Linda Nagata - Memory

“Better the silver than you!”

He tackled me. I screamed as my knee was further twisted and then somehow he had my arms locked behind my back, his mouth beside my ear. I hated him for it, because it was the same way Kaphiri had held me. But Yaphet’s words were different. “You will live through this day, Jubilee, I swear it.” And then he half carried me, half dragged me down the slope.

He had left his flying machine in the dry water course at the bottom of the little canyon. Jolly was already there, with Moki under one arm, and my savant under the other, climbing into one of the cargo baskets. “Jolly, don’t!”

“Do you want to kill us?” he shouted. “Do you want to kill yourself? The worm can only follow us if we’re on the ground. So get in. Get in! Our only chance is to fly.”

Yaphet left me no choice. “Your brother’s a lot smarter than you,” he said, and he shoved me into the basket opposite Jolly. My head struck one of the struts. A different kind of pain. The sharp, fresh scent of silver tinged the air.

I had landed on a folded sleeping bag, but something brittle crunched beneath it as I shoved myself up on my elbows. What I had taken for a harness between the two baskets was really a solid platform suspended by fixed struts. Yaphet clambered over the engine and dropped onto it. The size of the flyer was such that his face was only inches from mine. “Look back,” he ordered as the engine started up. I felt its vibration. I felt the wing begin to lift and I grabbed at the rim of the basket. “Look back!”

I did, and saw the worm. It darted up the slope behind us, following the track of my bike. The flying machine began to climb, lofting slowly into the air.

The worm reached my fallen bike. It turned immediately, tracking our path down to the canyon floor. We were twenty feet in the air, and twice that far away down the canyon when the worm reached the place where the flying machine had been. It stopped, its six-foot length sparkling in the sun like a stream of water that does not flow. Then it circled that place, around and around, faster with each circuit, like a mad thing. I felt the hair on my neck stand up. It never once looked up for us, as any living thing would do.

Then we soared around a bend in the canyon, and I couldn’t see it anymore. I turned, to look ahead of us.

“You could unbalance us,” Yaphet suggested, past the streaming wind. “You could shift your weight too suddenly, or jump out, and send us crashing to our deaths. If you want to.”

Jolly worried I might consider this a good idea. “Jubilee, he doesn’t mean it! Don’t do it. Please.”

I could not answer. A new clarity had come over me. If not for Yaphet, we would have fallen to the worm. If not for this wicked flying machine. “Why does the silver leave us alone?” I asked, without looking at him.

“Because we’re flying low. Not even twenty feet above the ground.”

We were lower than the canyon walls.

“And the sun protects us,” Yaphet added. “If silver begins to bloom along the wings, the sun will burn it and stop it from growing.”

“And if you go higher?” I remembered a day as bright as this one, when Udondi’s savant had risen into the sky above the highway to Xahiclan, higher and higher, until a tiny silver storm burst into existence around it.

Yaphet said, “I won’t go higher.”

I did not want to look at him. I was afraid to look. So I kept my gaze fixed on the canyon wall, and still he was all I saw. Our bodies speak their own language, and mine was waking to one it had heard only faintly that night outside the Temple of the Sisters.

What if I hate him? I’d asked Liam that question on the day I’d first heard Yaphet’s name, and Liam had answered honestly. It won’t matter.

It was Jolly who broke a silence of several minutes. “Yaphet, was it you who set those explosives?”

I had forgotten the explosives. So distracted was I, I had even forgotten the two convoys.

“No, it wasn’t me.”

“It brought down a landslide, didn’t it?”

“I couldn’t see what happened… but it sounded like a landslide. Are you thinking it was your uncle?”

Liam?I had forgotten him too. I looked north, but all I could see was the canyon wall. “We have to go back.”

Yaphet didn’t answer. Neither did Jolly, for of course it would be foolish to go back. They both knew it… and so did I. Liam and Udondi would be furious if we did not use this chance to escape—and still I could not just leave them… “Jolly!” He lay in the other basket, his arm around Moki. “You have my savant, don’t you? So call them.”

Yaphet said, “We’ll have to climb out of this canyon first.”

“Then let’s do it.” We’d gone fifteen miles to the southeast, maybe more. “Both convoys are far away now. They won’t see us.” Not if we were lucky.

As we climbed to the canyon rim I found myself watching the wing for the glimmer of silver, but none appeared, and then we were over the plain. We stayed low, only ten feet above the ground, but the land was very flat, so that if anyone was looking, we would certainly be seen. I studied the land to the north and east, but there was no dust anywhere, no sign of a truck moving. Jolly put through a call to Udondi’s savant, but there was no answer. “They could be in a canyon,” Yaphet said.

He didn’t like to fly in the open, so when he found a shallow stretch of lowland between two ridges, he guided the flying machine down into it. We were still heading generally southeast. Ahead of us loomed a rugged highland of steep canyons and wind-smoothed pinnacles. Goats moved on the barren cliffs. I took their presence as a hopeful sign. “There must be someplace in there to shelter from the silver,” I said, pointing them out.

Yaphet nodded. “That’s where we’ll go.”

We tried to reach the cliffs, but the winds were confused, darting at us in powerful gusts that pushed us back out onto the plain. We were working our way back to the cliffs once again, flying lower than ever, only a few feet above the rocky soil, when we heard two faint concussions, one swiftly following the other. I would have thought it my imagination, if Yaphet had not turned to look.

Far to the northwest, a huge dust cloud boiled silently into the sky—far too much dust to be caused by any convoy.

In the ancient city, the bogy had taken Liam for one of her warlords. I wondered if she had been right after all.

We made our way at last into the highlands, succeeding in late afternoon when the winds began to die. We entered the mouth of a north-facing canyon where we had earlier seen goats along the walls. After half a mile, Jolly sighted a wild kobold well on the lip of a little pocket valley some three hundred feet above the canyon floor.

None of us wanted to fly that high, but time was growing short. The sun had already dropped behind the crags and the canyon was in shadow. We could look for a more accessible kobold well, but chance did not favor the finding of one so late in the day. So we agreed to try for the little valley.

Yaphet guided the flying machine in a tight spiral, keeping close to the cliff wall. He would glance anxiously at the valley, then back again, to the leading edge of the wing, alert for the first sign of a silver bloom. Jolly too kept a close eye on the wing, but I was distracted by a herd of brown goats that had stopped their browsing to eye us as we rose past them. They didn’t seem to know what to make of us, for we did not much resemble the predators they were used to.

It was then, as I watched the goats, that a flicker of awareness stirred in my mind. Moki whined, and one of the goats snorted, scampering away on an invisible path that climbed the cliff face. The others followed after it, while I glanced up, confirming what I already knew: a glitter of silver had ignited on the nearest wing tip. “It has started,” I said, loud enough to be heard over the wind.