“Nor can I.”
“What’s it going to be? You can’t do a Cloud Opera, if that’s what you’ve planned. We had one of those last time.”
“Not a very good one though.”
“And the time before that—what was it?”
“A re-creation of a major space battle, I think. Effective, if a little on the brash side.”
“Yes, I remember now. Didn’t Fescue’s ship mistake it for a real battle? Dug a ten-kilometre-wide crater into the crust when his screens went up. The silly fool had his defence thresholds turned down too low.” Unfortunately, Fescue was in earshot. He looked at us over the shoulder of the line member he was talking to, shot me a warning glance then returned to his conversation. “Anyway,” Samphire continued, oblivious, “what do you mean, you can’t wait? It’s your show, Campion. Either you’ve planned something or you haven’t.”
I looked at him pityingly. “You’ve never actually won best strand, have you?”
“Come close, though… my strand on the Homunculus Wars…” He shook his head. “Never mind. What’s your point?”
“My point is that sometimes the winner elects to suppress their memories of exactly what form the Thousandth Night celebrations will take.”
Samphire touched a finger to his nose. “I know you, Campion. It’ll be tastefully restrained… and very, very dull.”
“Good luck with your strand,” I said icily.
Samphire left me. I thought I’d have a few moments alone, but no sooner had I turned to admire the view than Fescue leaned against the balustrade next to me, swilling a glass of wine. He held the glass by the stem, in jewelled and ringed fingers.
“Enjoying yourself, Campion?” he asked, in his usual deep-voiced, paternalistic, faintly disapproving way. The wind flicked iron-grey hair from his aristocratic brow.
“Yes, actually. Aren’t you?”
“It’s not a matter of enjoyment. Not for some of us, at any rate. There’s work to be done during these reunions—serious business, of great importance to the future status of the line.”
“Lighten up,” I said under my breath.
Fescue and I had never seen eye to eye. Among the nine hundred and ninety-three surviving members of the line, there were two or three dozen who exerted special influence. Though we had all been created at the same time, these figures had cultured a quiet superiority, distancing themselves from the more frivolous aspects of a reunion. Their body plans and clothes were studiedly formal. They spent a lot of time standing around in grave huddles, shaking their heads at the rest of us. They had the strongest ties to external lines. Many of them were Advocates, like Fescue himself.
If Fescue had heard my whispered remark, he kept it to himself. “I saw you with Purslane earlier,” he said.
“It’s not against the law.”
“You spend a lot of time with her.”
“Again… whose business is it? Just because she turned her nose up at your elitist little club.”
“Careful, Campion. You’ve done well with this venue, but don’t overestimate your standing. Purslane is a troublemaker—a thorn in the line.”
“She’s my friend.”
“That’s clear enough.”
I bristled. “Meaning what?”
“I didn’t see either of you at the orgy this morning. You spend a lot of time together, just the two of you. You sleep together, yet you disdain sexual relationships with the rest of your fellows. That isn’t how we like to do things in Gentian Line.”
“You Advocates keep yourselves to yourselves.”
“That’s different. We have duties… obligations. Purslane wouldn’t understand that. She had her chance to join us.”
“If you’ve got something to say, why not say it to her face?”
He looked away, to the brush-thin line of the horizon. “You did well with the aquatics,” he said absently. “Nice touch. Mammals. They’re from… the old place, aren’t they?”
“I forget. What is this little pep talk about, Fescue? Are you telling me to keep away from Purslane?”
“I’m telling you to buck up your ideas. Start showing some spine, Campion. Turbulent times are coming. Admiring sunsets is all very well, but what we need now is hard data on emergent cultures across the entire Galaxy. We need to know who’s with us and who isn’t. There’ll be all the time in the world for lolling around on beaches after we’ve completed the Great Work.” Fescue poured the remains of his wine into my ocean. “Until then we need a degree of focus.”
“Focus yourself,” I said, turning away.
Things began to improve in the afternoon, when interest shifted to the next evening’s strand. Purslane found me again, attending to a whimsical redesign of one of the outlying towers. She told me that she had heard about an orgy on the fiftieth level of the main spire, very exclusive, and that I should join her there in an hour. Still stinging from Fescue’s criticism, I told her that I was in no mood for it, but Purslane won me over and I agreed to meet when I was done with the tower.
When I arrived, the only other person there was Purslane.
“Wrong floor, I take it?”
“No,” she said, standing on the perfectly transparent floor of an outflung balcony, so that she appeared to float two kilometres above the sea. “Right floor, right time. I told you it was exclusive.”
“But you didn’t tell me it was this exclusive,” I said.
Purslane disrobed. As they stepped away, her clothes assumed the texture of weathered stone and froze into sculptural forms from deep antiquity. “Are you complaining?” she asked.
My own clothes broke up into a cloud of cherry blossom petals and scudded away across the door. “Not exactly, no.”
Purslane looked on approvingly. “I can tell.”
We rolled around on the glass floor, which softened and hardened itself in perfect consideration of our needs. As we made love, I tried to remember whether I’d designed the glass floor to be transparent in both directions—and if so what kind of entertainment we were providing to the line members who might be looking up to the fiftieth floor from below. Then I decided that I didn’t care. If we outraged them, so be it.
“You were right,” Purslane said, when we were lying together afterwards.
“Right about what?”
“The sunsets. Every bit as… challenging… as you said.”
“Go on. Kick a man when he’s down.”
“Actually I admire your nerve,” she said. “You had a plan and you stuck with it. And some of the sunsets were actually quite nice.”
She’d meant it as a compliment, but I couldn’t help looking wounded. “Quite nice.”
Purslane conjured a grape and popped it into my mouth. “Sorry. Campion.”
“It’s all right.” I said. “At least I won’t have people pestering me for the rest of the carnival, trying to get at the memories I edited out of the strand. At least they’ll know that’s precisely as exciting as it gets.”
It was true: the pressure was off, and to my surprise, I actually started relaxing and enjoying the remaining days and nights. The last time, my submitted strand had been so well received that there’d been mutterings that I must have spiced things up for effect. I hadn’t—those things really had happened to me—but I’d still spent the rest of the reunion in a state of prickly self-defence.
It was better now. I enjoyed feeling my mind filling with bright new experience; multiple snapshots of a dizzying complex and teeming Galaxy. It was the euphoria of drunkenness combined with an absolute, crystalline clarity of mind. It was glorious and overwhelming: an avalanche of history.