“Do you think anyone else knows?” I asked Purslane, during another covert meeting aboard her ship. “After all, the evidence is all out there in the public realm. Anyone else could spot those discrepancies if they paid enough attention.”
“That’s the point, though: I don’t think anyone else will. You and I are friends. I probably paid more attention to your sunsets than anyone else did. And I’m a stickler for detail. I’ve been looking out for false threads during every carnival.”
“Because you suspected one of us might lie?”
“Because it made it more interesting.”
“Maybe we’re making too much of this,” I said. “Maybe he just did something embarrassing that he wanted to cover up. Not a crime, but just something that would have made him look foolish.”
“We’ve all done foolish things. That hasn’t stopped any of us including them in our strands when the mood suits us. Remember Orpine, during the third carnival?”
Orpine had made a fool of herself near the Whipping Star, SS433, nearly crashing her ship in the process. But her honesty had endeared her to the rest of us. She had been chosen to forge the venue for the fourth carnival. Ever since then, including an embarrassing anecdote in a strand had almost become de rigueur.
“Maybe we should talk to Burdock,” I said.
“What if we’re wrong? If Burdock felt aggrieved, we could be ostracized by the entire line.”
“It’s a risk,” I admitted. “But if he has done something bad, the line has to know about it. It would look very bad if one of the other lines discovered the truth before we did.”
“Maybe we’re making a mountain out of a molehill.”
“Or maybe we’re not. Could we force the issue out into the open somehow? What if you publicly accuse me of lying?”
“Risky, Campion. What if they believe me?”
“They won’t be able to find any chinks in my story because there aren’t any. After due process, the attention will shift to Burdock. If, as you said, there are other things in his strand that don’t check out…”
“I don’t like it.”
“Me neither. But it’s not as if I can think of any other way of pursuing this.”
“There might be one,” Purslane said, eyeing me cautiously. “You built these islands, after all.”
“Yes,” I allowed.
“Presumably it wouldn’t stretch your talents to spy on Burdock.”
“Oh, no,” I said, shaking my head.
She raised a calming hand. “I don’t mean putting a bug on him, following him to his ship, or anything like that. I just mean keeping a record of anything he does or says in public. Is your environment sophisticated enough to allow that?”
I couldn’t lie. “Of course. It’s constantly monitoring everything we do in public anyway, for our own protection. If someone has an accident…”
“So what’s the problem?”
“The environment doesn’t report to me. It keeps this kind of thing to itself.”
“But it could be programmed to report to you,” Purslane said.
I squirmed. “Yes.”
“I realise this is unorthodox, Campion. But I think we have to do it, given all that could be at stake.”
“Burdock may say nothing.”
“We won’t know unless we try. How long would it take you to arrange this?”
“It’s trivial,” I admitted.
“Then do it. Last night was the eight hundred and third threading. There are less than two hundred days before we all leave Reunion. If we don’t find out what Burdock’s up to now, we may never have another chance.” Purslane’s eyes gleamed thrillingly. “We haven’t a moment to lose.”
Purslane and I agreed that we should keep our meetings to a minimum from then on, in case we began to draw attention to ourselves. Liaisons between line members were normal enough—even long-term relationships—but the fact that we insisted on meeting out of the public eye was bound to raise eyebrows. Even given the absence of a single Secure anywhere in the venue, there were plenty of places that were private enough for innocent assignations.
But our assignation was anything but innocent.
It wasn’t difficult to keep in touch, once we’d agreed a scheme. Since I had designed and constructed the venue, the machinery that handled the threading of the strands into our nightly dreams lay under my control. Each evening, I took the environment’s covert observations of Burdock over the last day, and ran a simple program to isolate those instances where Burdock was talking to someone else or accessing data from one of the public nodes I’d dotted around the venue. I then took those isolated sequences and slipped them into Purslane’s dreams, along with the allotted strand for that night. I did the same for myself: it meant that we had more to dream than everyone else, but that was a small price to pay.
By day, as we fulfilled our social obligations, we reviewed the Burdock data independently. The agreement was that if either of us noticed something unusual, we should leave a signal for the other party. Since I ran the venue, my signal consisted of a change to the patterning of the floor tiles on the thirtieth-level terrazzo, cunningly encoding the time of the unusual event in the Burdock data. I’d been fiddling around with the patterns long before the Burdock affair, so there was nothing odd about my actions as far as anyone else was concerned. As for Purslane, she’d agreed to stand at noon at a certain position on one of my spray-lashed suspension bridges. By counting the number of wires between her and land, I could isolate the anomaly to within a few tens of minutes.
We’d agreed that we wouldn’t meet in person until we’d had time to review each other’s observations. If we agreed that there was something worth talking about, then we’d “accidentally” meet each other within the next few days. Then we’d judge the right moment to slip away to Purslane’s ship. In practise, days and weeks would go by without Burdock doing anything that we both agreed was noteworthy or odd. Now and then he’d do or say something that hinted at a dark personal secret—but under that level of scrutiny, it was difficult to think of anyone who wouldn’t. And who among us didn’t have some secrets, anyway?
But by turns we noticed something that we couldn’t dismiss.
“This is the third time that he’s fished for information about the Great Work,” Purslane said.
I nodded. On three occasions, Burdock had steered his conversations with other line members around to the subject of the Great Work. “He’s very discreet about it,” I said. “But you can tell he’s itching to know more about it. But don’t we all?”
“Not to that degree,” she said. “I’m curious. I’d like to know what it is that has the lines so stirred up. But at the same time it doesn’t keep me awake at night. I know that the secret will eventually be revealed. I’m patient enough to wait until then.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Yes. And besides—I’ve heard enough rumours to think that I know half the answer already.”
That was news to me. “Go on.”
“It’s about knitting the worlds of the lines into a cohesive entity—a Galactic Empire, if you like. At the moment such a thing clearly isn’t practical. It takes us two hundred thousand years just to make one sweep through the Galaxy. That’s much too long on a human scale. We might not experience much time passing in our ships, but that doesn’t apply to the people living on planets. Entire cultures wax and wane while we’re making course adjustments. Some of the people down on those planets have various forms of immortality, but that doesn’t make history pass any less quickly. And it’s history that keeps destroying things. It’s history that stops us reaching our full potential.”