Linda Nagata - Memory

“It’s too late, I think.” He raised his arm to the silver, and the shimmering motes that danced about his hand brightened again. Then the silver rushed to him. Never had I seen it move so quickly. It flowed like water released from a dam, sweeping across the grass to wash past his calves, his hips, rising up around him in a great halo of gleaming light that revealed his cold smile, but only for a moment. The silver rushed over his body, sheathing him in a second skin just as it had done to Jolly long ago, but he was still alive under that terrible armor, because his shape reached for me, and I thought I heard his voice, speaking in a lower octave than before, so low it was barely audible. It was as if the world itself were speaking,Come find out.

“Jubilee!”

It was my mother, shouting from the temple. The sound of her voice broke whatever trance had held me on the wall. The silver was only a few feet away and rising fast. I stumbled back, forgetting for a moment where I stood so that I half fell, half jumped off the wall. It was six feet down on the uphill side and I hit hard. Pain lanced my ankle. I hissed and glanced over my shoulder to see silver pouring over the wall where I had just been, and flowing unimpeded through the open gate.

“Run!” my mother screamed. “Hurry! Hurry!”

She was racing down the hill to meet me. I could not bear that. I could not bear to think of her being taken by the silver. So I broke for the temple, ignoring the pain in my ankle and running hard. She met me and we ran together for the courtyard, illuminated by crossing lines of paper lanterns. Liam was there and he swung the gate shut as we entered. It closed with a sigh and a click, making a perfect seal.

In the courtyard the air was sweet with the scent of the guardian kobolds that were spawned each day in our well, living out their single night of existence in the ground or in the temple walls. Their vapor protected us. It had a mechanism about it that would not let the silver pass. I breathed it in gratefully, my heart beating hard.

But my mother was furious. “What were you doing out there? Did you fall asleep on the wall? Didn’t you see the silver rising? Jubilee, you could be dead.”

“But there was—” I stopped as tears started in her eyes.Tears? But there was nothing to cry over. I was safe inside the temple.

Then Liam touched my arm. “We have had news of your father.” He said it in a voice hardly more than a whisper. “He was taken by the silver this evening, outside Temple Nathé on the highway from Xahiclan.”

“No.”I shook my head. I would not believe it, but my mother nodded and the tears spilled from her eyes so I knew it must be true. She held me, and we cried together, until Liam finally made us go inside.

I sat up with my mother all that night. She was a silhouette beside her bedroom window, listening to the glassy tinkle of the fountain in the courtyard. I sat in the rocking chair. The runners whispered against the floor as I rocked myself in a slow, even rhythm. “I nursed you in that chair,” she said, without turning her head.

“You nursed each one of us.”

Starlight glimmered in her eyes. I caught the soft exhalation of her sigh. “Lie down on the bed, Jubilee. Try to sleep.”

I lay down, but sleep did not come. My mind would not rest. The same questions kept returning to me, over and over again: How had my father come to be on the road at dusk? Who was the stranger beyond the wall? Why had he given himself to the silver on the same night my father was taken? And why had he asked about my brother as if he were still alive?

Jolly should know that I am his father now.

It wasn’t possible to survive the silver. Was it?

Was the legend of Fiaccomo real?

By dawn all these mysteries had become one in my mind. Somehow the stranger had caused my father’s death. I was sure of it. And maybe he had caused Jolly’s too, and perhaps… it wasn’t over yet? Should I tell my mother what I had seen?

Or what I thought I had seen. When I tried to put it into words it sounded absurd. My mother would certainly say I’d been asleep on the wall, that I’d been dreaming, but it had been no dream.

Real then. It had been real and reality leaves tracks—but where to look for them? Where else but in the experience of others? I would visit the market, and inquire.

With this resolution made, I sat up. My mother turned from her post in the window. Behind her the sky was just beginning to lighten. “Jubilee,” she whispered, fear carried in a high overnote.

I went to her, and I took her hands. “Mama?”

“Jubilee, don’t—”

Don’t go.I knew that was what she wanted to say. Don’t go wayfaring. Stay home. Stay away from the silver. Be safe. Don’t make me sit this vigil for you. But she did not say it. She kissed my forehead and told me instead, “Wake your brothers and sisters. All but the baby. Send them to me.”

I nodded. My mother was wise.

I had no time to visit the market that day, or the next, caught up in the preparations for my father’s memorial ceremony. But on the third day, when all the notices had gone out and the food had been ordered, I found myself with a free hour in the early afternoon. My mother was napping with the baby and all the other children were quiet, so I took my savant and a folding chair and went out to the orchard with Moki, finding a shady site in a hollow between three trees.

I sat down with the savant in my lap and thought for a moment about strategy. What if Yaphet was in the market? His profile was linked to mine, but I didn’t want him to know I was about. I didn’t want anyone to know. So I stripped all identifiers from my market presence—name, face, notifiers, history. I reduced myself to a blank face within a portrait frame, and then I linked.

I went first to the library and, using a synthesized voice, asked my question of the resident savant: “Has anyone ever survived the silver?”

An oval portrait in the corner of the screen showed me what this savant had looked like when her persona was copied: a dark and wrinkled old woman with wide, bright eyes and white hair, but it was only a still portrait, bordered in black for she had died centuries ago. The intelligence I spoke to was not her. It was only a mechanic that mimicked her thought patterns.

The savant answered me in a low voice, each syllable carefully controlled. “There are several million references associated with your question. The most promising are on-screen now. They refer to a character named Fiaccomo. Fiaccomo is widely regarded as a legend in most markets, but there is evidence to suggest a historical basis—”

“Stop,” I said, scrolling quickly through the list of references. “Let’s try this again. Has anyone besides Fiaccomo survived the silver? Limit references to… the past seven years.” The years since Jolly was taken.

“This search yields only a few works of children’s fantasy from Ano. Do you wish to see?”

“No.”

I closed the link and thought some more. Perhaps the library wasn’t the right place to look. The library was a sanctuary of reliable information, but I was chasing ghosts. I shivered, remembering my exchange with the stranger:

Do I speak to a ghost?

A ghost all right, dressed in flesh. Now tell me, girl, where is Jolly?

I looked about me, at the insects drifting golden above the grass and the patterns of the leaves overhead against bright sunshine and none of it seemed real. Not nearly so real as my memories.

I entered the market again, but I did not go to the library this time. I put my face back on (though not my name) and wandered through the truckers’ clubs instead. That market linked three distant enclaves into the couplet of Halibury and Xahiclan. The players who walked in those streets or lingered in the clubs might in real life be as far away as Ano, or as close as a truck on the highway north of Temple Huacho, but they came together here, to share news and to gossip. If someone among them had seen a stranger haunting the silver I had no doubt it would be discussed here, and that the rumor of it could be uncovered with only a few questions.