Linda Nagata - Memory

Like a flash image in the market, I remembered the savant we’d pursued, the one we had thought was Kaphiri’s. I saw it again, rising higher and higher into the blue afternoon sky above the highway until a tiny silver storm burst into existence around it.

Just a little silver storm.

But here on the edge of the Iraliad, beneath the gloom of heavy clouds, silver was already lurking in every sheltered niche… like a fire that smolders, waiting for any faint breath of air to stir it into a firestorm. Could I give it that breath?

I yanked the savant from its bin and slapped the wings open. Then I whispered to it. “Go. Over the truck. As fast as you can, and as high.Go! ”

It shot off into the air. I expected to see it tumble as a bullet took it, but someone was firing again from the rocks above me and my pursuers had no time to devote to a harmless savant. I lay on my back and watched it sweep away toward the plain. It was only a hundred feet up when silver enveloped it in a small cloud of cool light that expanded rapidly, outward yes, but mostly downward, driving toward the ground with the force of a waterfall.

I heard a great scream of brakes, a roar of tires on dirt, the popping of stones. I raised my head to look and saw a flood of silver gushing around the truck’s melted tires. Several of the bikers were down: frozen ghost-shapes wrapped in luminous death, melting into the shallow flood. Beyond them the plain was aglow with a blanket of silver only a few inches deep.

No one was watching me anymore.

I scrambled to my feet, heaving the bike back onto its tires. It started up at a word. I rode it back up the side of the gully, letting it find its own way. It slipped once, and I looked back to see the gully floor flooded with silver. But the tires caught again and then I was over the rim.

Liam must have heard me coming. He staggered from behind a rock. He had found his rifle, for he had it in hand, but half his face was covered in fresh blood. I fought a rush of revulsion. A player’s blood is poison if it gets inside another’s veins. But this was Liam. I spun the bike to a stop and he lurched onto the seat behind me. “Uphill!”

“Where’s Udondi?”

“I’m here.” She emerged on her bike from the rocks where she’d sheltered. Her rifle was slung over her shoulder and she looked unharmed. “Let’s go, before this silver consumes us too.” With that she took off into the tumbled rocks that surrounded the foot of the pinnacles, and I followed, not daring to look behind until we’d climbed up some two hundred yards above the plain. There, just where the pinnacles properly began, we found a small, west-facing ledge. We stopped then, and looked back.

Silver was puddled in a shallow lake against the rocks. It did not reach as far out into the plain as I had thought, but it reached far enough. The truck was dissolved in it, sunk almost to its roof. The fallen bikes were gone, and of the players who had pursued us, I saw no sign.

“So, Jubilee,” Udondi said in a wary voice, “have you become like Kaphiri now?”

I turned, to face her troubled gaze. I couldn’t meet it long, for it was true: I had summoned the silver, and made it serve my own ends. How many players had I just killed? Eight? Ten? Did this balance my father’s death?

“You had no choice in it,” Liam said gruffly. “We’d all be prisoners now, or dead, if you hadn’t sent the savant up. And Kaphiri would have Jolly back this very night. It’s your luck we’re still here at all.”

My wicked luck, that made others fall in my place. Even my bike was safe. I could see it lying on its side out on the plain, covered in a drape of white dust.

But Udondi bowed to Liam’s words. “You’re right, I know. And it was my own wish that the silver would swallow our enemies… though I never thought to call it to that purpose. It’s not a thing to be commanded. I fear there will be a cost.”

I looked up sharply. “Where’s Moki?” I had seen him last, fleeing before the truck. I dropped the kickstand and slid off the bike. “Moki!” My voice echoed off the rocks. “Udondi, did you see him?” She shook her head. “Moki!”

Tears were welling in my eyes when I turned to Liam. Hadn’t he warned me to leave Moki home? Then I caught my breath as my gaze fell on his bloody face.

Liam said, “I haven’t seen Moki since your bike went down, Jubilee. I’m sorry.”

“But you’re hurt. I forgot. Oh, Liam.” His cheek was caked in blood and dirt, with fresh blood still seeping from behind his sunglasses.

“A rock fragment hit my eye. That’s when I dropped the bike.” Gingerly, he lifted away his sunglasses. I flinched. “That ugly?” he asked.

I nodded. The wound was a nasty gouge across his eye, the lower lid torn, the upper swollen so it could not close. The eye itself was oozing tears of blood. The sight of it frightened me, more so because I had open abrasions on my hands from when my bike had fallen. If our blood crossed we might both die.

Udondi saw my predicament. “Stay back, Jubilee,” she said. “No need to take a chance.”

So I held Liam’s rifle while she examined the wound. “Can you see?” she asked Liam.

He shrugged. “It’s a blur on that side.”

“And no doubt very painful. Let’s cover it, and tonight we can put together an elixir that will help it heal.”

“Hold on,” Liam said softly. “Look around. On the ridge behind you. Is that someone coming?”

I turned and brought the rifle to bear on a hooded, sticklike figure in dull-colored clothes, angling down the boulder-strewn slope above us. My first thought was that one of the bikers had survived, but my quick offense collapsed when I sighted Moki trotting proudly in front of this desert apparition, as if intent on doing the introductions himself.

“Moki!”

He came bounding at my call, and I greeted him with a joyous hug, almost dropping the rifle in my enthusiasm. Fortunately Udondi acted with more thought, neither raising her weapon nor lowering her guard. Instead she called a cautious greeting. “If you are not one of those who pursued us on the plain, then well met.”

“If I were one of them,” the stranger answered in a throaty voice that identified her as an older woman, “I do not think I would be in fit condition to speak.”

Udondi stiffened at this jibe. Her grip on the rifle tightened just a little. “We did not ask to be pursued, nor to be accosted.”

The stranger stopped, still many yards away. She regarded us, her brown, time-weathered face looking out from the hood of a tunic that might once have been white but was now stained to the reddish-brown color of the Iraliad. She wore loose trousers and cloth boots of the same color, and an unused veil that draped her shoulder, but beneath her soft clothes I sensed she was as thin and hard as the pinnacles that towered over our heads—and in her height she echoed them too. My head did not reach her shoulder, while Udondi looked like a petite child before her. She said, “Your objection was strongly stated. Is it your way to summon the silver to your defense?”

Udondi’s posture softened. “No. That was a desperate act. One I hope we never repeat.”

“Still… it can be hard to forget such a weapon.” Her gaze turned to me, where I knelt, cradling Moki. “Such knowledge can haunt us, following us even from one life to the next.”

Her words stung. I wondered: was it possible I’d done such a thing before? I didn’t want to believe it. “I saw another savant taken by the silver only a few days past. And the air was heavy with the silver’s scent all this afternoon. That’s why the idea came to me.” But wasn’t that how languages came to me as well? In the right circumstances, memories were stirred.