Linda Nagata - Memory

At Yaphet’s direction, we carried the flying machine to the edge of the precipice, and the silver fell back before our advance. The air was calm, and the stars were bright despite the luminous glow of the flood.

I huddled with Jolly in one of the cargo baskets, and we cradled Moki between us. “Please don’t do it,” Jolly whispered. “He’ll hurt you. You know he will.”

“Not tonight.”

I watched Kaphiri as he made a nest for himself in the other basket. Then Yaphet crawled into the pilot’s sling. He yelled at Kaphiri to make a path through the silver that lay beyond the cliff, and the silver rolled back as if some god’s breath had blown upon a cloud of cold smoke. The engine started. Then the plane rocked forward, and with a sickening lurch, dropped from its perch on the cliff’s edge. I cried out, sure we were all falling to our deaths. Then the wings crackled as air filled their hollows. The nose of the flying machine nodded upward, and slowly, slowly we began to climb.

The canyon was filled with silver: a great gleaming river flowing between islets of sharp stone. We followed its current to the plain. I had wondered once what it was like to be a bird, forced to fly all night above a world drowned in luminous silver. That night I learned. It was cold! Bitterly cold in the high air above the world, and dreamlike: the dream of some ancient god bent on defying all the rules of the world.

It was a brilliant night. The Bow of Heaven glowed, without dimming the stars around it, and the world was ablaze with silver. The only real darkness was cast by the plateaus of two distant mesas, one to the east, and one north: Azure.

We could see it easily; the night was that clear. Yaphet brought the flying machine round in a smooth arc, and a wisp of silver danced along the wing’s edge. I pushed it away and Kaphiri laughed, as if at a child’s clever trick. He made no move to fend off the silver, leaving it all to me.

It took only a little while to reach Azure, but we did not go all the way to my uncle’s encampment. How could I explain to Liam what I was doing? I was fairly sure there were not words in any language to convince him that a bargain with his brother’s murderer was the right thing to do.

So we studied the mesa from afar, until we sighted the camp, and then we set Jolly down a quarter mile away from it along the mesa rim. Yaphet did not even touch down. He slowed the flying machine, bringing it almost to a stall a few feet above the ground. Jolly and I shared a long look. I did not believe I would see him again. “Take Moki,” he whispered. Then he dropped from the cargo basket and fell into the brush. An explosion of birds took flight, and then we were away from the mesa and over the plain again. I heard a shout from the plateau. It sounded like my name. Moki turned to look, but I did not.

It was my task to guard Yaphet, but my vigil failed during that long flight south. I fell asleep, waking only when Yaphet shouted some question and Kaphiri answered that we should bear west. My face and hands were numb with cold and I pulled Moki’s small body close to warm them.

We were very high. The silver-flooded plain lay far below us, unbroken by any peak or pinnacle, but ahead there were mountains.

I had seen the Sea Comb from afar, but only as we drew close did I understand the expanse of that range. The part standing above the flood was twice as tall as the Kalang: a wall of sharp, ice-coated peaks raised against a dawn sky of liquid blue-gray.

As the dawn brightened, the silver rolled back, uncovering a land as strange as any I have seen. A city of glass towers sparkled in the foothills, carpeting the dry slopes and filling the valley floors for mile after mile. The glass towers were black, or gray, or blue, standing impossibly high and thin. Some of the buildings crowded one against the next, but where there was space between them, the ground sparkled in broken glass. As we passed over I saw why. Every few seconds a great windowpane would pop loose from one of the towers and drop, turning and flashing in the muted light, until it struck the ground, bursting apart in a high-pitched, crashing explosion of sound. It seemed to me that if the wind blew hard, the towers themselves would be toppled.

The glass city did not belong in our world. I was sure of it. The architecture was wrong. The towers were too tall, too thin, too fragile for our gravity… but the gods had come from another world.

I wondered: How does a player become a god? What is a god? What qualities might define one? If we could learn to command the power of the silver, would that make us gods? Or was that only a first step?

The city fell behind us, and soon after that the desert began to yield to an upland of shrubs and small trees, that grew greener and more lush with the increasing elevation. The ground no longer seemed far away, for the land rose steeply, while we only slowly climbed toward the middle peaks. Then Kaphiri guided us into a canyon, and suddenly the mountains surrounded us.

We flew between the canyon’s narrow walls for perhaps five miles, and then at Kaphiri’s direction we climbed above the canyon rim. A temple compound was perched there on the very edge of the precipice, and at once I recognized it as the temple Jolly had described. The defensive walls were massive, at least forty feet high and twenty wide, surrounding a courtyard and a central temple building, all of it built of a melancholy gray stone. Beyond the temple was a lovely green meadow edged in forest, with high peaks in the distance that glistened white with ice.

As Yaphet brought the flying machine around in a broad circle I looked again at the forest edge. Silver lingered there, in patches sheltered by the shadows of the trees, and between the silver I thought I saw players wandering in slow groups as if searching for something. But I wasn’t sure. Maybe they were some kind of strange, upright animal, for they seemed small and hunched, with heads too large for their bodies, but before I could decide, they disappeared, shying away from the wind-rush of the flying machine.

Then we were over the canyon again, and a moment later the temple’s massive wall was rushing up below us. Yaphet had chosen to land on the wall that faced the canyon. I glimpsed staircases rising up to it from the courtyard, and saw that only a shallow curbing offered protection from the precipitous drop. Then the wings flared, rolling back to embrace the air just as the wings of a bird will, and we floated gently down the last few feet, landing with only a slight bump.

Immediately, I rolled out of the cargo basket and staggered to my feet. It was as if I had been half-asleep all night, enthrall to some bizarre dream, but in that moment I wakened fully to my situation, and horror filled me. I was standing on the wall of Kaphiri’s temple, his stronghold, where he had returned again and again over many lifetimes in his long and bitter struggle with the will of our flawed goddess. Why had I come? What had moved me to abandon Jolly, and Liam, and Udondi to flee south with my father’s murderer? I wanted to discover that I had been swept up in a dream, another vision, but that dawn had too much of reality about it. I was stiff with cold, and exhausted, and hungry, and in desperate need to answer a particular call of nature.

Moki whined and I picked him up, the warmth of his small body so tender against my cheek that I knew it was no dream.

I stepped to the edge of the wall. Silver still filled the canyon. It flowed downhill in a great, silent river, roiling and tumbling past the foot of the temple wall without ever quite touching the stone. I breathed in the sweet perfume of temple kobolds, mixed with the sharp scent of silver, and it seemed to me that temple was strong and well defended. But then I stepped around the wing and I saw that the wall had been breached by the silver at least once, for a strange folly of blue glass had replaced some of the stone. The folly started at the top of the wall and plunged down into the courtyard, looking like the spillway of a steep mountain stream. I was tired, and it was hard to focus on the translucent mass, but it seemed to be filled with swooping shapes and swirls as if some edgeless, unstable geometry was trapped within it.