Linda Nagata - Memory

Jolly started to creep away from me, moving toward it. “No,” I whimpered. “Don’t go.”

I grabbed his shirt again and tried to drag him back, but he turned on me in fury. “Don’t touch me! If the silver takes one of us, it’ll take the other too if we make a bridge for it to cross.”

“I don’t care!” I started to cry, but I didn’t touch him again. I held on to Moki instead, who was trembling in my lap. “I want Mama. I want Dad.”

“I do too,” Jolly said in a soft, shaky voice. Then a tendril of silver slipped across the bed and touched his knee. For a moment the tendril glowed brighter. Then it flashed over him, expanding across his legs, his torso, his arms, his face, all of him, in a raw second. For one more second he knelt on the bed like a statue of a boy cast in silver. Then the cloud rolled over him, hiding his terrible shape within a curtain of perfect silence.

I couldn’t breathe. Air wouldn’t come into my chest. I pressed myself against the wall and held on to Moki, wanting to scream, wanting it almost as badly as I wanted air, but I didn’t dare because I didn’t want Mama to come into the room and be stolen by the silver too. Even when the glittering mist began to retreat, leaving the foot of the bed empty, with ancient letters newly written in gold on the bed frame and on the stone floor, I stayed silent in my corner. I waited until the cloud had drifted out of the room—not out of the window, for the window was gone, and most of the bedroom’s wall with it, dissolved in the silver, just like Jolly.

I stared out at the orchard, wondering why the trees had remained unchanged, but silver was like that: sometimes it would leave things and sometimes it would change them, but it always took the players it touched, and animals too. I waited, until the last wisp still clinging to the ruined wall evaporated from existence. Then I screamed.

If a child should ask,What is the world? a parent might answer, “It is a ring-shaped island of life made by the goddess in defiance of the frozen dark between the stars. On the outer rim of this ring there is mostly land, and that is where we live. On the inner rim there is only ocean. We have day and night because the world-ring spins around its own imaginary axis. At the same time it follows another, greater circle around the sun so that we see different stars in different seasons.” These are the simple facts everyone accepts.

But if a child should ask, What is the silver? the answer might take many forms.

“It is a fog of glowing particles that arises at night to rebuild the world.”

“It is a remnant of the world’s creation.”

“It is the memory of the world.”

“It is the dreaming mind of the wounded goddess and you must never go near her! Her dreams will swallow any player they touch. Do you want to be swallowed up by the silver? No? Then stay inside at night. Never wander.”

What is the silver? After Jolly was taken, that question was never far from my mind. I interviewed my mother, I consulted libraries for their opinions, and I asked the passing truckers what they thought. It was from the truckers I first heard the rumor that the silver was rising. The oldest among them had lived more than two hundred years, and they swore it was a different world from the one in which they’d been born: “The roads were safer in those days. The silver did not come so often, nor flood so deep.”

Sometimes their younger companions would scoff, but as I grew older, even the youths insisted they had seen a change. “ The silver is rising, higher every year, as if it would drown the world.”

I began to keep records. I noted the nights on which the silver appeared, how often it touched the temple’s perimeter wall, and how often it passed over. That first year I kept count, it reached the orchard only once, but in the second year it breached the wall three times, and seven times in the year after that.

I was fifteen when I showed these notes to my mother. Her expression was grim as she studied them. “Kavasphir is a wild land,” she admitted, handing the notes back to me.

“Do you think the silver is rising?”

She was hesitant in her answer. “All things move in cycles.”

“I have heard the silver moves in a cycle of a thousand years. That it grows more abundant with time, until the world seems on the verge of drowning in it… and then it is driven back until there is almost no silver left and that is almost as bad.”

My mother said, “I have heard that too.”

I waited for her to elaborate, to explain why this was a foolish rumor, but she was lost in thought. It was night, and we sat together in her bedroom, the only sound that of the fountain playing in the garden beyond the open window.

At last I spoke again, my voice hushed. “Do you think it’s true?”

“It’s hard to know for sure.”

“But it could be?”

“The world is old, and most of our past forgotten. But fragments remain. In the libraries… and in the lettered stone and the follies the silver makes. There is enough to convince most scholars that the world has passed through many ages of history. Sometimes the silver was common. Other times it was rare. No one can say why.”

“No one has explained it?”

She shrugged. “Many have tried to explain it, but none in a manner to convince me. Players love stories, but they do not always love facts.” We traded a smile. “Don’t be afraid, Jubilee. Perhaps the silver is rising, but I don’t think we are on the verge of drowning just yet.”

What is the silver? Eventually I decided it must be all the things players claimed it to be. It was a remnant of the world’s creation: that was how it was able to disassemble solid objects, breaking them down into its gleaming fog while it compiled new objects in their places. It was the memory of the world, mapping the structure of everything it touched, so that it could bring ancient objects forward in time—to create meaningless follies in the wilderness, or to deposit veins of valuable ore in the exposed rock of the Kavasphir Hills. And it was the mind of a dreaming goddess, or at least of some savant of an ancient world far more learned than ours. This I allowed only because of a handful of legends. Mostly the silver acted in a way that seemed random, and unaware. Now and then though, there were stories of some tool or talisman brought forward through time, delivered at a crucial moment, as if someone beyond the silver sought to move the pieces…

But why only now and then?

I would look at the scar on the back of my hand, remembering the night Jolly was taken, and I would wonder.

I never told my mother how I got that scar. It was a strange mark: an intricate ridge of reddish tissue that didn’t fade as any normal scar would. I would look at it, and wonder: Had I caused Jolly’s death with my adventure in the kobold well? For neither I nor anyone else could explain why the silver had been able to breach the temple that night.

But if ever I got to thinking it might be my fault, I would remember what Jolly had said, a moment before the silver spilled over the windowsill: I called it, and now it’s coming. Those words were engraved in my memory, though how he—or anyone—could summon the wild chaos of silver I didn’t know.

There was much I didn’t know, but I swore it would not always be so.

I was never lonely in those years. By the time I was seventeen, the count of my younger siblings had grown to six and I had long since corrupted my nearest sister, Emia, and our oldest brother after her, Rizal, and made them my companions in many adventures that our parents did not approve. But I abandoned them that year, when my father’s brother came to live with us.