Linda Nagata - Memory

I felt stunned, and frightened, and for a long time I stood there, just holding his hands. When we finally let go I thought I would see the ha dissolve from his hands, but it stayed with him. It sparkled in his hair. He held his hands up, gazing at them in wonder.

“Maybe we don’t need him?” I asked.

Yaphet shook his head. “I think we do… but we can’t wait.”

So we prepared the flying machine, first unfolding the wings and stretching the canvas tight across the frame, then dividing our supplies between the flying machine’s two cargo baskets. In the canyon, the silver was rising, climbing swiftly nearer the temple wall. I could feel the lines of its structure, vibrating with information, but the structure I saw with my eyes and the structure I felt were not the same thing. The second was vaster, reaching far beyond my sight. I searched for Kaphiri within those lines, but he had hidden himself away.

I turned my back on the canyon. Yaphet was busy checking the wings. I still did not see any mechanics, either in the courtyard or on the walls, and that seemed strange to me. I was about to say something about it when Moki growled.

I looked up. Moki stood at the tail of the flying machine, gazing back along the length of the wall, toward the stairway we had ascended, and the hair on his back was raised, and his teeth were bared.

Silver lit up the canyon, but in the courtyard the temple walls cast black shadows. I stepped forward, straining to see what Moki saw. It could not be Kaphiri. He was still far away. “Is it a mechanic, boy?”

A black shadow slipped from the blackness on the stairway. Another followed close behind it, and another, and another still. They were humanlike, but hunched over, like awkward animals scampering on all-fours. At the same time, they weren’t human at all. They were too tiny by half, with hairless heads and huge eyes that gleamed and flashed in the starlight. They whispered to one another:

La-zur-i. La-zur-i. La-zur-i. La-zur-i.

Like the hissing of snakes.

There had been no mechanics in the courtyard or on the walls. I understood then that there would be no mechanics in the meadow either. Kaphiri must have somehow ordered them in, opening the way for the bogy army to carry out their vendetta—against Yaphet. “Yaphet,run! ”

More stooped figures joined the first four. One raised a thing like a stick to its lips. I turned to flee, and a dart smacked my shoulder. Its tip stuck in the fabric of my field jacket, but did not pierce it. Another dart whistled past my ear. “Yaphet!”

He dropped to the ground, and the tiny missile passed over his shoulder. In an instant, he was on his feet again. “The flying machine!”

“Leave it! They want to kill you. Run. Run!”

He grabbed the dart that had stuck in my jacket, and he hurled it back at them. “Go back!” he shouted. “Back into the silver!” But they did not heed him. Already they were swarming past the tail of the flying machine.

Moki had given up his defense. He darted past us. “Come on,” I yelled, and this time Yaphet gave in. He grabbed my hand and we ran together along the wall.

Where was the next stairway? I knew there was one by the temple gate, but that was on the other side of the complex. Had there been another in between? We had to get off the wall. We had to get back into the temple. The mechanics would surely be there, hidden away in some chamber. If we released them, the bogies would be driven back.

“Jubilee, wait!” Yaphet grabbed my hand and we stopped together, staring ahead at Jolly’s monument. It blocked our escape: a tentacle of blue glass reaching from the top of the wall, down into the courtyard. In the canyon, the silver had not yet risen high enough to touch the base of the temple wall, but the folly had made its own silver. Fine veins of it flowed over the monument, a nerve plexus of tiny streams, joining, parting, glistening, collecting in a slowly growing pool of silver on the courtyard’s tiled floor.

If we tried to climb over it, we would surely be consumed.

The bogies were a stone’s throw behind us, and the walls were too sheer to climb.

“Mari!” I screamed, desperately hoping she would hear me. “Release the mechanics! Release them now!” But there was no response from the temple. Not even a light.

I did not see a way out for us. But Yaphet still harbored a hope. “Call the silver,” he said.

“I do not know how.”

“Call it.”

I looked again at the onrushing shapes of the bogies. One of them paused, to raise a tube to its mouth. I lifted my hand, and the ha sparkled brightly between my fingers. The silver in the canyon brightened. I felt its proximity, and the lines of influence reaching from it to my beckoning hand, seeking a connection…

A tendril of silver shot up from the canyon, hurtling straight toward us. I cried out, stumbling backward, but Yaphet stayed rooted in place. He raised his own glittering hand, and he warded the tendril away. It went swirling around us, and as it passed, it slowed and it expanded, billowing into a wall of luminous fog that divided us from the bogies, hiding them from our sight.

We were left standing in a ring of silver. Its diameter was wider than the wall, so we could see down into the courtyard, and the canyon, and to my relief there were no bogies on either side. I turned to Yaphet, throwing my arms around him and kissing him—“You did it! You did it!”—while Moki danced at our feet.

Then a bogy scuttled out of the silver. I saw it from the corner of my eye and fell back. It raised a tube to its lips. Phwat! A wasp buzzed, and Yaphet’s whole body snapped backward. His hands rose spasmodically, to tear at a black dart dangling from his throat. Then he plunged over the wall, into the courtyard.

“Yaphet!” I dropped to my belly, in time to hear the sickening thunk of his impact against the tiles. Clinging to the edge, I looked down, to see him forty feet below me, his crumpled form illuminated by the glow of the silver that pooled at the foot of Jolly’s monument. I wanted to go to him, but the wall was too sheer to climb, and I could not bring myself to jump. A mob of bogies appeared out of the shadows by the temple. They swarmed over Yaphet, ignoring my screams of rage. They were like ants, swarming over a choice morsel. I could not even see his body. Then, as if they had become one creature, of one mind, they moved toward the pool of silver. One of them touched it, and the silver flowed over all of them, billowing madly up the wall so that I had to ward it off to keep from being consumed.

Some part of me died with Yaphet. We’d shared lifetimes together, and I knew I must have lost him before, but not like this. He had been taken away by phantoms from out of the silver, and only the god or the goddess could have sent them.

In my heart I was sure it had been the god. He was a brooding remnant within the Cenotaph, still at war with the goddess who had brought life to the world. He must have taken Yaphet, believing him to be Kaphiri—for only Kaphiri could turn back the flood of silver that would soon drown all the world. When the final flood came, life would be erased from the world, and the dark god would finally have his victory.

Except the god had been mistaken. Kaphiri still existed.

A coldness settled in my heart, and I whispered a vow of vengeance against the builder of the world.

Moki whined and waggled. The silver that surrounded us could not stand against the vapors of the temple kobolds. It was swiftly steaming into nothingness, so it was no trick for me to push the remnants away.

No bogies remained on the wall, or in the courtyard, or anywhere in sight. With Moki at my heels I walked past the flying machine. It was still poised, ready for its journey to the Cenotaph. I made sure it was anchored, so no stray wind could blow it away. Then I made my way down the dark stairway to the temple, where I found Mari, standing in the doorway, her hands kneading at the fabric of her skirt. “I heard your cries,” she said.