“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.