Memory

Chapter 29

We made our way at last into the highlands, succeeding in late afternoon when the winds began to die. We entered the mouth of a north-facing canyon where we had earlier seen goats along the walls. After half a mile, Jolly sighted a wild kobold well on the lip of a little pocket valley some three hundred feet above the canyon floor.

None of us wanted to fly that high, but time was growing short. The sun had already dropped behind the crags and the canyon was in shadow. We could look for a more accessible kobold well, but chance did not favor the finding of one so late in the day. So we agreed to try for the little valley.

Yaphet guided the flying machine in a tight spiral, keeping close to the cliff wall. He would glance anxiously at the valley, then back again, to the leading edge of the wing, alert for the first sign of a silver bloom. Jolly too kept a close eye on the wing, but I was distracted by a herd of brown goats that had stopped their browsing to eye us as we rose past them. They didn’t seem to know what to make of us, for we did not much resemble the predators they were used to.

It was then, as I watched the goats, that a flicker of awareness stirred in my mind. Moki whined, and one of the goats snorted, scampering away on an invisible path that climbed the cliff face. The others followed after it, while I glanced up, confirming what I already knew: a glitter of silver had ignited on the nearest wing tip. “It has started,” I said, loud enough to be heard over the wind.

Yaphet looked at me. Then he looked up, and his eyes went wide. He jerked at the controls, and the flying machine lurched. Jolly yelped, grabbing for Moki with one hand and a strut with the other.

“Hold on,” Yaphet muttered. “We only have a few seconds. If we don’t make the well—”

The tuft of silver expanded with astonishing speed, rushing along the wing’s edge like a gleaming, glittering stream just escaped from its dam.

Yaphet saw it and leaned hard on the control stick. “I’m going for the cliff! There’s no place to land, so get ready to jump—”

“No! Turn away! Turn away now!” There was no way we could survive a crash against the cliff face, but maybe we could survive the silver?

Motes glittered on the back of my hand and danced between my fingertips. Myha was awake. So for the first time, I invited it deliberately into my mind.

A liquid awareness filled me. The silver on the wing’s edge boiled in my consciousness, becoming part of me, an extension of my will. Holding tight to a strut with one hand, I reached out toward the silver with the other. In the way I had learned, I leaned on it with my mind. I used it, like a glove that I could wear, and pushed, and it came away from the wing in a long thin skein of silver.

But silver will always sink to the ground. Detached from the wing, with nothing to buoy it up, the skein fell while we flew forward into it. Yaphet shouted, hammering at the controls so that the flying machine jerked upward, in a sharp turn away from the cliff. I dove half out of the basket and pushed, out and down. The skein passed just beneath my hand. It stirred an electric awareness in my skin so sharp I yanked my hand back, as if from contact with a flame.

Then it passed beneath us, brushing the belly of the plane and igniting a scatter of silver sparkles, but I commanded them away. More motes formed along the wing, but these too I willed away. Then the cherished scent of temple kobolds reached me, and a moment later Yaphet guided us over the wild well and we landed gently in a little bowl of dry grass.

I could not wait to distance myself from the flying machine. I was climbing out of the basket even before it came to a rest. “Jubilee, wait,” Yaphet said. “It’s windy. If we don’t anchor the plane—”

I stumbled on my swollen knee. At the same time, a gust caught the wing, dragging the whole flying machine a foot back toward the cliff. “Jolly, get off!” I shouted. “Now!”

Jolly’s eyes were wide with fright. He shooed Moki out of the basket, then tumbled after him. Deprived of his weight, the plane skidded back again. Yaphet too scrambled free, but he did not abandon the plane. He grabbed a strut and sank in his heels. “Get the ropes!” he shouted at Jolly. “In the cargo basket. Help me tie it down.”

I wanted to see Yaphet’s flying machine tumble over the cliff. On the other hand, I did not want to be trapped three hundred feet above the canyon floor. Torn by these conflicting desires, I risked a quick glance around. The valley reached back only fifty feet or so. Really, “valley” was much too grand a word for it. It was more a gloomy little hollow, hemmed in by sheer walls of stone. Birds could reach us, and I guessed that goats could climb down from the ridgeline, but I did not know if a player could scale those cliffs—certainly the task looked hopeless for a player with a twisted knee.

So after a moment of indecision, I lurched after the flying machine and grabbed a strut, bracing my good leg against a rock. Jolly found the rope. He looped it around the central struts, and Yaphet secured the other end to a boulder. “Help me furl the wings,” he told Jolly.

I had not realized it before, but the white wings were made of a metallic cloth, stretched upon a frame. Yaphet showed Jolly how to unclip the edge, and tie down the cloth so the wind would not catch it.

When the danger was past, I turned away from the hateful machine. But I managed only a few stumbling steps before my knee gave out. I sank down in the dry grass, not knowing what else to do, or what to think. It did not seem hard anymore to accept the idea of ha, but I could not get my mind around the fact of a flying machine.

“Jubilee?” I looked up to see Jolly beside me, a furtive look on his face. “Is your leg badly hurt?” He sounded very guilty—as he should. He had dropped the heavy bike on my leg after all.

“My knee’s swollen.”

He cast a nervous glance over his shoulder. Then, speaking under his breath, “He is so much like Kaphiri.”

“Has he threatened you?”

“No! He’s angry though.”

“Not with you,” I reminded him. Then I nodded toward a stand of tangled brush that grew against the back wall. “Go and find me a walking stick, okay?”

I used the stick to hobble behind the brush and relieve myself. I had very little urine in me, which made me wonder how much water Yaphet had aboard his flying machine. All mine had been lost with the bike, and by the half-dead look of the vegetation in our little valley, I was certain we would find no water there.

When I came back, Yaphet was rearranging the supplies in the cargo baskets. He said nothing. He did not look at me. I asked about water. He had two gallons. He told me to sit down and he would get it. I hobbled the few steps to the rim of the valley, sitting beside the wide mound of dirt surrounding the kobold well.

From the valley’s rim, I could look out of the canyon to the plain beyond. The dust cloud had long since blown away and shadows were running long. Very soon it would be dark.

I closed my eyes, feeling sick inside. Yaphet was my lover, I could not deny it. I felt as if I had always known him and always loved him. It didn’t matter at all that I didn’t want him. It didn’t matter at all that he horrified me.

I listened to the rustle of the wind, to the fall of a pebble from the cliffs above… to the crunch of Yaphet’s footsteps in the dry grass. I did not turn to look at him—I was too stubborn for that—but I knew exactly where he was by the sound of his steps.

He came and he stood behind me, handing a bottle of water over my shoulder. I took it, careful not to touch his hand. I drank.

“I wanted to tell you about the flying machine,” he said, “but I knew how you would see it.”

“Then why? Why did you do it?”

“I was born to it!” No apology in his voice. No shame. “I dreamed it, every night when I was little.”

“I saw it in you. That first time we spoke. I saw it in your eyes. An obsession, though I didn’t know what it was.”

He crouched behind me.

I tensed. I still would not look at him, but I was brutally aware of his proximity, of his very gravity. “Don’t touch me,” I warned.

“You know it’s never been that way between us.”

I turned to look at him. I could not help myself. “Do you remember it?”

“Enough to know it.” He slipped his sunglasses off with a black-gloved hand. “You’re angry with me, Jubilee, but I’m not the only one with secrets. I thought Jolly did that trick with the silver, but he said it was you. Are you like him? Are you like them?”

With his face set in anger, he was Kaphiri’s dark-skinned twin. “You are frightening my brother,” I said softly.

He glanced over his shoulder, but Jolly had gone with Moki to explore the back of the valley. “He’s not afraid of the plane.”

“The plane?”

“The airplane. The flying machine.”

“That’s not what I meant. You remind him of Kaphiri.”

Yaphet scowled, clearly hurt and perplexed that I would say such a thing. “You think I’m the same as him? You and Jolly would belong to him now, if I hadn’t come.”

That was true, though I wasn’t ready to admit it aloud. I fixed my gaze on the plain, where glints of silver had begun to appear. “Jolly is terrified of him. He knows him well enough to be afraid. And I… I’ve met him too, face-to-face since we last talked, and… you look like him. Almost exactly like him… as if the two of you were made from the same memory of silver.”

Yaphet considered this for many seconds. Then he denied it. “Players are not made in multiple copies.”

“Well, you are. Or he is. You’re like him. In many ways. But you’re… you’re different too.” I had sensed a whispered connection with Kaphiri, but with Yaphet that connection was a clear song. I could never confuse one with the other, not even if they stood together, side by side. “You don’t feel like him. Not at all.”

I should have been more careful with the words I used. “Did you touch him?”

“What?”

I had never suspected such cold fury could inhabit Yaphet’s eyes. “Something’s changed in you, Jubilee.”

“What do you mean? What’s changed?”

“He touched you, didn’t he? It feels like he did. Did he hurt you?”

I had been holding my breath. But I let it go in a sigh as I realized his anger was not directed at me. “He did touch me,” I admitted. “And he hurt me. And he changed me too.”

Our eyes locked, but too many thoughts were chasing around Yaphet’s head and he could not meet my gaze for long. I half expected him to give it up and leave, but when he shifted his position it was to sit beside me—close beside me. His shoulder almost touched mine. His hand rested on his knee in a relaxed posture, but it was a pose. I could see white lines of stress in his dark skin. “Tell me.”

So I did. First I spoke of the blood poisoning. Then I told him the story Udondi had told to me, of Kaphiri and his lover, and how she had left him for another.

In the evening’s fading light, Yaphet’s eyes were colored with a quiet fear. “These two lovers… they looked the same?”

“Udondi didn’t say.”

I spoke next of my encounter with the silver, on the night I left the Temple of the Sisters. He believed my story. How could he not? He had seen me push the silver away. But for Yaphet, belief was not enough.

“How could such a thing work?”

I shook my head. “You might as well ask, how does the silver work? What is it, after all?” The old questions, that had haunted me since Jolly disappeared, but Yaphet surprised me with an answer.

“The silver is a mechanism,” he said, as if this were common knowledge. “A machine devised by the ancients who made this world. A device, and if we could relearn its use, we could control it, and make it serve our purposes.”

I raised my hands, examining them thoughtfully. In the dusk, a few scattered glints of silver could still be seen between my fingers. “This is ha,” I said softly. “Do you see it?”

When he saw what I meant, he reared back in fear. But then he leaned in again, to examine the specks. “How do you do that?”

“I don’t know. It just came to me, after his blood poisoned mine. My brother, he believes we’re like mechanics, that we have configuration codes, hidden away in our cells. Jolly thinks my codes were reset by the contact with Kaphiri’s blood, and I was changed. He says Kaphiri reset his own codes; that he knows how.”

“He does?” There was a sudden avarice in his voice. “Does Jolly know how?”

I had expected Yaphet to be offended—any sane player should be offended by the idea of human configuration codes. But he was not, and that offended me. “You’ve thought of such things before?”

His back grew stiff. He turned away from me. “I’ve thought of a lot of things.”

“Do you believe we are mechanics?”

“Jubilee, I don’t know!”

“And this desire I feel for you, is it a mechanism?”

He laughed and the sound was cold, with no humor in it. “Oh, yes. I’m sure that much is true.”

I had not expected such an answer and it hurt me. I was surprised how much. Oh, but we’d had a fine first day. I’d declared my hatred for him, I’d struck him, I’d warned him not to touch me. “I think there was more pleasure in this for my mother and father.”

“Your mother likely has a better temper.”

“She does,” I admitted.

“Jubilee… I’m sorry I keep offending you. I don’t know if we’re like mechanics. I don’t know what we are, but I do believe there’s an explanation for us, and for this world: a story that will explain why it exists and why it works as it does. If we could learn that story, then everything that confuses us would make sense… some kind of sense, anyway. Things like the silver… and the way we are made to love one another.”

I have never been so conscious of anyone as I was of Yaphet in those lingering minutes. The blink of his eye. The slight rise and fall of his chest as he breathed. The tardy drag of his long black braid whenever he turned his head. Each tiny movement recorded itself in my memory.

“Yaphet?”

He smiled one of his rare smiles. “That’s the first time you’ve said my name.”

“I have not told you everything yet.”

“Oh.” He was silent a moment, staring down at the plain. “I guess you should, then.”

So I described the vision that had come to me as I slept in the sanctuary of Azure Mesa. And then I told him of the experiment with the kobold circle. “It was called‘the mirror of the other self,’ and he was there, within it. But why was it him, and not you?”

“Did you want him to come?”

“No! Have you not been listening? He is wrong. There is something about him that is corrupt. It was so, even in that vision of my other life.”

“But he was your lover.”

“In another life! And even then it was a mistake.”

“But it makes me angry! What’s wrong with me? I’ve never felt this way before.”

“I haven’t either.”

We sat in silence for some time, while the night gathered around us. Stars pricked the blue sky, while on the plain below silver filled the canyons, so that the dark land seemed infused with veins of luminous metal.

“Is that all?” Yaphet said at last. “Or is there more still?”

“A little more.”

He made a groan of mock despair. “Say it, then. Let me have it all, for you could tell me anything now and I would believe it.”

I snorted—“That’s what you say now”—and I told him of the goddess and the task she had given me. He listened. He made no comment on it except to ask, “Now is that all?”

“It is.”

He looked over his shoulder. I followed his gaze, to see Jolly, playing a game of fetch with Moki beside the flying machine. “I want you to be my wife, Jubilee. Now.” He put his finger against my lips. “Don’t speak! Because you’ll say it’s impossible, that we don’t know what will happen to us tomorrow. But that’s why I want you to marry me now. We are caught up in something, and maybe this time is all the time we’ll ever have. Marry me now.”

“But Jolly is here!”

“Just the words. Just share the words with me.”

My mouth felt dry. “I cannot kneel. My knee is swollen—”

“Then we’ll sit. Take my hand.”

“All right.” I laid my hand in his, but in that moment the awareness of silver stirred in my mind. I turned, to see a herd of goats hurrying down an invisible trail on the valley’s sheer back wall. “There is a silver storm coming.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do. We should bring your flying machine into the circle of the well.” I started to get up, but my knee quickly reminded me that was not a good idea.

“Stay here,” Yaphet said. “Jolly will help.”

The flying machine was cleverly designed, so that Yaphet was able to collapse the wing. With Jolly’s help he dragged the folded frame into the circle of the kobold well. The nose and tail stuck out beyond the mound, but we gathered handfuls of freshly spawned kobolds from the mouth of the well and scattered them about, expanding the protected zone.

When all the gear was safely within the circle, Jolly crept up to the precipice and looked over. “The canyon floor is flooded,” he called back.

Yaphet went to look, and an expression of awe came over his face. “You can see it climbing. Does the whole Iraliad flood every night?”

Jolly answered, “Ficer said it’s worse now than when he was a boy.”

The goats snorted when they found us occupying their well, but they joined us anyway, and after a few minutes Moki gave up growling at them.

We were halfway through a cold dinner when the savant spoke in its cultured voice. “A call,” it said. “From Liam.”

“Answer it!” I had been sitting shoulder to shoulder with Yaphet, but when the savant settled in my lap, he moved back, positioning himself so that he could see the screen without being seen by those on the other side.

The image that formed was of stars, faint above a horizon limned with silver, “Liam?” I heard the scuff of a boot on gravel, then the tumbling bounce of a small stone. “Liam!” I called, louder this time.

“Jubilee?” His shadowed face filled the mimic screen, and in a moment the savant compensated for the lighting. He was dusty and haggard, his face thinner than I had ever seen it. The patch was gone from his eye, but there was a pink scar across his lid where the rock fragment had cut him. His eyes were red. From the dust, I told myself. The dust. “You’re alive.” His voice was a whisper of disbelief. “We found your bike. We thought—”

“I’m alive. And I’m free. Jolly is with me. Is Udondi—?”

“She’s here.” He looked away, calling to her. “Udondi! I’ve found Jubilee!”

A few seconds later her face appeared beside his. “Jubilee! Where are you? How did you—?”

I wasn’t ready to explain. “Did you set the explosives?” I asked. “Was that you?”

Liam nodded. “Ficer is with us. He brought them from the Temple of the Sisters. We found your bike after. We thought you must have been with them, when—” He shook his head and stepped away.

Udondi looked after him with a troubled gaze. “I think this has been the longest day of his life,” she said softly. Then she looked back at the screen and her gaze grew sharp, though it was not fixed on me. “Is that Jolly?”

I turned, expecting to see Yaphet, but it was Jolly who stood at my shoulder. He had come up silently while we spoke.

“This is my brother,” I said.

Then another face crowded in beside Udondi’s.

“Ficer!” Jolly shouted. “You came back!”

“Of course I came back. Didn’t I say I would?”

We demanded their story first. Ficer told of how he had reached the Temple of the Sisters at midmorning yesterday, minutes ahead of a convoy of three trucks. “The drivers did not speak the name of the traveler, but it was clear who they served.” He hid his bike and pretended to be one of the scholars and in that way the day passed. Dusk came, but Ficer would not risk suspicion by climbing the tower to send a message. “There is a cavern that opens on the white plain, that is used to garage the passing trucks. In the morning, when the drivers went down there, I tried to call you, but it was well past sunrise, and I think you were gone from the mesa top by then. Emil was very worried. He sent me back up the tower, saying that if I could not find you, I should try to find your uncle, and in that, at least, I had some success.”

Udondi nodded. “We had already encountered that convoy. There were five trucks altogether—too many for us to stop, but we delayed them a day when we released the last of our metallophores into their engines. We spent that day in hiding, while they spent it repairing their trucks. But they also used the time to put up an antenna, and in the morning it was clear why. They had decided to split up. Only three trucks went to the Sisters, while the other two went north.

“We used the antenna to call ahead to Emil, and he told us you were gone, and that we should look for you at Azure. We cut the power supply to the antenna, and then we left, but it was a dark day, and by noon a great bank of silver drifted in from the west and we were forced to take shelter in a refuge mesa.” She shook her head. “The next day was no better. We could not leave, and we could not contact you. It was maddening! To be trapped there, not knowing what harm you might be facing. But this morning the sun came out, and Ficer called, with word that you were still free. You did well, Jubilee.”

“It was my luck.” My usual harsh luck that I had lived, but only at the cost of Kaphiri’s drivers, crushed beneath tons of stone.

“We are sheltering at Azure this night,” Udondi said, “but on the mesa top, and not in the cavern, for the silver does not look like it will rise much tonight. I slept in the cavern once, years ago, and once is enough.”

“What shelter did you find?” Ficer asked us. “Or have your gifts protected you from the silver?”

I said the truth, as much as I dared: “We found a wild well.”

He gave me a strange look, and it occurred to me we had seen no wild wells in all those hills. But Ficer asked no more questions, and after, I pled fatigue, for Jolly and I had not slept the night before, and we said good night.

The viewscreen darkened, and Jolly and Yaphet became shadows in the starlight. On the other side of the folded flying machine, the milling goats were shadows too. “You left out a lot,” Yaphet said.

Jolly agreed. “You didn’t mention Yaphet. And you let them believe we were still in those hills.”

“You think that was wrong? Should I have told them about the flying machine, Jolly? Or that my lover is mad? Or that he is the twin of Kaphiri?”

“We’ll have to tell them tomorrow.”

“We’ll have to tell them when we see them. Not before.”

“Do you really think I’m mad?” Yaphet asked in a troubled voice, so I couldn’t help but smile.

“Well,” I conceded, “maybe just a little.”