system before then, they must have been very well camouflaged.”

  “We can’t just. . . give up,” I said, thinking of the man we had left behind on Burdock’s ship. “We owe it to Burdock, and Grisha, and Grisha’s people.”

  “If there’s nothing there, there’s nothing there,” Purslane said.

  She was right. But it wasn’t what I wanted to hear.

  We landed on the island and reset our body clocks so that—to first approximation—we looked and felt as if we had just passed a restful, dream-filled night. That was the idea, at least. But when I conjured a mirror and examined my face in it I saw a quivering, tic-li
ke tightness around the mouth. I tried a kinesic reset but it didn’t go away. When Purslane and I met alone on one of the high balconies, after breakfasting with a few other line members, I swear I saw the same tightness.

  “How did it go?” I asked.

  She kept her voice low. “It was as bad as I feared. They thought my strand was wonderful, darling. They won’t stop asking me about it. They hate me.”

  “That’s sort of the reaction we were hoping for. The one thing no one will be wondering about is what you were up to last night. And we can be sure no one ducked out of the strand.”

  “What about Burdock’s impostor? We didn’t know about him when we hatched this plan.”

  “He still had to act like Burdock,” I said. “That means he’ll have needed to dream your strand.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “You only have to get through this one day. It’s Squill’s strand tonight. He always gives good dream.”

  Purslane looked at me pityingly. “Keep up, Campion. Squill’s been off-form for half a million years.”

  Unfortunately, she was right about Squill. His strand consisted of endless visits to planets and artefacts left over from the Interstitial Uprising, overlaid with tedious, self-serving monologues of historical analysis. It was not the hit of the reunion, and it did little to take the heat off Purslane. The next night wasn’t much better: Mullein’s strand was a workmanlike trudge through thirty cultures that had collapsed back to pre-industrial feudalism. “Mud,” I heard someone say dispiritedly, the day after. “Lots of . . . mud.”

  The third night was a washout as well. That was when Asphodel would have delivered her strand, had she made it back to the reunion. As was our custom, her contribution took the form of a compilation from her previous strands. It was all very worthy, but not enough to stop people talking about Purslane’s exploits.

  Thankfully, things picked up for her on the fourth night. Borage’s strand detailed his heroic exploits in rescuing an entire planet’s worth of people following the close approach of a star to their Oort cloud. Borage dropped replicators on their nearest moon and converted part of it into a toroidal defence screen, shielding their planet from the infall of dislodged comets. Then he put the moon back together again and (this was a touch of genius, we had to admit) he wrote his signature on the back of the tide-locked moon in a chain of craters. It was flashy, completely contrary to any number of Line strictures, but it got people talking about Borage, not Purslane.

  I could have kissed the egomaniacal bastard.

  “I think we got away with that one,” I told Purslane, when she was finally able to move through the island without being pestered by an entourage of hangers-on.

  “Good,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean we’re any closer to finding out who killed Grisha’s people.”

  “Actually,” I said, “I’ve been thinking about that. Maybe there’s something in that data after all.”

  “We’ve been through it with a fine-toothed comb.”

  “But looking for the obvious signatures,” I said.

  “There are too many gaps.”

  “But maybe the gaps are telling us something. What caused the gaps?”

  “Burdock being too cautious, throwing up his screens every time a speck of dust came within a light-second of his ship. His screens are sensor-opaque, at least in all the useful bands.”

  “Correct. But some of those activations were probably necessary: there was a lot of rubble, after all.”

  “Go on,” she said.

  “Well, if there was a lot of debris that far out, there must have been even more closer to the action. Enough to trigger the screens of the other ship.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “Me neither, until now. And the type of search we’ve been doing wouldn’t have picked up screen signatures. We need to slice the data up into short time windows and filter on narrow-band graviton pulses. Then we might find something.”

  “I’m already on it,” Purslane said.

  I closed my eyes and directed a command at my own ship. “Me too. Want to take a bet on who finds something first?”

  “No point, Campion. I’d thrash you.”

  She did, too. Her ship found something almost immediately, now that it had been given the right search criteria. “It’s still at the limits of detection,” she said. “They must have had their screens tuned right down, for just this reason. But they couldn’t run with them turned off.”

  “Is this enough to narrow it down?”

  “Enough to improve matters. The resonant frequency of the graviton pulse is at the low end: that means whoever’s doing this was throwing up a big screen.”

  Like blowing a low note in a big bottle, rather than a high note in a small bottle.

  “Meaning big ship,” I said.

  “I’m guessing fifty or sixty kilometres at the minimum.” She looked at the parade of hanging ships. “That already narrows it down to less than a hundred.”

  My ship pushed a memory into my head: a girl seated in the lotus position, with a golden, glowing cube rotating above her cupped palms. It meant that the ship had a result.

  “Mine’s in,” I said, requesting a full summary. “My ship says seventy kilometres at the low end, with a central estimate around ninety. See: slow, but she gets there in the end.”

  “My ship’s refined its analysis and come to more or less the same conclusion,” Purslane said. “That narrows it down even more. We’re talking about maybe twenty ships.”

  “Still not good enough,” I said ruefully. “We can’t point fingers unless we have a better idea than that.”

  “Agreed. But we have the drive flame as an additional constraint. Not all of those twenty ships even use visible thrust. And we also know who Burdock spoke to about the Great Work.”

  I paused and let those numbers crunch against each other. “Better. Now we’re down to . . . what? Seven or eight ships, depending on where you draw the cut-off for the size estimate. Seven or eight names. One of which happens to be Fescue.”

  “Still not good enough, though.”

  I, thought for a moment. “If we could narrow it down to one ship . . . then we’d be sure, wouldn’t we?”

  “That’s the problem, Campion. We can’t narrow it down. Not unless we saw what those anticollision fields looked like.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “If we could get them to put up their screens . . . all we’d need to do is find the ship with the closest resonance to the one in Grisha’s system.”

  “Wherever you’re taking this line of thought. ..” Purslane’s eyes flashed a warning at me.

  “All I need to do is find a way to get them to trigger their shields. Full ship screens, of course.”

  “It won’t work. If they get an inkling of what you’re up to, they’ll tune to a different resonance.”

  “Then I’d better not give them much warning,” I said. “We’ll do it on Thousandth Night, just the way we said we would. They’ll be too distracted to plan anything in advance, and they won’t be expecting a last-minute surprise.”

  “I like the way you say ‘we’.”

  “We’re in this together now,” I said. “All the way. Even if we take the line with us.”

  Purslane sniffed her wineglass. “How are you going to get everyone to turn on their shields?”

  I squinted against the sun. “I’m sure I’ll think of something.”

  Because I was dreading its arrival, Thousandth Night was suddenly upon us. Since Purslane’s discovery that Burdock had lied, the reunion had passed by in a blur. For nine hundred and ninety-nine nights we had dreamed of suns and worlds, miracles and wonders, and perhaps a little mud along the way. Our knowledge of the galaxy we called home had accreted yet another layer of detail, even as the endless transformations of history rendered much of that knowledge obsolete. For most of us, it was of no concern. The innate fascination of the strands, the spectacle, intrigue, and glamour of this final evenin
g together was all that mattered. Not the Advocates, though. Though they did their best to hide it, they itched with impatience. For two million years, they had accepted the crushing scale of the galaxy and their own fixed relationship to that immensity. When Abigail Gentian shattered herself into nine hundred and ninety-nine gemlike pieces, she had hoped to conquer space and time. Instead, she had only come to a deeper understanding of her own microscopic insignificance. The Advocates could not tolerate that any longer.

  I kept a stiff, strained smile on my face as I made my rounds of the Thousandth Night revellers, accepting compliments. Although my strand had not set the world on fire, no one had any serious complaints about the venue. The island was just the right size: small enough to feel intimate, but with enough curious little byways and quirks of design not to become boring. Every now and then I had introduced some minor change—moving a passage here, or a staircase there, and my efforts were generally deemed to have been worthwhile. The white terraces, balconies and bridges of the island had a charm of their own, but they had not detracted from the strands, and the threadings had gone flawlessly. Time and again, people squeezed my sleeve and asked me what I had lined up for the final night, and time and again, I confessed that I couldn’t even be sure that I had lined anything up at all.

  Of course, I knew I must have planned something.