Linda Nagata - Memory

I nodded. This day I was determined to obey her, no matter what.

Our guests had retreated ahead of us to the hilltop. As they looked past us I could see excitement in the faces of the children, but in their mothers’ eyes I saw anxiety. I could hardly bear not knowing. I hurried the last few steps. Then I let go of my mother’s hand and turned back.

The trees were widely spaced so it was easy to see down the grassy slope and across the stream to the cave, but I saw no sign of Kaphiri there. Our guests were mesmerized instead by the appearance of silver in daylight.

The kobolds had wakened the dormant silver. It billowed out of the grotto’s dark mouth, looking thin and almost white in the sunlight, floating higher than silver should, as if it had become light as a cloud. It drifted over the shrine, hiding our offerings. It rolled to the water where some of it was caught by the current and carried downstream in steaming clouds, but the main bank of silver crossed the water, filling the little vale and climbing the slope of the hill. An anxious, excited murmur ran through our gathering as the silver drew nearer. I could smell its fresh and lively scent. My heart beat faster. Instinct warned me to run away, to flee over the hill, and I knew everyone around me felt the same. But we stayed, and in a moment the sunlight did its work. The silver broke up into iridescent tendrils that rose like steam among the branches of the trees, vanishing utterly as they passed above the canopy.

In a few minutes it was all over. The silver was gone, and the streambed was as it had been except the gifts on the shrine and the cloth I had left there were gone. Taken by the goddess in her dream? It’s what my mother would say.

The bare river rock glistened now with flecks of gold. More flecks decorated the bridge, but that was all. The silver had not lasted long enough to bring about any real change.

Kaphiri seemed to forget us. For twenty days there was no sign of him, though I remained vigilant, spending many nights on the wall. No one questioned me. They knew I had a lover, and it was only natural I would want to be alone with him; when the market link was down, it was just as natural for me to choose to be alone in my grief. I was of the age of restlessness and melancholia, and my behavior was easily explained.

That was why I was on the wall one dreary evening, when clouds lay low and heavy over the land. Night was falling early. The vale had become a wide gray shadow and the horizon had taken on the color of old steel, when the headlight of a bike appeared in the distance, racing through the dusk for the shelter of Temple Huacho.

There was no sign of silver that night; no hint that this rider might be a servant of Kaphiri, but I’d been on edge so long I started to my feet, expecting the worst. I wished furiously that I had my hunting rifle in hand, but it was locked up safe in my room. (My mother was accepting of my seclusion, but she would have wanted an explanation for a rifle laid across my lap.)

Then from across the vale I heard a high-pitched cry, “Jubilee!” and I was glad I didn’t have a weapon.

“Auntie Som!” I shouted in return. I whooped and waved, and she waved back at me, the headlight on her bike bright as a star in the gloom. “Auntie Som!” We hadn’t expected her until tomorrow afternoon.

Auntie Som was my mother’s older sister. She was a cessant who’d made a life for herself teaching school in the Ano marketplace. She’d visited us before, first when my brother Jacio was born, and three times since, as each new baby came. This time she had come to stay.

I leaped off the wall and ran to open the gate, while my brothers and sisters bubbled out of the temple, racing one another down through the orchard while Moki dashed, barking, about their feet. My mother followed, carrying Zeyen. She met her sister at the gate and hugged her; and while there were tears in her eyes, there was also a smile on her face.

I closed the gate, then turned to watch them all as they walked back up the hill. Liam had stayed behind too, though I wasn’t aware of him in the deep shadows until he spoke. “I think it’ll rain tonight.”

I jumped, but then I forced myself to laugh at my own edginess.

Liam wasn’t fooled. “Jubilee, are you planning to run away?”

“No!”

The dusk had passed into full night and I could barely see him, though I could feel him thinking, thinking. At last he spoke, his voice hardly more than a whisper, “Anyway, you’re free to go, now that you know your mother won’t be alone.”

I didn’t want anyone up the hill to overhear, so I whispered too. “Do you want to go? Are you ready?”

“None of us ever knows how much time we’ll have.”

I nodded, though I don’t think he could see me in the dark. “I’ve been worried… about Mama.”

“You can stay here,” he said quickly. “You don’t have to go with me.”

“It’s not that.”

He hesitated. “Saying good-bye is the hardest.”

“Liam, will you wait a few more days. Please? Until Auntie Som is settled.” Until I could convince myself Kaphiri would not come again. Why should he come? Jolly was long gone, and there was nothing else here he could want.

Liam sighed. “You’ve been spending so much time out here, I thought you were on the edge of leaving.”

“I wouldn’t run away.”

“All right. I’m sorry.”

“You’ll wait then?”

“A few days. Not longer.”

A drop of rain struck my cheek, and then another.

“Come on,” Liam said. “This is not a night to stay out and wait for ghosts.”

Is that what I’d been doing?

I retrieved my savant from the wall, while the rain became a steady drizzle. Moki dashed after us as we jogged through the orchard, toward the friendly glow of the lanterns that hung in the courtyard.

It was the last night I would spend at home.

I fell asleep listening to the rain and heard it again when I awoke in the morning. A glance out my window showed gray veils drifting over the hills but the clouds that trailed them had grown thin. I guessed there would be abundant sun before the morning was far gone. So I dressed in shorts, a field shirt, and ankle-high shoes. I’d decided to search the hills around Temple Huacho; see what turned up. If I found no sign of spies or wanderers, maybe it would be easier to believe Kaphiri had forgotten us; that he’d sent none of his followers to interfere in our lives; and that my father’s death that night had been a terrible coincidence and nothing more.

I grabbed a jacket and made my way to the kitchen. My mother was there, helping Zeyen and four-year-old Arial with their breakfast, while she chatted with Auntie Som and Emia. Liam was breakfasting at the far corner of the table. He saw me first. “Are you going out?”

The others turned, and suddenly I felt guilty for wanting to spend the day away from them. I gave a little shrug. “I was thinking about it.”

“Eat breakfast first,” my mother said. “And take Liam with you. He’s about to go crazy trapped inside these walls.”

I had just sat down when Jacio came bursting in, with Moki prancing at his heels. “Jubilee! Jubilee! There’s a machine in the forest.”

I was on my feet in an instant. “What kind of machine? Where?”

At the same time my mother demanded to know, “Jacio, what were you doing past the wall?”

Jacio wisely chose to answer me. “It’s a savant,” he panted, his dark hair tousled and his pale cheeks flushed red. “But the shape’s different. It’s not one of ours.”

Jacio was ten, the same age I’d been when Jolly was taken. I’d enlisted him to look for “strange things”—it was the kind of imaginative game he enjoyed, though I’d never expected him to be the first to find a sign of Kaphiri.