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.”