Thousandth Night by Alastair Reynolds Read Free Book Online Page A

now.”
    “All
right,” I said. “Consider me suitably emboldened.”
    But
though I strove for a note of easy-going jocularity, I could not shake the
sense that our adventure had taken a turn into something far more serious.
Until this evening all we had done was indulge in harmless surveillance: an
indulgence that had added spice to our days. Now we had falsified a strand and
were trespassing on someone else’s ship. Both deeds were as close to crimes as
anything perpetrated within the history of the Gentian Line. Discovery could
easily mean expulsion from the line, or something worse.
    This
was not a game any more.
    As
we approached the end of the chamber, the constriction at the end eased open
with an obscene sucking sound. It admitted warm, wet, pungent air.
    We
stooped through the low overhang into a much larger room. Like the airlock
chamber, it was lit by randomly spaced light nodes, embedded in the fleshy
walls like nuts wedged into the bark of a tree. Half a dozen corridors fed off
in different directions, labelled with symbols in an obsolete language. I
paused a moment while my brain retrieved the necessary reading skills from deep
recall.
    “This
one is supposed to lead the command deck,” I said, as the symbols became
suddenly meaningful. “Do you agree?”
    “Yes,”
Purslane said, but with the tiniest note of hesitation in her voice.
    “Something
wrong?”
    “Maybe
you’re right. Maybe this isn’t such a good idea after all.”
    “What’s
got you afraid all of a sudden?”
    “This
is too easy,” Purslane said.
    “I
thought it was meant to be easy. I thought that was the point of going to all
that trouble with the access protocol.”
    “I
know,” she said. “But it just seems . . .  I was expecting something to slow us
down. Now I’m worried that we’re walking into a trap.”
    “Burdock
has no reason to set a trap,” I said. But I could not deny that I felt the same
unease. “Burdock isn’t expecting us to visit. He isn’t aware that we’re onto
him.”
    “Let’s
check out the command deck,” she said. “But let’s be quick about it, all right?
The sooner we’re back on the island, the happier I’ll be.”
    We
took the corridor, following its rising, curving ramp through several
rotations, obeying signs for the deck all the while. Around us the ship
breathed and gurgled like a sleeping monster, digesting its last big meal.
Biomechanical constructs were typical products of the Third Intercessionary
period, but I had never taken to them myself. I preferred my machines
hard-edged, the way nature intended.
    But
nothing impeded our progress to the command deck. The deck was spaciously
laid-out, with a crescent window let into one curve of wall. It looked back
across the sea, to the island. A spray of golden lights betrayed the darkening
sliver of the main spire. I thought of the dreamers ranged throughout that
tower, and of the lies we were peddling them.
    Mushroom-shaped
consoles studded the floor, rising to waist height. Purslane moved from one to
the next, conjuring a status readout with a pass of her hand.
    “This
all looks good so far,” she said. “Control architecture is much as I remember
it from my ship. The navigations logs should be about. .. here.” She halted at
one of the mushrooms and flexed her hands in the stiffly formal manner of a
dancer. Text and graphics cascaded through the air in a flicker of primary
colours. “No time to go through it all now,” she said. “I’ll just commit it to
eidetic memory and review it later.” She increased the flow of data, until it
blurred into whiteness.
    I
paced nervously up and down the crescent window. “Fine by me. Just out of
interest, what are the chances we’ll find anything incriminating anyway?”
    Purslane’s
attention snapped onto me for a second. “Why not? We know for a fact that he
lied.”
    “But
couldn’t he have doctored those logs as well? If he had something to hide . . .
why leave the evidence