Linda Nagata - Memory

I bowed my head, bringing my ears closer to the sound. There was a space in my mind that was dark. I had never been aware of it before: a great, sleeping mass of memory, now waking, bit by bit, as if each word muttered by the savant was a spark of light illuminating another word in a language I had spoken before I knew any other. They were my words, and the voice I heard was my voice, speaking to me across time, from out of another life.

I shuddered, and vaguely I was aware of arms around me, steadying me as I sank cross-legged to the floor. I was listening to a monologue, the recitation of a history, but no sooner did I understand this than the voice fell silent. I ran my hands over the savant; turned it over in my lap, but no image appeared in its glassy surface. Then I looked up, to discover that someone new had joined us in the room.

She was an image of course, some kind of projection, for I could see through her to the drifting savants beyond but—

She was myself.

An older version of myself to be sure. She looked the age of my mother, and her fashion was not mine: her dark hair was pinned up in a dignified style that astonished me, and she was dressed in a formal gown of gold fabric, its pleated skirt accenting her height. And still I could not doubt that she was me.

As stunned as I was, she looked more surprised. “How can this be?” she whispered, in the language I knew so intimately now. “Do I look on a projection of myself?”

“No,” I answered, my tongue still unfamiliar with the words now so bright in my memory. “This is my life, and you are a savant.”

“A recording… that’s right. I was recording our history… though why, or for who…” She shook her head. “It was an act of vanity. But why are you so like me? Or anyway, like the girl I might have been?”

“Because I am you—don’t you understand?—in another life.”

“Another life ? This one has not been enough?”

“You are not so old.”

“Am I not? Nine hundred years in the service of the goddess, and I was never a child. Now she has brought us all to ruin! And yet if that’s so, why are you here? It should have ended. It should have ended this night. How can you be here?”

Nine hundred years? My mouth was dry, so that at first I could not speak. I wondered if this persona was sane. “Why…” I swallowed, trying to get some moisture in my mouth. “Why did you think the world was at an end?”

“Because it is broken! It is flooded with silver. Most players have already been taken.” She raised her hands, and the ha sparkled between her fingers. “Only a few of us are left to hold it back. Too few. We cannot win.”

“But the world didn’t end,” I said. “Anyway, not yet.”

“Is this the same world?”

“I think it is.”

“What is your name?”

“Jubilee.”

“That’s different from mine. I am called Selma.”

I shrugged. “We are not born with any memory of our past lives. We don’t remember our past names.”

“Then how do you know you lived before?”

“The talents of our past return to us… and also, a memory of our lovers.”

“Indeed.”

“Is this new to you?”

“Very new, though it smacks of the goddess. Did she finally return? Is this how she sought to set things right?”

“I don’t know.”

Selma turned half away, a distracted, angry look on her face. “The silver is memory. Do you know that?”

“I have heard it said before.”

“It is the memory of the world, from its creation. The memory of the creation is still in it, and maybe, it even holds a memory of the minds of the god and the goddess who together made this world—though none of us left has the skill to bring her whole out of the past. I do not know what has caused the silver to flood, unless the god has won, and decreed that the world will be returned to chaos, so that he may stage the creation again.”

“The god?” A sullen anger ignited in me. “The god had nothing to do with the creation. This world was made by the goddess alone. The god pursued her. He came out of darkness to destroy her work.”

Selma did not answer this for many long seconds. Her hand clutched at her gown, and she frowned, pacing first a step away, then a step closer. “Is that what you were taught?” She turned to study me more closely. “Well, time has passed. It’s only to be expected that the story would change.”

I did not want to hear such words. One by one my ideas of the world had shattered, beginning that night I watched Kaphiri make his way up the road to Temple Huacho. I felt unbalanced and angry, and I did not try to hide it. “She is the wounded goddess. She was nearly destroyed when she warred with the dark god.”

Selma nodded, and there was a great sadness in her eyes. “That much is true.”

True? How could anyone ever know what was true? But my curiosity won out. Selma was ancient. She spoke as one who had lived in the beginning of the world, and I wanted to know what she knew. “Please tell me the story, as you learned it.”

“I did not learn it. I lived it. But I will tell you.”

For several seconds she was silent, gathering her thoughts. Then she began to speak:

“It is not true that the god pursued her from out of the darkness. They came together. Please do not think too highly of them. They were beings of great intellect and great power, but also of great arrogance. They were lovers. But as with any arrogant creature, they were also competitors. They set out to create a project together, a world of their own, where they might play games until the end of time. Would you ever presume to make a world, Jubilee? No? Ah well, neither would I.

“But together the god and the goddess created this world. They spun it out of the mass of a lifeless planet that had the misfortune to form too close to its sun, so that its atmosphere was a thick blanket of poisonous vapor over a surface hot enough to melt soft metals. They tore that failed planet apart, and with its debris they built a new world in the shape of a ring because it was an efficient design, with more surface area than the planet they had destroyed, but still with room in the long core for the machinery of their creation.

“And their new world was beautiful. No one could deny that.

“So they invited people from other worlds to come play in their creation. They even made avatars that they could inhabit when it pleased them. These avatars were ordinary players in all respects, except that one resembled the favored form of the goddess, and one resembled the god, and they would host these deities on rare occasion.”

She was telling me about myself. It was not a truth I wanted to know, but how could I deny it? The goddess had come to me. She had inhabited me. She had used me as her avatar. “Then you—”

(…and me too…)

—were made as a toy?”

“That description is painful… but not unfair.”

“And you were not born of parents?”

“I have said I was made.”

“Then you were a mechanic? You were never human at all? And I… I am the same as you.”

“No, Jubilee, you misunderstand both your own history and the skill of the goddess. I am no mechanic, and neither are you. The goddess would never inhabit a simple mechanic. I am human—though I was made and not born—and if you are the same as me, then you are utterly human too.”

“And Yaphet?”

She looked at me closely. “Is this the name of your lover?”

I nodded, too frightened to speak.

“They made him too. But all the other players they brought from other worlds.”

I wondered how many other worlds there might be, and how a goddess might move between them… but the silver was rising, and there were many things I needed to know.