Linda Nagata - Memory

When that grew dull I opened my senses, deliberately seeking Kaphiri’s presence. He seemed far away. My heart went cold as I imagined the wickedness he was doing: summoning the silver into enclaves, or trapping wayfarers on the road. I tried to summon him back. He heard my desire, and for a while he seemed to heed me. His presence grew stronger. But he did not come to me, and soon exhaustion led me to give up the duel.

Jolly woke, and we walked on for several hours more. Then it was my turn to lie down and sleep. I closed my eyes, but sleep didn’t come. I longed for sunlight, the more because I did not believe I would ever see it again. I consoled myself with memories of sunlit days, and blue skies, and green meadows.

When I stood up again, I was suddenly conscious of every bruise and trauma I had received since the fall of the flying machine. “Remind me not to seek my ease again,” I said to Jolly through gritted teeth. We shared out most of our food, and drank half the remaining water. Then we set out again.

Eventually, we found the bottom of the Cenotaph. We knew it immediately. All the tumbled stones and dust of the slopes stopped at a hard boundary, and the ground became level and smooth. Its color was white, even in the sheen of the surrounding silver. Even so, it did not seem to be entirely present . At least, I could not quite focus my eyes on it. It was as if the surface was constantly shifting up and down by tiny fractions of an inch… or as if it was saturated with silver slowly boiling on a microscopic scale, forever bubbling in mindless acts of minute creation. When I stepped out on it, I half expected a column of silver to erupt around me.

That didn’t happen, but the ground felt springy, bubbly, and sometimes we would sink in it to our ankles, and sometimes we would seem to be walking just above any visible surface.

After a few steps the silver closed in behind us, and we could no longer see the slope we had just descended. There was only the silver, and the uncertain ground. We walked, but with nothing to measure our progress, we did not seem to be going anywhere. Or more accurately, it felt as if there was nowhere to go, that all places were one place, and the world was empty, save for us.

After we had been walking for some time, Jolly came to a stop, and I beside him. The silence in that place was extraordinary. It rang in my ears. “How can we know what direction to go?” Jolly asked softly.

“I don’t know.” I kept my voice low too; it seemed necessary in that place. “We could be walking round in circles and not know it… but I had thought to find the center. Kaphiri said this pit was made when the dark god was hurled from the sky and struck the world…”

“And that would put him at the center…?”

“It’s only a guess. But we know he is here somewhere, for the world has never been able to repair itself. The dark god has kept it from healing.”

So we walked on some more, but after a few minutes Jolly stopped again. “I can sense a presence.” This time his voice was no more than a whisper.

I answered in kind. “Kaphiri?”

“No.” He stared off into the silver.

I followed his gaze, and not just with my sight. Kaphiri burned in my awareness as a dread beacon, but as I looked, I too discerned the essence of another within the silver, faint, elusive, yet somehow familiar, a memory, perhaps, of another life. “Is it the god?”

Jolly shook his head. “No. It’s not him. It’s her . The goddess. She’s here, Jubilee.”

Memories are elusive. We might struggle to recall a song or the name of a player, but come up with nothing until someone sings a teasing note, or utters the first syllable of the forgotten name. Then recognition floods in. When Jolly named the goddess, I knew it was so: the presence I sensed was her.

“Has she come to help us?” I whispered.

“How can she? She is wounded.”

“Where is the god?”

“I don’t know.”

“He should be here.”

“I can’t sense him. Can you?”

I shook my head. “But he must be here. She said he would be here.” The goddess had sent us into the Cenotaph to find him. She was our ally. I took Jolly’s hand. “Perhaps she has come to show us the way. We will find her first. Then we’ll find him.”

So we gave up trying to guess at the direction of the center, and we followed her presence instead.

Sometimes I could hardly sense her. Other times she seemed to be all around us, existing at once in every direction. “Are you there?” I cried out in frustration. “Are you here? Where are you?” Her gravity pulled me in circles, and only when Jolly grabbed my hand and steered me in a straight path would I remember to walk on.

We walked and walked, and I began to think we would walk forever through that flat, featureless terrain. At the same time I worried the goddess was a being of mist only, so that even as we sought her, we pushed her away when we pushed at the silver.

Then at last we came upon the edge of a folly.

The silver rolled back, revealing a complex landscape, like a miniature city, though the tallest towers were only knee-high. There were no windows or doors in the “buildings,” at least none that I could see, for each of them was encrusted in a sheath of some colorful growth, lumpy and uneven like the mold that will grow on bread, but in strident colors of bright green and pink, red, yellow and electric blue. I decided they were more like blocks, or oddly shaped boxes, than buildings.

They stood in clusters, some arranged in perfect squares, but most of them irregularly shaped, with narrow aisles of smooth white ground wedged between each group.

We stopped on the folly’s edge. “My lady,” Jolly called, “are you here?”

There was no answer.

I stepped forward, and tentatively, I touched a nodule on one of the mold-encrusted blocks. It looked like a solid thing, some kind of organic mineral, but that was illusion. At the first pressure of my finger the nodule burst with a tiny pop ! I had heard that sound before. I yanked my hand away as a spurt of glowing silver slurry shot straight up into the air. Only a tiny droplet touched my finger, but that burned with a fury, and I turned away, my hand pressed against my belly and tears starting in my eyes.

Kaphiri felt it too. All this time he had been a distant presence in my awareness, gnawing on my consciousness like the pain of some deep wound that I could not reach, or comfort.

Suddenly he was aware of me. I felt his sharp surprise, his panic, as he turned away from whatever wicked deed had occupied him.

Jolly threw his arms around me, crying out in a high, frightened voice, “Jubilee, are you all right? Are you all right?”

“I will be.” The pain was easing. I looked at my fingertip, and it was livid red. “Do you remember when we climbed down the kobold well, and I broke into the vein of liquid silver?”

“This is the same thing?”

I nodded. “We must walk very carefully now. Do not touch the blocks, for they will burst at the lightest pressure.”

He nodded nervously.

“And, Jolly, Kaphiri is coming back. He knows we are close to the goddess now.”

I went first through the aisles, and Jolly followed behind me. The goddess was everywhere in my awareness and I could not tell which way would bring me closer to her center, so I just followed the easiest path. A sense of haste was upon me. Kaphiri was drawing swiftly nearer, and I wanted to find the goddess before he could come. So our cautious walk soon gave way to a hurried jog, and then to a scuttling run, but that was the limit of our speed. We could not push the silver away any faster than that.

The blocks grew higher as we advanced, until their average was waist-high, with the tallest towers reaching to my chin.