Linda Nagata - Memory

That was true, though I wasn’t ready to admit it aloud. I fixed my gaze on the plain, where glints of silver had begun to appear. “Jolly is terrified of him. He knows him well enough to be afraid. And I… I’ve met him too, face-to-face since we last talked, and… you look like him. Almost exactly like him… as if the two of you were made from the same memory of silver.”

Yaphet considered this for many seconds. Then he denied it. “Players are not made in multiple copies.”

“Well, you are. Or he is. You’re like him. In many ways. But you’re… you’re different too.” I had sensed a whispered connection with Kaphiri, but with Yaphet that connection was a clear song. I could never confuse one with the other, not even if they stood together, side by side. “You don’t feel like him. Not at all.”

I should have been more careful with the words I used. “Did you touch him?”

“What?”

I had never suspected such cold fury could inhabit Yaphet’s eyes. “Something’s changed in you, Jubilee.”

“What do you mean? What’s changed?”

“He touched you, didn’t he? It feels like he did. Did he hurt you?”

I had been holding my breath. But I let it go in a sigh as I realized his anger was not directed at me. “He did touch me,” I admitted. “And he hurt me. And he changed me too.”

Our eyes locked, but too many thoughts were chasing around Yaphet’s head and he could not meet my gaze for long. I half expected him to give it up and leave, but when he shifted his position it was to sit beside me—close beside me. His shoulder almost touched mine. His hand rested on his knee in a relaxed posture, but it was a pose. I could see white lines of stress in his dark skin. “Tell me.”

So I did. First I spoke of the blood poisoning. Then I told him the story Udondi had told to me, of Kaphiri and his lover, and how she had left him for another.

In the evening’s fading light, Yaphet’s eyes were colored with a quiet fear. “These two lovers… they looked the same?”

“Udondi didn’t say.”

I spoke next of my encounter with the silver, on the night I left the Temple of the Sisters. He believed my story. How could he not? He had seen me push the silver away. But for Yaphet, belief was not enough.

“How could such a thing work?”

I shook my head. “You might as well ask, how does the silver work? What is it, after all?” The old questions, that had haunted me since Jolly disappeared, but Yaphet surprised me with an answer.

“The silver is a mechanism,” he said, as if this were common knowledge. “A machine devised by the ancients who made this world. A device, and if we could relearn its use, we could control it, and make it serve our purposes.”

I raised my hands, examining them thoughtfully. In the dusk, a few scattered glints of silver could still be seen between my fingers. “This is ha ,” I said softly. “Do you see it?”

When he saw what I meant, he reared back in fear. But then he leaned in again, to examine the specks. “How do you do that?”

“I don’t know. It just came to me, after his blood poisoned mine. My brother, he believes we’re like mechanics, that we have configuration codes, hidden away in our cells. Jolly thinks my codes were reset by the contact with Kaphiri’s blood, and I was changed. He says Kaphiri reset his own codes; that he knows how.”

“He does?” There was a sudden avarice in his voice. “Does Jolly know how?”

I had expected Yaphet to be offended—any sane player should be offended by the idea of human configuration codes. But he was not, and that offended me . “You’ve thought of such things before?”

His back grew stiff. He turned away from me. “I’ve thought of a lot of things.”

“Do you believe we are mechanics?”

“Jubilee, I don’t know!”

“And this desire I feel for you, is it a mechanism?”

He laughed and the sound was cold, with no humor in it. “Oh, yes. I’m sure that much is true.”

I had not expected such an answer and it hurt me. I was surprised how much. Oh, but we’d had a fine first day. I’d declared my hatred for him, I’d struck him, I’d warned him not to touch me. “I think there was more pleasure in this for my mother and father.”

“Your mother likely has a better temper.”

“She does,” I admitted.

“Jubilee… I’m sorry I keep offending you. I don’t know if we’re like mechanics. I don’t know what we are, but I do believe there’s an explanation for us, and for this world: a story that will explain why it exists and why it works as it does. If we could learn that story, then everything that confuses us would make sense… some kind of sense, anyway. Things like the silver… and the way we are made to love one another.”

I have never been so conscious of anyone as I was of Yaphet in those lingering minutes. The blink of his eye. The slight rise and fall of his chest as he breathed. The tardy drag of his long black braid whenever he turned his head. Each tiny movement recorded itself in my memory.

“Yaphet?”

He smiled one of his rare smiles. “That’s the first time you’ve said my name.”

“I have not told you everything yet.”

“Oh.” He was silent a moment, staring down at the plain. “I guess you should, then.”

So I described the vision that had come to me as I slept in the sanctuary of Azure Mesa. And then I told him of the experiment with the kobold circle. “It was called‘the mirror of the other self,’ and he was there, within it. But why was it him, and not you?”

“Did you want him to come?”

“ No! Have you not been listening? He is wrong . There is something about him that is corrupt. It was so, even in that vision of my other life.”

“But he was your lover.”

“In another life! And even then it was a mistake.”

“But it makes me angry! What’s wrong with me? I’ve never felt this way before.”

“I haven’t either.”

We sat in silence for some time, while the night gathered around us. Stars pricked the blue sky, while on the plain below silver filled the canyons, so that the dark land seemed infused with veins of luminous metal.

“Is that all?” Yaphet said at last. “Or is there more still?”

“A little more.”

He made a groan of mock despair. “Say it, then. Let me have it all, for you could tell me anything now and I would believe it.”

I snorted—“That’s what you say now”—and I told him of the goddess and the task she had given me. He listened. He made no comment on it except to ask, “Now is that all?”

“It is.”

He looked over his shoulder. I followed his gaze, to see Jolly, playing a game of fetch with Moki beside the flying machine. “I want you to be my wife, Jubilee. Now.” He put his finger against my lips. “Don’t speak! Because you’ll say it’s impossible, that we don’t know what will happen to us tomorrow. But that’s why I want you to marry me now. We are caught up in something, and maybe this time is all the time we’ll ever have. Marry me now.”

“But Jolly is here!”

“Just the words. Just share the words with me.”

My mouth felt dry. “I cannot kneel. My knee is swollen—”

“Then we’ll sit. Take my hand.”

“All right.” I laid my hand in his, but in that moment the awareness of silver stirred in my mind. I turned, to see a herd of goats hurrying down an invisible trail on the valley’s sheer back wall. “There is a silver storm coming.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do. We should bring your flying machine into the circle of the well.” I started to get up, but my knee quickly reminded me that was not a good idea.