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.
I’ll go with him. He won’t call it wayfaring, for he does not believe there is a lover anywhere in the world for him, but he has a mission, just the same. He is the last gift of the goddess. He is here to awaken our ha, so that we might live in the open, with no fear of the silver.
That is how the god and the goddess intended us to live, when they first dreamed of the world, in the lost and ancient past.
Books by Linda Nagata
Tech-Heaven
The Bohr Maker
Deception Well
Vast
*Limit of Vision
*Memory
*A Tor Book
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
MEMORY
Copyright © 2003 by Linda Nagata
Edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof, in any form.
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
ISBN 0-312-70999-4
First Edition: April 2003
For Junzo—
A Quest, a Puzzle
And Multiple Lives