Linda Nagata - Memory

I told her, “There have been two more players made since the beginning.” I glanced over my shoulder, and Kaphiri was still there. He met my gaze, but he looked confused. I realized then that Selma could not see him, for if she could, she would have surely called out to this avatar of her lover. And he could not see her, or he would be looking at her, and not at me.

Turning back around, I told her of Kaphiri, and of Jolly. She seemed mystified by this news. Then I described how the goddess had come to me, warning that some fragment of the dark god was hidden in the Cenotaph, and that I must find a way to remove him, and heal that wound.

Selma looked stunned, and shaken. “Then the war is not over.”

“I guess not.”

“And the flood is caused by the god after all.”

“It’s what she said. But how is it you didn’t know this? If you were there in the beginning?”

“I do not have the sight of the goddess. It’s been many centuries since she came to me. I thought the war long past.”

“But you must know how I can heal the wound in the world? You must have ideas?”

“He is a god, Jubilee.”

“But surely he is broken? Surely he is less than a god now?”

“She did not tell you what to do?”

“No! She is wounded, and very weak. Players say the silver is her fever dream and only rarely is she conscious.”

Selma did not answer; she did not even move. She stood there frozen, so that I feared the ancient machinery she inhabited had failed. “Don’t go,” I pleaded. “Not yet.”

Her eyes blinked, and they were shining with tears. “Jubilee, you have explained so much to me.”

“Then return the favor please, and tell me, why was there a war?”

She answered with a long, sad sigh. “You and I, Jubilee, and your lover Yaphet, and my lover, all of us are ordinary players. We are not the goddess and we are not the god, and their sins are not our sins. Do you understand this?”

I nodded, though I was too dazed by then for any true understanding.

“Their arrogance betrayed them. They became jealous of one another, and they began to argue over whose world this really was, for the god had made its mechanical structure, but the goddess had given it beauty and life. Their conflict grew violent, and the goddess sought to evict him from the world. In retaliation, he told her he would dissolve the biosphere, so that he might build it over again and prove he could bring beauty to a world as well as she. The players they had cajoled into populating their world were forgotten, no more than discarded toys, their lives of no value in the schemes of our failed deities.”

“So they fought?”

“And both lost.”

“And the world was broken?”

“I thought the world was finished. But looking at you, I know it lived longer than I expected. Do you know the age of the world?”

“Many tens of thousands of years, I think.”

Again she looked stunned. “So long? I recorded this persona on what I thought would be the last night of the world. It was an act of vanity, or of anger. A great flood of silver had consumed the land, a flood that dwarfed all floods before it. I did not think any players would survive that night.”

“The goddess found a way to turn back the flood.”

“By the look in your eyes I will guess this cure was almost as evil as the affliction.”

“She caused almost all the silver to be destroyed, and the players died of hunger and war. Only a few survived it, but of those few some had lovers, and there were babies. Still, it must have been hundreds of years—maybe thousands—before all the players could be reborn, and by then the silver was on the verge of flood again. This cycle has happened many times… at least seven times that we know of… because the wound has never been healed. But how can I make a god—even a wounded god—leave the world?”

“I do not know.”

“But you must know! She lived within you, didn’t she?”

“She did not tell me how to murder her.”

Murder.

Murder again.

“Death is my role,” I whispered.

“What are you saying?”

I was speaking to myself as much as to her. “It’s what Kaphiri told me. Death is my role.”

“Jubilee, do you know how to murder a god?”

I shook my head. But then a new thought came to me, and though it repulsed me, I could not let it go. “Tell me, did the goddess make the kobolds? Do you know?”

“What is a kobold?”

“They are beetlelike mechanics that grow in the ground wherever a plume of nutrients awakens the kobold motes that are everywhere in the world.”

“I have not heard of mechanics like these.”

I nodded. “I am not surprised, for it is said they did not exist at the beginning of the world. They were made later, in a time when the world was on the verge of starving to death… by a player who could survive the silver.”

“Like this Kaphiri you have described?”

“Maybe it was him. But I think it was someone more clever.”

Fiaccomo had defied death in the silver, seducing the goddess and stealing her creative powers to bring the first kobolds into the world. So it was said. Ki-Faun twisted this gift, making a kobold that could erase not just a player, but the very memory of that player from the silver so he never would be born again…

Was the goddess aware that players had stolen this knowledge from her mind? Did she guess what might be done with it?

Death is my role.

My heart was beating hard, and it took some time to understand that the voice calling my name was a real voice, and not the whispering of some ancient version of myself. “Jubilee,” Yaphet crooned, his mouth beside my ear. “Come back to me. Come back, please.”

I shoved the savant away, and I turned to him, crying against his shoulder and whispering, “I’m afraid. I’m afraid.” Over and over again. I did not want to know what I knew, or what I had to do. I did not want anything but to hide in Yaphet’s arms.

We spent the remaining hours of that night together. All those who have lovers will know how it was between us. There is no choice in love. Though we were in the house of Kaphiri, and though my heart was sick with fear, we had comfort between us, and I still treasure those hours above all others in my memory, which has grown very full indeed.

I slept through much of that next day. Sometimes I sleep just to avoid being awake. A waking mind must face facts and make decisions. I wanted none of that. I wanted to sleep forever, but in the afternoon my conscience stirred, and I wakened.

Instantly I felt cold, for Yaphet was gone.

I knew where he was. In my imagination I could see him in the library, poring over ancient slices of lettered stone, or electronic documents that might have been written by himself, lifetimes ago.

I called Moki and he appeared from under the bed and I petted him for a few minutes, but it did little to calm me. In the vision I had suffered at Azure Mesa I had spoken with Ki-Faun, who was Yaphet. His words reechoed in my mind and I felt their weight like a curse: The knot is tied around you, milady, did you know it? All our fates circle around you.

He had been so old I had not recognized him as my lover, but he knew me.

He had put the kobold in my hand. I wondered if that memory lay somewhere beneath the surface of Yaphet’s mind… and if so, how far beneath the surface?

There was a knock at the door, and I stood and dressed, though I did not hurry, knowing he would wait.

He had been made in the image of Yaphet, and Yaphet had been made to resemble the god, and I was an avatar of the goddess, a container for her to play in, when she was in a playful mood.