Linda Nagata - Memory

He thought a moment. Then his eyes grew wide. “Ki-Faun was wrong!”

I closed my eyes, trembling to think how perilous the chance had been. What if, in that other life, I had succeeded in his plot against Kaphiri? The world would be drowned. “Soon you’ll learn to awaken the ha . When you do, you must tell everyone of this danger. Don’t forget it.”

“And you?”

I shrugged, feeling a weight upon me, the same as in my vision. The goddess had lied to me. I was not her hands. Hands were used for building; for creating new things. But that had never been my task.

“Can you sleep?” I asked Jolly.

He said he could not.

“Then let’s go up to the mesa top, and see what the dawn will bring.”

That dawn was cloudless. A flood of silver lay on the plain, but it dissolved at the sun’s touch, vanishing first in streaks and rays that lanced from the eastern horizon. Then the disc of the sun rose past a line of distant mesas, releasing a great wave of light to roll the remnants away.

Far to the south and west there were dark lines on the horizon that might have been storms in the southern desert where the Cenotaph lay, the wound in the world. Otherwise the day was perfect: clear skies and no wind to stir the dust, so that I felt we could see for a hundred miles in any direction.

In all that vastness, nothing moved. We waited for most of an hour, but no plume of dust marked the trail of a motorcycle. Where was Liam? It came to me that I might never know.

Finally, Jolly spoke: “I think we should go.”

“Where would you go?”

“Anywhere! Just not here. Kaphiri will find us if we stay here.”

Of course he was right. The Temple of the Sisters was only 120 miles away.

I sniffed the air, seeking the scent of silver, but all I could smell was the dusty odor of desert soil and the sweet perfume of blossoms from the brush in the ravines. I wanted to wait for Liam, but that did not seem wise.

It was easier to decide that we should leave than to know where to go. To the south lay the terrible lands of the Cenotaph, where the goddess had directed me, but I did not want to take Jolly there. North and east would bring us ever deeper into the wastes of the Iraliad, while west would return us to the margin of the desert. West was also the direction of home, though both of us knew it would be foolhardy to return to Temple Huacho. “He’ll be watching,” Jolly said, “waiting for me to find my way back.”

I nodded. “It could be he will leave them unharmed, so long as he believes there’s a chance you might go back.” We both took comfort from this thought.

So we would not go home, but we decided to go west anyway, for that was where Liam had disappeared, and I wanted to find him. We went down to the gate. I was operating the winch, using it to lower my bike over the low cliff when Jolly called out. “Look there! Jubilee! A column of dust.”

I made sure the bike was safely on the ground before I looked. To the south and west, perhaps thirty miles or more away, in a direction that pointed back to the Temple of the Sisters, a plume of dust stained the blue sky. I could not see its source, but it was more dust than the wheels of two motorcycles could raise, even if they raced flat-out. “Maybe it’s a large herd of cattle?” I said, without much hope.

Jolly was more honest: “It’s a convoy.”

“They would have stayed last night with Maya and Emil and the other scholars. I hope no harm has come to them.”

“Ficer went back there.”

But Ficer had not stopped the convoy. How could he? He was just one man.

We climbed down the cliff face. Moki went into his box, while Jolly rode behind me. If we went west, they would see us immediately. So we turned east instead, setting off on the trail that circled the mesa. We went slowly at first, so as not to stir up our own revealing plume of dust, but as soon as the mesa lay behind us, I pushed the bike to speed. Our direction was north and east, a bearing that would take us deeper into the desert. It was also in my mind that with every mile, we were growing closer to Yaphet.

At first our progress was easy. The miles fell behind us as we fled across a smooth plain. But as the day advanced, the land rose in a rugged slope cut with shallow gullies and studded with a few far-scattered bluffs. It was a region made strange by its emptiness: we saw no follies, or deposits of exotic ore to indicate the presence of silver… though we knew silver had flooded this part of the desert only the night before. It was as if the folly constructed here was one of an untouched land.

Our progress slowed. Twice we found ourselves in dead-end canyons, not of any spectacular depth, but still with walls too steep to scale, so we were forced to retrace our path and find another way. It was after the second such doubling back that we sighted our pursuers again. From the vantage of Azure Mesa they had been only a distant plume of dust. Now that plume had separated into three, and I could see the metal glimmer of a truck at the base of each. They were not trying to hide their approach. Two ran parallel to our track, one to the east of it, and one to the west. The third truck was farther behind, but it followed our trail exactly. Even as I watched, it dropped out of sight, descending into the same shallow gully we had followed.

“They didn’t bother to stop at Azure,” Jolly said.

“I don’t understand. How can they run so quickly and still follow our trail?”

“The middle truck, it follows our trail.”

“But it’s farthest behind.”

“So they already know where we are? Is that what you’re thinking?”

I glanced over my shoulder. There was a small bluff a mile or so to the east, and another, closer, to the northeast, but to the west there was no eminence for many miles. “Let’s change direction. West and south will take us from the sight of any watcher on high ground.”

So we descended again into the little canyon we had only recently escaped, and we followed a branch of it west for many miles, until it became a shallow drainage between two low hills. At last we were able to look back: only to discover the convoy had not followed our trail to its farthest point. Instead, they had cut across the land, as if they’d known of our change of direction almost as soon as it was made. Not even two miles separated us now, and that gap was closing swiftly as the three trucks sped toward us. “ They are watching us! But how?”

Jolly’s voice was whispery with panic: “Look there.” He pointed to the north. “That glimmer.”

Almost lost in the shimmering heat was a metallic spark, but it was not a truck, for it floated high above the ground. I squinted. “Some kind of bird?” Then it caught the sunlight, reflecting it in a brilliant flare as only metal can. “Or a savant,” I said, reaching for my rifle.

Jolly pulled it from the sheath and handed it to me. “Hurry! They’ll be here in a minute.”

I refused to look back at the trucks. “Don’t breathe,” I whispered as I brought the rifle to my shoulder. Taking careful aim, I squeezed off one shot, then another, but to my consternation, neither found its target. A second later the glimmer descended from sight, disappearing into a low swale… and a cold confusion took me. I twisted around to look at Jolly. “Did you see that?”

He nodded, his cheeks pale beneath a frosting of dust. A savant is a small thing. When I’d taken aim with my rifle I’d judged it to be much less than a mile away. Farther, and we would not have seen it at all through the heat shimmers of that desert noon. But the swale where it had disappeared was two miles, maybe two and a half to the north—farther away than the pursuing trucks. “That was no savant,” I said softly. “It was something larger.” Much larger, though what, I could not imagine.