Linda Nagata - Memory

“Let’s go!” Jolly’s voice was breaking in panic. “Jubilee, now! ”

I nodded, though I had no plan, no idea what to do except to run. I eased the bike forward. I was picking out a path on the crumbly slope when a muffled voice spoke my name from somewhere close behind us: Jubilee!

I jumped in fright and the bike slipped. Jolly cried out, throwing his arms around my waist. The voice called again: Jubilee! An old man’s voice, shouting as if from behind a pillow: Jubilee!

I recognized it then. “It’s the savant.”

“What?”

Again I stopped the bike. “Open the saddle box. Let it out.”

“There’s no time.”

“Just do it, Jolly.”

Furiously, he popped the hasp. The savant bobbed into the air, unfolding into its smooth wing shape. “A call,” it said in its calm and formal voice. “From Yaphet.”

Yaphet?His image coalesced on the savant’s mimic screen. Dust smudged his cheeks and lightened his hair, and his eyes were hidden behind black sunglasses, and still I caught my breath, so much did he resemble Kaphiri. Jolly’s hand squeezed my shoulder. “Jubilee, he looks like—”

“I know.”

But Yaphet’s skin was bronze, and flushed with heat, while Kaphiri’s face was cold and pale—and Yaphet stirred in me a different kind of fear. I hoped he was still far away, but I did not believe it, and his first words confirmed my hope was in vain. “Jubilee, I’ve seen you. I think it’s you. Two players on one motorcycle? You’re running west.” He gestured with field glasses held in a black-gloved hand.

“Where are you?” I wasn’t ready to meet him. Not yet. I wasn’t ready to meet the trucks. It was all coming down too fast and I wanted to be anywhere but where I was.

He saw my panic and answered cautiously. “I’m here. A few miles north… or north and west of your position.”

I looked to the northwest, but I could not see him. I had no field glasses.

“There’s a second convoy, Jubilee, three miles or so west of me. It’s moving to meet the other trucks.”

I was aware suddenly of the dryness of my mouth in that desert air. “We’re trapped then.”

“Drop back to the south,” Yaphet advised in a voice so flat it did not sound truly human. “It’s not over yet.”

We turned south. There was no sign of the dark line of storms I had seen that morning. The sky was brassy with a dust that blurred the sun but did nothing to mute its heat. I sniffed at the air, but there was no scent of silver anywhere. The sun was too bright, and all I could smell was dust and my own sweat.

Jolly kept watch behind us, twisting around every few seconds to see if anything had changed. After a few minutes he said, “I see that savant again—or whatever it is. It’s moved farther east.”

“Can you see the second convoy?”

“No.”

A concussion struck my ears, a booming roar of thunder that I felt in my chest. There was a great rumbling of sliding stone, and when I glanced back, a cloud of cinnamon dust was climbing into the sky, from beyond a ridge to the northwest. “Yaphet,” I whispered, for he had been out there, only a few miles away.

Then I too saw the savant. It was much closer now, less than a mile away, and clearly, it was no savant.

It was a flying machine.

An impossible flying machine, soaring at least a hundred feet above the ground. I could see the dark shape of a player suspended beneath it, prone within a harness. I thought I could see a sparkle of silver along its wings. It passed behind an outcropping of rock.

My hands shook as I brought the bike to a stop. “Could Kaphiri order the silver away, even from a flying machine?”

“I don’t know! Maybe he can. Do you think it’s him beneath that wing?”

“Jolly, I tried to shoot him down! What if I had killed him?”

“We have to go. Now.”

I hesitated. Yaphet was out there somewhere. Had he caused the explosion we had just heard? That night at the Temple of the Sisters I had told him everything. I warned him Kaphiri must not die, but did he believe it?

“Jubilee!” Jolly shouted. “We have to—”

The thunder of a second explosion overwhelmed his voice. Then the flyer reappeared, speeding toward us down the canyon we had followed. Something else moved on the ground beneath it: a thread of glimmering water some six feet long. It flowed around boulders and down shallow slopes, retracing exactly the tracks left by my bike, and suddenly I knew how the convoy had followed us.

I thought my heart would stop, but Jolly’s reaction was the opposite. He had never seen a worm mechanic before, but I had described it well enough. “Go!” he shouted, and his fist hammered my shoulder. “Go now! Go now!”

But Yaphet was shouting too, and this time his voice did not come to us through my savant, which I had locked away again in my saddle box. Instead it reached us on the open air. “Get ready, Jubilee! Abandon the bike! There is no choice!”

Every word was clearly uttered, yet none of it made sense until I looked up at the flying machine.

It had overtaken the worm. It had run ahead of it, so close now I could easily see the face of the player suspended beneath it. It looked like Kaphiri, but it was not him.

Horror washed over me. We had only seconds before the worm mechanic caught us, but in that lost moment the threat of the worm meant nothing to me. All I could think was that this was my lover, in a flying machine. A forbidden flying machine. A wicked flying machine, with a glimmer of silver dancing along the leading edge of its long white wing. Yaphet lay prone in a harness beneath that wing, his legs splayed around the engine, with two white baskets on either side of him that held supplies. Only a psychotic would tempt the silver in a flying machine. A suicidal player or a murderous one. I knew the stories. There were many, and all were centered on a wicked player, his doomed machine sparkling with silver as it passed far above the influence of an enclave’s defending kobolds, to descend among the houses, and ignite a silver storm.

This was my lover.

I knew then that there was no forgiveness for the sins and failures of our past lives.

I rocked the bike forward, sending it coasting down the slope, engaging the engine again as we rolled. Yaphet soared over us, his engine silent, the only sound an artificial wind passing over the white wing. “Jubilee! Stop. Look at me. You have to abandon the bike. The mechanic will have you if you stay on the ground, but it can’t follow you in the air.”

“No! Go away. I don’t know you. I don’t need you—”

But Jolly’s desperation was different from mine. He reached around me and switched off the bike’s engine. The wheels locked. The bike skidded and went down. Jolly jumped free, but I did not. My leg was caught beneath the bike and I slid with it down the graveled slope. I heard Jolly shouting at me to“Get up! Get up!” A shadow passed over the sun, and then Yaphet was beside me, heaving the bike off my leg. I scrambled to my feet.

That was when I felt the pain. I gasped as my knee gave out. But Yaphet was beside me. He caught me as I dropped. He took my weight, passing my arm around his shoulder—and as soon as I had my balance I punched him: hard in the chest and we went down together. For one full second he stared at nothing, a look of stunned disbelief on his face. Then I pushed him away. “I hate you!” The words rushed from my throat, an honest assessment in a desperate situation. I would have left him to the worm then, if I could. I tried to. I scrambled backward on three limbs. “Stay away from me!” I warned.

But his anger was the equal of mine, and he at least could walk. “The silver take you, Jubilee.”