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...”