Linda Nagata - Memory

We waited seven days to hold the memorial ceremony, as custom advises for those taken by the silver. This is to allow time for friends to gather from neighboring enclaves. But travel is dangerous as my father’s fate showed, and I did not expect many guests—revealing how little I knew of Kedato Panandi.

My father had traveled often and made many friends. In the end, forty-two players risked the journey to Temple Huacho, many from far away Xahiclan, and if they hadn’t thought to bring gifts of food and drink and their own bedding we would have been hard-pressed to provide for them all. Among them were merchants and truckers and hoteliers and librarians and even the matchmaker from Halibury who had changed his opinion of my father over the past nineteen years.

The night before the service I went with my mother to the well room. She wore her green evening gown, and I wore a new dress of dark blue, for this was a formal occasion.

Stored in tiny, airtight drawers along the walls were the dormant kobolds she’d collected since the founding of Temple Huacho. Most of the little mechanics had been gathered from the mouth of our well, but many had been received from other temples, and some very rare specimens had been traded from hand to hand, traveling to us in slow steps from far around the ring of the world.

Our well produced kobolds in four different series: one of metallo-lithophores that specialized in mining; another of metallo-lithophores dedicated to building many rare objects of metal and glass; a third, unique series that produced the organic stones from which our orchard had been grown; and of course the series that encompassed the temple guardians, which were found in every well. For everything else we had to trade.

My mother approached the wide cabinet that housed the temple series. She knelt beside it, examining the drawers before choosing one at knee height. It rolled out to its full length of two feet. Inside were many small, transparent boxes. She selected one from the back, closed the drawer, then carried the box to her workbench.

The box was a complicated device used to store dormant kobolds. It was divided into two horizontal sections with a trapdoor between them. In the upper chamber were six kobolds. They looked very much like the guardian kobolds that lived within the walls and grounds of the temple, exuding their sweet, protective scent whenever the silver drew near. Like the guardians, these had membranes resembling petals on their backs, so that each looked like a blossom, but not a simple blossom like a cherry. Their petals were thicker and more numerous and they overlapped one another like the petals of a rose, hiding the degenerate legs beneath them. But where the temple guardians were white, these kobolds were a dusky red touched with tones of purple. A warning color.

My mother manipulated a bar built within the box, using it to push one of the kobolds onto the trapdoor. Then she pressed a lever, and the kobold was sucked into the lower level with a pop of pressurized air. After that she opened the bottom of the box and the kobold spilled onto the workbench, its useless legs already twitching as the touch of oxygen brought it out of hibernation.

“We’ll need two,” my mother said as she handed me the box. “But it’s best to do one at a time. So return this to the drawer for now, and be sure you close it tightly.”

I did as I was told. When I returned to the bench my mother had turned the kobold onto its back. Its legs waved in the air as she bent over it, studying its configuration code with her magnifying goggles. Then, using a tiny pick, she pressed at its belly, manipulating the digits. Sometimes configuration codes are fixed, but most kobolds have a range of functions that can be selected by adjusting the readout on their bellies.

“Have you memorized the setting?” I asked.

“It’s displayed on the screen of my goggles.”

“How can you keep your hand so steady?”

Her lips twitched in a faint smile, though she did not look away from her work. “It’s my talent. Steadiness.”

Her tears were long gone, her mood calm as she used the pick to tick off changes in the code.

“You did this for Jolly too, didn’t you?” I asked.

The thought came out of nowhere, taking me by surprise. I had blurted it out without thinking and immediately I was sorry. She didn’t need to be reminded of that other grief now—but I should have known my mother better. “How much do you remember of Jolly?” she asked without pausing in her work.

I remembered every detail of his last night. “I haven’t forgotten anything.”

She nodded her approval. “You must remember your father too. If we embrace the memory of those we love, they’ll continue inside us.”

I nodded, though I didn’t speak right away. Steadiness was not my talent.

Philosophers tell us to take comfort in the thought that those who are gone are born again into new lives but this was no comfort to me, for the memories we are made of are not reborn, and though my father might have already found new life in the womb of a woman somewhere in the world he would never be my father again.

But as they had for a week now, my thoughts slid from the fate of my father to the problem of the stranger beyond the wall. Neither my mother nor Liam had seen Kaphiri that night (if indeed it was him), for he had been standing beneath the wall, out of view of the temple—and I had said nothing.

I didn’t know what to say. I would go over it in my mind—Mama, I saw a magic man beyond the wall that night. He came out of the silver looking for your dead son.

She already had grief enough.

But I could not stop thinking about Kaphiri, and the way he had asked after Jolly as if Jolly were still alive.He should know that I am his father now.

These words, they haunted me. The possibilities they implied… it was almost more than I could bear.

So I watched my mother as she ticked off each of the hundreds of digits in the kobold’s code, and when I was sure my voice would be steady I asked, “Mama? Have you ever heard of a player called Kaphiri?”

She did not hesitate in her work. “No. I don’t know that name.”

“It’s said he can survive the silver.”

A smile touched her lips. “Has that rumor started again?”

I shrugged, though she wasn’t looking at me.

“No one can survive the silver, Jubilee. Don’t wish for it. You’ll only hurt yourself wishing for things that will never be.”

“It’s said Fiaccomo could pass through the silver.”

“It’s said he died in the silver and only the special favor of the goddess restored him. But that’s just a story.”

“I’m not so sure.”

My mother ticked off several more digits on the kobold before she answered. “All right. I thought Fiaccomo was a myth, but what you found in the ruined city suggests there really was a player by that name. That doesn’t mean he had supernatural powers. That city fell because the silver behaved then as it does now.”

I didn’t see it that way. “But why did the silver come in such a great flood on that one night, when no one in that city had even seen silver before?”

“Jubilee, I just don’t know.”

“I think I do.” I hesitated. I’d never told my mother this before: “That night Jolly was taken… he told me he’d called the silver, and it’s said Fiaccomo could do the same.”

“Jubilee!” This time she did stop her work. She laid down the pick and took off her goggles and looked at me so that I immediately regretted saying anything. “Jubilee.”

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “It’s what he said, but he didn’t mean to do it.”

“He didn’t do it. Stories are not the same as life. No one can call the silver.”