Linda Nagata - Memory

Yaphet looked at me. Then he looked up, and his eyes went wide. He jerked at the controls, and the flying machine lurched. Jolly yelped, grabbing for Moki with one hand and a strut with the other.

“Hold on,” Yaphet muttered. “We only have a few seconds. If we don’t make the well—”

The tuft of silver expanded with astonishing speed, rushing along the wing’s edge like a gleaming, glittering stream just escaped from its dam.

Yaphet saw it and leaned hard on the control stick. “I’m going for the cliff! There’s no place to land, so get ready to jump—”

“No! Turn away! Turn away now!” There was no way we could survive a crash against the cliff face, but maybe we could survive the silver?

Motes glittered on the back of my hand and danced between my fingertips. Myha was awake. So for the first time, I invited it deliberately into my mind.

A liquid awareness filled me. The silver on the wing’s edge boiled in my consciousness, becoming part of me, an extension of my will. Holding tight to a strut with one hand, I reached out toward the silver with the other. In the way I had learned, I leaned on it with my mind. I used it, like a glove that I could wear, and pushed , and it came away from the wing in a long thin skein of silver.

But silver will always sink to the ground. Detached from the wing, with nothing to buoy it up, the skein fell while we flew forward into it. Yaphet shouted, hammering at the controls so that the flying machine jerked upward, in a sharp turn away from the cliff. I dove half out of the basket and pushed , out and down. The skein passed just beneath my hand. It stirred an electric awareness in my skin so sharp I yanked my hand back, as if from contact with a flame.

Then it passed beneath us, brushing the belly of the plane and igniting a scatter of silver sparkles, but I commanded them away. More motes formed along the wing, but these too I willed away. Then the cherished scent of temple kobolds reached me, and a moment later Yaphet guided us over the wild well and we landed gently in a little bowl of dry grass.

I could not wait to distance myself from the flying machine. I was climbing out of the basket even before it came to a rest. “Jubilee, wait,” Yaphet said. “It’s windy. If we don’t anchor the plane—”

I stumbled on my swollen knee. At the same time, a gust caught the wing, dragging the whole flying machine a foot back toward the cliff. “Jolly, get off!” I shouted. “Now!”

Jolly’s eyes were wide with fright. He shooed Moki out of the basket, then tumbled after him. Deprived of his weight, the plane skidded back again. Yaphet too scrambled free, but he did not abandon the plane. He grabbed a strut and sank in his heels. “Get the ropes!” he shouted at Jolly. “In the cargo basket. Help me tie it down.”

I wanted to see Yaphet’s flying machine tumble over the cliff. On the other hand, I did not want to be trapped three hundred feet above the canyon floor. Torn by these conflicting desires, I risked a quick glance around. The valley reached back only fifty feet or so. Really, “valley” was much too grand a word for it. It was more a gloomy little hollow, hemmed in by sheer walls of stone. Birds could reach us, and I guessed that goats could climb down from the ridgeline, but I did not know if a player could scale those cliffs—certainly the task looked hopeless for a player with a twisted knee.

So after a moment of indecision, I lurched after the flying machine and grabbed a strut, bracing my good leg against a rock. Jolly found the rope. He looped it around the central struts, and Yaphet secured the other end to a boulder. “Help me furl the wings,” he told Jolly.

I had not realized it before, but the white wings were made of a metallic cloth, stretched upon a frame. Yaphet showed Jolly how to unclip the edge, and tie down the cloth so the wind would not catch it.

When the danger was past, I turned away from the hateful machine. But I managed only a few stumbling steps before my knee gave out. I sank down in the dry grass, not knowing what else to do, or what to think. It did not seem hard anymore to accept the idea of ha , but I could not get my mind around the fact of a flying machine.

“Jubilee?” I looked up to see Jolly beside me, a furtive look on his face. “Is your leg badly hurt?” He sounded very guilty—as he should. He had dropped the heavy bike on my leg after all.

“My knee’s swollen.”

He cast a nervous glance over his shoulder. Then, speaking under his breath, “He is so much like Kaphiri.”

“Has he threatened you?”

“No! He’s angry though.”

“Not with you,” I reminded him. Then I nodded toward a stand of tangled brush that grew against the back wall. “Go and find me a walking stick, okay?”

I used the stick to hobble behind the brush and relieve myself. I had very little urine in me, which made me wonder how much water Yaphet had aboard his flying machine. All mine had been lost with the bike, and by the half-dead look of the vegetation in our little valley, I was certain we would find no water there.

When I came back, Yaphet was rearranging the supplies in the cargo baskets. He said nothing. He did not look at me. I asked about water. He had two gallons. He told me to sit down and he would get it. I hobbled the few steps to the rim of the valley, sitting beside the wide mound of dirt surrounding the kobold well.

From the valley’s rim, I could look out of the canyon to the plain beyond. The dust cloud had long since blown away and shadows were running long. Very soon it would be dark.

I closed my eyes, feeling sick inside. Yaphet was my lover, I could not deny it. I felt as if I had always known him and always loved him. It didn’t matter at all that I didn’t want him. It didn’t matter at all that he horrified me.

I listened to the rustle of the wind, to the fall of a pebble from the cliffs above… to the crunch of Yaphet’s footsteps in the dry grass. I did not turn to look at him—I was too stubborn for that—but I knew exactly where he was by the sound of his steps.

He came and he stood behind me, handing a bottle of water over my shoulder. I took it, careful not to touch his hand. I drank.

“I wanted to tell you about the flying machine,” he said, “but I knew how you would see it.”

“Then why? Why did you do it?”

“I was born to it!” No apology in his voice. No shame. “I dreamed it, every night when I was little.”

“I saw it in you. That first time we spoke. I saw it in your eyes. An obsession, though I didn’t know what it was.”

He crouched behind me.

I tensed. I still would not look at him, but I was brutally aware of his proximity, of his very gravity. “Don’t touch me,” I warned.

“You know it’s never been that way between us.”

I turned to look at him. I could not help myself. “Do you remember it?”

“Enough to know it.” He slipped his sunglasses off with a black-gloved hand. “You’re angry with me, Jubilee, but I’m not the only one with secrets. I thought Jolly did that trick with the silver, but he said it was you. Are you like him? Are you like them ?”

With his face set in anger, he was Kaphiri’s dark-skinned twin. “You are frightening my brother,” I said softly.

He glanced over his shoulder, but Jolly had gone with Moki to explore the back of the valley. “He’s not afraid of the plane.”

“The plane?”

“The airplane. The flying machine.”

“That’s not what I meant. You remind him of Kaphiri.”

Yaphet scowled, clearly hurt and perplexed that I would say such a thing. “You think I’m the same as him? You and Jolly would belong to him now, if I hadn’t come.”