Linda Nagata - Memory

“There, Maya,” Emil said. “Did you set your zeroes in the pythagorean sequence?”

She shrugged. “It was all long ago.”

It went that way for an hour or more as we read and discussed the little book. Before long I came to understand that a kobold circle was a means of procuring rare kobolds that could seldom, if ever, be found naturally in wells. If the book was correct, then a kobold created within a circle might be completely unlike any of those that had given rise to it.

In the road show Maya had described, the new kobold had been nothing more than a toy, but Known Kobold Circles implied wider possibilities. Its pages listed hundreds of formulas for producing kobolds, most with catalog numbers that would fit among the mysterious, empty pages of my mother’s kobold libraries. Unknown kobolds—though Ki-Faun had included brief sketches describing what they might be used for. Most produced elixirs that were claimed to prolong life and health and even to cool the blood fever. (“We could have made use of that !” Emil chuckled.) But a very few seemed to have something to do directly with silver… Recalling its memories? That had been my impression on first reading, but now I felt less sure. Certainly the silver must have some means of memory. How else could it bring follies forward in time? Still… “I think these formulas are more about calling certain follies from the silver, than about calling out the silver’s memory.”

Even that was unheard of, as the general murmur confirmed.

It was a wonder to me, to think I might hold in my hands the instructions for a method of kobold culture unknown to even dedicated keepers like my mother. If the formulas proved true then I would know something of kobolds that my mother did not—and how astonishing that would be!

Sleep did not come easily that night. I lay awake, listening, I don’t know for what. I could hear a distant guitar, and closer, the soft scratch of kobold feet on the stone windowsill. The rich, cloying scent of temple kobolds pervaded my every breath.

A restlessness grew in me, so that after some time I left my bed, to stand watch at the window. From my room I could see the plain below the pinnacles. The silver was just taking form there, as a thin, bright sheen like liquid glass poured across the flat basin. I could feel its presence, as a strange new awareness in my mind. I could feel it, as if the silver had somehow become part of my mind. I felt it flowing past the rocks and swallowing them whole. I felt it rising.

Fear took me, and I retreated from the window, but it made no difference. My preternatural awareness continued, as if some outpost of my mind existed down there on that plain, looking, listening, waiting on my instruction while my familiar self trembled in the darkness of my borrowed room.

A terrible suspicion took root in my mind. “No,” I whispered. “No. I am not him.”

But had some part of him gotten inside me, when his blood mixed with mine? Had that poison wakened something in me? Was this how Kaphiri sensed the silver? Was this how he felt?

A faint glitter caught my eyes and I looked down, to find my hands surrounded by tiny sparkles of silver. Horror washed over me. I was not like him! I dashed my hands against my thighs. “Go away!”

The vision snapped, as if in obedience to my command. My awareness collapsed, to become only a human awareness. Fatigue rushed over me, and I soon convinced myself it had been nothing more than a dream.

I awoke in the morning to find my strength returned and I refused to stay longer in bed. I repacked my bike and checked my rifle, and when that was done I spent some time translating the lists of configuration codes in Known Kobold Circles for the scholars of that house—a payment of sorts for the kindness they had shown me—but I could not keep my mind on it. I was impatient for Liam and Udondi to return.

By late afternoon the waiting became unbearable, so I slipped away from a discussion of the nature of silver, and with Moki at my side I climbed the long stairway to the top of the pinnacle to look for my companions. Maya had warned me not to show myself outside the temple, so I sent my savant to look over the wall, while I lingered in the stairwell.

The day was clear, and the savant had command of the land for miles all around, yet it reported no sign of movement. I told myself not to worry. Sunset was still more than two hours away.

I called Yaphet, but he didn’t answer, so I left a message. I started to call Liam, then remembered I had destroyed his savant. So I called Udondi, but there was no answer. Next I tried Jolly, using the new address he’d given to Liam. No answer.

I grew annoyed. No one I cared to talk to ever seemed to be within reach. I understood the difficulties of communication in the Iraliad; I knew that a savant stored in the bin of a bike would be unlikely to catch a radio signal, but that knowledge did not ease my isolation.

After an hour or so I heard footsteps climbing the stairwell, and a few minutes later Maya appeared from below. “Ah good,” she said, when her gaze fell upon me, crouched at the top of the stairs. “I was afraid I’d find you in the open. Have you sighted your companions yet?”

“No, and they should have been back by now. They wanted to leave again at dusk.”

“There are many reasons they might be delayed. Don’t worry too much.” She sat on the stairs, unfolding a square of paper across her lap. “I’ve had a map made for you. It shows all the refuge mesas in the northern Iraliad… and it also charts several wild kobold wells. It might be helpful to know where they are. Not that the wells offer much shelter. Most are in the open desert, or in boulder fields. A few are in canyons, or on cliff walls. Still, you’d be safe from the silver if you camped at any of these sites, and it’s unlikely anyone else will know of them.”

I leaned over her shoulder, studying the map. The nearest wild kobold well was only fifty miles or so away. “So if Kaphiri has sent more players, they’ll likely look for us at the mesas, and not at these wild wells.”

“That may be,” Maya said, “but if you camp at the wells you’ll find no food or water or shelter from the elements, and no defensible positions. It’s a trade-off, though it may be a worthwhile one. You’ll have to decide as you go.”

I nodded. “Thank you for all you’ve done.”

“Too much and not enough,” she said as she handed me the map. “We do ask this of you: make no copy of this map for your savant, and destroy it as soon as you have left this region. The life span of a wild well is fleeting, but the life span of expired information is not. In a few months this map will show only where wells used to be. I wouldn’t want anyone to follow it to their death in the silver.”

Dusk came and went, and still there was no word from Liam, but as the scholars had predicted, the silver did not immediately appear at the onset of darkness.

The scholars based their predictions on the rhythm of storms that arose in the Iraliad’s southern basin. Little was known of the basin, except that silver seeped from it, even in the daylight. It was a lowlying, broken land, “As if the fist of the god had struck the world,” Emil said. Like the other scholars, he believed some force or factor, hidden there beneath veils of silver, controlled the rise and fall of silver storms even as far away as the northern edge of the Kalang Crescent.

“Our histories tell us the goddess spun the world from a cloud of silver, and that the silver is her mind, dreaming the world into existence. But where does the silver come from? And how could the goddess control it? I believe some hint of an answer might be found within the southern Iraliad. That region is different from all others in the world, for the silver is never absent, and no player may go there, and live… except perhaps the traveler.