Linda Nagata - Memory

We brought the bikes inside to get them out of the rain. Then we returned to the well room, which was the only room Nuanez Li used anymore. He had gone in ahead of us, and we found him waiting there with the light turned on, looking forlorn as he stood before the open door of a small cabinet. “There’s only kibble,” he said softly. “It’s not fresh.”

Kibble is a wayfarer’s food, made of a strain of kobold that can eat almost anything organic. The kobold’s body swells into a marble-sized pellet of protein. Then the head and legs die and fall off, leaving a protein pellet encased in a sweetened carbohydrate shell. Kibble can last for months, and apparently that was how Nuanez cultivated it: in large batches in a back room of the temple whenever he could get the carcass of a wild calf, or gather enough fallen leaves to make a compost heap.

“We have other food,” Liam said. “If you’ll permit it, we’d be honored to provide dinner tonight.”

Nuanez looked close to tears at this suggestion, and I could not tell if it was because he felt ashamed, or because he was moved to be with other players again. Liam nodded, pretending Nuanez had assented. Then he went to fetch our road packets from the bikes and Nuanez went with him.

When they came back Nuanez carried all the packets himself, looking as pleased as a child on his birthday. He sat beside me at the table and sorted through them again and again, admiring the labels, and the listed contents. Liam encouraged him to choose whichever he wanted and that took another ten minutes until finally I said I should cover his eyes and let him pick blindly. He agreed that would be best and afterward he ate with his eyes closed, and a look of bliss upon his face. None of us had the heart to disturb him, so it was a silent dinner, requiring only a few minutes to finish.

Afterward I forced myself up. Leaning past Liam, I put my hand on his flashlight. “I’m going to get our things off the bikes.”

He looked up at me, and the look in his eyes made me remember that we had not finished our business of the afternoon. Udondi saw it too. She leaned across the table, distracting Nuanez with questions about the structure of the temple. “Oh, aye,” Nuanez said. “It’s all plastic, compiled of carbon harvested from the air…”

I took the flashlight and left. I did not look back. Shadows retreated ahead of me in the hallway and I heard Nuanez ask, “Where are they going?” Udondi answered something I could not understand and Moki’s claws scrabbled at the floor as he hurried to catch up.

I listened for Liam following me, but he moved like a cat, silent. Saying nothing. When I could stand it no longer I turned about in the hall sending the shadows jumping up the mildewed walls. “I had to do something!”

He was six paces behind me, looking as angry as he’d been that afternoon, as if he’d packed the emotion away, only to pull it out again, still fresh. “You didn’t thinkI’d do something?”

“I’m not the kind of player to wait for someone else.”

“If you don’t learn to think first, Jubilee, to think ahead, you’re not going to last out here. It’s as simple as that.”

I nodded. “I made a mistake, Liam. I know that.”

He watched me, as if waiting for something more. “What? No promise it won’t happen again?”

“I can’t promise that.”

“So you’re honest.” He held out his hand. “Give me the flashlight.”

It was his, so I handed it to him. He went past me, into the front hall where we had left the bikes. “Liam, I am sorry.”

He was already throwing open the saddle boxes, pulling out the sleeping bags, and our savants. “I don’t want to die out here. I don’t want you to die.”

“We aren’t going to die.”

“Spend a few months on the road, and you won’t sound so confident when you say that.”

He was in no mood to make peace. So I took my savant and went out on the stoop to call my mother, but I could not get a signal, not even when I floated the savant high on a wire line. Liam came out to watch. “No luck?”

I shook my head. “Either the district antennas are down or there are no district antennas.”

“That last, I’d guess.”

Moki was running about in the rain. I whistled for him, trying hard to hold on to an artificial calm. At Temple Huacho we had often lost our market connection, but never before had I been prevented from calling home if I was away. What was going on there? Did they need me? Would I ever know?

It came to me that I might find Jolly, and that I might take him back to Kavasphir only to find that our home, Temple Huacho, had been lost: fallen to ruins at the hands of some cessant cult, or washed away by the silver, and all that we loved in this world gone.

“She’ll be all right,” Liam said as if he had heard my heart. “Your mother is good at taking care of things.”

“She is. I know it.”

But Kaphiri was a hazard altogether different from any she had faced before.

Back in the well room, Udondi saw things in a more positive light. “If you can’t get a link out of here, neither can the worm.”

That was true. So it was possible nothing was known of our activities since we’d left the Kalang’s western rim. If we could get rid of the worm before we left the Crescent’s eastern spur, we might still stand a chance of slipping away undiscovered.

I laid out my sleeping bag beside one of the heating coils. Then I checked that my rifle was loaded. “How can we stop the worm?” I wondered aloud. “Would a shot to the head do it?”

Nuanez had heard the story of the worm from Udondi. “Depends on the design,” he said. “Some mechanics have intelligence in every segment. Do you want to sleep in my bed?”

I glanced at his sagging mattress—“No thank you; this is fine”—and crawled inside my bag before he could insist.

Liam said, “The metallophores could still work. Or maybe we could take it in a noose.”

“No,” I said. “If you noose it, the worm would only split into segments and escape.” I pulled the bag over my shoulders, grateful for the nearby heating coil.

“Maybe it could be noosed about the head,” Nuanez said.

“It has only one set of eyes,” Liam mused. “That probably means the intelligence is local to the head.”

“So a head shotmight work,” I mumbled as a lethargy crept over me. The room grew distant, and yet I didn’t fall asleep. Or if I did, it was only a half sleep in which the voices of the others continued to play inside my mind, their soft words wrapped around a whiskey smell. I guessed it was Udondi who’d produced the liquor, because I never knew Liam to carry it. I listened to their low voices, and after a while it was mostly Nuanez who spoke, his words building the shape of his life in my half-waking mind.

Long ago he had come to the Kalang Crescent with his lover, and together they had made this temple around a kobold well they discovered freshly born from the ground. A lifetime spent in that horrible forest! I could not imagine it, yet Nuanez spoke fondly of his past. He had been happy, and I can only think his lover Mari had been happy too. There had been twenty-six children, though one daughter was lost to the forest mechanics when she was five. Nuanez still was bitter: “Kalang—whoever he was—was a fool to leave them here. Now it’ll take a silver flood to be rid of them.”

In time the children grew up and one by one they went away. “I hope some of them found lives out there,” Nuanez said, a faraway note in his voice. “Anyway, none came back.”

But Nuanez did not look old enough to have even one child. I wondered if he might be the youngest son after all, left on his own after some terrible accident, his loneliness driving him to re-create a life history of love and family bonds. “How is it you look so young?” I asked.