Ariel’s memories.
I tried four cylinders in all. One was a collection of images relating to the operation of the sarcophagus-like ships in which the Akashel traveled. The second offered an overview of the current state of the Weave; the third provided language instruction—I assumed it was the language Ariel had once spoken. All three used images to convey concepts and—in the case of the language instructional—to illustrate word sounds and ideographs, and these had been culled from her experience. It was her long-fingered grayish hands operating the controls of the ship, her voice sounding out words in my mind, her memories of missions past that increased my understanding of the Weave.
Why hadn’t she taken advantage of this resource?
I speculated that she might have been injured in the explosion. A head injury that caused her to lose her memory even before electron decay had wiped it out. Or maybe it had been a conscious decision. According to the second volume of the trilogy, she had despaired over having to kill Isha. She might have seen the destruction of the ship as an opportunity to avoid completing her mission. Or maybe the destruction of the ship eliminated any possibility of return and she had decided that memory loss was preferable to the yearning of an exile. But if that were so, why had she headed for the SETI array near Green Bank? Coincidence? From what I had just learned of the Weave, coincidence was a faulty concept. The cylinders with the clawlike ends might, I thought, have some application in this regard, but I was leering of experimenting with them.
The fourth cylinder contained personal memories and made me reluctant to investigate a fifth. The intensity of Ariel’s emotional range, her sexual reactions, her extreme devotion to the man whose grotesque face loomed above her in the act of love, all this left my own emotions in a tangle. Nothing I learned from any of the cylinders fit perfectly in my brain. Receiving her memories was like trying on a hat that was too large—I kept having to prevent it from falling down over my eyes—and all my new knowledge was imperfectly seated, my comprehension full of gaps. Her passions leaped high in me, bright and fertile as flames, sowing patches of inappropriate heat throughout my body. I felt muddled, my identity eroded.
The next morning as I lashed the case to my pack, Henley asked what I was going to do with it. I’d spent much of the night considering that very question, concluding that there was no choice other than to pass the case on to Ariel—here was the past she had been desperately seeking. Not all of it, of course. Her sojourn in the woods was forever lost. But in those cylinders were answers to her most urgent questions. I was fearful of the changes they might provoke. Would they disable her capacity for living in this alien environment? Would she recall a means of returning to the place from which she came? Would old memories create a dissonance with the new, a conflict that would destabilize her damaged core? And more pertinent to my selfish interests, would her love for Isha burn away what she felt for me?
Two nights later at the Mountain Dew Motel, when I told her about the cylinders, she expressed dismay that I had not been forthcoming about the purpose of the trip; but it was dismay tempered by distraction. The case itself commanded most of her attention. I left her with it and retreated to the restaurant adjoining the motel, where I ate a cheeseburger and a slice of chocolate pie. Now and then on the two-lane blacktop that ran past the motel, a pick-up or a fifteen-year-old car would rattle past, and as I stared out the window my thoughts came to reflect a similar intermittency, rising out of a despondent fugue, engaging me for a second, then fading; but as my emotions cooled, I began to think about what I had learned. In particular, what I had learned about the Weave.
From Ariel’s books I had gained an impression of opposing forces who sought to manipulate events throughout the multiverse to their own ends, one creating a circumstance that the other would then modify. But that was a gross simplification. Complicated by the buckshot effect, the operations of the Akashel and Akhitai were essentially infinite in scope. The image I had fashioned of shuttles passing back and forth across an immense loom was about as apt as it would be to describe a galaxy as a few stars and some clumps of dirt—there were so many missions, so many repetitions thereof, it was more appropriate to view the Weave in terms of a cockroach army swarming a kitchen floor. To think of Ariel as part of this, not a soldier but part of an uncontrollable infestation, appalled me and I wanted to deny it; but the information I had gleaned from the old Ariel’s understanding of the Weave rendered this view undeniable. The struggle between the Akashel and the Akhitai was less a war contested by opponents with contrary moral and philosophical imperatives than the desperate attempts of two exterminators with variant methods to prevent an unraveling of the fabric of time and space caused by the bugs they had released. The multiverse was falling apart, a rotting tapestry increasingly enfeebled by the holes the Akashel and Akhitai were punching in it. Ariel, Isha, and all their fellows had become both problem and solution, cancer and cure.
Depressing though this was, the knowledge steadied me. My position was that of a man adrift on the ocean who discovers that the shore toward which he’s been rowing is a mirage. What is there to do except keep rowing? I checked my watch. Two and half hours had passed since I’d left Ariel. Impatient to know her mind, to discover if I had lost her, I paid my bill and returned to our room. She was sitting on the end of the bed with her head down, the case open beside her, cylinders strewn across the blanket, and she was holding a gun. Not an ordinary gun. Made of dull red metal. No trigger guard and no apparent trigger. It had the look and size of a souped-up power drill. The grip was so large she had to use both hands. Lifting it and setting it down on the bed cost her considerable effort.
“You didn’t look underneath the cylinders,” she said when I asked about the gun. She patted the case. “False bottom.”
I dropped onto the bed beside her. “How’s it work?”
“You squeeze the grip to fire. I’m not strong enough anymore. I’m not sure you’re strong enough.”
I made to grab it and she stopped me.
“Don’t,” she said. “You could destroy the motel if it went off.”
“I want to see how heavy it is.”
“Don’t!”
I lay down, propped on an elbow, trying to see inside her head. “You okay?”
She gave a perfunctory nod. “Fine.”
“Real fine? Ordinary fine?”
A flash of exasperation crossed her face, but then she said, “Better than I was. At least I understand some things.”
“Did you try all the cylinders?” I asked.
“No.”
“Aren’t you going to?”
She worried her lower lip, as if contemplating an answer, but kept silent and after a long moment she put her hand on mine. I intertwined my fingers with hers. “Are we okay?” I asked.
“That’s not the easiest question to answer.”
She seemed to be vacillating between the poles of her personality, passing in an instant from sweet uncertainty to stoic, hard, unapproachable. I had a few hundred more questions, but decided to cut to the chase.
“You still love me?”
She lay beside me, pulled my head to her breast and whispered something. I tensed, thinking she had spoken the name of her old lover. Then she spoke again and there was the hint of an R in her pronunciation, just as occurred whenever she tried to say “ridge,” and I realized that she had spoken my given name, Richard—with her impediment, it came out, “Isha.”