Nicola Griffith - Ammonite

Again and again her face shivered to splinters; again and again it re-formed.

Marghe knew that this meant something: she listened to the world with her body; she hit the gong; her new face swam apart and came back together.

Strike the gong.

They were connected: the world, her body, her face. Perhaps she should not be asking who she was but, rather, of what she was a part. The world was telling her: her blood, the tides in her cells, and the fluctuations in her nerves already beat to its rhythm, just as they had once resonated to the electromagnetic surges of Earth. Her body rang with this world. She had a place here; she could take it up, if she chose.

Strike the gong.

Marghe drank down the cold, still air, felt it suck heat from her lungs. She expelled it gently through her mouth in a deliberate cloud of breath crystal that dulled the surface of the gong. Her mark.

She raised her head. The sky was covered with endless round humps of dark cloud, like a shoal of blue-backed salmon broaching the sea, poised forever before diving. A nerka sky. Those clouds were made of her breath and the breath of a million women who had made peace with the world; women she had set out to study, like seashells.

No longer.

It was possible now for her to put aside that person she had been and choose to accept Thenike, or Cassil or Holle and Shill, even Danner and Lu Wai and Letitia Dogias, as nothing more and nothing less than equals from whom she could learn and derive comfort, to whom she could offer advice or a strong hand. If she chose.

Strike the gong.

She struck it harder than she needed to and set it dancing on its rope. The sound clashed and jarred around the clearing. Choose, it seemed to be saying. Choose. But there was no real choice; that decision was made already. All she had to do was accept it: Jeep the world, Jeep the virus, would become part of her now whether she wanted it or not. There was not enough FN-17 to last her back to Port Central. Even if she was fit enough to travel, even if the tribes and their feud were not making it impossible to cross Tehuantepec, even if the weather didn’t mean no ships could make the passage south until the Moon of the Aches, there was not enough. There was not enough. The virus was going to invade her, cell by cell, sliding cold fingers into her cells and curling around her genes. She would never get rid of it. Never.

She could stop taking the FN-17 voluntarily, let Jeep in with open arms. It was coming anyway. This way she could prepare herself. It might make a difference, Thenike said; she might stand a better chance of living if her mind was not fighting her body, if she was struggling toward the possible, toward staying alive, rather than fighting for the impossible, to keep the virus out, right out from under her skin.

To make that choice, to voluntarily set aside the FN-17, she would have to take a step into the unknown; she would have to step out from behind her professional persona and be naked, vulnerable. Herself.

Marghe squirmed. Maybe she should keep taking the vaccine. After all, it was possible that Danner even now might be working miracles, might be establishing new relays, or moving satellites, or sending Mirrors north to track her SLJC. Then she could go up to Estrade before the six months were over. She would not have the virus. She…

No. All dreams. She would contract the virus; she would be infected and survive, or she would be infected and die. The rest was just details.

Strike the gong.

The face that re-formed was gaunt and pale, and reminded her of her mother.

At the back of all her fears lay her mother. Her mother coughing and sweating.

Dying. There were no decisions to be made after dying.

Her mother had died on the bed in the cottage’s spare room, the one that was not really big enough. She had lain there, looking as though she might still take a small tearing breath and start coughing again, and Marghe had waited, holding her own breath, hoping. But her mother remained quiet. Marghe had stood there for almost an hour, not believing what had happened. It had taken just three days to turn her mother from a laughing woman striding along the Welsh hillsides to this waxy, thin mannequin. There was nothing left of that vital, bright woman now, except the memories buried deep within her daughter.

Marghe stared at the gong, at the pale, featureless reflection. If she died here, who would remember her, and how? She had been Marghe the SEC representative, or Marghe the vaccine guinea pig. No one knew Marghe the woman.

Except perhaps Aoife. Aoife, who had carved her the palo and given her the knowledge she had needed to stay alive, but who had tried to keep her captive in a place where she would have died slowly of being less than human.

Marghe had asked Thenike why the Echraidhe were so inflexible, so bound by tradition.

“Because they are so few,” Thenike had said. “Because their sisters’ mothers are also their choose-mothers’ sisters. They’re born too close. All their memories interlock and look down the same path to the same places. Each memory reflects another, repeats, reinforces, until the known becomes the only. For the Echraidhe, it’s not real if it can’t be seen elsewhere, in their mother’s memory, or their mother’s mother. For them, perhaps, there is no such thing as the unknown.” Thenike shook her head. “It’s a danger to all who are able to deepsearch into their memories well, or often.”

“Viajeras.”

“And those who might have become viajeras,” Thenike agreed. She seemed focused somewhere deep inside. “You can see so much of the world through others’ memories, places you’ve never been, faces you’ve never seen and never will, weather you’ve never felt and food you’ve never tasted, that sometimes it’s hard not to want to just feel, taste, see those familiar things over and over. Truly new things become alien, other, not to be trusted. There are those who know their village so well, through the eyes and hearts of so many before them, that they can’t leave it to go somewhere else, they can’t bear to place their feet on a path they have never trodden, on soil they have never planted with a thousand seeds in some past life as lover or child. Some become unable to leave their lodge or tent, or can’t sail past the sight of familiar cliffs. Many who can deepsearch powerfully enough to be a viajera end like this.”

“And you?”

Here Thenike had smiled, though Marghe saw memories of bitter times written on her face. “I’m fortunate enough to have the memories of a thousand different foremothers, some clear, some not. Fortunate, too, to become bored with the past and eager to sail over the horizon or walk over the crest of the hill and see what’s on the other side.”

Strike the gong, it was just after midday. Marghe shivered, cold after sitting all morning.

The results of the virus, the abilities it conferred, could send a person mad.

Uaithne had been proof enough of that. How would it affect her? Would she be able to see into her past, the past of her mother, her aunts? Her father? No one at Port Central had mentioned any of this to her, no strange memory effects… but how many had tried? It was not a thing that just happened. It involved ritual and discipline. Perhaps, though, it involved more than that. Perhaps the virus had to be part of the cells from birth, even before birth.

Strike the gong.

Early afternoon. Marghe saw a tiny figure walking out of the gathering dark and across the snow toward her. She could not spare the figure her whole attention; part of her body was always listening, attuned to Jeep. Waiting. The figure grew, stepping carefully. Carrying something. Food. Gerrel put down the covered tray an arm’s length from Marghe’s feet and withdrew without speaking. It struck Marghe, then, just how much she knew about Gerrel: not only her name, her house, soestre and antecedents, but what foods made her wrinkle her upper lip in distaste, what stories she liked to be told when it was cold and gloomy outside, what made her laugh or blush. That knowledge told her a great deal about herself, about her attitudes to this place: these people were becoming real to her.