Memory

Chapter 32

I could not answer Kaphiri’s questions. I was too tired to do anything but wander aimlessly and worry. “You are no good to me like this,” he said, and he led me to a bedroom Mari had made up.

When I awoke it was deep in the night. Through the window I could see stars, but they were pale in the sky, their light faded by the gleam of silver from beyond the temple walls. Moki stirred beside me, and I gave him a quick hug. “Yaphet?” I whispered, hoping he had come to the room while I slept. I listened for his breathing, but all was silent.

Fear drove away the last of my sleepiness. I was supposed to protect Yaphet, but I had hardly seen him since we arrived. All that day and night I had left him to Kaphiri’s mercies. Quickly I rose, and found that I had slept in my clothes.

I did not know where the light might be, and I didn’t want to spend time looking for it, so I groped my way to the door. It was not locked.

In the hallway the light tubes were dim amber, emitting hardly enough illumination to reach the floor. The hallway looked the same in both directions, but I knew to turn left. I had been asleep on my feet when Kaphiri brought me to my room, and I should not have known my way around his temple, but I did. I knew that wide hallway, and the turnings I would have to take to reach the great room. Even the echo of my footsteps I had heard before.

I passed the kitchen and went on, until I came to the great central hall with its tall doors to the courtyard. Moki whined to go out, but I did not dare let him, fearing the mechanics that patrolled there. So I called him with me as I approached the grand staircase.

Ever since I’d arrived, a strange, remembered fear had lived within me. It grew suddenly stronger as I set foot on that stair. The steps were made of massive blocks of the same gray stone used in the walls. I had climbed them before. I knew their number. When I reached the top, I paused to gaze warily across a wide landing at a closed door. I knew that door. I knew its bronze gleam, and the raised scene worked into its surface, of a sun rising beyond the horizon of a ring-shaped world. The door must have weighed several hundred pounds, but it was perfectly balanced. At a touch it swung soundlessly open… and my memory failed.

There should have been a wide audience chamber on the other side of that door. There should have been a raised dais at the far end, and a chair of rank, and whispering ghosts with fingers like leaves brushing my arms and begging my help…

For I had walked through this temple in that vision I endured at Azure Mesa.

But instead of an audience chamber, I found the library. I stood with the door propped open, staring at a bookcase that stretched from floor to ceiling, every shelf on it crammed with paper and parchment manuscripts, and leaves of lettered stone, and relics.

I wandered the length of the bookcase, trailing my fingers on the spines of the manuscripts to assure myself they were real.

An aisle opened at the end of the row, with scattered tables pushed up against the wall. Many more bookshelves lay beyond the first.

I walked past them, and as I made my way around the last one, I knew where I was. The raised dais was gone, and the chair of rank. In their place stood a long table holding a scattering of manuscripts. Three chairs were placed around it. Two had stacks of lettered stone piled in their seats. The other held Yaphet, sprawled in sleep upon the table. I wanted to wake him, to tell him what I knew: that we were in the house of Ki-Faun—in my mind’s eye I could see him sitting exactly where Yaphet sat: his old, crab body hunched in his chair as he watched me with a pained gleam in his ancient eyes that I could not understand—but I knew Yaphet must be exhausted and I did not want to interrupt his slumber.

Moki had disappeared somewhere among the stacks, so I had no warning. I turned my head and Kaphiri was there in the shadows.

So forlorn was his expression that I thought our time was over. All hope seemed gone from his eyes, and with it his fiery ambition to become a god, so that nothing was left to him but to call the silver into that room to consume us all—except that it would not consume him. I think that was all that held him back—the knowledge that he would be left behind.

He said to me, “You have been here before. Do you remember?”

“I do.”

He nodded at Yaphet. “And do you remember him? No?”

I was unsure what he was asking.

“It’s just that he returns so naturally to the habits of his past, I thought you would know him.”

I studied Yaphet and, slowly, I began to see that room again with the eyes of my past self. I saw age fall upon Yaphet, so that his body withered and his lush black hair vanished and tendrils of beard trailed like strands of gray moss from his chin. “It was him,” I said, astounded at my sudden knowledge. “He was Ki-Faun.” I turned to look again at Kaphiri. “Or was it you?”

“It was him.”

Of course, for I had been sent to murder Kaphiri.

“Will you come?” he asked me, and when I hesitated he added, “There is nothing to fear. It’s only your memories that I desire now.”

We walked into a room of ghosts. From outside the closed door I could already hear their whispering, and when the door opened their chatter was like the streaming of wind in treetops.

They were savants. Hundreds of them, some floating near the ceiling, some hovering just above the floor, or at every level in between. Some were wing-shaped, others spherical, while many more were flatscreens. Some of these were fixed to the walls, or sitting like decorations on the shelves. They spoke to one another in languages I had never heard before, carrying on conversations that never slowed for the drawing of a breath.

“Are they sane?”

Kaphiri shrugged. “Speak to them and find out.”

Where should I start? There were so many, it would require years to know them all, but the silver was rising, and I feared we had only days left, at best. Just a few days to learn the ways of goddesses and gods. But if any players had ever known such things, surely they would be the most ancient, those who had lived when the world was first made?

“Which is the oldest?” I asked. “Do you know?”

“That one never speaks.”

“I would see it anyway.”

He shrugged and slipped into the chaos of drifting savants. I expected him to select one of the decrepit ones hovering near the floor, but instead he reached for a translucent wing that hung in perfect stillness and stability near the ceiling. It looked to be made of some substance like glass, but with a greater purity, and clarity, than I had ever seen. The wing was as long as my arm, and two inches in thickness at its widest point. Colors burst to life within it when Kaphiri took it in his hands. He gazed at them, and his face grew more stern, and colder even than it had been before. Then he gave it a shove. The colors disappeared as it left his hands. It glided across the room, angling toward me as if it understood its destination, and it did not wobble, though it bumped against several other savants along the way.

I caught it and pulled it close, gazing into its glassy body, but the colors that had appeared when Kaphiri touched it did not immediately appear for me. “How do you know it is oldest?” I asked, for there was nothing worn in its appearance or quaint in its fashion. If he had told me his kobolds had assembled it only yesterday, I would have no reason to disbelieve him, and I would be much impressed with his art. Even without color, it was a beautiful thing.

“Languages grow and change, you know this?”

I nodded.

“Even though I may not understand a language, it is still possible to see its relationship to languages that surround it in time. The similarity of words and grammar and symbols… I have traced many languages back through time. Among the oldest of them that I can still understand, there is mention of savants like this one, and even then they were considered relics. If this savant were to speak, it might use the oldest language in the world, the one that lies at the root of them all.”

Colors had begun to wake in it now, and at the same time I felt the electric presence of the ha stir against my hands. “What is happening?”

“It knows you through the ha.” He allowed himself a smirk. “That was how I acquired it. It was supposed to be ancient, but all the scholars who examined it could not get it to awaken. They were certain it was broken, or else a fraud. It was only by chance that I discovered otherwise.”

“Why would it respond to the ha? Was it made by you, in another life?”

“I wondered the same. But no. It dates from the beginning, eight centuries at least, before my first life.”

I lowered the savant, to look at him. “I was taught we were all created in the beginning, that we all lived our first lives together.”

“Not quite all of us.”

“You then? And Jolly? But what do the two of you share? You are not alike. You are not. Except the silver doesn’t take you.”

“And the ha is awake in us.”

“And in me…” I gazed again into the mysterious glass of the savant, seeing lines of colors warming within its depths. “The goddess said we were children, that we’ve been children too long. Jolly is to teach other players to awaken their ha… I think it’s why he was made… But it was you who wakened the ha in me.”

“I did not plan that.”

“Oh, I know. You thought it would kill me.” I saw symbols forming now in the savant’s glassy heart. Vaguely, I heard the first stirrings of an ancient voice, whispering down through time. “This is what I think, that in the first years, the ha must have been awake in all players, or anyway, all who were not children—”

He stiffened. “Is it whispering?” he asked incredulously. “Can you hear it?”

I could. At first it spoke so softly I could barely distinguish the words, but I knew immediately that its language belonged to me. “I have it,” I whispered, and Kaphiri stepped closer. I felt his tension as a pressure in my mind, and it was at once frightening and amusing. He needed me. He knew it now, without any doubt attached.

I bowed my head, bringing my ears closer to the sound. There was a space in my mind that was dark. I had never been aware of it before: a great, sleeping mass of memory, now waking, bit by bit, as if each word muttered by the savant was a spark of light illuminating another word in a language I had spoken before I knew any other. They were my words, and the voice I heard was my voice, speaking to me across time, from out of another life.

I shuddered, and vaguely I was aware of arms around me, steadying me as I sank cross-legged to the floor. I was listening to a monologue, the recitation of a history, but no sooner did I understand this than the voice fell silent. I ran my hands over the savant; turned it over in my lap, but no image appeared in its glassy surface. Then I looked up, to discover that someone new had joined us in the room.

She was an image of course, some kind of projection, for I could see through her to the drifting savants beyond but—

She was myself.

An older version of myself to be sure. She looked the age of my mother, and her fashion was not mine: her dark hair was pinned up in a dignified style that astonished me, and she was dressed in a formal gown of gold fabric, its pleated skirt accenting her height. And still I could not doubt that she was me.

As stunned as I was, she looked more surprised. “How can this be?” she whispered, in the language I knew so intimately now. “Do I look on a projection of myself?”

“No,” I answered, my tongue still unfamiliar with the words now so bright in my memory. “This is my life, and you are a savant.”

“A recording… that’s right. I was recording our history… though why, or for who…” She shook her head. “It was an act of vanity. But why are you so like me? Or anyway, like the girl I might have been?”

“Because I am you—don’t you understand?—in another life.”

“Another life? This one has not been enough?”

“You are not so old.”

“Am I not? Nine hundred years in the service of the goddess, and I was never a child. Now she has brought us all to ruin! And yet if that’s so, why are you here? It should have ended. It should have ended this night. How can you be here?”

Nine hundred years? My mouth was dry, so that at first I could not speak. I wondered if this persona was sane. “Why…” I swallowed, trying to get some moisture in my mouth. “Why did you think the world was at an end?”

“Because it is broken! It is flooded with silver. Most players have already been taken.” She raised her hands, and the ha sparkled between her fingers. “Only a few of us are left to hold it back. Too few. We cannot win.”

“But the world didn’t end,” I said. “Anyway, not yet.”

“Is this the same world?”

“I think it is.”

“What is your name?”

“Jubilee.”

“That’s different from mine. I am called Selma.”

I shrugged. “We are not born with any memory of our past lives. We don’t remember our past names.”

“Then how do you know you lived before?”

“The talents of our past return to us… and also, a memory of our lovers.”

“Indeed.”

“Is this new to you?”

“Very new, though it smacks of the goddess. Did she finally return? Is this how she sought to set things right?”

“I don’t know.”

Selma turned half away, a distracted, angry look on her face. “The silver is memory. Do you know that?”

“I have heard it said before.”

“It is the memory of the world, from its creation. The memory of the creation is still in it, and maybe, it even holds a memory of the minds of the god and the goddess who together made this world—though none of us left has the skill to bring her whole out of the past. I do not know what has caused the silver to flood, unless the god has won, and decreed that the world will be returned to chaos, so that he may stage the creation again.”

“The god?” A sullen anger ignited in me. “The god had nothing to do with the creation. This world was made by the goddess alone. The god pursued her. He came out of darkness to destroy her work.”

Selma did not answer this for many long seconds. Her hand clutched at her gown, and she frowned, pacing first a step away, then a step closer. “Is that what you were taught?” She turned to study me more closely. “Well, time has passed. It’s only to be expected that the story would change.”

I did not want to hear such words. One by one my ideas of the world had shattered, beginning that night I watched Kaphiri make his way up the road to Temple Huacho. I felt unbalanced and angry, and I did not try to hide it. “She is the wounded goddess. She was nearly destroyed when she warred with the dark god.”

Selma nodded, and there was a great sadness in her eyes. “That much is true.”

True? How could anyone ever know what was true? But my curiosity won out. Selma was ancient. She spoke as one who had lived in the beginning of the world, and I wanted to know what she knew. “Please tell me the story, as you learned it.”

“I did not learn it. I lived it. But I will tell you.”

For several seconds she was silent, gathering her thoughts. Then she began to speak:

“It is not true that the god pursued her from out of the darkness. They came together. Please do not think too highly of them. They were beings of great intellect and great power, but also of great arrogance. They were lovers. But as with any arrogant creature, they were also competitors. They set out to create a project together, a world of their own, where they might play games until the end of time. Would you ever presume to make a world, Jubilee? No? Ah well, neither would I.

“But together the god and the goddess created this world. They spun it out of the mass of a lifeless planet that had the misfortune to form too close to its sun, so that its atmosphere was a thick blanket of poisonous vapor over a surface hot enough to melt soft metals. They tore that failed planet apart, and with its debris they built a new world in the shape of a ring because it was an efficient design, with more surface area than the planet they had destroyed, but still with room in the long core for the machinery of their creation.

“And their new world was beautiful. No one could deny that.

“So they invited people from other worlds to come play in their creation. They even made avatars that they could inhabit when it pleased them. These avatars were ordinary players in all respects, except that one resembled the favored form of the goddess, and one resembled the god, and they would host these deities on rare occasion.”

She was telling me about myself. It was not a truth I wanted to know, but how could I deny it? The goddess had come to me. She had inhabited me. She had used me as her avatar. “Then you—”

(…and me too…)

—were made as a toy?”

“That description is painful… but not unfair.”

“And you were not born of parents?”

“I have said I was made.”

“Then you were a mechanic? You were never human at all? And I… I am the same as you.”

“No, Jubilee, you misunderstand both your own history and the skill of the goddess. I am no mechanic, and neither are you. The goddess would never inhabit a simple mechanic. I am human—though I was made and not born—and if you are the same as me, then you are utterly human too.”

“And Yaphet?”

She looked at me closely. “Is this the name of your lover?”

I nodded, too frightened to speak.

“They made him too. But all the other players they brought from other worlds.”

I wondered how many other worlds there might be, and how a goddess might move between them… but the silver was rising, and there were many things I needed to know.

I told her, “There have been two more players made since the beginning.” I glanced over my shoulder, and Kaphiri was still there. He met my gaze, but he looked confused. I realized then that Selma could not see him, for if she could, she would have surely called out to this avatar of her lover. And he could not see her, or he would be looking at her, and not at me.

Turning back around, I told her of Kaphiri, and of Jolly. She seemed mystified by this news. Then I described how the goddess had come to me, warning that some fragment of the dark god was hidden in the Cenotaph, and that I must find a way to remove him, and heal that wound.

Selma looked stunned, and shaken. “Then the war is not over.”

“I guess not.”

“And the flood is caused by the god after all.”

“It’s what she said. But how is it you didn’t know this? If you were there in the beginning?”

“I do not have the sight of the goddess. It’s been many centuries since she came to me. I thought the war long past.”

“But you must know how I can heal the wound in the world? You must have ideas?”

“He is a god, Jubilee.”

“But surely he is broken? Surely he is less than a god now?”

“She did not tell you what to do?”

“No! She is wounded, and very weak. Players say the silver is her fever dream and only rarely is she conscious.”

Selma did not answer; she did not even move. She stood there frozen, so that I feared the ancient machinery she inhabited had failed. “Don’t go,” I pleaded. “Not yet.”

Her eyes blinked, and they were shining with tears. “Jubilee, you have explained so much to me.”

“Then return the favor please, and tell me, why was there a war?”

She answered with a long, sad sigh. “You and I, Jubilee, and your lover Yaphet, and my lover, all of us are ordinary players. We are not the goddess and we are not the god, and their sins are not our sins. Do you understand this?”

I nodded, though I was too dazed by then for any true understanding.

“Their arrogance betrayed them. They became jealous of one another, and they began to argue over whose world this really was, for the god had made its mechanical structure, but the goddess had given it beauty and life. Their conflict grew violent, and the goddess sought to evict him from the world. In retaliation, he told her he would dissolve the biosphere, so that he might build it over again and prove he could bring beauty to a world as well as she. The players they had cajoled into populating their world were forgotten, no more than discarded toys, their lives of no value in the schemes of our failed deities.”

“So they fought?”

“And both lost.”

“And the world was broken?”

“I thought the world was finished. But looking at you, I know it lived longer than I expected. Do you know the age of the world?”

“Many tens of thousands of years, I think.”

Again she looked stunned. “So long? I recorded this persona on what I thought would be the last night of the world. It was an act of vanity, or of anger. A great flood of silver had consumed the land, a flood that dwarfed all floods before it. I did not think any players would survive that night.”

“The goddess found a way to turn back the flood.”

“By the look in your eyes I will guess this cure was almost as evil as the affliction.”

“She caused almost all the silver to be destroyed, and the players died of hunger and war. Only a few survived it, but of those few some had lovers, and there were babies. Still, it must have been hundreds of years—maybe thousands—before all the players could be reborn, and by then the silver was on the verge of flood again. This cycle has happened many times… at least seven times that we know of… because the wound has never been healed. But how can I make a god—even a wounded god—leave the world?”

“I do not know.”

“But you must know! She lived within you, didn’t she?”

“She did not tell me how to murder her.”

Murder.

Murder again.

“Death is my role,” I whispered.

“What are you saying?”

I was speaking to myself as much as to her. “It’s what Kaphiri told me. Death is my role.”

“Jubilee, do you know how to murder a god?”

I shook my head. But then a new thought came to me, and though it repulsed me, I could not let it go. “Tell me, did the goddess make the kobolds? Do you know?”

“What is a kobold?”

“They are beetlelike mechanics that grow in the ground wherever a plume of nutrients awakens the kobold motes that are everywhere in the world.”

“I have not heard of mechanics like these.”

I nodded. “I am not surprised, for it is said they did not exist at the beginning of the world. They were made later, in a time when the world was on the verge of starving to death… by a player who could survive the silver.”

“Like this Kaphiri you have described?”

“Maybe it was him. But I think it was someone more clever.”

Fiaccomo had defied death in the silver, seducing the goddess and stealing her creative powers to bring the first kobolds into the world. So it was said. Ki-Faun twisted this gift, making a kobold that could erase not just a player, but the very memory of that player from the silver so he never would be born again…

Was the goddess aware that players had stolen this knowledge from her mind? Did she guess what might be done with it?

Death is my role.

My heart was beating hard, and it took some time to understand that the voice calling my name was a real voice, and not the whispering of some ancient version of myself. “Jubilee,” Yaphet crooned, his mouth beside my ear. “Come back to me. Come back, please.”

I shoved the savant away, and I turned to him, crying against his shoulder and whispering, “I’m afraid. I’m afraid.” Over and over again. I did not want to know what I knew, or what I had to do. I did not want anything but to hide in Yaphet’s arms.

We spent the remaining hours of that night together. All those who have lovers will know how it was between us. There is no choice in love. Though we were in the house of Kaphiri, and though my heart was sick with fear, we had comfort between us, and I still treasure those hours above all others in my memory, which has grown very full indeed.