Linda Nagata - Memory

“The goddess commands that I end the war.”

His gaze fixed on me again, and it was hard. “Do you still serve her?”

“Only in this last thing… and she has done all she can to aid me.”

He looked at the great shell. He looked at me. Doubt showed in his eyes. “To aid you? How? She has not made you a goddess?”

“No, and she never will. We are only players, my love. Accept it.”

“Then what aid has she given to you?”

I opened my fist to show him the kobold. I wanted him to know.

He recognized it, and the shock made him stumble back a step. “No, my love!Throw it away! You must throw it away now—”

“Oh, I will.” I turned, intending to hurl the kobold into the heart of the goddess, but he was faster than I.

He caught my wrist. He unbalanced me, and we both went down. “You will not destroy yourself.” He clawed at my fingers, his nails tore gouges of flesh from my hands. “I will not live forever without you! I will not! I will not!”

I tried to throw him off, but he was stronger—or more desperate—than I. Oh, how I regretted my hesitation! Why had I not thrown the kobold while I had the chance?

His knife appeared out of nowhere. It flashed with the speed of a worm mechanic, plunging straight through my wrist. I screamed, and my hand spasmed. The kobold spilled upon the ground. He yanked the knife out of my flesh, and swept up the kobold. Then he was on his feet, glaring down at me. “You will not leave me this way!”

He turned, and aiming at the bank of silver that surrounded us, he cocked his arm, ready to throw the kobold away, just as he’d done in that other life.

But in this life Moki reached him first. Jolly’s little hound had a long grudge against Kaphiri. He leaped on him, sinking his strong teeth into the back of Kaphiri’s knee, and Kaphiri went down. The kobold burst within his palm. I saw the silver vapors leach out between his fingers. He saw them too, and his eyes went wide. He stood up and hurled the remains of the kobold as far away as he could, but he had been turned around, and the fragments flew into the great shell. The burnt avatar of the goddess wailed. She leaped upon his back, driving him to his knees, but it was far too late to stop the kobold in its work. A brilliant silver fire spilled across Kaphiri’s hand. I did not wait to see more. I grabbed Moki and scrambled away, while a horrible scream erupted behind me, and a wailing that I knew must be the avatar.

I did not look back again until I collapsed beside Jolly on the edge of the open ground. Blood was pumping from my wrist, and I could not feel the silver at all. Only Jolly’s will kept it from collapsing around us. He put his arms around me, unmindful of the blood—“Come on, Jubilee. Come on”—and we retreated together. A few steps only, and then he had to stop and lean against the silver. I used that chance to look back.

They had become a pillar of incandescent fire. Within the shell of the temple many other white fires blazed. They drew the silver to them, as true fire will pull in oxygen. Fat streams of luminous mist raced past us, swirling into the conflagration, and causing it to burn brighter and brighter so I thought I would go blind with its brilliance.

I turned away, and I did not look back again.

The silver streamed past us for only a few minutes. After that all became quiet and calm again. So at least we knew we had not set off the destruction of the silver, though what we had accomplished was less clear. I did not doubt Kaphiri was gone forever, but the goddess was vast, and I wondered if our white fire had consumed only some small part of her?

There was no way to know, and neither one of us had the courage to suggest going back. So we continued our retreat, creeping for hours across the spongy ground, with Moki in between us.

The silver was never more than a few inches away. Jolly struggled to push it off, to hold it back. It yielded to him only with great reluctance, but it did give way.

At one point we stopped, and Jolly made a bandage for my arm, using the fabric of his shirt. I looked in his eyes, and saw his exhaustion, and I knew his thirst must be the equal of mine. But we had no water. We had no food. “Maybe you should sleep,” Jolly suggested. “And when you wake up you’ll be stronger. You’ll be able to help me hold off the silver.”

But I was afraid to sleep. I was afraid Jolly would give in to exhaustion too, and then the silver would roll in. Or that I would bleed to death. If I was going to die, I wanted to know it. So we pushed on.

I do not know how much time passed like that. It might have been only an hour, or many hours, I cannot say. Consciousness was slippery, and time did not seem to matter.

But sometime later Jolly spoke again. “Jubilee? Is something happening? Look around. Is the silver changing?”

I looked up, surprised to discover that we had left the flat floor of the Cenotaph. We were clambering up a slope of tumbled stone. “How long have we been climbing?” I whispered.

“I don’t know. Not long, I think. But look at the silver. Is it my eyes? Or is it changing?”

I looked. The silver was still wrapped close around us, but its light seemed different. Warmer. No longer was it a featureless fog, for I could see swirls and currents running through it. “Is it thinning?”

“I don’t know.” He sat down on the loose slope. “I’m so tired.”

“I know.” I raised my good hand. The ha still sparkled between my fingers. “If you want to sleep, I think maybe I can hold the silver off.”

“Okay.”

But he didn’t sleep. Neither did I. We sat together, and after a while the silver started brightening again, but now its light seemed tinted warm yellow. It was a familiar hue, though at first I couldn’t think where I had seen it before, until finally the memory came to me: it was sunlight.

As the silver cleared, the slope around us came into view: a wasteland of crumbled minerals, and flows of transformed stone. There was not a weed, or a blade of grass, or a trickle of water anywhere to be seen.

Then the last of the silver above us gave way, and suddenly sunlight fell upon us and we could see all the way to the top of the Cenotaph, and to a brilliant blue sky beyond.

“Oh,”Jolly said.

I could not manage even that much. All I could do was to stare up at a towering wall that was certainly equal in height to the southern escarpment of the Kalang. “We can’t climb that,” Jolly whispered. “Not without food and water.”

Water. Already my throat was dry and horribly swollen. “Maybe we’ll find water.”

“Okay. Maybe.”

But neither of us made a move to start. We waited, while the sun chased away the silver that still lay below us. In only a few minutes we could see all the way across the vast crater of the Cenotaph, to the far wall, blurred by distance. I studied the white floor of the crater, but I could not see the ruins of the goddess’s temple.

“Maybe she really is gone from the world,” Jolly said. He lay back, and after a few minutes he pointed at the sky. “Look there,” he said. “A hawk flying.”

We watched it until it passed out of sight over the rim of the Cenotaph.

“We should go,” Jolly said.

So far we had climbed only a hundred feet or so above the crater floor, but I felt a little stronger for our rest, or maybe it was the comfort of sunlight. Anyway, I made it to my feet and we pushed on, not because there was a hope of getting out, but because there was nothing else to do.

We had been going only a few minutes when I started to hallucinate. I thought I heard voices calling down the cliff walls, familiar syllables echoing against the rock: Jol-ly-ly-ly! Jub-blee! Jub-blee! Jub-blee! Sounds that rippled over the stone.