Linda Nagata - Memory

I came to understand it only slowly, that our senses are filters. We do not hear everything there is to hear, or we would be overwhelmed by the complexities of sound. We do not see everything there is to see, or our brains would fail trying to interpret every nuance of light. But in the silver Jolly was not protected by any similar filter. He perceived far more than his mind could make sense of, and so he could make sense of nothing… until he found Kaphiri. Solid and unchanging, Kaphiri was the rock he could cling to while chaos rushed around him. It was the difference between a player who is swept away in a raging river, and one who stands upon a rock while the river sweeps past him, gazing at the debris that passes by.

“I am his eyes,” Jolly concluded. “I see the world for him. I see his enemies.”

It was very quiet in that refuge, with no sound of wind or water, or the night songs of birds. When Ficer stirred in his bedding, it seemed a loud noise. “So he needs you,” Ficer said. “But he must fear you too. He must fear you could find some way to lead his enemies to him.”

Jolly shook his head. “No. You don’t understand. To do that, I’d have to go back into the silver, and then I’d be lost again. Jubilee—” He turned to me. “Don’t you see? If I go home, he’ll know it. He knows I’m from a place called Kavasphir. If he looks hard enough, he’ll find it—”

Something must have shown in my face.

“Has he been there already?” There was horror in Jolly’s voice. “Is that where you met him?”

I wanted to deny it, but I was not well practiced at telling lies. “He came. One night when I was sitting on the wall. He asked for you. I told him you were gone. I thought you were dead. I didn’t know.”

“And my father? Was that when…?”

“No. Kaphiri had already found him on the road.”

I told Jolly my story then, keeping nothing back, not even the story of the blood poisoning, which Jolly accepted with a look that had more of resignation in it, than surprise.

Should I have lied? Should I have tried to shield some of the truth from him? He was a child after all…

And yet he was not a child. He had been through the silver, and he had passed through other fires. Those experiences had changed him. Ficer was right in that. Besides, Jolly had a truth-sense too keen for me to evade. If ever I tried to pass lightly over a subject he questioned me, drilling down to levels of fact I hardly knew existed. I relived my journey that night, and it was late before we finally lay down to sleep.

That night when we put out the light, I did not expect to sleep, for my mind was full with the day’s events, each memory jostling for recognition and reflection. But sleep came anyway, quieting my troubled thoughts one by one, until all that remained in my awareness was a soft whispering, a murmur of voices with no apparent source unless it was my own ears, stunned by the profound silence of that cavern. Adrift between sleep and wakefulness, I listened, and gradually the whispering resolved into words, faint and garbled at first, and in a language I did not immediately know, but as it had so many times before, the knowledge of another language wakened in me.

Or I wakened into that knowledge.

I have dreamed often, and what happened then was no dream, though it was a kind of vision, for I wakened into more than just the knowledge of another language. I wakened into another life. My life, though it was not the one I had lived.

The whispering grew closer, surrounding me, faint ghost voices imploring me to do what only I could do. Save us. That was their plea. Their ghost fingers brushed my arms, my face, light touches like puffs of warm air. They whispered blessings. They touched my tears as if this effusion was a sacred liquid.

The fear in my belly was so hot I thought I would puke. I had already run away once. Now they begged me to go back.

I raised my head, looking up to meet the gaze of an old man, small and crooked as a crab that has spent most of its life living in borrowed shells. His complexion was dark, but his skin had a translucence to it, a smooth purity, as if he had never seen the sun. His hair was gone, but tendrils of beard remained, reaching past his knees like lichen that hangs from the limbs of trees. He sat in an ornate chair, a small throne really, for we were in an audience chamber of grand design such as I had seen only in market dramas, with high ceilings and immense windows of colored glass and all of its span filled with whispering ghosts begging me to do what I dreaded to do.

The old man was Ki-Faun. In my vision I knew this. He was the player who had authored a book of kobold lore. I had never seen him before, yet I felt as if I had always known his name. At the same time, I was not entirely that other me, for I felt surprise too. Ki-Faun, the author of my book? Yes.

I had not seen him before, but as I looked on him I was surprised by a sense of familiarity, and I began to realize that I had known him, but in another guise, or more likely another life altogether.

Surprise filled his eyes, and he leaned forward to look at me more closely, as if he was troubled by remembrances too. His old crab hands pinched at the armrests of his chair, and his eyes closed briefly. “Not by chance,” he whispered. When his gaze met mine again there was the faintest of smiles on his faded lips. “The knot is tied around you, milady, did you know it? All our fates circle around you.”

I had no idea what he meant, but I knew what he wanted. “You want to blame me, but it’s not because of me! He was something strange and wicked before I ever knew him!”

“We do not blame you,” Ki-Faun said softly. “But we need you, just as we have needed you in other lives before this.” He set a kobold in my hand. “We have reached the end of this age. We will either master the silver, or we will drown in it—”

“You think you can master it?”

“With the time that you buy us, yes. We are that close. Our fates circle around you.”

“He will not want to see me again!”

An expression of such pain crossed the old man’s face I thought he would cry. “Oh, no, milady, he will want to see you.”

An anguished cry pierced my dream, and I awoke with a start, to find myself once again in the room at Azure Mesa that we had chosen for sleep. Faint light fell from my drifting savant, and in that illumination I could see Jolly sleeping peacefully beside me, but beyond him Ficer was calling out in a troubled sleep. Sweat shone on his face. My own clothes were damp and my skin was clammy. The scent of kobolds was strong in the air, and sweeter than the kobold scent of Temple Huacho.

I sat up, feeling my muscles limp, and trembling. I leaned against the hardness of the stone wall, thinking on my vision, and trying not to think on it, as if I were still two people: one that was me, and one that was me, in another life.

A life I had lived.

How to describe the horror this conviction brought? To know who I had been, what I had done…

He was something strange and wicked before I ever knew him!

Not for a moment did I doubt who “he” might be, and it was Ki-Faun’s plan that I should return to him.

Most of the time we live an illusion. We put the worst possibilities out of our thoughts, and live as if evil is a neutered beast, incapable of the horrors described in stories of old. We see ourselves as strong, and lucky; the weakened beast is no more than a shiver in our spines on a blustery evening—and this is a good way for us to live. For to be fully conscious of the potential horrors of existence would quickly destroy existence, as a raging stream will level the mud castle a child has made upon its bank.