Linda Nagata - Memory

“But he’s looking at us!”

Indeed, the figure had drawn close enough that I could see his eyes. Their gaze was fixed on me. He gestured, as if commanding me to stand fast. “Remember the translation?” I said.

Jolly glanced at me, and nodded.

A reflection of the other self.

I reached for my rifle. “No,” Jolly said. “It’s too soon for that.”

I pulled it out anyway. In my vision I had been the only one of his enemies who could get close to him.

“Jubilee, it’s not time!”

“Then let him stay away!”

He might have heard me, for he hesitated. Confusion bloomed on his distant face. He looked about, but he no longer seemed to see us. His mouth opened as if with a shout, but no sound could be heard. Then he changed. It was not him anymore that we saw in the distance, but a woman. She walked on toward us, a woman of good height and strong build, dressed in a gown of gold and white. Her dark hair lay loose about her shoulders, and there was a glow on her face of some hidden vitality, a perfection of body and spirit that did not seem to be of this world.

As she drew near, Jolly grabbed my arm and whispered the most nonsensical thing: “Jubilee, it’s you.”

Meaningless words that I ignored.

“It is you,” he insisted.

“Hush. It is the goddess.”

The memory of her lay within me, a vague remembrance, but certain all the same. I dismounted from the bike and went to meet her, wondering if she would step from the panel of silver and into the world, but she did not. She stopped only a step away. We faced each other, and for a dizzying moment I could not tell which of us stood within the mirror of silver, and which stood without, for her world seemed far larger than my tiny cage of stone.

She did not speak, either in words or in visions. Instead she reached out, much as the bogy had reached out from the wall of the tower room in the abandoned city. But as her arm passed through the panel it changed: on her side she was lovely, but the hand that darted out to touch me was a tiny, wizened, blackened thing—the arm of a corpse subjected to a long, slow fire. I flinched back, but she was faster. Her palm brushed my forehead.

The contact lasted only a moment, but that was enough. I stumbled back. Vaguely, I was aware of Jolly, shouting at me to flee, but I could not. My body felt far away, a distant object that I watched from a place deep inside myself, while another presence looked out from my eyes, and spoke with my voice. “This is a chance I did not foresee.”

The silver panel dissolved. In a few seconds it melted into nothingness so that I stood in an empty room, listening to my voice speaking words that did not come from me. “Do I still live within your memory?” it asked. “It was so long ago, when you were my hands and my eyes… before the war began… So much was lost. So much broken. And still this last battle will not end! It drains me, and I cannot heal.”

My mind jumped with frantic questions. Was she in me? Was I in her? In those seconds I could not tell the difference.

“Don’t you remember…? Oh. Oh, no. I took that away. It was too horrible to remember. It’s enough to know he came to unmake this world we had built. I drove him into the darkness, but some shadow of him exists here still. You sense it, don’t you?I sense it.” Her voice fell to a whisper. “He has left a wound in the world, and the silver gushes from it, like blood to drown all the land and sea. Some fragment of himself festers within it, like a poison, and it cannot heal. I cannot heal, so that I too am become no more than a shadow.”

A shadow strong enough to take me over!That was my thought, and I guess she understood it.

“You are my hands,” she said gently. “From the first days it was so. You must be my hands again. Find this wound. A veil of stealth lies over it, but you must look past that, and remove this fragment of our enemy, and let us heal.”

Then she turned. It was a clumsy movement and partly mine, for her presence was fading within me, dissolving like silver in the dawn’s light. She felt herself slipping away, and fear—or maybe it was despair—caused my heart to quicken. Hurry now. “Where is the new one?” she demanded. “Where is he?”

He stood in the doorway, watching us with panicky eyes. “Jubilee?” Jolly whispered. “Is it you?”

The goddess frowned. “How is it you are still so young? Ah, but at least your ha has awakened. I see it all about you. You must waken it in the others. All of them. Teach them how. They have been children for far too long…”

Even as she spoke, I felt her slip loose, sliding past me, into that remote place where I had been, while I was pulled back into myself. She spoke once more, but in a soundless voice, rising up from memory. “Remember! When the ha awakens, any player may speak to the silver and guide its function. But that will not turn back its advance. Do not make that mistake again!”

Then she was gone.

I staggered, all my energy gone away with her. My lungs heaved, and flecks of silver glittered between my fingers and in the folds of my sleeves. I braced myself against the cold stone of the wall. “Jolly! Was she real? Or was she another vision?”

Jolly knew then that she was gone. He came to put an arm around my waist.

“She was real,” he said.

“What is this wound in the world that she spoke of? If a goddess cannot heal it—”

“I know what it is.”

Raw fear was in his eyes, and for many seconds the only sound in that room was my frantic breathing, for I knew too. I had seen the edge of it. It had been visible from the southern escarpment of the Kalang: a terrible region, hazed with dust, and lightning storms. “It is the southern desert.”

Jolly nodded. “Kaphiri called it the Cenotaph. I don’t know why. He tried to go there once. It’s a great pit, with steep sides that go down and down into endless clouds of silver. He never found the bottom, and climbing out again, he nearly died of thirst and hunger.”

“He tried to go down there?” It seemed an act of madness to me. “Why? Why would anyone?” I wanted a reason. I needed a reason. One I could believe in.

“Because he had learned there is a god there. Her enemy. Just as she said. A god from out of the darkness.”

“But that’s a reason to run away! It’s not a reason to go.”

“It was for him, but he failed.”

“Of course he failed! How can any player do what a goddess cannot?”

Jolly considered this, as if he saw real merit in the question. “She is wounded.”

That was true. I had felt her weakness.

She had called me her hands. I had been her hands in some other life. I had served her will. Was that why sparks of silver now danced between my fingers? “This is ha ,” I realized, raising my right hand to examine the glitter. “Or anyway,ha is the ability to survive this, to use it. Kaphiri wakened it in me… but who wakened it in you?”

“No one. It just came.”

“I think Ficer was right. She made you for this—to waken on your own to the silver, and then to waken it in other players…”

“I don’t know how to do that!”

“Can you learn?”

“I don’t know.”

“If you could—”

“If I could, then any player could learn to survive the silver. Our father—he’d be alive now, he’d be here, if—”

“No. Don’t say that. Neither of us knew anything then—and even the goddess cannot turn back time.” For if she could, surely she would have restarted this broken world? “Jolly, there’s something else, something she told me after she could no longer speak aloud. She said that even though a player may come to control the silver, that will not turn back its advance. She said we must not make that mistake again. You understand?”