Thousandth Night (3 page)

“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.

By
day, as we fulfilled our social obligations, we reviewed the Burdock data
independently. The agreement was that if either of us noticed something
unusual, we should leave a signal for the other party. Since I ran the venue,
my signal consisted of a change to the patterning of the floor tiles on the
thirtieth-level terrazzo, cunningly encoding the time of the unusual event in
the Burdock data. I’d been fiddling around with the patterns long before the
Burdock affair, so there was nothing odd about my actions as far as anyone else
was concerned. As for Purslane, she’d agreed to stand at noon at a certain
position on one of my spray-lashed suspension bridges. By counting the number
of wires between her and land, I could isolate the anomaly to within a few tens
of minutes.

We’d
agreed that we wouldn’t meet in person until we’d had time to review each
other’s observations. If we agreed that there was something worth talking
about, then we’d “accidentally” meet each other within the next few days. Then
we’d judge the right moment to slip away to Purslane’s ship. In practise, days
and weeks would go by without Burdock doing anything that we both agreed was
noteworthy or odd. Now and then he’d do or say something that hinted at a dark
personal secret—but under that level of scrutiny, it was difficult to think of
anyone who wouldn’t. And who among us didn’t have some secrets, anyway?

But
by turns we noticed something that we couldn’t dismiss.

“This
is the third time that he’s fished for information about the Great Work,”
Purslane said.

I
nodded. On three occasions, Burdock had steered his conversations with other
line members around to the subject of the Great Work. “He’s very discreet about
it,” I said. “But you can tell he’s itching to know more about it. But don’t we
all?”

“Not
to that degree,” she said. “I’m curious. I’d like to know what it is that has
the lines so stirred up. But at the same time it doesn’t keep me awake at
night. I know that the secret will eventually be revealed. I’m patient enough
to wait until then.”

“Really?”
I asked.

“Yes.
And besides—I’ve heard enough rumours to think that I know half the answer
already.”

That
was news to me. “Go on.”

“It’s
about knitting the worlds of the lines into a cohesive entity— a Galactic
Empire, if you like. At the moment such a thing clearly isn’t practical. It
takes us two hundred thousand years just to make one sweep through the Galaxy.
That’s much too long on a human scale. We might not experience much time
passing in our ships, but that doesn’t apply to the people living on planets.
Entire cultures wax and wane while we’re making course adjustments. Some of the
people down on those planets have various forms of immortality, but that
doesn’t make history pass any less quickly. And it’s history that keeps
destroying things. It’s history that stops us reaching our full potential.”

“I’m
not sure I follow you,” I said.

“Think
of all those myriad human cultures,” Purslane said. “To all extents and
purposes, they exist independently of each other. Those within a few light
years of each other can exchange ideas and perhaps even enjoy a degree of
trade. Most are too far apart from that: at best they might have some vague
knowledge of each other’s existence, based on transmissions and data passed on
by the likes of you and me. But what can two cultures on either side of the
Galaxy know of each other? By the time one gets to hear about the other, the other
probably doesn’t exist any more. There’s no possibility of mutual cooperation;
the sharing of intellectual resources and knowledge.” Purslane shrugged. “So
those cultures stumble through the dark, making the same mistakes over and over
again, constantly reinventing the wheel. At best they have some knowledge of
galactic history, so they can avoid repeating the worst mistakes. At worst
they’re evolving in near-total ignorance. Some of them don’t even remember how
they got where they are.”

I
echoed Purslane’s shrug. “But that’s the way things must be. It’s human nature
for us to keep changing, to keep experimenting with new societies, new
technologies, new modes of thought. . . ”