Linda Nagata - Memory

“We’ve done well, don’t you think?” Jolly said, and I couldn’t help but laugh.

We were in a chamber of silver, on an unstable slope that fell away to the abode of a wicked god, and my head hurt, and I was thirsty. “At least it’s not dark.”

“Are you holding the silver off?”

I nodded. “It’s certainly not him . But I can feel him out there. I can feel his ha . He’s not far away.”

Jolly raised his dusty hands. The ha sparkled brightly between his fingers. “I think I can hold off the silver too. We should be all right, so long as one of us is awake.”

“Do you know how far it is to the bottom?”

He shook his head. “A long way, I think.” Then he added, in a frightened whisper, “I’m scared.”

I glanced upslope, but after a few feet, the only thing to be seen was silver. “We could try going back.”

“Back to what? The silver is rising. There’s no way out.”

“There is for you—”

“No.”

“Jolly, you could make your way back to Liam—”

“No! I’m scared, but I’m not leaving you. I’m not. We came for a reason, and there’s no going back. Not even for me. Jubilee, if the final flood comes, it will only be me and him alive in the whole world. That’s what I’m scared of, more than anything. So we have to go on. There’s no choice, and no other way out.”

So we scavenged the wreckage, and after a few minutes we found some water bottles and the bag of food I had packed. Sharing the weight of these things we set off downslope, trading off between us the task of pushing the silver away.

At first the air was very cold. My breath condensed in little gray clouds. I had never seen that before. Neither had Jolly. We played with it for a while.

It was hard walking. The slope was steep and covered with loose stones that rolled away under the pressure of a foot. We both fell down several times. I was afraid one of us would twist an ankle or break a leg, and then what would we do?

I didn’t want to think about it.

So we pushed the silver away ahead of us, and let it close in behind, and after a while we came to a precipice. It was a cliff of hard white stone, full of tiny air bubbles. I’d never seen anything like it. It felt as slippery as soap, and when I scuffed at it with my heel, it crumbled.

I stood on its edge, pushing with all my will against the silver, for I wanted to know if the drop was ten feet or two hundred. The silver rolled back, and I saw that it was more than ten feet down. It was at least twenty, and maybe a lot farther. Remembering the southern escarpment of the Kalang, I felt a little queasy. I stepped back from the edge.

“Let’s follow the cliff,” Jolly said. “Sooner or later we’ll find a way down.”

On the cliff’s edge, the walking was easy. Maybe the escarpment had pushed its way into existence only recently. It seemed that way, for its lip was bare of the loose stones that covered the slope above. We followed it for a long time. As we walked, I kept glancing over my shoulder, partly because I knew Kaphiri was somewhere close by. His presence burned within the net of awareness that is part of the ha . I knew he could sense me in the same way, and I feared he would emerge from the silver while our attention was turned away—though exactly what his intentions might be, I didn’t know. He wanted the death of the dark god, but I suspected he wanted my death too.

Another part of my edginess was due to the voices that began to whisper to me. For a long time I wasn’t sure they were real. They sounded distant, like someone calling, who is almost too far away to hear. I couldn’t make out any of their words, but I heard them speaking in the turning of a stone under my foot, or in the wash of my breath, or the ticking of Moki’s nails.

I started remembering things too. Flashes would come to me, perfectly clear recollections. I was feeling bored, watching a baby play. I was driving a truck. I was reading a manuscript, or tending a kobold well. Perfectly ordinary recollections, except they weren’t mine. They did not even belong to some version of me in another life. I was seeing into the lives of other players, and that seemed wrong somehow, though I could not stop it.

I wished they would all shut up and leave me alone.

I described the effect to Jolly, and he looked at me in evident relief. “It’s happening to you too? Thank goodness! I thought I was losing my mind.”

“It’s like we’re breathing in memories.” I stopped and shrugged out of my jacket. “I was cold when we started, but it’s gotten hot.”

It got hotter still. Heat soaked through the soles of my boots. I started to get scared about it. Then it was cold again. Just like that. Like stepping through a door. But when I walked back a few paces, it was still cold. The heat was gone, and it was cold that stung my hand when I touched the rocks.

“Have you noticed there are no follies here?” Jolly asked.

I looked around, and realized it was true. There were no follies like those we were accustomed to seeing. “I wonder if the voices are follies, and the memories?” Flashes of substance from out of the chaos, unmade as soon as they were formed, except where we passed. In our bubble of stillness we held them for a while in our senses.

It was hot again when Jolly finally found a break in the cliff face. It looked like part of the white rock had dropped away in an avalanche, leaving a cleft at the top. I guessed there would be a skirt of debris below, but we couldn’t see it.

“It looks rough,” I said.

“So maybe if we keep going, we’ll find a paved road to take us down?”

“Well it’s not impossible.”

He grinned. “You realize, if we were stronger, we could will a road into existence.”

“Or another flying machine.”

“Or our father.”

Or Mama. Or Yaphet. “We’d be gods, if we could do that.”

We made our way down the cleft. The stone walls played strangely with my vision. From the corner of my eye I would see the outline of a window, or the shape of a watching player, but when I turned to look, there would be only white stone. I might have passed it off as an illusion, but Moki was nervous. He would stop and growl at nothing. Then dart ahead and growl again.

We had been walking several minutes when I slipped on a rock. I caught my balance with a hand against the white stone. In the moment I touched the rock, a burnt black hand reached out of it to grab my arm. I yelped, and flailed wildly, while Moki launched into a storm of barking. The arm dissolved like a soap bubble.

“What was that?” Jolly demanded, and his eyes were wider than I’d ever seen them.

“A bogy, I think.”

They were hideous and they haunted the walls. As we descended they appeared every few minutes: a fire-blackened hand reaching for us, or a burnt face pressing out of the rock. The faces spoke, asking always the same questions: Will you stop him? Will you? Can you? They were the fevered whisperings of our wounded goddess, but they were not her, so we made no answer, but hurried on, and when the cleft ended and we found ourselves on the apron of debris left by the avalanche, we felt relief, for the bogy-haunted walls were behind us.

We had no way to measure time. We were deep within the Cenotaph and neither the sun’s light nor the light of the stars could reach us. In the pit the illumination was always the same: a beautiful silver glow that turned Jolly’s face gray and made Moki’s coat look whitened with age.

All I knew was that we had been walking for many hours. We both started to stumble, but neither of us called for a rest until Jolly almost slipped over another precipice. Even then he did not want to stop, but I insisted he lie down for a time and close his eyes. Moki curled up beside him, and they both fell quickly asleep. I walked circles around them to keep myself awake.