Linda Nagata: Memory

I haven’t said much about my father. In a sense, there isn’t much to say. He was a wayfarer who had traveled a third of the way around the ring of the world to find his destined lover, and during his years on the road he had many adventures, and many narrow escapes. Then one sunny day he found his way to the enclave of Halibury, and as he’d done in hundreds of enclaves before, he went to see the matchmaker.

That self-righteous old man wanted nothing more than to send this foreign ruffian on his way. But against all expectation, this Kedato Panandi turned out to possess the blood pattern that matched my mother’s. The matchmaker sent a note to her at Temple Huacho, giving the worst description.

My mother was not a young woman. She’d given up wayfaring ten years before. Having reached her late forties, she’d settled her mind to a single life. Now she read the matchmaker’s description and was afraid. The body speaks its own language. What if this stranger truly was a wicked man? And what if she loved him anyway? Such things happened. This was no perfect world.

So she dithered in her answer, until finally Kedato bribed the matchmaker’s assistant and got her name. The body speaks its own language. They were married on the day they met, and though she was twenty years older than her husband and far more learned, Kedato Panandi was a gentle, intelligent man, and together they were able to make a marriage of love and of respect. Theirs was the same story told in a thousand romantic tales out of history. (No one tells the stories with bad endings.) Read any of these to understand my father.

Like his older brother, Liam Panandi too had traveled alone a third of the way around the ring of the world, stopping at every enclave he passed to visit the matchmaker and enter his blood pattern into the local market pool. But he had not found a lover yet.

Who hasn’t paused to wonder why the world is made this way? Our dogs, and the animals that run wild, are all able to mate freely: any male and any female of their species together stand a good chance of producing offspring. So why is life harder for men and women? Why do our bodies speak in individual languages that almost no one else can understand?

“Because the goddess who left us here was wicked and cruel.” That’s what Liam growled, that first night he was with us, still surly from the road, and I thought he might be right. Who else but a wantonly powerful goddess could find romance in the notion that only one lover exists for all of us, in all the vast world?

There was no question of Liam and I becoming lovers. We were not a match. But he was only twenty-five while I was already seventeen, and we soon became good friends, hunting and exploring the wilderness around Temple Huacho until my sister complained I had forgotten her name.

Late in that year my father announced a plan to journey to Xahiclan. He liked to travel, so three or four times a year he would take the truck to Halibury or Xahiclan, bringing one of the children along with him each time. I whispered to Liam that we should grab the seats.

I’d heard a rumor in the market that there had been a great flood of silver on the Jowádela Plateau, and that truckers from Xahiclan had since sighted a vast field of newly deposited ruins north of the highway. The site was nearly three hundred miles from Temple Huacho, but Liam and I had fared as far as a hundred miles over roadless wilderness, camping overnight on hilltops before returning home. So three hundred miles didn’t sound so far, especially if we could ride most of the way in the truck.

My father was agreeable. So we loaded our off-road bikes onto the truck, shoved our savants in beside them, then climbed into the cab, waving good-bye to my jealous siblings and promising to bring them trophies from the ruins, if there were any to be found.

The morning was brilliant, the air steamy after a night of hard rain. We set off down the hill on a switchback road that had been rebuilt six times in the last year alone, after being destroyed by the night fogs. By contrast, the bramble of sweet raspberries surrounding the road never seemed to change.

That was the fickle nature of the silver: no one could say what its particles would seize and transform, and what would emerge unchanged from its fog, except that animate creatures could not survive the least contact with it—not the deer of the forest or the cats that hunted them, the birds or the insects or the players—and no living thing had ever been returned by it to the world.

That is why in some languages the silver is called“the fog of souls.” It is true that in their last exhalations the dying breathe forth clouds of silver that sink to the bedding or the floor, and then quickly vanish. This silver is said to contain the memory of the life that has passed, but I have done the math, and in a thousand years there are not enough dead to explain the silver that arises in just one night. So it would seem that human souls are but a small part of the memory of a world.

At the bottom of the hill the brambles came to an end, and shortly after that so did the pavement. For the next sixty miles we made our own road, driving through shallow vales filled with nodding fields of shoulder-high grass.

Long before I was born, a crew of engineers had passed through Kavasphir, laying out a route for an army of road-building kobolds to follow. For three months a smooth ribbon of pavement linked Temple Huacho to the Xahiclan highway. Then the silver rose, and in one night erased the road. What impressed me most about this story was that the road had lasted ninety days. In my lifetime I would expect it to be gone in less than ten.

So there were no roads in Kavasphir, but I didn’t mind. The slopes were gentle, and riding in the truck on its gliding suspension, propelled by silent engines through oceans of grass as high as the windows, I would pretend I was a bird, skimming the valleys on my smooth wings, free.

We stopped once in late morning, on a rise of land between two wide vales where a folly had been deposited by a recent flood of silver. It was an arched gateway of blue lapis lazuli sprouting between the rock outcroppings that stood watch in the narrow pass. The gateway’s two decorated pillars held up a sloping roof studded with stone dragons peeking out from under the shingle. The surrounding rocks were also decorated, with a frieze depicting a busy enclave populated by thousands of fanciful animals carrying on at tasks of trade and entertainment as if they were players.

My father frowned at the lovely obstruction, and offered his mundane assessment: “It’s too narrow to get the truck through.” And there was no way to drive around.

But it was early in the day so I wasn’t worried. “Out,” I said to Liam, pushing him toward the door. “I want to read the inscriptions.”

“I can read them from here,” Liam said as he slid off the seat and dropped to the ground. “It says, ‘Luck and goodwill.’ It’s what these follies always say.”

But Kedato didn’t agree. “It’s neither one for us if we can’t get through.”

“We’ll get through,” I said as I scrambled out of the truck. Then I hurried to read the inscriptions while I still could.

The language was a version of the Ano syllabary: spiky symbols carved deep in the mottled blue stone and painted in gold leaf to make them stand out. I made out “luck” and “prosperity” so Liam was not far wrong. But there was far more that I could not read just yet, so I went to the back of the truck to retrieve my savant.

Kedato and Liam were there, arguing over which kobolds to use against the gate. My father glanced up at me, and smiled. He knew what I had come for. My savant was already unloaded, floating beside him at shoulder height. “Hurry and make your pictures,” he said. “We need to be on our way.”