The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 12

by Jonathan Strahan

  And there was Campion, sole representative of Gentian Line, one of the oldest in the Commonality. Gentian Line went all the way back to the Golden Hour, back to the first thousand years of the human spacefaring era. Campion was a popular guest, always on someone or other’s arm. It helped that he was naturally at ease among strangers, with a ready smile and an easy, affable manner—full of his own stories, but equally willing to lean back and listen to ours, nodding and laughing in all the right places. He had adopted a slight, unassuming anatomy, with an open, friendly face and a head of tight curls that lent him a guileless, boyish appearance. His clothes and tastes were never ostentatious, and he mingled as effortlessly with the other guests as he did with the members of our Line. He seemed infinitely approachable, ready to talk to anyone.

  Except me.

  It had been nothing to dwell over in the early days of the reunion. There had been far too many distractions for that. To begin with there was the matter of the locale. Phecda, who had won the prize for best strand at the Thousandth Night of our last reunion, had been tasked with preparing this world for our arrival. There had been some grumbles initially, but everyone now agreed that Phecda had done a splendid job of it.

  She had arrived early, about a century in advance of any of the rest of us. Tierce, the world we had selected for our reunion, had a solitary central landmass surrounded by a single vast ocean. Three skull-faced moons stirred lazy tides in this great green primordial sea. Disdaining land, Phecda had constructed the locale far from shore, using scaper technology to raise a formation of enormous finger-like towers from the seabed.

  These rocky columns soared kilometres into the sky, with their upper reaches hollowed out into numerous chambers and galleries, providing ample space for our accommodation and celebrations. Bridges linked some of the towers, while from their upper levels we whisked between more distant towers or our orbiting ships. Beyond that, Phecda had sculpted some of the towers according to her own idiosyncrasies. Music had played a part in her winning strand, so one of the towers was surmounted by a ship-sized violin, which we called the Fiddlehead tower. Another had the face of an owl, a third was a melted candle, while the grandest of them all terminated in a clocktower, whose stern black hands marked the progression of the thousand nights.

  Phecda had done well. It was our twenty-second reunion, and few of us could remember a more fitting locale in which to celebrate the achievements of our collective circuits. Whoever won this time was going to have quite an act to follow.

  It wouldn’t be me. I had done well enough in my circuit, but there were others who had already threaded better strands than I could ever stitch together from my experiences. Still, I was content with that. If we maintained our numbers, then one day it might end up being my turn. Until that distant event, though, I was happy enough just to be part of our larger enterprise.

  Fifty or more nights must have passed before I started being quietly bothered by the business of Campion. My misgivings had been innocuous to start with. Everyone wanted a piece of our Gentian guest, and it was hardly surprising that some of us had to wait our turn. But gradually I had the sense that Campion was going out of his way to shun me, moving away from a gathering just when I arrived, taking his leave from the morning tables when I dared to sit within earshot.

  I told myself that it was silly to think that he was singling me out for this cold-shoulder treatment, when I was just one of hundreds of Mimosa shatterlings who had yet to speak to him personally. But the feeling dogged me. And when I sensed that Campion was sometimes looking at me, directing a glance when he thought I might not notice, my confusion only deepened. I had done nothing to offend him or any member of his Line—had I?

  The business with the flowers did not start immediately. It was around the hundredth night when they first appeared, left in a simple white vase just outside my room in the Owlhead tower. I examined them with only mild interest. They were bulb-headed flowers of a lavish dark purple colour, shading almost to black unless I took them out onto the balcony.

  I asked around as to who might have left the flowers, and what their meaning might have been. No one else had received a similar puzzle. But when no one admitted to placing the flowers, and the days passed, I forced myself to put them from mind. It was not uncommon for shatterlings to exchange teasing messages and gifts, or for the locale itself to play the odd game with its guests.

  Fifty or sixty nights later, they reappeared. The others had withered by this time, but now I took the opportunity to whisk up to my ship and run the flowers through Sarabande’s analyser, just in case there was something I was missing.

  The flowers were Deadly Nightshade, or Belladonna. Poisonous, according to the ship, but only in a historic sense. None of us were immortal, but if we were going to die it would take a lot more than a biochemical toxin to do it. A weapon, a stasis malfunction, a violent accident involving the unforgiving physics of matter and energy. But not something cobbled together by ham-fisted nature.

  Still I had no idea what they meant.

  Somewhere around the two hundredth night the flowers were back, and this time I swore I was nearly in time to see a figure disappearing around the curve in the corridor. It couldn’t have been Campion, I told myself. But I had seen someone of about the right build, dressed as Campion dressed, with the same head of short curls.

  After that, I stationed an eye near my door. It was a mild violation of Line rules—we were not supposed to monitor or record any goings-on in the public spaces—but in view of the mystery I felt that I was entitled to take the odd liberty.

  For a long time the flowers never returned. I wondered if I had discouraged my silent visitor with that near-glimpse. But then, around the three hundred and twentieth night, the flowers were there again. And this time my eye had caught Campion in the act of placing them.

  I caught his eye a few times after. He knew, and I knew, that there was something going on. But I decided not to press him on the mystery. Not just yet. Because on the three hundred and seventieth night, he would not be able to ignore me. That was the night of my threading, and for one night only I would be the unavoidable focus of attention.

  Like it or not, Campion would have to endure my presence.

  HE SMILED AT me. It was the first time we had looked at each other for more than an awkward moment, before snatching our glances away.

  “I suppose you think us timid,” I said.

  “I don’t know. Why should I?”

  “Gentian Line has suffered attrition. There aren’t nine hundred and ninety-nine of you now, and there’ll be fewer of you each circuit. How many is it, exactly?”

  He made a show of not quite remembering, although I found it hard to believe that the number wasn’t etched into his brain. “Oh, around nine hundred and seven, I think. Nine hundred and six if we assume Betony’s not coming back, and no one’s heard anything from him in half a million years.”

  “That’s a tenth of your Line. Nearly a hundred of your fellow shatterlings lost.”

  “It’s a dangerous business, sightseeing. It’s Shaula, isn’t it?”

  “You know my name perfectly well.”

  He grinned. “If you say so.”

  He was giving me flip, off-the-cuff answers as if there was a layer of seriousness I was not meant to reach. Smiling and twinkling his eyes at me, yet there was something false about it at all, a stiffness he could not quite mask. It was the morning before the night of my threading, and while the day wasn’t entirely mine—Nunki, who had threaded last night, was also being congratulated and feted—as the hours wore on the anticipation would start to shift to my threading, and already I was feeling more at the centre of things than I had since arriving. Tonight my memories would seep into the heads of the rest of us, and when we rose tomorrow it would be my experiences that were being dissected, critiqued and celebrated. For these two days, at least, Campion would be obliged to listen to me—and to answer my questions.

  We stood at a high balc
ony in the Candlehead tower, warm blue tiles under our feet, sea air sharp in our noses.

  “How does it work, Campion, when there are so many of you dead? Do your reunions last less than our own?”

  “No, it’s still a thousand nights. But there are obviously gaps where new memories can’t be threaded. On those nights we honour the memories of the dead. The threading apparatus replays their earlier strands, or makes new permutations from old memories. Sometimes, we bring back the dead as physical imagos, letting them walk and talk among us, just as if they were still alive. It’s considered distasteful by some, but I don’t see the harm in it, if it helps us celebrate good lives well lived.”

  “We don’t have that problem,” I said.

  “No,” he answered carefully, as if wary of giving offence. “You don’t.”

  “Some would say, to have come this far, without losing a single one of us, speaks of an innate lack of adventure.”

  He shrugged. “Or maybe you just choose the right adventures. There’s no shame in caution, Shaula. You were shattered from a single individual so that you could go out and experience the universe, not so that you could find new ways of dying.”

  “Then you don’t find us contemptible?”

  “I wouldn’t be here—I wouldn’t keep coming here—if I felt that way. Would I?”

  His answer satisfied me on that one point, because it seemed so sincerely offered. It was only later, as I was mulling over our conversation, that I wondered why he had spoken as if he had been our guest on more than one occasion.

  He was wrong, though. This was our twenty-second reunion, and Campion had never joined us before.

  So why had he spoken as if he had?

  I FELT FOOLISH. We had communicated, and it had been too easy, too normal, as if there had never been any strange distance between us. And that was strange and troubling in and of itself.

  The day was not yet done, nor the evening, so I knew that there would be more chances to speak. But I had to have all my questions ready, and not be put off by that easy-going front of his. If he wanted something of me, I was damned well going to find out what it was.

  The flowers meant something, I was sure, and at the back of my mind was the niggling trace of half an answer. It was something about Belladonna, some barely-remembered fact or association. Nothing came to mind, though, and as the morning eased into afternoon I was mostly preoccupied with making last minute alterations to my strand. I’d had hundreds of days to edit down my memories, of course, but for some reason it was always a rush to distil them into an acceptable form. I could perform some of the memory editing in my room in the Owlhead tower, but there were larger chunks of unconsolidated memory still aboard my ship, and I realised it would be quicker and simpler to make some of the alterations from orbit.

  I climbed the spiral stairs to the roof of the Owlhead and whisked up my ship. For all the charms of Phecda’s locale, it was good to be back on my own turf. I walked to the bridge of Sarabande and settled into my throne, calling up displays and instrument banks. My eyes swept the glowing readouts. All was well with the ship, I was reassured to note. In six hundred and thirty days we would all be leaving Tierce, and I would call on Sarabande’s parametric engine to push her to within a sliver of the speed of light. Already I could feel my thoughts slipping ahead to my next circuit, and the countless systems and worlds I would visit.

  Beyond Sarabande, visible through the broad sweep of her bridge window, there were at least a hundred other ships close enough to see. I took in their varied shapes and sizes, marvelling at the range of designs adopted by my fellow shatterlings. The only thing the ships needed to have in common was speed and reliability. There were also a handful of vehicles belonging to our guests, including Campion’s own modest Dalliance, dwarfed by almost every other craft orbiting Tierce.

  I worked through my memory segments. It didn’t take long, but when I was done something compelled me to remain on the bridge.

  “Ship,” I said aloud. “Give me referents for Belladonna.”

  “There are numerous referents,” Sarabande informed me. “Given your current neural processing bottleneck, you would need eighteen thousand years to view them all. Do you wish to apply a search filter?”

  “I suppose I’d better. Narrow the search to referents with a direct connection to the Lines or the Commonality.” It was a hunch, but something was nagging at me.

  “Very well. There are still more than eleven hundred referents. But the most strongly indicated record relates to Gentian Line.”

  I leaned forward in my throne. “Go on.”

  “The Belladonna Protocol is an emergency response measure devised by Gentian Line to ensure Line prolongation in the event of extreme attrition, by means of accident or hostile action.”

  “Clarify.”

  “The Belladonna Protocol, or simply Belladonna, is an agreed set of actions for abandoning one reunion locale and converging on another. No pre-arranged target is necessary. Belladonna functions as a decision-branch algorithm which will identify a unique fallback destination, given the application of simple search and rejection criteria.”

  A shiver of disquiet passed through me. “Has Gentian Line initiated Belladonna?”

  “No, Shaula. It has never been necessary. But the Belladonna Protocol has been adopted by a number of other Lines, including Mimosa Line.”

  “And have we...” But I cut off my own words before they made me foolish. “No, of course not. I’d know if we’d ever initiated Belladonna. And we certainly haven’t suffered extreme attrition. We haven’t suffered any attrition at all.”

  We’re too timid for that, I thought to myself. Much too timid. Weren’t we?

  I WHISKED BACK to Tierce. Campion was lounging in the afternoon sunlight on the upper gallery of the Candlehead, all charm and modesty as he fielded questions about the capabilities of his ship. “Yes, I’ve picked up a weapon or two over the years—who hasn’t? But no, nothing like that, and certainly no Homunculus weapons. Space battles? One or two. As a guiding rule I try to steer clear of them, but now and again you can’t avoid running into trouble. There was the time I shattered the moon of Arghul, in the Terzet Salient, but that was only to give myself a covering screen. There wasn’t anyone living on Arghul when I did it. At least, I don’t think there was. Oh, and the time I ran into a fleet of the Eleventh Intercessionary, out near the Carnelian Bight...”

  “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 welc
ome 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.”