Linda Nagata - Memory

He nodded, but his grip on Moki tightened. “Do you remember that night I called the silver?”

I could feel his dark eyes on me, and there was defiance in his voice, but I was not going to argue with him. I knew what he had done. Maybe, I knew how he had done it. “I remember it all.”

He leaned back against the wall, his right hand obsessively stroking Moki’s neck. “You are a ghost too, Jubilee. The silver was there in our room. I knew it must have taken you too. How could you have escaped? I thought you were dead. That we both were, and I had killed you.”

I turned to him in surprise. “No. The silver never touched me.”

Ficer appeared in the doorway then, startling Jolly so that he shrank against the wall. “Getting jumpy again?” Ficer asked as he lay down on his sleeping bag.

Jolly smiled sheepishly. “Sorry.” Then he glanced at me. “Did you see what happened that night?”

“Yes.”

His next words were haunted with memory. “There is silver in all of us. Mama told me when a player dies, silver will leave the body, like a last breath. I was that wisp-of-silver. I felt like a ghost, floating, not solid at all though I was still me. Like being in a dream, when you can’t touch anything, but I could see. I could see everywhere… that’s how it seemed. Windows opened everywhere I looked. It was the world—at least I guessed it was. None of it looked like any part of the world I had seen before. But at least it was somewhere, and I was nowhere. I tried to get through the windows, but they kept slipping away. I didn’t know how to move. I thought I would never escape.”

Whether that time in the silver encompassed hours or days or the slow turn of seasons, Jolly couldn’t say, but it was long. I think it was a different kind of time than passes in the world. Perhaps it was a kind of infancy, for like an infant that grows in strength and learns to walk, Jolly’s helplessness gradually yielded to a new mobility. He struggled always to move toward one of these vistas that he called a “window” and finally he reached one.

“It was like being pushed into a painting of a landscape, only to find the land in the painting was the real world, while…” He waved his hand vaguely. “Wherever I had been… that was a dream. Though it had felt real enough when I was there.”

“Where did you find yourself?” I asked when he’d been silent for most of a minute.

“Nowhere.” He shook his head. “There was no one there. Nothing. It was an empty land”—he glanced at Ficer, stretched out on his bedroll—“a lot like this place, but by the ocean.”

He had been terribly frightened and utterly alone. Wandering that strange coast he grew hungry and horribly thirsty under a pitiless sun. He hid behind rocks and watched as wild animals came up out of the water, great fat seals and giant sea stars with shining tentacles. A bull hippo chased him, giving up only when he scrambled up a cliff face where it could not follow.

“I stayed there three days. It rained twice and I had some water, but the sea snails I could pry from the rocks were salty and they made me sick. I thought I was going to die. It made me so angry. I didn’t want to die. But I was sick. I could hardly stand up. When the silver came, the third night I was there, I tried to run, but there was nowhere to go. No more cliffs to climb. So the silver caught me, and it was just like the first time. The world slipped away and I could see it only through windows. I was a ghost again, looking through windows, with a different view everywhere I turned… but I never saw home.”

Moki stirred, so Jolly set him on his feet. The hound stretched and yawned and wagged his tail, and we both watched, as if it was a fascinating thing to see. Then Jolly spoke again. “I thought everyone had lied to me.” His fist clenched against his knee. “I was so angry. Furious at Mom, Dad, because they’d lied to me about the silver—”

“They didn’t lie—”

“I know that! I know it now. But then, I thought it was the same for everyone, that the silver only took you away, it didn’t kill you.”

“But it’s not like that… is it?” I longed for him to tell me that everything I knew was wrong, that players could return from the silver, but Jolly was wiser than that.

He shook his head. “Other players can’t survive the silver. It’s only me and… and…”

“Kaphiri?” I asked softly.

Jolly looked suddenly fearful. “You know him?”

“I’ve met him.” I tried to keep my voice calm. “He’s hunting you. And now… I think he’s hunting me too.”

Jolly nodded, and turned away again. I was afraid he’d stop speaking, so I pressed him with a question. “Jolly? How did he find you?”

“He didn’t. I found him.”

He described how he’d struggled once more to escape the silver by reaching toward the vistas he could see, the “windows” as he called them. It was hard for him to move willfully. It was so much easier to drift, and yet, as he strove for direction, he learned, and motion became easier. This time he chose carefully, before slipping through a window into the world.

“It was a better place,” Jolly said. “A lot like Kavasphir, though there were animals there I never saw before, so I think it was really far away. But there was a stream with fish in it, and wild berries, and I set a trap and after a couple of days I caught a piglet.” He shrugged. “It’s better to hunt with a rifle.”

So I would guess.

“Anyway, I stayed there many days. I didn’t keep count. But I never saw another player. It was lonely, and I wanted to go home. So when the silver rose again, I walked into it.”

That became the pattern of his life, for weeks at least. Perhaps for months. He would look for a place like Kavasphir, or any place that seemed familiar, or just a place where there was some sign that players might be nearby. But the world is vast, and he never found his way home.

“Then he came,” Jolly said. “I saw him, far away in the silver. At first I thought I was only looking through another window, but there was something different about him… as if he was solid and everything else was mist. The other windows would fade in and out of existence, but he was solid. Not a window at all, but a player within the silver itself.

“A player… but he wasn’t a ghost like me. He was real. Solid . Fixed in place… like the sea snails I’d pried off the rocks. That’s what he was like. I went to him, but he couldn’t see me. He was in the silver, but he couldn’t see. You understand? I was the silver. He was still a player.”

“You were transformed? And he was still untouched?”

Jolly nodded. “The silver would not take him, or touch him. That was his power, but it was a curse too. It made him angry, though I didn’t know it then.” His eyes had a distant look. “He couldn’t see me, but I could see him. He was walking, and there was solid ground under his feet, but it was not solid for me. I followed him anyway, through a window and out of the silver.” Jolly’s smile was bitter. “He saw me then. I scared him. He looked so scared. But only for a few seconds.” His face grew sad as he remembered. “He took care of me, and for a time I was happy that I’d found him.”

They learned much from each other, Kaphiri and my brother. Though they both could survive the silver, their talents were not the same. When Kaphiri entered the silver, he remained a physical being. He could go only where he could walk within the fog. It was different for Jolly. His fate was like that of the metal pole Ficer had directed me to touch. The silver would dissolve his body, but he would not lose coherence. He would remain whole in the memory of the silver. He would remain aware. It was as if the silver’s awareness became his, as if he shared the mind of the goddess. He could see through the silver, to places all around the ring of the world. He could reach through it: a ghost that might appear anywhere the fog touches.