Linda Nagata - Memory

Of all the layers we passed, the most enthralling were the long veins of lettered stone. The trail was rough and commanded my full attention, yet I could not resist stealing a glance, and then another, at that treasure. Whole words, clearly legible, leaped out at me. I could have spent a lifetime there, happily decrypting the secrets of the past. I was so distracted that for many minutes I forgot to look behind. We were hardly a hundred feet from the bottom when I thought to pause and glance back—only to discover that Liam was nowhere to be seen.

“Udondi!” I called. “Hold up.”

I searched the slope where the trail passed, but the light was all harsh sun and deep shadows, and at first I could not see him.

Udondi turned her bike around. She rode up beside me. Dust covered her face and her sunglasses. “He’s there,” she said, “where the trail crosses the top of that ravine.”

Most of the ravine was so steep it was almost a dry waterfall, but near its top there was a ledge where the trail wound past. Liam was there, lying on his belly in the shadow of a large, flat stone of some rusting metal, gazing up the cliff face. “Where’s his bike?” I wondered.

Udondi shook her head. “I don’t—”

We both saw it at the same time: the worm, sliding down the sheer wall of the cliff. It moved with the swiftness of water. It glittered like water too as the brilliant sunlight reflected off its scales. I watched it enter the ravine where Liam lay hidden. I expected it to slow or circle away as it drew near him, but it slipped past, unaware of him behind the rusting stone.

“Let’s go,” Udondi said, a sudden urgency in her voice. “Now!”

“But why doesn’t he pull his rifle?”

“Rifles don’t work.”

Liam rose from behind the stone that sheltered him. He put his foot against a knee-high boulder, sending it bounding into the steep ravine. It exploded past the brush and knocked loose more boulders, along with a trickle of tumbled stone.

“Sweet silver,”I whispered.

Liam kicked more rocks, generating more tiny rock falls that went whooshing into the ravine, adding mass on top of the first bouncing stones so that within seconds the whole floor of the ravine was in motion. Small gray birds rose up from the slope as if they’d been shaken loose. Moki started to climb from his bin, but I put my hand on his neck as a sign that he should be still.

“Get back!” Udondi shouted over the rumble of stone. “This whole cliff face could go.”

The thundering avalanche was shaking loose stones ahead of the flow and I thought she might be right. I started to retreat, but I stopped when I saw the glitter of the worm below us, in the lower reach of the ravine.

It was still well ahead of the tumbling rocks, but it was no longer fleeing downhill. Instead, it had turned. It was attempting to escape the avalanche by climbing the ravine’s steep wall.

Moki saw it too and jumped from his bin just as I pulled my rifle. I shot from the hip, aiming not at the worm, but at the rocks just above it. The loose stone fountained, startling both Moki and the worm. They both hesitated. “Moki!” I shouted. “Come here!”

Udondi was firing now too. Her first shot missed, but her second kicked close to the worm’s head. It reared back—and then the slide was on it. Its tail vanished under the tumbling rocks. Momentum spun its forward half around even as it dropped segments, and then it vanished inside a cloud of roiling dust.

Udondi whooped. “Got it!”

“Moki!”I called again, but he couldn’t hear me. The rock slide was thundering past and I could feel the ground shaking under my bike. I slammed my palm against my thigh. “Moki!” Fear got the better of him at last. He gave up on the worm and came bounding back to me. I helped him scramble into his bin, at the same time glancing at the cliff directly above us, where a dozen tiny rock falls were skipping merrily downhill. “Udondi…”

“I see it. Come on!”

We raced our bikes then, starting a small rockfall of our own as we cut straight down to the next switchback. Moki hunkered low in his bin to keep from being bounced out.

The cow trail left the cliff through a steep tangle of stone and boulders left by past slides. Hooves had shaped the path into densely packed gravel—good traction for our bikes. The wheels became round and we sped toward the washes, the avalanche deafening behind us, spitting dust at our backs. Dust everywhere, and grit in our eyes so I could hardly see.

Then it was over. The rocks had spent their momentum. Birds whirled through the billowing dust, and for a moment I wondered if I’d gone deaf, the silence was so astonishing. Then a stray rock rattled, the wind whispered past my ears, and time began again.

I turned to look back at the cliff. Even through the dust it was easy to see that at least a third of the trail had fallen away, and there at the top of the slide…

“Liam!”I shouted. I grinned to see him, a tiny figure, gingerly working his bike around the unstable slope that remained.

Udondi laughed. “That’ll do for the worm. I don’t think even a mechanic can get out from under that much stone.” Moki shook the dust from his head and sneezed, drawing a smile from Udondi. “This dust. If anyone is watching, they won’t overlook it.”

I had one more worry. “The trail’s gone. How are the cows going to get back to the top? They’ll be trapped down here.”

Udondi considered this carefully. Then, “Hmm. We could stay to rebuild the trail.”

I gave her a sour look, and she smiled. “Don’t worry over it too much, Jubilee. I’m sure the herds have faced landslides before.”

We waited in the shadow of one of the stone god-men for Liam to come down. As the dust settled, the transformed strata of the Kalang Crescent were revealed, glistening and glittering, scoured smooth by the avalanche. Wisps of silver curled ominously from the torn cliff face, evaporating in the sunlight. All was quiet now, and still I had the impression of a terrible pressure in the land, as if some great engine of silver lay trapped there, set to a task of endless creation deep beneath the Kalang.

It was late morning by the time Liam found a way down, and the news he brought was not good. “I saw a plume of dust to the west. Ten, fifteen miles, maybe, back along the base of the Kalang. It disappeared after a few minutes but I don’t doubt it was kicked up by a truck—one that was forced to slow when it hit rough terrain.”

No one was surprised.

Udondi frowned at the sky, where clouds had begun to gather, just as they had yesterday. “We ride fast,” she said at last. “There are refuge mesas in the northern Iraliad, way stations for travelers. If we can reach one, we might be able to defend it, and then the silver can take care of our pursuers.”

“If Kaphiri doesn’t interfere,” I added gloomily, remembering the apparition Liam had seen last night.

“He’s still a player, and he can die as easily as any other player from a bullet wound.” She looked at Liam. “This time we’ll be ready for him.”

It was not a question, and Liam did not answer.

We rode swiftly, following the line of the Kalang to the east until that great plateau reached its sheer end. There we paused to look back at the cliff where we had stood late yesterday afternoon. How high it seemed, and far away! We had felt safe from the silver up there, but here on the plain I could see faint puffs of silver smoking from the cliff face even in the daylight, and I wondered how safe we had really been.

We had come to a boundary. On one hand the land descended to the terrible wastes of the southern basin. On the other it rose in a long, gradual slope to the high desert of the northern Iraliad. I was glad that was our direction, and I wondered if I would have had the courage to turn south, if Jolly had been waiting for me there.