Linda Nagata - Memory

The desert woman nodded, as if she approved this new turn of my thoughts. “I am Maya Anyapah,” she said. “Temple keeper here at the Sisters—” She gestured at the pinnacles. “Night is not far off and it’s my duty to offer sanctuary…” Her lips pursed in a cool smile. “At least to the survivors. Will you trust me ?”

Udondi glanced at Liam, who answered with an ironic smile: a rather frightening expression given the blood on his face. “I would like the chance to prove we are not brigands.”

Udondi nodded. “Then, Keeper, we gratefully accept your offer of sanctuary this night.”

Liam and Udondi went with Maya Anyapah, but after receiving instructions on how to find the temple, I took Liam’s rifle and walked back down to the plain to retrieve my fallen bike. Moki went with me.

We skirted the pool of silver I had made. There was nothing left to mar its smooth surface, for the truck had been entirely consumed. I thought of it being returned by the silver in some far-off time, perhaps transformed to wood or quartz or jade. Few things leave the world forever; even players are returned when they are born again, but like the follies of the silver, they never return unchanged.

I walked out onto the plain. It was a folly too, as I had guessed, made of white, interlocking tiles the same color as the powdery dust. The walking was easy, and I had only a quarter mile or so to reach my bike, but it seemed much longer. Now that my blood had cooled, my body was remembering its traumas. My back ached where the soft shot had knocked me from my bike. My palms were skinned, and my shoulders and wrists felt as if they’d been sprained in my fall. The bike seemed very heavy, but when I finally got it back up on its tires it started easily. Moki scrambled into his bin, and after that it was a quick ride through the rocks to the temple door.

The Temple of the Sisters was built within the living rock of one of the pinnacles. From the front step, I gazed up at huge double doors of shining black onyx, carved in an intricate geometric relief. I could see no place to leave my bike, so I nudged one of the doors open and walked it inside, feeling truly like a brigand. I found myself in a large room lit with warm yellow ceiling panels. Hangings softened the stone walls, and across the carpeted floor pillows and low couches invited conversation… if only someone would linger long enough to speak.

The room was empty, but the other bikes were there, parked on a strip of stone floor, so I left mine beside them. Then I crossed to an arched hallway. The sound of voices encouraged me to push on to a kitchen where Maya Anyapah was recounting the temple’s history as she tended Liam’s wound at a massive slate table. In this way I learned the Temple of the Sisters was astoundingly old, 617 years, while its kobold well still showed no sign of the decrepitude that usually comes over a well of that age. Such was the power of silver in the Iraliad.

Udondi sat on the floor, cleaning her rifle beside a large fireplace where a bank of glowing coals yielded only an occasional yellow flame. When she saw me she sent me immediately out again to fetch the other rifles. I brought them, and my savant as well. My shoulders burned to carry even that little weight, my back ached, and I felt colder than I should have. That was the nearness of death, I think. I was not used to players dying. Especially, I was not used to causing their deaths, but I could not think what else I should have done.

The keeper offered me tea, but I was sad, and I wanted nothing to eat or drink. “Is there a high place where I can try to link?” I asked. “An upper room, maybe?”

“There’s a stair to the very top if you want to climb that far. Sometimes the Tibbett antenna can be reached from there.”

“You don’t keep an antenna of your own?” Liam asked her. He sat hunched over a steaming teacup, a plastic patch over his injured eye.

“There was one. But antennas bring company. It’s more peaceful, since a windstorm took it down.”

“Do you live alone?” Udondi asked.

“No, no. We are a colony of old cessants, though my companions went off to Tibbett a few days past. Only the old man is here, in his room upstairs. He’s almost two hundred twenty now, and he’s gone very frail.”

“Where is the stair?” I asked with some impatience.

Maya nodded at the door. “At the end of the hall, but it’s a long climb.”

“Don’t try to reason with her,” Liam warned. “She’s set her mind to it. You won’t persuade her to rest.”

Udondi set her rifle aside. “I’ll go with you.”

“No,” I said—too quickly. A faint blush touched my cold cheeks, but I was in no mood for company, even Udondi’s. “Really. Stay here. I’ll be down soon.” I started for the door.

“Jubilee,” Udondi called. I hesitated, glancing back. “Death is not an easy thing to face.”

“I’ll be okay.” And I hurried from the kitchen before she could persuade me to stay. Moki chose to remain behind by the fire’s warmth, so I got my wish to climb the stair alone.

The stairway spiraled up through the natural rock, opening on three more floors, each with a wide sitting room, and tall windows to the right and left set into the rock, admitting a wan gleam of late afternoon light. Hallways like the one below led away to private rooms.

Past the fourth floor the stairway narrowed, becoming as tight as a chimney and almost as steep as a ladder. If I had gone back for my bike (as I’d considered doing) I would have had to leave it in the last sitting room, for it would not have fit past those tight turns.

So I climbed on foot, and climbed and climbed, following a spiral of optical tubes set into the stairwell, and as my body warmed my back hurt less but it never stopped hurting altogether.

At last I saw gray daylight above me, and in a few more steps I emerged on a walled platform at the very top of the pinnacle. The wall was chest-high and damp, and as I looked over it I could see nothing of the surrounding plain, for I had climbed literally into the clouds. Fog wrapped the platform and I could just glimpse the boulder-strewn ground far, far below at the pinnacle’s base.

I instructed the savant to seek a link to my mother, but there was no link, and I was so high already I didn’t dare float it on a line. I felt close to despair. If only I could know my mother was well; if only I could tell her I was well too… though I didn’t want to tell her what I had done that day.

I sat down on the wet stone, my back against the enclosing wall and the savant cradled in my lap. I tried to imagine myself back at Temple Huacho, and my mother, busy in the kitchen, or taking my littlest brothers and sisters on a walk through the orchard, but those scenes kept getting messed up with the memory of the bikers behind me on the plain, and of Kaphiri’s shadowed face on that night he had come asking for Jolly, until in desperation I pressed my palms against my eyes to drive all visions away.

That’s when my savant spoke in its soft old man’s voice. “There is a call for you.”

I looked up, wide-eyed. “I thought there was no link.”

“There is none to the west. This call is from Yaphet.”

Yaphet.

Suddenly I wanted to see him almost as much as I wanted my mother. “Open the link. Now. Please.”

And as easily as that Yaphet was on the screen, looking at me with a stunned half smile. “Jubilee? I’ve tried to call you, every few hours, for days.”

“We weren’t in range of any antennas.”

“I thought something had happened to you.”

“We’re okay. But you…” His cheek wore a dark bruise, and he had a cut over one eye. “You’re hurt.”

“No. It’s nothing.”

“You left home, didn’t you?”