Linda Nagata - Memory

They all turned to me with startled faces. Then Liam chuckled. “Jubilee, I thought you were asleep.”

“Not really.”

Nuanez eyed me with that disturbing, speculative glint he had. “Do I look young?”

Udondi answered that. “Hardly a teen.”

This pleased him. “That’ll be a relief for Mari! She wouldn’t want to come back to an old man. Ah, I miss her so much. She endured a lot to win the traveler’s favor. He was a cruel one, with never a kind word for her, but she would always gift him the best room and the best food when he came to stay.” Nuanez smiled sheepishly. “It’s hard to believe, I guess, but we kept a fine house when Mari was here. Not like now…”

“Your house is warm,” Udondi said, “and your hospitality unquestioned… but who is this traveler you speak of?” Was there an edge of excitement in her voice?

Nuanez frowned, struggling with the memory. “Did he ever have a name? If he did I don’t remember it. We called him the traveler. Or we called him nothing at all. He’s here . That’s all Mari would say when I returned in the evening from tending the wells, but I knew who she meant. He had no need of a name.

“He came the first time not long after we moved here, but even then he knew his way in the forest. He showed me kobold wells I had not found before, and he ordered me to care for them. It made my circuit very long, but I kept them well. Mari wanted me to. The traveler knew many things, and Mari loved to learn new things. Our wells must be very special, she’d say. To bring him back again and again.

“Years passed between his visits, and when he came back he always looked just the same. Mari noticed it first. He doesn’t age , she’d say.”

This startled me, and my gaze shifted to Udondi, who answered my look with a slight nod.

Nuanez went on with his story. “Mari felt her own age growing heavy on her. She had spent ninety-one years as a wayfarer. She was past one hundred when she found me. She’d been through a lot and… it made her afraid. If she died and was born again, would she have to spend another ninety years in fruitless searching? She didn’t want to die and lose what she had. So finally she gathered her courage and asked the traveler about his secret, how he had held on to his youth.

“He had always been a cruel man, but he showed her some kindness then. He told her he would help her, that she did not have to die. So she went away with him. He was going to make her young again, that’s what she told me, and then she’d come back, and we’d be together always…”

Again Udondi and I exchanged a look, and I could see she thought this traveler was Kaphiri.

Nuanez did not notice. “She’ll be surprised when she does finally come home, because I have found a way to get my own youth back, and I found it right here, in our own kobold wells. After Mari left, I had a lot of time, so I read her books, and I experimented with the kobolds and changed their configuration codes and finally I got what Mari wanted: an elixir to return youth.”

I pushed myself up on one elbow, peering at his boy-face. “So you made yourself young again.” But his youth was not the same as Kaphiri’s. The player I’d met at Temple Huacho had none of the childish look or mannerisms of Nuanez. Kaphiri had seemed not so much young, as timeless, immune to age.

“She should have come back by now,” Nuanez said, and his voice broke. His face scrunched up, so that I was afraid he would cry. “Why does it take so long?”

“Has the traveler never come back?” Udondi asked gently.

“Never. The road is dangerous, I know, and if something happened to him in some far land, then Mari might have become lost. That could be why she takes so long. But the goddess will finally guide my Mari home. I know it. The silver’s aware of all of us. Mari told me it was so, and she grew up in the mountains, so she would know.”

He snapped his fingers. “But I’m forgetting again! It’s gotten bad lately. The traveler must have known something I did not, for he never forgot anything…” Nuanez tapped his forehead. “But me… I feel stuffed with memories. Too many memories. They make me fuzzy-headed. Sometimes I feel I don’t have room in my head to think at all, but—” He stopped in midsentence, a distant look in his eyes as if he were off chasing some stray thought. Then he smiled. “Mari doesn’t like me forgetting.”

His bed creaked as he stood. He shuffled over to one of the cabinets behind the heating coil at the foot of his bed. Opening the plastic door, he bent over, and rummaged around inside. “Oh. Miracle. I’ve found it.”

When he turned around, I glimpsed a flat, greenish object half-hidden in his great hand. “This was Mari’s. When she was a girl in the mountains, it was the custom to make shrines to the goddess. If you left something valuable for the silver, sometimes something even more valuable was returned, so it was said. Well, Mari had a brother who was good at everything, while she was not so good. It sat hard with her, and one day she made a shrine and left her cat there. That cat was more precious to her than anything… except, I guess, beating her brother. She wanted the goddess to send her something powerful in trade for that cat. Well, she lost the cat, and all she got in return was this book.” He handed a little palm-sized book to Udondi, who thumbed through it curiously. “Can you read it?” Nuanez asked hopefully.

“Not a word.”

He sighed. “Neither could Mari. She never showed it to the traveler, or told him she had it, because she didn’t trust him to let her know what it was about. But before we came here she used to show it to everyone she met, hoping someone could read it.”

“Jubilee is good with these things,” Udondi said, and she passed the book to me. I accepted it eagerly. The cover was green plastic, but each inner page was a wafer of green lettered stone, the black writing tiny, compressed. I bent over it, squinting in the poor light. I knew these letters! My lips moved as I sounded out the words. “Sweet silver,” I whispered.

“Do you have it?” Liam asked.

I nodded, feeling a sudden chill. “It’s the same language used by the bogy in the ruined city.”

“You can read it?” Nuanez asked in hoarse amazement. “What does it say?”

I turned a few pages, reading words where I could. “It looks like an index of configuration codes.”

“For regrowing youth?”

“I don’t think so. It’ll take me some time to work the whole thing out, but here… and here. These seem to do with recalling memories.”

His face fell in clear disappointment. “Oh, I have too many memories already. An old man’s mind in a young man’s body and no room left for thinking.”

I frowned over the book. Had I misspoken? The codes had to do with recalling memories, yes, but not the memories of individual players. Rather, the memory of silver…

Could that be?

I glanced at Nuanez, knowing I should explain the difference, but I’d begun to covet the book. I held it against my chest. “May I read it?”

“You can have it! Didn’t I say that? Mari intended to give it to the one who could read it. She got to thinking maybe that was the reason she’d been given the book in the first place—to hold on to for another. She traded her cat for it. She wanted it to mean something. Oh, Mari. You’d be disappointed to know it was only configuration codes.”

After that the light was put out and the others slept, but I lay awake, thinking, still holding the book in my hands. Mari had traded her cat for it—the same as if I’d traded Moki. A powerful gift.

Wasthe silver aware? I riffled the book’s crisp stone pages and a light fluttered from them. A greenish light.