Thousandth Night Read Free

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.
    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
molluscs 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