At the last count there were ten million settled solar systems out there. Fifty million planet-class worlds. Entire upstart civilisations had risen and fallen since the last reunion, several times over. With the passing of every reunion it seemed impossible that the wilder fringes of humanity could become any stranger, any less recognisable. Yet they always contrived to do so; oozing into every cosmic niche like molten lava, and then carving out new niches that no one had dared dreamed of before.
Two million years of bioengineering and cyborg reshaping had equipped humankind for any possible physical environment. Twenty thousand distinct branches of humanity had returned to alien seas, each adopting a different solution to the problem of aquatic life. Some were still more or less humanoid, but others had sculpted themselves into sleek sharklike things, or dextrous multi-limbed mollusks or hard-shelled arthropods. There were thirteen hundred distinct human cultures in the atmospheres of gas giants. Ninety that swam in the metallic hydrogen oceans under those atmospheres. There were vacuum dwellers and star dwellers. There were people who lived in trees, and people who had, by some definition, become trees themselves. There were people as large as small moons, which fostered entire swarming communities within their bodies. There were people who had encoded themselves into the nuclear structure of neutron stars, although no one had heard much from them lately. Against all this change, the nine hundred and ninety-three members of the Gentian Line must have appeared laughably quaint and antique, with our stolid adherence to traditional anatomy. But all this was just convention. Prior to arrival on the planet, we were free to adopt whatever forms we chose. The only rule was that when we emerged from our ships we must assume the forms of adult humans, and that we must bring our minds with us. Minor matters such as gender, build, pigmentation and sexual orientation were left to our discretion, but we were all obliged to carry the facial characteristics of Abigail Gentian: her high cheekbones, her strong jaw and the fact that her left eye was green and the other a wintery, jackdaw blue.
Everything else was up for grabs.
Perhaps it was the stirring up of the past as each new thread was added, but we all felt Abigail Gentian’s base memories looming large in our thoughts as Thousandth Night approached. We remembered how it had felt to be just one individual, in the centuries before Abigail shattered herself into pieces and sent them roaming the Galaxy. We all remembered being Abigail.
Somewhere near the seven-hundredth threading, I was again approached by Purslane. Her hair was styled in stiff spiral arms, like the structure of our galaxy. They twinkled with embedded gems: reds, yellows and hard blue-whites for different stellar populations.
“Campion?” she asked cautiously.
I turned from the balcony. I was repairing one of the bridges after a storm, knitting it back together with wizardlike hand movements, making the invisibly small machines that composed the bridge dance to my commands. Matter flowed like milk, and then hardened magically.
“Come to torment me about sunsets?”
“Not exactly. You and I need to talk.”
“We could always go to one of those exclusive orgies,” I said teasingly.
“I mean somewhere private. Very private.” She seemed distracted, quite unlike her usual self. “Did you create a Secure on this island?”
“I didn’t see the need. I can create one, if you think it’s worth it.”
“No: that’ll just draw too much attention. We’ll have to make do with my ship.”
“I really need to finish this bridge.”
“Finish it. I’ll be on my ship whenever you’re ready.”
“What is this about, Purslane?”
“Be on my ship.”
She turned away. A few moments later a square glass pane tumbled out of the sky and lowered itself to the ground. Purslane stepped onto the pane. Its edges expanded and then angled upward to form a box. The box rose into the air, carrying Purslane, and then suddenly accelerated away from the island. I watched it speed into the distance, the grey light occasionally flaring off one of its flat sides. The box became tiny and then just a twinkling dot. It vanished into the scarred, mountainous hull of an enormous waiting ship.
I returned to my bridge-repair work, wondering.
“What is all this about?”
“It’s about your thread, among other things.” She looked at me astutely, reclining in the lounge chair that her ship had provided. “You told us all the truth, didn’t you? You really did spend two hundred thousand years watching sunsets?”
“If I wanted to make something up, don’t you think I would have made it a tiny bit more exciting?”
“That’s what I thought.”
“Besides,” I said. “I didn’t want to win this time. Creating this venue was a major headache. You’ve no idea how much I agonised about the placement of these islands, let alone whatever I’ve cooked up for Thousandth Night.”
“No, I can believe it. And I believe you. I just had to ask.” She tugged down one of the spiral arms in her hair and bit on it nervously. “Though you could still be lying, I suppose.”
“I’m not. Are you going to get to the point?”
My travel box had brought me into Purslane’s hovering ship an hour after her departure. My ship was modestly sized for an interstellar craft; only three kilometres long, but Purslane’s was enormous. It was two hundred kilometres from nose to tail, with a maximum width of twenty. The tail parts of her ship projected above the atmosphere, into the vacuum of space. By night they sparkled as anti-collision fields intercepted and vaporised meteorites. Auroral patterns played around the upper extremities like a lapping tide.
There were many reasons why someone might need a ship this big. It might have been constructed around some antique but valuable moon-sized engine, or some huge, fabulously efficient prototype drive that no one else possessed. Any advance that could get you slightly closer to the speed of light was to be treasured. Or it might be that her ship carried some vast, secret cargo, like the entire sentient population of an evacuated planet. Or it might be that the ship had been made this big in a gesture of mad exuberance, simply because it was possible to do so. Or it might be—and here my thoughts choked on bitter alienness—that the ship had to be this big to contain its one living passenger. Purslane was human-sized now, but who was to say what her true form was like between our visits to Reunion?
I didn’t want to know, and I didn’t ask.
“The point is delicate,” Purslane said. “I could be wrong about it. I almost certainly am. After all, no one else seems to have noticed anything unusual…”
“Anything unusual about what?”
“Do you remember Burdock’s thread?”
“Burdock? Yes, of course.” It was a silly, if understandable question. None of us were capable of forgetting any of the threaded strands unless we made a conscious effort to delete them. “Not that there was much about it worth remembering.” Burdock was a quiet, low-profile line member who never went out of his way to make a show of himself. He’d threaded his strand a few weeks earlier. It had been uneventful, and I hadn’t paid much attention to it. “It was almost as if he was trying to upstage me in the dullness stakes.”
“I think he lied,” Purslane said. “I think Burdock’s thread was deliberately altered.”
“By Burdock himself?”
“Yes.”
“Why would he do that, though? The strand still wasn’t very interesting.”