Free Thousandth Night by Alastair Reynolds Page A

to do this.”
    I
nodded at Burdock. “Tell us.”
    “Prepare,”
he whispered.
    An
instant later I felt a kind of mental prickle as something touched my brain,
groping its way in like an octopus seeking a way into a shell. Purslane
tightened her hold, anchoring herself to me. There was a moment of resistance
and then the intrusive thing was ensconced.
    My
sense of being present in the room became attenuated, as if my body was
suddenly at the far end of a long thread of nerve fibres, with my brain
somewhere else entirely. I didn’t know how Burdock was doing it, but I could
see at least two possibilities. The air in his ship might have been thick with
machines, able to swim into neural spaces and tap into direct mental processes.
Or the ship itself might been generating external magnetic fields of great
precision, steering the foci into my skull and stimulating microscopic areas of
my mind. I was only dimly aware of Grisha and Burdock looking on, half a
universe away.
    Coldness
seized me, electric with the crackle and fizz of subatomic radiation. I was
somewhere dark beyond imagination. My point of view shifted and something
awesome hoed into view. As my disembodied eyes adjusted to the darkness, the
thing brightened and grew layers of dizzying detail.
    It
was a spiral galaxy.
    I
recognised it instantly as the Milky Way. I had crossed it enough times to know
the kinked architecture of its stellar arms and dust lanes, a whorl as familiar
and idiosyncratic as a fingerprint. The hundreds of billions of stars formed a
blizzard of light, but through some trick of perception I felt that I
recognised all the systems I had visited during my travels, as well as all
those I had come to know through the shared memories of the Gentian Line. I
made out the little yellow sun which we now orbited, and felt both
inconsequential and godlike as I imagined myself on a watery world circling
that star, a thing tiny beyond measure, yet with an entire galaxy wheeling
inside my head.
    “You
know this place, of course,” said Burdock’s disembodied voice. “As one facet of
Abigail, you’ve crossed it ten or twelve times; tasted the air of a few hundred
worlds. Enough for one lifetime, perhaps. But that was never enough for
Abigail, for us. As Abigail’s shattered self, we’ve crossed it ten thousand
times; known a million worlds. We’ve seen wonder and terror; heaven and hell.
We’ve seen empires and dynasties pass like seasons. And still that isn’t
enough. We’re still monkeys, you know. In terms of the deep structure of our
minds, we’ve barely left the trees. There’s always a shinier, juicier piece of
fruit just out of reach. We’ve reached for it across two million years and it’s
brought to us this place, this moment. And now we reach again. We embark on our
grandest scheme to date: the Great Work.”
    The
view of the Milky Way did not change in any perceptible way, but I was suddenly
aware of human traffic crossing between the stars. Ships much like those of the
Gentian Line fanned out from points of reunion, made vast circuits across
enormous swathes of the Galaxy, and converged back again two or three hundred
thousand years later, ready to merge experiences. Cocooned in relativistic
time, the journeys did not seem horrendously long for the pilots: mere years or
decades of flight, with the rest of time (which might equal many centuries)
spent soaking up planetary experience, harvesting memory and wisdom. But the
true picture was of crushing slowness, even though the ships moved at the keen,
sharp edge of lightspeed. Interesting star systems were thousands or tens of
thousands of years of flight time apart. Planetary time moved much faster than
that. Human events outpaced the voyagers, so that what they experienced was
only glimpses of history, infuriatingly incomplete. Brief, bittersweet golden
ages flourished for a handful of centuries while the ships were still moving
between stars. Glories went unrecorded,