Thousandth Night Read Free Page A

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 anticollision 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.