Linda Nagata - Memory

There should have been a wide audience chamber on the other side of that door. There should have been a raised dais at the far end, and a chair of rank, and whispering ghosts with fingers like leaves brushing my arms and begging my help…

For I had walked through this temple in that vision I endured at Azure Mesa.

But instead of an audience chamber, I found the library. I stood with the door propped open, staring at a bookcase that stretched from floor to ceiling, every shelf on it crammed with paper and parchment manuscripts, and leaves of lettered stone, and relics.

I wandered the length of the bookcase, trailing my fingers on the spines of the manuscripts to assure myself they were real.

An aisle opened at the end of the row, with scattered tables pushed up against the wall. Many more bookshelves lay beyond the first.

I walked past them, and as I made my way around the last one, I knew where I was. The raised dais was gone, and the chair of rank. In their place stood a long table holding a scattering of manuscripts. Three chairs were placed around it. Two had stacks of lettered stone piled in their seats. The other held Yaphet, sprawled in sleep upon the table. I wanted to wake him, to tell him what I knew: that we were in the house of Ki-Faun—in my mind’s eye I could see him sitting exactly where Yaphet sat: his old, crab body hunched in his chair as he watched me with a pained gleam in his ancient eyes that I could not understand—but I knew Yaphet must be exhausted and I did not want to interrupt his slumber.

Moki had disappeared somewhere among the stacks, so I had no warning. I turned my head and Kaphiri was there in the shadows.

So forlorn was his expression that I thought our time was over. All hope seemed gone from his eyes, and with it his fiery ambition to become a god, so that nothing was left to him but to call the silver into that room to consume us all—except that it would not consume him. I think that was all that held him back—the knowledge that he would be left behind.

He said to me, “You have been here before. Do you remember?”

“I do.”

He nodded at Yaphet. “And do you remember him? No?”

I was unsure what he was asking.

“It’s just that he returns so naturally to the habits of his past, I thought you would know him.”

I studied Yaphet and, slowly, I began to see that room again with the eyes of my past self. I saw age fall upon Yaphet, so that his body withered and his lush black hair vanished and tendrils of beard trailed like strands of gray moss from his chin. “It was him,” I said, astounded at my sudden knowledge. “He was Ki-Faun.” I turned to look again at Kaphiri. “Or was it you?”

“It was him.”

Of course, for I had been sent to murder Kaphiri.

“Will you come?” he asked me, and when I hesitated he added, “There is nothing to fear. It’s only your memories that I desire now.”

We walked into a room of ghosts. From outside the closed door I could already hear their whispering, and when the door opened their chatter was like the streaming of wind in treetops.

They were savants. Hundreds of them, some floating near the ceiling, some hovering just above the floor, or at every level in between. Some were wing-shaped, others spherical, while many more were flatscreens. Some of these were fixed to the walls, or sitting like decorations on the shelves. They spoke to one another in languages I had never heard before, carrying on conversations that never slowed for the drawing of a breath.

“Are they sane?”

Kaphiri shrugged. “Speak to them and find out.”

Where should I start? There were so many, it would require years to know them all, but the silver was rising, and I feared we had only days left, at best. Just a few days to learn the ways of goddesses and gods. But if any players had ever known such things, surely they would be the most ancient, those who had lived when the world was first made?

“Which is the oldest?” I asked. “Do you know?”

“That one never speaks.”

“I would see it anyway.”

He shrugged and slipped into the chaos of drifting savants. I expected him to select one of the decrepit ones hovering near the floor, but instead he reached for a translucent wing that hung in perfect stillness and stability near the ceiling. It looked to be made of some substance like glass, but with a greater purity, and clarity, than I had ever seen. The wing was as long as my arm, and two inches in thickness at its widest point. Colors burst to life within it when Kaphiri took it in his hands. He gazed at them, and his face grew more stern, and colder even than it had been before. Then he gave it a shove. The colors disappeared as it left his hands. It glided across the room, angling toward me as if it understood its destination, and it did not wobble, though it bumped against several other savants along the way.

I caught it and pulled it close, gazing into its glassy body, but the colors that had appeared when Kaphiri touched it did not immediately appear for me. “How do you know it is oldest?” I asked, for there was nothing worn in its appearance or quaint in its fashion. If he had told me his kobolds had assembled it only yesterday, I would have no reason to disbelieve him, and I would be much impressed with his art. Even without color, it was a beautiful thing.

“Languages grow and change, you know this?”

I nodded.

“Even though I may not understand a language, it is still possible to see its relationship to languages that surround it in time. The similarity of words and grammar and symbols… I have traced many languages back through time. Among the oldest of them that I can still understand, there is mention of savants like this one, and even then they were considered relics. If this savant were to speak, it might use the oldest language in the world, the one that lies at the root of them all.”

Colors had begun to wake in it now, and at the same time I felt the electric presence of the ha stir against my hands. “What is happening?”

“It knows you through the ha .” He allowed himself a smirk. “That was how I acquired it. It was supposed to be ancient, but all the scholars who examined it could not get it to awaken. They were certain it was broken, or else a fraud. It was only by chance that I discovered otherwise.”

“Why would it respond to the ha ? Was it made by you, in another life?”

“I wondered the same. But no. It dates from the beginning, eight centuries at least, before my first life.”

I lowered the savant, to look at him. “I was taught we were all created in the beginning, that we all lived our first lives together.”

“Not quite all of us.”

“You then? And Jolly? But what do the two of you share? You are not alike. You are not . Except the silver doesn’t take you.”

“And the ha is awake in us.”

“And in me…” I gazed again into the mysterious glass of the savant, seeing lines of colors warming within its depths. “The goddess said we were children, that we’ve been children too long. Jolly is to teach other players to awaken their ha … I think it’s why he was made… But it was you who wakened the ha in me.”

“I did not plan that.”

“Oh, I know. You thought it would kill me.” I saw symbols forming now in the savant’s glassy heart. Vaguely, I heard the first stirrings of an ancient voice, whispering down through time. “This is what I think, that in the first years, the ha must have been awake in all players, or anyway, all who were not children—”

He stiffened. “Is it whispering?” he asked incredulously. “Can you hear it?”

I could. At first it spoke so softly I could barely distinguish the words, but I knew immediately that its language belonged to me. “I have it,” I whispered, and Kaphiri stepped closer. I felt his tension as a pressure in my mind, and it was at once frightening and amusing. He needed me. He knew it now, without any doubt attached.