At length he said in a low, urgent voice, “Describe her to me!”
I did so, in detail, coloring and shading my words to draw him the most vivid picture I could.
“She is beautiful, you say?”
“I believe so. You know that at my age one must work from abstract notions, not from the flow of the glands.”
“Her voice arouses me,” said the Prince. “She has power. She is queenly. She must be beautiful; there’d be no justice if her body failed to match the voice.”
“She is,” I said heavily, “another man’s wife, and the giver of hospitality.”
I remembered a day in Roum when the Prince’s palanquin had come forth from the palace, and the Prince had spied Avluela, and ordered her to him, drawing her through the curtain to make use of her. A Dominator may command lesser folk that way; but a Pilgrim may not, and I feared Prince Enric’s schemes now. He dabbed at his eyes again. His facial muscles worked.
“Promise me you’ll not start trouble with her,” I said.
The corner of his mouth jerked in what must have been the beginning of an angry retort, quickly stifled. With effort he said, “You misjudge me, old man. I’ll abide by the laws of hospitality here. Be a good man and get me more wine, eh?”
I thumbed the serving niche and obtained a second flask. It was strong red wine, not the golden stuff of Roum. I poured; we drank; the flask was swiftly empty. I grasped it along its lines of polarity and gave it the proper twist, and it popped and was gone like a bubble. Moments later the Rememberer Olmayne entered. She had changed her garments; earlier she had worn an afternoon gown of dull hue and coarse fabric, but now she was garbed in a sheer scarlet robe fastened between her breasts. It revealed to me the planes and shadows of her body, and it surprised me to see that she had chosen to retain a navel. It broke the smooth downward sweep of her belly in an effect so carefully calculated to arouse that it nearly incited even me.
She said complacently, “Your application has been approved under my sponsorship. The tests will be administered tonight. If you succeed, you will be pledged to our division.” Her eyes twinkled in sudden mischief. “My husband, you should know, is most displeased. But my husband’s displeasure is not a thing to be feared. Come with me, both of you.”
She stretched forth her hands, taking mine, taking the Prince’s. Her fingers were cool. I throbbed with an inner fever and marveled at this sign of new youth that arose within me—not even by virtue of the waters of the house of renewal in sacred Jorslem.
“Come,” said Olmayne, and led us to the place of test.
3
And so I passed into the guild of Rememberers.
The tests were perfunctory. Olmayne brought us to a circular room somewhere near the summit of the great tower. Its curving walls were inlaid with rare woods of many hues, and shining benches rose from the floor, and in the center of all was a helix the height of a man, inscribed with letters too small to be read. Half a dozen Rememberers lounged about, plainly there only by Olmayne’s whim, and not in the slightest interested in this old and shabby Watcher whom she had so unaccountably sponsored.
A thinking cap was offered me. A scratchy voice asked me a dozen questions through the cap, probing for my typical responses, querying me on biographical details. I gave my guild identification so that they could contact the local guildmaster, check my bona fides, and obtain my release. Ordinarily one could not win release from a Watcher’s vows, but these were not ordinary times, and I knew my guild was shattered.
Within an hour all was done. Olmayne herself placed the shawl over my shoulders.
“You’ll be given sleeping quarters near our suite,” she said. “You’ll have to surrender your Watcher garb, though your friend may remain in Pilgrim’s clothes. Your training will begin after a probationary period. Meanwhile you have full access to any of our memory tanks. You realize, of course, that it will be ten years or more before you can win full admission to the guild.”
“I realize that,” I said.
“Your name now will be Tomis,” Olmayne told me. “Not yet the Rememberer Tomis, but Tomis of the Rememberers. There is a difference. Your past name no longer matters.”
The Prince and I were conducted to the small room we would share. It was a humble enough place, but yet it had facilities for washing, outlets for thinking caps and other information devices, and a food vent. Prince Enric went about the room, touching things, learning the geography. Cabinets, beds, chairs, storage units, and other furniture popped in and out of the walls as he blundered onto the controls. Eventually he was satisfied; not blundering now, he activated a bed, and a sheaf of brightness glided from a slot. He stretched out.
“Tell me something, Tomis of the Rememberers.”
“Yes?”
“To satisfy curiosity that eats at me. What was your name in previous life?”
“It does not matter now.”
“No vow binds you to secrecy. Will you thwart me still?”
“Old habit binds me,” I said. “For twice your lifetime I was conditioned never to speak my name except lawfully.”
“Speak it now.”
“Wuellig,” I said.
It was strangely liberating to commit that act. My former name seemed to hover in the air before my lips; to dart about the room like a jewelbird released from its captivity; to soar, to turn sharply, to strike a wall and shiver to pieces with a light, tinkling sound. I trembled, “Wuellig,” I said again. “My name was Wuellig.”
“Wuellig no more.”
“Tomis of the Rememberers.”
And we both laughed until it hurt, and the blinded Prince swung himself to his feet and slapped his hand against mine in high good fellowship, and we shouted my name and his and mine again and again, like small boys who suddenly have learned the words of power and have discovered at last how little power those words really have.
Thus I took up my new life among the Rememberers.
For some time to come I did not leave the Hall of Rememberers at all. My days and nights were completely occupied, and I remained a stranger to Perris without. The Prince, too, though his time was not as fully taken up, stayed in the building almost always, going out only when boredom or fury overtook him. Occasionally the Rememberer Olmayne went with him, or he with her, so that he would not be alone in his darkness; but I know that on occasion he left the building by himself, defiantly intending to show that, even sightless, he could cope with the challenges of the city.
My waking hours were divided among these activities:
+ Preliminary orientations.
+ Menial duties of an apprentice.
+ Private researches.
Not unexpectedly, I found myself much older than the other apprentices then in residence. Most were youngsters, the children of Rememberers themselves; they looked upon me in bafflement, unable to comprehend having such an ancient for a scholmate. There were a few fairly mature apprentices, those who had found a vocation for Remembering midway in life, but none approaching my age. Hence I had little social contact with my fellows in training.
For a part of each day we learned the techniques by which the Rememberers recapture Earth’s past. I was shown wide-eyed through the laboratories where analysis of field specimens is performed; I saw the detectors which, by pinpointing the decay of a few atoms, give an age to an artifact; I watched as beams of many-colored light lancing from a ringed outlet turned a sliver of wood to ash and caused it to give up its secrets; I saw the very images of past events peeled from inanimate substance. We leave our imprint where we go: the particles of light rebound from our faces, and the photonic flux nails them to the environment. From which the Rememberers strip them, categorize them, fix them. I entered a room where a phantasmagoria of faces drifted on a greasy blue mist: vanished kings and guildmasters, lost dukes, heroes of ancient days. I beheld cold-eyed technicians prodding history from handfuls of charred matter. I saw damp lumps of trash give up tales of revolutions and assassinations, of cultural change, of the discarding of mores.