BELLADONNA NIGHTS
Alastair Reynolds
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?”