Linda Nagata - Memory

“And we cannot go into the silver.”

Yaphet nodded agreement. “And still I might take the chance… except you’re right. We are older than Kaphiri. Far older. You talked to that ancient savant. Her one life was so very long. If you remembered what she remembers, would you have room for anything else? And among all that knowledge, would you be able to find the one fact you’re looking for?”

I smiled a fuzzy smile. “You make it sound like it would be easier to just ask her how to reach the next level of the ha .”

“Ask her?” A fierce scowl darkened his brow. “Actually, I hadn’t thought of that.”

So we ran to the room of savants, taking the kobold circle with us, for we had no way of knowing how much time might pass before the new kobold emerged. But the ancient savant would not waken. Yaphet examined it, but all he could say was that its power system must have failed. “The shock of powering-up after so many millennia. It’s amazing it worked at all.”

I held the lifeless glass shell, furious at the thought of the knowledge it contained, locked away forever.

“Okay,” Yaphet said. “So we’ll have to remember it some other way.”

But a sense of urgency had come over me. “What time is it? Has the dawn come yet?”

“Long since.”

“Then where is Kaphiri?”

We went to the kitchen. Mari was there, but she said he had not come back.

“I thought he would return at dawn.”

She shrugged. “Sometimes he is gone for days.”

“It is always night somewhere in the world,” Yaphet said, and his face was grim.

It made me shudder, to think of Kaphiri following the night around the ring of the world. I had thought his rampage would end at dawn… but what was there to stop him now except exhaustion?

I looked at Yaphet. “We need his talents. We must make him come back.”

“How can we?”

“I’ll call him. When the silver rises tonight… I’ll seek him. I’ve felt him through the silver before.”

So we waited out the day. I slept for part of it. Yaphet did not sleep; he said he could not. There was an energy burning in him, and he spent all that day at study in the library, but he did not learn how to awaken his ha . Near dusk we ate a quiet meal in the kitchen, with the kobold circle on the table before us. “Do you still plan to call him?” Mari asked, standing in what I had come to think of as her place, beside the stove.

“Yes, as soon as the silver has risen. We’re going to leave after that. So I want to thank you for your kindness…”

She shrugged. “If you come back, I’ll be here.”

“We won’t be coming back.”

“So sure, are you?”

“Yes.”

I felt the weight of the book, Known Kobold Circles , in my pocket. Almost as heavy as the weight of my conscience. I reached for the book. Yaphet caught my hand, and we traded a look. “She should know,” I said softly. He could not meet my gaze. So I pulled out the book and showed it to her. “Nuanez gave this to me because I could read it.”

Her face went slack. With a trembling hand, she pulled out a chair. Then she collapsed into it, steadying herself with a palm against the table. “Nuanez?” she whispered. “How is it you know that name?”

“I stayed in his house. I spoke with him. He’s still waiting for you, Mari, in the forest of the Kalang. He’s still there, waiting for you to come back.”

I went on to tell her all I could remember. She listened, asking no questions, her face locked in frozen grief. When I was done, she sat in silence for several minutes. Then she excused herself, saying she had chores to do.

“I wonder if that was a mistake?” Yaphet asked when she was gone.

I wondered too, but Nuanez had been waiting so very long. “Maybe she’ll return now?”

I hoped she would.

I reached for the kobold circle, picking it up yet again to examine it. Many hours had passed since it was formed. I had looked at it a hundred times without discovering any hint of change, but now dark lines appeared between the joined kobolds. I cried out in excitement, and over the next hour Yaphet and I watched as the kobolds were pushed apart by some force within the sphere. Lifelessly they fell aside, and at last a new kobold crawled with slow determination from the ruins of the sphere. I stared at it and felt cold, for it was the same kobold I had seen in my vision: a large, glossy, silver specimen, with a carapace like a lozenge, and six strong legs, but no head, no eyes.

Yaphet picked it up.

“Don’t crush it!” I warned.

“I won’t.”

“Its vapors are the harmful thing.”

“I know.”

He had a case for it in his pocket, and he put it in that. Then he handed it to me. “We should go tonight,” he said, “whether Kaphiri returns or not.”

I slipped the case into the pocket of my field jacket. It was our plan to use the flying machine, to get as close to the Cenotaph as we could. We hoped to land near its rim. Then we would walk down into the pit, and perhaps it would take us only a day or two to reach the bottom… but Yaphet had not found his ha . “We need him,” I whispered. “I cannot fend off the silver by myself.”

“Every night, thousands more die.”

“I know.”

“Last night—”

“I know! I know it. Please don’t say it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“We’ll go. But let me call him first. Let me try.”

We found a cloth bag in one of the cabinets, and I filled it with bread and cheese and rations. Yaphet took several plastic bottles from another shelf and filled them with water from the tap. Then we went outside.

Night had come to the mountains, though it was not full darkness yet. The sky still had some blue in it, and only the brightest stars showed. From the direction of the forest we heard the plaintive call of a night bird, but within the courtyard all was still. Not a breath of wind stirred, and I did not see even a single mechanic as we crossed the tiles. Moki trotted ahead of us, his ears pricked and alert, but he did not seem worried. We climbed the stairs to the top of the wall, and every breath that we drew was laden with the sweet scent of temple kobolds.

We paused to look down into the canyon. A river of silver ran through it. It was still far below the wall, but I could feel it, streaming past the lines of my awareness. I closed my eyes. The silver was in me. It was in all of us, but in me it was awake. The ha was a new sense, one that reached beyond taste and touch, beyond sight and scent and hearing. This new sense reached out into the night, riding on thin lines of detection, and almost immediately I felt him. It was just as Kaphiri had said, that night when he came to us. The ha of one’s lover makes an unmistakable signal. I clutched Yaphet’s hands. “He is far away.”

“Call him.”

He was not truly my lover, but I called him anyway. My desire made a tremor in the silver, a wordless wanting. I felt him startle. I felt his anger run back to me, following on the same lines of connection, his cold resistance.

“Look,” Yaphet said.

Our joined hands sparkled with the ha . It ran up his arms, and mine.

“I can feel you,” he whispered. “I can feel the flowing of the silver.”

“Is it awake in you?”

“I don’t know… but I can feel him too.”

“And he feels you… but he’s not coming. Yaphet, he’s not coming… is he?” The connection I felt with Kaphiri was so strong it hardly seemed possible that he could refuse… and then he was gone, vanished from my awareness.

“He has gone into the daylight,” Yaphet said.

“He won’t come back.”