Belladonna Nights

I HAD BEEN thinking about Campion long before I caught him leaving the flowers at my door.

It was the custom of Mimosa Line to admit witnesses to our reunions. Across the thousand nights of our celebration a few dozen guests would mingle with us, sharing in the uploading of our consensus memories, the individual experiences gathered during our two-hundred thousand year circuits of the galaxy.

They had arrived from deepest space, their ships sharing the same crowded orbits as our own nine hundred and ninety-nine vessels. Some were members of other Lines—there were Jurtinas, Marcellins and Torquatas—while others were representatives of some of the more established planetary and stellar cultures. There were ambassadors of the Centaurs, Redeemers and the Canopus Sodality. There were also Machine People in attendance, ours being one of the few Lines that maintained cordial ties with the robots of the Monoceros Ring.

And there was Campion, sole representative of Gentian Line, one of the oldest in the Commonality. Gentian Line went all the way back to the Golden Hour, back to the first thousand years of the human spacefaring era. Campion was a popular guest, always on someone or other’s arm. It helped that he was naturally at ease among strangers, with a ready smile and an easy, affable manner—full of his own stories, but equally willing to lean back and listen to ours, nodding and laughing in all the right places. He had adopted a slight, unassuming anatomy, with an open, friendly face and a head of tight curls that lent him a guileless, boyish appearance. His clothes and tastes were never ostentatious, and he mingled as effortlessly with the other guests as he did with the members of our Line. He seemed infinitely approachable, ready to talk to anyone.

Except me.

It had been nothing to dwell over in the early days of the reunion. There had been far too many distractions for that. To begin with there was the matter of the locale. Phecda, who had won the prize for best strand at the Thousandth Night of our last reunion, had been tasked with preparing this world for our arrival. There had been some grumbles initially, but everyone now agreed that Phecda had done a splendid job of it.

She had arrived early, about a century in advance of any of the rest of us. Tierce, the world we had selected for our reunion, had a solitary central landmass surrounded by a single vast ocean. Three skull-faced moons stirred lazy tides in this great green primordial sea. Disdaining land, Phecda had constructed the locale far from shore, using scaper technology to raise a formation of enormous finger-like towers from the seabed.

These rocky columns soared kilometres into the sky, with their upper reaches hollowed out into numerous chambers and galleries, providing ample space for our accommodation and celebrations. Bridges linked some of the towers, while from their upper levels we whisked between more distant towers or our orbiting ships. Beyond that, Phecda had sculpted some of the towers according to her own idiosyncrasies. Music had played a part in her winning strand, so one of the towers was surmounted by a ship-sized violin, which we called the Fiddlehead tower. Another had the face of an owl, a third was a melted candle, while the grandest of them all terminated in a clocktower, whose stern black hands marked the progression of the thousand nights.

Phecda had done well. It was our twenty-second reunion, and few of us could remember a more fitting locale in which to celebrate the achievements of our collective circuits. Whoever won this time was going to have quite an act to follow.

It wouldn’t be me. I had done well enough in my circuit, but there were others who had already threaded better strands than I could ever stitch together from my experiences. Still, I was content with that. If we maintained our numbers, then one day it might end up being my turn. Until that distant event, though, I was happy enough just to be part of our larger enterprise.

Fifty or more nights must have passed before I started being quietly bothered by the business of Campion. My misgivings had been innocuous to start with. Everyone wanted a piece of our Gentian guest, and it was hardly surprising that some of us had to wait our turn. But gradually I had the sense that Campion was going out of his way to shun me, moving away from a gathering just when I arrived, taking his leave from the morning tables when I dared to sit within earshot.

I told myself that it was silly to think that he was singling me out for this cold-shoulder treatment, when I was just one of hundreds of Mimosa shatterlings who had yet to speak to him personally. But the feeling dogged me. And when I sensed that Campion was sometimes looking at me, directing a glance when he thought I might not notice, my confusion only deepened. I had done nothing to offend him or any member of his Line—had I?

The business with the flowers did not start immediately. It was around the hundredth night when they first appeared, left in a simple white vase just outside my room in the Owlhead tower. I examined them with only mild interest. They were bulb-headed flowers of a lavish dark purple colour, shading almost to black unless I took them out onto the balcony.

I asked around as to who might have left the flowers, and what their meaning might have been. No one else had received a similar puzzle. But when no one admitted to placing the flowers, and the days passed, I forced myself to put them from mind. It was not uncommon for shatterlings to exchange teasing messages and gifts, or for the locale itself to play the odd game with its guests.

Fifty or sixty nights later, they reappeared. The others had withered by this time, but now I took the opportunity to whisk up to my ship and run the flowers through Sarabande’s analyser, just in case there was something I was missing.

The flowers were Deadly Nightshade, or Belladonna. Poisonous, according to the ship, but only in a historic sense. None of us were immortal, but if we were going to die it would take a lot more than a biochemical toxin to do it. A weapon, a stasis malfunction, a violent accident involving the unforgiving physics of matter and energy. But not something cobbled together by ham-fisted nature.

Still I had no idea what they meant.

Somewhere around the two hundredth night the flowers were back, and this time I swore I was nearly in time to see a figure disappearing around the curve in the corridor. It couldn’t have been Campion, I told myself. But I had seen someone of about the right build, dressed as Campion dressed, with the same head of short curls.

After that, I stationed an eye near my door. It was a mild violation of Line rules—we were not supposed to monitor or record any goings-on in the public spaces—but in view of the mystery I felt that I was entitled to take the odd liberty.

For a long time the flowers never returned. I wondered if I had discouraged my silent visitor with that near-glimpse. But then, around the three hundred and twentieth night, the flowers were there again. And this time my eye had caught Campion in the act of placing them.

I caught his eye a few times after. He knew, and I knew, that there was something going on. But I decided not to press him on the mystery. Not just yet. Because on the three hundred and seventieth night, he would not be able to ignore me. That was the night of my threading, and for one night only I would be the unavoidable focus of attention.

Like it or not, Campion would have to endure my presence.

HE SMILED AT me. It was the first time we had looked at each other for more than an awkward moment, before snatching our glances away.

“I suppose you think us timid,” I said.

“I don’t know. Why should I?”

“Gentian Line has suffered attrition. There aren’t nine hundred and ninety-nine of you now, and there’ll be fewer of you each circuit. How many is it, exactly?”

He made a show of not quite remembering, although I found it hard to believe that the number wasn’t etched into his brain. “Oh, around nine hundred and seven, I think. Nine hundred and six if we assume Betony’s not coming back, and no one’s heard anything from him in half a million years.”

“That’s a tenth of your Line. Nearly a hundred of your fellow shatterlings lost.”

“It’s a dangerous business, sightseeing. It’s Shaula, isn’t it?”

“You know my name perfectly well.”

He grinned. “If you say so.”

He was giving me flip, off-the-cuff answers as if there was a layer of seriousness I was not meant to reach. Smiling and twinkling his eyes at me, yet there was something false about it at all, a stiffness he could not quite mask. It was the morning before the night of my threading, and while the day wasn’t entirely mine—Nunki, who had threaded last night, was also being congratulated and feted—as the hours wore on the anticipation would start to shift to my threading, and already I was feeling more at the centre of things than I had since arriving. Tonight my memories would seep into the heads of the rest of us, and when we rose tomorrow it would be my experiences that were being dissected, critiqued and celebrated. For these two days, at least, Campion would be obliged to listen to me—and to answer my questions.

We stood at a high balcony in the Candlehead tower, warm blue tiles under our feet, sea air sharp in our noses.

“How does it work, Campion, when there are so many of you dead? Do your reunions last less than our own?”

“No, it’s still a thousand nights. But there are obviously gaps where new memories can’t be threaded. On those nights we honour the memories of the dead. The threading apparatus replays their earlier strands, or makes new permutations from old memories. Sometimes, we bring back the dead as physical imagos, letting them walk and talk among us, just as if they were still alive. It’s considered distasteful by some, but I don’t see the harm in it, if it helps us celebrate good lives well lived.”

“We don’t have that problem,” I said.

“No,” he answered carefully, as if wary of giving offence. “You don’t.”

“Some would say, to have come this far, without losing a single one of us, speaks of an innate lack of adventure.”

He shrugged. “Or maybe you just choose the right adventures. There’s no shame in caution, Shaula. You were shattered from a single individual so that you could go out and experience the universe, not so that you could find new ways of dying.”

“Then you don’t find us contemptible?”

“I wouldn’t be here—I wouldn’t keep coming here—if I felt that way. Would I?”

His answer satisfied me on that one point, because it seemed so sincerely offered. It was only later, as I was mulling over our conversation, that I wondered why he had spoken as if he had been our guest on more than one occasion.

He was wrong, though. This was our twenty-second reunion, and Campion had never joined us before.

So why had he spoken as if he had?

I FELT FOOLISH. We had communicated, and it had been too easy, too normal, as if there had never been any strange distance between us. And that was strange and troubling in and of itself.

The day was not yet done, nor the evening, so I knew that there would be more chances to speak. But I had to have all my questions ready, and not be put off by that easy-going front of his. If he wanted something of me, I was damned well going to find out what it was.

The flowers meant something, I was sure, and at the back of my mind was the niggling trace of half an answer. It was something about Belladonna, some barely-remembered fact or association. Nothing came to mind, though, and as the morning eased into afternoon I was mostly preoccupied with making last minute alterations to my strand. I’d had hundreds of days to edit down my memories, of course, but for some reason it was always a rush to distil them into an acceptable form. I could perform some of the memory editing in my room in the Owlhead tower, but there were larger chunks of unconsolidated memory still aboard my ship, and I realised it would be quicker and simpler to make some of the alterations from orbit.

I climbed the spiral stairs to the roof of the Owlhead and whisked up my ship. For all the charms of Phecda’s locale, it was good to be back on my own turf. I walked to the bridge of Sarabande and settled into my throne, calling up displays and instrument banks. My eyes swept the glowing readouts. All was well with the ship, I was reassured to note. In six hundred and thirty days we would all be leaving Tierce, and I would call on Sarabande’s parametric engine to push her to within a sliver of the speed of light. Already I could feel my thoughts slipping ahead to my next circuit, and the countless systems and worlds I would visit.

Beyond Sarabande, visible through the broad sweep of her bridge window, there were at least a hundred other ships close enough to see. I took in their varied shapes and sizes, marvelling at the range of designs adopted by my fellow shatterlings. The only thing the ships needed to have in common was speed and reliability. There were also a handful of vehicles belonging to our guests, including Campion’s own modest Dalliance, dwarfed by almost every other craft orbiting Tierce.

I worked through my memory segments. It didn’t take long, but when I was done something compelled me to remain on the bridge.

“Ship,” I said aloud. “Give me referents for Belladonna.”

“There are numerous referents,” Sarabande informed me. “Given your current neural processing bottleneck, you would need eighteen thousand years to view them all. Do you wish to apply a search filter?”

“I suppose I’d better. Narrow the search to referents with a direct connection to the Lines or the Commonality.” It was a hunch, but something was nagging at me.

“Very well. There are still more than eleven hundred referents. But the most strongly indicated record relates to Gentian Line.”

I leaned forward in my throne. “Go on.”

“The Belladonna Protocol is an emergency response measure devised by Gentian Line to ensure Line prolongation in the event of extreme attrition, by means of accident or hostile action.”

“Clarify.”

“The Belladonna Protocol, or simply Belladonna, is an agreed set of actions for abandoning one reunion locale and converging on another. No pre-arranged target is necessary. Belladonna functions as a decision-branch algorithm which will identify a unique fallback destination, given the application of simple search and rejection criteria.”

A shiver of disquiet passed through me. “Has Gentian Line initiated Belladonna?”

“No, Shaula. It has never been necessary. But the Belladonna Protocol has been adopted by a number of other Lines, including Mimosa Line.”

“And have we...” But I cut off my own words before they made me foolish. “No, of course not. I’d know if we’d ever initiated Belladonna. And we certainly haven’t suffered extreme attrition. We haven’t suffered any attrition at all.”

We’re too timid for that, I thought to myself. Much too timid. Weren’t we?

I WHISKED BACK to Tierce. Campion was lounging in the afternoon sunlight on the upper gallery of the Candlehead, all charm and modesty as he fielded questions about the capabilities of his ship. “Yes, I’ve picked up a weapon or two over the years—who hasn’t? But no, nothing like that, and certainly no Homunculus weapons. Space battles? One or two. As a guiding rule I try to steer clear of them, but now and again you can’t avoid running into trouble. There was the time I shattered the moon of Arghul, in the Terzet Salient, but that was only to give myself a covering screen. There wasn’t anyone living on Arghul when I did it. At least, I don’t think there was. Oh, and the time I ran into a fleet of the Eleventh Intercessionary, out near the Carnelian Bight...”

“Campion,” I said, his audience tolerating my interruption, as well they had to on my threading day. “Could we talk? Somewhere quieter, if possible?”

“By all means, Shaula. Just as long as you don’t drop any spoilers about your coming strand.”

“It isn’t about my strand.”

He rose from his chair, brushing bread crumbs from his clothes, waved absent-mindedly to his admirers, and joined me as we walked to a shadowed area of the gallery.

“What’s troubling you, Shaula—last minute nerves?”

“You know exactly what’s troubling me.” I kept my voice low, unthreatening, even though nothing would have pleased me more than to wrap my hands around his scrawny throat and squeeze the truth out of him. “This game you’ve playing with me... playing on me, I should say.”

“Game?” he answered, in a quiet but guarded tone.

“The flowers. I had a suspicion it was you before I left the eye, and then there wasn’t any doubt. But you still wouldn’t look me in the face. And this morning, pretending that you weren’t even sure of my name. All easy answers and dismissive smiles, as if there’s nothing strange about what you’ve been doing. But I’ve had enough. I want a clear head before I commit my strand to the threading apparatus, and you’re going to give it to me. Starting with some answers.”

“Answers,” he repeated.

“There was never any doubt about my name, was there?”

He glanced aside for an instant. Something had changed in his face when he looked back at me, though. There was a resignation in it—a kind of welcome surrender. “No, there wasn’t any doubt. Of all of you, yours was the one name I wasn’t very likely to forget.”

“You’re talking as if we’ve already met.”

“We have.”

I shook my head. “I’d remember if I’d ever crossed circuits with a Gentian.”

“It didn’t happen during one of our circuits. We met here, on Tierce.”

This time the shake of my head was more emphatic. “No, that’s even less likely. You ignored me from the moment I arrived. I couldn’t get near you, and if I did, you always had some excuse to be going somewhere else. Which makes the business with the flowers all the more irritating, because if you wanted to talk to me...”

“I did,” he said. “All the time. And we did meet before, and it was on Tierce. I know what you’re going to say. It’s impossible, because Mimosa Line never came to Tierce before, and these towers aren’t more than a century old. But it’s true. We’ve been here before, both of us.”

“I don’t understand.”

“This isn’t the first time,” Campion answered. Then he looked down at the patterned tiles of the floor, all cold indigo shades in the shadowed light. “This day always comes. It’s just a little earlier this time. Either I’m getting less subtle with the flowers, or you’re retaining some memory of it between cycles.”

“What do you mean, cycles?” I reached out and touched his forearm, not firmly, but enough to know I was ready to stop being mocked with half-truths and riddles. “I asked my ship about the flowers, you know. Sarabande told me about the Belladonna Protocol. It was there at the back of my mind somewhere, I know—but who’d bother caring about such a thing, when we haven’t even lost a single shatterling? And why do you leave the flowers, instead of just coming out with whatever it is you need to share?”

“Because you made me promise it,” Campion said. “The flowers were your idea. A test for yourself, so to speak. Nothing too obvious, but nothing too cryptic, either. If you made the connection, so be it. If you didn’t, you got to see out these thousand nights in blissful ignorance.”

“They weren’t my idea. And blissful ignorance of what?”

I sensed it was almost more than he could bear to tell me. “What became of Mimosa Line.”

HE TOOK ME to the highest lookout of the Clockhead tower. We were under a domed ceiling, painted pastel blue with gold stars, with open, stone-fretted windows around us. It surprised me to have the place to ourselves. We could look down at the other shatterlings on the galleries and promenades of the other towers, but at this late afternoon hour the Clockhead was unusually silent. So were we, for long moments. Campion held the upper hand but for now he seemed unsure what to do with it.

“Phecda did well, don’t you think,” I said, to fill the emptiness.

“You said you returned to your ship.”

“I did.” I nodded to the painted ceiling, to the actual sky beyond it. “It’s a fine sight to see them all from Tierce, but you don’t really get a proper sense of them until you’re in orbit. I go back now and then wherever I need to or not. Sarabande’s been my companion for dozens of circuits, and I feel cut off her from her if I’m on a world for too long.”

“I understand that. I feel similarly about Dalliance. Purslane says she’s a joke, but that ship’s been pretty good to me.”

“Purslane?”

Something tightened in his face. “Do you mind if I show you something, Shaula? The locale is applying fairly heavy perceptual filters, but I can remove them simply enough, provided you give me consent.”

I frowned. “Phecda never said anything about filters.”

“She wouldn’t have.” Campion closed his eyes for an instant, sending some command somewhere. “Let me take away this ceiling. It’s real enough—these towers really were grown out of the seabed—but it gets in the way of the point I need to make.” He swept up a hand and the painted ceiling and its gold stars dissolved into the hard blue sky beyond it. “Now let me bring in the ships, as if it were night and you could see them in orbit. I’ll swell them a bit, if you don’t mind.”

“Do whatever you need.”

The ships burst into that blueness like a hundred opening flowers, in all the colours and geometries of their hulls and fields. They were arcing overhead in a raggedy chain, sliding slowly from one horizon to the other, daggers and wedges and spheres, blocks and cylinders and delicate lattices, some more sea-dragon than machine, and for the hundred that I presently saw there had to be nine hundred and more still to tick into view. It was such a simple, lovely perceptual tweak that I wondered why I had never thought to apply it for myself.

Then Campion said, “Most of them aren’t real.”

“I’m sorry?”

“The bulk of those ships don’t exist. They’re phantoms, conjured into existence by the locale. The truth is that there are only a handful of actual ships orbiting Tierce.”

One by one the coloured ships faded from the sky, opening up holes in the chain. The process continued. One in ten gone, then two in ten, three in ten...

I looked at him, trying to judge his mood. His face was set in stone, as impassive as a surgeon administering some terrible, lacerating cure, sensing the patient’s discomfort but knowing he must continue. Now only one in ten of the ships remained. Then one in twenty, one in thirty...

“Mine is real,” he said eventually. “And three vehicles of Mimosa Line. None of the others were present, including all the ships you thought belonged to your guests.”

“Then how did they get here?”

“They didn’t. There are no guests, except me. The other Line members, the Centaurs, the Machine People... none of them came. They were another illusion of the locale.” He touched a hand to his breast. “I’m your only guest. I came here because no one else could stand to. I’ve been coming here longer than you realise.” And he raised his hand, opened his fist, and made one of the ships swell until it was larger than any of Tierce’s moons.

It was a wreck. It had been a ship once, I could tell, but that must have been countless aeons ago. Now the hull was a gutted shell, open to space, pocked by holes that went all the way through from one side to the other. It was as eyeless and forbidding as a skull stripped clean of meat, and it drifted along its orbit at an ungainly angle. Yet for all that I still recognised its shape.

Sarabande.

My ship.

“You all died,” Campion said softly. “You were wrong about being timid, Shaula. It was the exact opposite. You were too bold, too brave, too adventuresome. Mimosa Line took the risks that the rest of us were too cowardly to face. You saw and did wondrous things. But you paid a dire price for that courage. Attrition hit you harder than it had any Line before you, and your numbers thinned out very rapidly. Late in the day, when your surviving members realised the severity of your predicament, you initiated Belladonna.” He swallowed and licked his tongue across his lips. “But it was too late. A few ships limped their way to Tierce, your Belladonna fallback. But by then all of you were dead, the ships simply following automatic control. Half of those ships have burned up in the atmosphere since then.”

“No,” I stated. “Not all of us, obviously...”

But his nod was wise and sad and sympathetic. “All of you. All that’s left is this. Your ships created a locale, and set about staging the thousand nights. But there were none of you left to dream it. You asked about Gentian Line, and how we commemorated our dead? I told you we used imagos, allowing our fallen to walk again. With you, there are only imagos. Nine hundred and ninety-nine of them, conjured out of the patterns stored in your threading apparatus, from the memories and recordings of the original Mimosa shatterlings. Including Shaula, who was always one of the best and brightest of you.”

I forced out an empty, disbelieving laugh.

“You’re saying I’m dead?”

“I’m saying all of you are dead. You’ve been dead for much longer than a circuit. All that’s left is the locale. It sustains itself, waits patiently, across two hundred thousand years, and then for a thousand nights it haunts itself with your ghosts.”

I wanted to dismiss his story, to chide him for such an outlandish and distasteful lie, but now that he had voiced it I found it chimed with some deep, sad suspicion I had long harboured within myself.

“How long?”

The breeze flicked at the short tight curls of his hair. “Do you really want to know?”

“I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t.” But that was a lie of my own, and we both knew it for the untruth it was. Still, his reluctance was almost sufficient answer in its own right.

“You’ve been on Tierce for one million, two hundred and five thousand years. This is your seventh reunion in this locale, the seventh time that you’ve walked these towers, but all that happens each time is that you dream the same dead dreams.”

“And you’ve been coming along to watch us.”

“Just the last five, including this one. I was at the wrong end of the Scutum-Crux arm when you had your first, after you initiated the Belladonna Protocol, and by the time I learned about your second—where there was no one present but your own residuals—it was too late to alter my plans. But I made sure I was present at the next.” His face was in profile, edged in golden tones by the lowering sun, and I sensed that he had difficulty looking me straight in the eyes. “No one wanted to come, Shaula. Not because they hated Mimosa Line, or were envious of any of your achievements, but because you rattled their deepest fears. What had happened to you, your adventures and achievements, had already passed into the safekeeping of the Commonality. None could ignore it. And no Line wants to think too deeply about attrition, and especially not the way it must always end, given enough time.”

“But the dice haven’t fallen yet—for you.”

“The day will come.” At last he turned to face me again, his face both young and old, as full of humour as it was sadness. “I know it, Shaula. But it doesn’t stop me enjoying the ride, while I’m able. It’s still a wonderful universe. Still a blessed thing to be alive, to be a thing with a mind and a memory and the five human senses to drink it all in. The stories I’ve yet to share with you. I took a slingshot around the Whipping Star...” But he settled his mouth into an accepting smile and shook his head. “Next time, I suppose. You’ll still be here, and so will this world. The locale will regenerate itself, and along the way wipe away any trace of there ever being a prior reunion.”

“Including my memories of ever having met you.”

“That’s how it has to be. A trace of a memory persists, I suppose, but mostly you’ll remember none of it.”

“But I’ll ask you to pass a message forward, won’t I. Ask you to leave flowers at my door. And you’ll agree and you’ll be kind and dutiful and you’ll come back to us, and on some other evening, two hundred thousand years from now, give or take a few centuries, we’ll be in this same lookout having much the same conversation and I won’t have aged a second, and you’ll be older and sadder and I won’t know why, to begin with. And then you’ll show me the phantom ships and I’ll remember, just a bit, just like I’ve always remembered, and then I’ll start asking you about the next reunion, another two hundred thousand years in the future. It’s happened, hasn’t it?”

Campion gave a nod. “Do you think it would have been better if I’d never come?”

“At least you had the nerve to face us. At least you weren’t afraid to be reminded of death. And we lived again, in you. The other Lines won’t forget us, will they? And tell me you passed on some of our stories to the other Gentians, during your own Thousand Nights?”

“I did,” he said, some wry remembrance crinkling the corners of his eyes. “And they believed about half of them. But that was your fault for having the audacity to live a little. We could learn a lot.”

“Just don’t take our lessons too deeply too heart.”

“We wouldn’t have the nerve.”

The sun had almost set now, and there was a chill in the air. It would soon be time to descend from the Clockhead tower, in readiness for the empty revelry of the evening. Ghosts dancing with ghosts, driven like clockwork marionettes.

Ghosts dreaming the hollow dreams of other ghosts, and thinking themselves alive, for the span of a night. The imago of a shatterling who once called herself Shaula, daring to hold a conscious thought, daring to believe she was still alive.

“Why me, Campion? Out of all the others, why is it me you feel the need to do this to?”

“Because you half know it already,” he answered, after a hesitation. “I’ve seen it in your eyes, Shaula. Whatever fools the others, it doesn’t escape you. And you’re wrong, you know. You do change. You might not age a second between one reunion and the next, but I’ve seen that sadness in you build and build. You feel it in every breath, and you pick up on the flowers a little sooner each time. And if there was one thing I could do about it...”

“There is,” I said sharply, while I had the courage.

His expression was grave but understanding. “I’ll bring you flowers again.”

“No. Not flowers. Not next time.” And I swallowed before speaking, because I knew the words would be difficult to get out once I had started. “You’ll end this, Campion. You have the means, I know. There are only wrecks left in orbit, and they wouldn’t stand a chance against your own weapons. You’ll shatter those wrecks like you shattered the moon of Arghul, and when you’re done you’ll turn the same weapons onto these towers. Melt them to lava. Flush them back into the sea, leaving no trace. And turn the machines to ash, so that they can’t ever rebuild the towers or us. And then leave Tierce and never return to this place.”

He stared at me for a long moment, his face so frozen and masklike it was as if he had been struck across the cheeks.

“You’d be asking me to murder a Line.”

“No,” I said patiently. “The Line is gone, and you’ve already honoured us. All I’m asking for is one last kindness, Campion. This wasn’t ever the way it was meant to be.” I reached for him then, settling my hand on his wrist, and then sliding my fingers down until I held his in my own. “You think you lack the courage to commit grand acts. I don’t believe a word of it. And even if you did, here’s your chance to do something about it. To be courageous and wise and selfless. We’re dead. We’ve been dead for a million years. Now let us sleep.”

“Shaula...” he began.

“You’ll consider it,” I said. “You’ll evaluate the options, weigh the risks and the capacity for failure. And you’ll reach a conclusion, and set yourself on one course or another. But we’ll speak no more of it. If you mean to end us, you’ll wait until the end of the Thousandth Night, but you’ll give me no word of a clue.”

“I’m not very good at keeping secrets.”

“You won’t need to. This is my threading, Campion. My night of nights. It means I have special dispensation to adjust and suppress my own memories, so that my strand has the optimum artistic impact. And I still have the chance to undo some memories, including this entire conversation. I won’t remember the phantoms, or the Belladonna Protocol, or what I’ve just asked of you.”

“My Line frowned on that kind of thing.”

“But you got away with it, all the same. It’s a small deletion, hardly worth worrying about. No one will ever notice.”

“But I’d know we’d had this conversation. And I’d still be thinking of what you’d asked of me.”

“That’s true. And unless I’ve judged you very wrongly, you’ll keep that knowledge to yourself. We’ll have many more conversations between now and Thousandth Night, I’m sure. But no matter how much I press you—and I will, because there’ll be something in your eyes as well—you’ll keep to your word. If I ask you about the flowers, or the other guests, or any part of this, you’ll look at me blankly and that will be an end to it. Sooner or later I’ll convince myself you really are as shallow as you pretend.”

Campion’s expression tightened. “I’ll do my best. Are you sure there’s no other way?”

“There isn’t. And you know it as well. I think you’ll honour my wish, when you’ve thought it over.” Then I made to turn from him. “I’m going back to the Owlhead tower to undo this memory. Give me a little while, then call me back to the Clockhead. We’ll speak, and I’ll be a little foggy, and I’ll probably ask you odd questions. But you’ll deflect them gently, and after a while you’ll tell me it’s time to go to the threading. And we’ll walk down the stairs as if nothing had changed.”

“But everything will have,” Campion said.

“You’ll know it. I won’t. All you’ll have to do is play the dashing consort. Smile and dance and say sweet things and congratulate me on the brilliance of my circuit. I think you can rise to the challenge, can’t you?”

“I suppose.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

I left him and returned to my parlour.

LATER WE DANCED on the Fiddlehead rock. I had the sense that some unpleasantness had happened earlier between us, some passing cloudy thing that I could not bring to mind, but it could not have been too serious because Campion was the perfect companion, attentive and courteous and generous with wit and praise and warmth. It thrilled me that I had finally broken the silence between us; thrilled me still further that the Thousand Nights had so far to run—the iron hands of the Clockhead tower still to complete their sweep of their face.

I thought of all the evenings stretching ahead of us, all the bright strands we had still to dream, all the marvels and adventures yet to play out, and I thought of how wonderful it was to be alive, to be a thing with a mind and a memory and the five human senses to drink it all in.