Linda Nagata - Memory

Moki pricked his ears and stared upward. Even Jolly stopped to look, scowling at the terrible walls. “Did you hear that?” he asked me.

“You mean Liam calling?”

“Yes.”

“I thought I imagined it.”

“Well then, I imagined it too.”

Even in my fevered state of mind that didn’t seem likely. “So call out to him.”

Jolly drew a great breath. Then he bellowed at the top of his lungs, “Uncle!!! We’re here. We’re here!” and it made such a cacophony of echoes that a flight of doves took off from the crater rim, and I feared a landslide would start among the loose scree.

But when the last of the echoes died away, Liam called out again. “Stay where you are! We’ll come get you!”

Then I heard Udondi whoop and Ficer bellow.

“They’re all here!” Jolly shouted, and I returned his smile.

We made our way back to the Temple of the Sisters. I rode behind Liam, my arms around his waist and my cheek pressed against his broad shoulders. It took us three days to reach the Sisters, and we camped twice on high ground and only once by a kobold well. The silver still appeared each night, but only as a low mist in the ravines and along the lower slopes of each desert rise.

We stayed seven nights at the Sisters, and I spent most of my time there writing down my remembrances. It was Emil who suggested it, for I could not speak of all that had happened. It hurt too much even to try, but he said I should not keep it inside.

So I started writing. I started in the middle, with all that had happened since I’d left the Temple of the Sisters, and by the time we were ready to leave, I had a draft for Emil to read.

After that we continued north, skirting the foot of the Kalang. I thought of Nuanez in his forest, and I told myself that someday I would visit him, but I did not have the heart for it just yet.

After two days we reached the desert highway. Or at least Ficer said we had reached it. I could not make out a road unless it was that the ratio of rocks had fallen off somewhat.

Ficer left us there, heading east back into the desert, while we turned west. By the afternoon, the invisible highway finally became a true road, and we followed its switchbacks up a long, steep slope, until by evening we had left the Iraliad behind.

Udondi said there had once been a temple where the road met the edge of the great desert basin, but it was not there when we passed through, so we camped another night.

Evidence of silver storms was everywhere. The road to Xahiclan had mostly been erased. Now and then there were follies marking where it had once run: arches and huts, and once, a wilderness of blocks hauntingly similar to the miniature cityscape we had found in the Cenotaph. We met no other travelers.

On the third day we found a long section of intact road. The miles fell behind us, and by late afternoon we reached the broad river valley where Xahiclan once stood.

The enclave was gone.

I had been there only once, but I remembered fondly walking the long, tall wall that skirted the river, and the merry streets with their crowded buildings, bright with lights at night and the heady scent of kobolds. I wondered if Kaphiri had murdered the city, or if the rising silver had simply overwhelmed it, but it seemed likely I would never know.

We camped again that night, and then we pushed on to Temple Nathé. All that day again we met no other travelers, and I dreaded to find that Nathé’s walls had fallen too, but when we finally reached the valley’s head, the temple was there, gleaming white in the evening’s light, and as we drew near, players appeared upon the walls, and the gates swung open in welcome. The voice of the keeper, Elek Madhu, carried down to us in the fading light. “Welcome! Welcome to Temple Nathé. We had begun to fear we were the last players left in all the world.”

“Not the last. Not quite,” Liam called.

And then another voice called down to us, a voice I had known since before my birth. “Liam? Liam, is that you?”

“Mama!” I slipped off the back of Liam’s bike, and raced through the gate, and I met my mother just as she reached the bottom of the stairs that descended from the wall. I fell into her arms, and for the first time since Yaphet was taken I cried, and for a time I thought I would never stop.

My mother’s sister, Auntie Som, and all my own brothers and sisters were safe at Temple Nathé too. Emia and Rizal, Jacio and Tezoé, and Arial and little Zeyen, both of whom had not even been born when Jolly disappeared. They were frightened of Jolly. He looked younger than Rizal, but there was a gravity about him that did not belong to a child, and the ha still sparkled across his fingers. Only my mother did not seem to mind. She took his hands and gazed at them a moment, then she held him close and kissed him until he cried too.

Later that evening she told me the story of how she had come to be at Temple Nathé, and she warned me that I must acknowledge a debt of gratitude to someone I despised. It seemed that after we left Mica Indevar unconscious on the steps of Temple Nathé, the Ano truckers took it as a good excuse to leave him behind. “I don’t know exactly what he did after you left,” my mother said. “But after many days he made his way to Temple Huacho, as you feared. He was not alone. There had been silver storms in Xahiclan, and some of his companions seemed to be refugees, but they weren’t unhappy about the trouble. They muttered that the same would come to Huacho, and on one night someone left the gate open, and the silver filled the orchard, and pressed against the temple walls. That next day I left.”

“They drove you out?” I could not imagine my mother ceding Temple Huacho to bandits.

“I had already lost Kedato, and Jolly, and you… and I knew they would not stay long, though they might poison the well.” She gave me a sheepish look. “I almost poisoned the well myself, they had me so angry. In the end, though, it didn’t matter. Sometime after I left, the silver came upon them. I don’t know how it happened, but there is nothing left there now.”

Kaphiri had said the same thing. He never had lied to me. Now he was gone forever and that was a joy to me, not only for the wickedness he had done… but because some part of me was afraid I might have been tempted by him.

Yaphet’s death had left me nearly empty. Just the thought of him would open a great wound in my heart. I tried to put him out of my mind. I wished fervently that I had never found him, never met him at all, for then I would not own this pain.

My mother assured me that I was young, that Yaphet might have been born again already, but there were not so many players left in the world that this seemed likely to me.

And I had another fear. Yaphet’s body had been taken by the goddess. Had she captured his memories too? Each of us has an essence—that part of us that is kept in the silver until we are reborn into the world. If the goddess had held on to that part of Yaphet, then he is lost to me forever. No matter how many lives I live, I will never find him. I will never find another lover.

A thousand years from now, will I be as angry as Kaphiri? Will I be as hateful?

Temple Nathé finally has some new guests this night. Three wayfarers have arrived from the north, and they report that many enclaves along the coast are still intact. This is excellent news, and Liam has decided to go there. Udondi will go with him, as well as my brother Rizal and my sister Emia, who have both decided to seek for their own lovers in the wide world.

I will be leaving in the morning too. My mother and I and my Auntie Som are going back to Kavasphir. We will see if the well at Huacho still exists, and if it does not, we will search those hills until we find another. I will help my mother to rebuild Temple Huacho, though I don’t think I’ll stay for long. Three years. Maybe four. Then Jolly will be a man and it will be time for him to leave.