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MEMORY

Books by Linda Nagata

Tech-Heaven

The Bohr Maker

Deception Well

Vast

*Limit of Vision

*Memory

*A Tor Book

www.ebookyes.com

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are

used fictitiously.

MEMORY

Edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

www.tor.com

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

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Epilogue

MEMORY

Chapter

1

When I was ten I had a blanket that was smooth and dark, with no light of its own until I moved and then

its folds would glitter with thousands of tiny stars in all the colors of the stars in the night sky. But the pale

arch that appears at the zenith on clear nights and that we call the Bow of Heaven never would appear on

my blanket—and for that I was glad. For if there was no Heaven, I reasoned, then the dead would

always be reborn in this world and not the next, no matter how wise they became in life.

This was always a great concern for me, for my mother was the wisest person I knew and I feared for

her. More than once I schemed to make her look foolish, just to be sure she would not get into Heaven

when her time came. When my antics grew too much she would turn to my father. With a dark frown and

her strong arms crossed over her chest she would say, “We have been so very fortunate to have such a

wild and reckless daughter as Jubilee. Obviously, she was sent to teach us wisdom.” My father would

laugh, but I would pout, knowing I had lost another round, and that I must try harder next time.

I seldom suffered a guilty conscience. I knew it was my role to be wild—even my mother agreed to

that—but on the night my story begins I was troubled by the thought that perhaps this time I had gone too

far.

I lived then in the temple founded by my mother, Temple Huacho, a remote outpost in the Kavasphir

Hills, a wild land of open woods and rolling heights, infamous for the frequency of its silver floods.

As often as three nights in ten the silver would come, rising from the ground, looking like a luminous fog

as it filled all the vales, to make an island of our hilltop home. I would watch its deadly advance from my

bedroom window, and many times I saw it lap at the top of the perimeter wall that enclosed the temple

grounds.

That wall was my mother’s first line of defense against the rise of silver and she maintained it well. Only

twice had I seen a silver flood reach past it, and both times the chemical defenses of the temple kobolds

that lived within the wall stripped the silver of its menace before it could do us harm. True silver is heavy

and will always sink to fill the low ground. But the remnant silver that made it past the wall spired like

luminous smoke, tangling harmlessly in the limbs of the orchard trees.

Because silver was so common in that region no one dared to live near us. Only a temple, with its

protective kobolds, could offer shelter from the nocturnal floods, and Temple Huacho was the only one

that had been established anywhere in Kavasphir. So the mineral wealth the silver brought was ours to

exploit, while the temple well was famous for producing new and mysterious strains of the beetlelike

metabolic machines called kobolds. My mother harvested the kobolds while my father prospected, and

eight or nine times a year small convoys of truckers would visit us to collect what we had to trade.

On that evening, two trucks had arrived from distant Xahiclan and the drivers had with them a boy

named Tico who was also a lesson in wisdom for his parents. Naturally I loved him on sight, and so did

my brother Jolly who was a year older than me but not nearly so useful to our parents. We abandoned

our younger siblings (who we were supposed to watch) to play wild games in the orchard. After

dinner—a magnificent feast that my parents had prepared and that we did not appreciate except for the

sweets at the end—we disappeared again, this time on a special quest.

In the old enclaves like Xahiclan the temples all had long histories. Thousands of players depended on

their protective powers, and so they had become sacred places. Children were not allowed to play on

the grounds, and only the temple keepers were permitted inside the buildings. None of this solemnity was

attached to Temple Huacho. Our outpost was not thirty years old; it was home to no one but our own

family; and it was the only playground my brothers and sisters and I had ever known.

Jolly and I were oldest, so we could go where we wanted within the confines of the temple wall, though

perhaps not to the well room, not without supervision. But Tico wanted to see the well of the kobolds.

He told us he had never seen a kobold well before. Jolly and I were so astonished to hear this that it took

only a moment for us to reason that the rule about not visiting the well room was an old one, and that if

we were to ask, our mother and father would surely say we were old enough now to go there on our

own…but of course we couldn’t ask: they were busy with the truckers and would not want to be

bothered, while it was up to us to keep Tico entertained.

So we crept quietly through the halls, accompanied by Jolly’s little dog, Moki—a sharp-faced hound

with large upright ears, a short back, lush red fur, and a long tail. Moki had been Jolly’s pet for as long as

I could remember. He stood only knee-high, but he followed my brother everywhere. Now he trotted

beside us, his nails clicking against the tiled floor.

Temple Huacho was a house of stone, made from the abundant minerals of Kavasphir. The floor tiles

were a cream-colored marble laced with gold; the walls were of lettered stone, in a shade of green like

malachite with the letters compressed into barely readable veins of black print; the ceilings were made of

translucent slices of a lighter green stone bearing the image of fossilized forests. Lights shone behind the

ceiling panels, giving the effect of walking through a woodland on a cloudy day. Tico was much

impressed by this decor. On the way to the well room he kept whispering about how wealthy we must be

until I decided that perhaps I didn’t like him quite as much as I had thought.

The entrance to the well room was framed by the trunks of two trees fossilized in white jade. Jolly held

on to Moki while I leaned past the nearest trunk, taking a quick, cautious look around the room,

confirming that it was empty. Then I motioned Tico and Jolly forward.

The well room was a round chamber, its walls lined with cabinets holding hundreds of tiny, airtight

drawers where mature kobolds were stored. On the right-hand side, in front of these cabinets, was the

broad jade table that served as my mother’s workbench. Her microscopes and analytical equipment

were shapeless lumps beneath a white dust cover. On the left side of the room another workbench

supported stacks of transparent boxes—test chambers for uncataloged kobolds—but they were empty.

At the center of the room was the temple well. A thigh-high mound of fine soil surrounded its throat.

Over the years I had watched this mound grow until now it spilled onto the tiles around it, where its soil

was scuffed and crushed to a fine brown powder by passing feet.

Tico did not wait for further invitation. He strode past me to the mound’s edge, where he looked over the

embankment of dirt, and down, into the dark, jagged hole that was the throat of the well.

A kobold well is made wherever a plume of nutrients chances to rise from the steaming core of the

world, a bounty that awakens the kobold motes, tiny as dust, that lie dormant everywhere in the soil.

I felt proud when I saw the awe on Tico’s face. The well was the heart of Temple Huacho. It was the

reason my mother had settled there. It was the source of our security, and our wealth. So I was surprised

when Tico’s expression changed. Awe became confusion. And then confusion gave way to a wicked

scowl. “Is that it?” he asked. “A dirty hole in the ground?”

I frowned down at the fine, loose soil, wanting desperately to impress him. “There are kobolds,” I said,

and I pointed at the well’s throat where two newly emerged kobolds were using their weak limbs to claw

free of the hard-packed ground. These were large metallophores—metal eaters—as big as my father’s

thumb and beetlelike in appearance, their color as dull as the soil that nourished them.

Kobolds were a kind of mechanic, a machine creature, and like any machine they were created by the

labor of other machines: the kobold motes, to be specific. That was the essential division among the

animate creatures of the world: mechanics were made, so that they began existence in finished form,

while organic life had to strive for existence through the complexities of birth and growth and change.

Mechanics were living tools. The metallophores that I pointed out to Tico could be configured to make

many kinds of simple metal parts. As a spider eats and secretes a web, so kobolds could take in raw

material, metabolize it so that it took on a new form, and secrete it. But where spiders secreted only

webs, kobolds could produce things as diverse as medicine or machine parts, depending on the strain.

The common metallophores of our well did their work inside a metabolic foam, which they would excrete

in layer upon layer for many days depending on the size of the artifact they had been programmed to

make. When the project was complete the foam would be washed away, revealing the fan blade, or

bracket, or truck body that the configuration had called for.

All players were dependent upon mechanics, but we were especially dependent on the kobolds. We

could not have survived without them, so it was easy to believe the legends that said they had been made

for us.

But Tico showed no sign of being impressed by the large metallophores, so I hurried to look for other

kobolds, and soon I spotted some that were tiny, the size of a grain of wheat or even smaller, moving

through the mound’s soft soil. “See those?” I asked Tico. “There. Where the soil quivers? Those are

probably the kind that make platinum circuits. My mother’s been trying to improve that strain.”

He shrugged. “Who cares about kobolds? I’ve seen thousands. I thought you were going to show me a

well like the ones in Xahiclan. They’re a hundred feet across, with crystal walls crawling with rare

kobolds no one’s ever seen before.”

A hundred feet across? I wondered if it could be true. I looked at Jolly. He had circled around to the

well’s other side where he stood with his hands clasped behind his back, a sure sign he was getting

angry. Moki sat beside him, his alert ears listening for any familiar words in our conversation. Jolly said,

“At Temple Huacho we find lots of kobolds no one’s ever seen before. More than in all of Xahiclan,

because this temple is new.”

I smiled, pleased at my brother’s parry. But now the line had been drawn and Tico had territory to

defend. “New kobolds out of this little hole? I don’t believe it!”

It took me a moment to understand that he had just called my brother a liar. When I did, my cheeks grew

hot. “Why do you think your dad comes all the way out here?” I demanded. “It’s because our kobolds

are special.”

“Uh-uh!” Tico countered. “It’s for the minerals.”

Jolly smiled his signature half smile. I saw it, and took a step back from Tico. In a quiet voice Jolly said,

“You forget where you are, Tico. This is the Kavasphir Hills. You’re not in an old, tame enclave like

Xahiclan. We don’t need a big well, because the silver here is powerful.”

Jolly was a beautiful child, smooth-skinned and bright-eyed, his blue-black hair sprouting in unruly

spikes—but he was eleven, and the easy cheerfulness of his early years had already begun to fade under

the pressure of a growing self-doubt, for no talent from his past lives had ever returned to him. Every new

skill had to be learned with great labor, as if for the first time. Though I was younger, I was far ahead of

him in reading and math, because for me each new lesson only wakened a knowledge I already had,

while Jolly had to earn it. He would grow frustrated, and rail that he must have been the stupidest player

in existence, to have learned nothing from his past lives.

That night though, he was a player. He told Tico, “This land belongs to the silver. It’s in the ground. It’s

in the well.” He stomped his shoe softly. “It’s here, right under our feet.”

Tico didn’t like this idea. He took a step back. “It’s not.”

“Oh, yes it is,” I said, rising to my brother’s aid—though the idea of silver lying in wait underground was

new to me, and deeply unsettling…because it made sense. Questions I had never thought to ask were

suddenly answered, and I echoed them aloud: “Where do you think kobold motes come from?” (As if I

knew!) “The silver makes them, that’s where. It’s in the land.”

“It is not!” Tico said. He was becoming desperately angry now. “My uncle’s a stone mason. I’ve been to

a quarry where stones are cut out of the ground, and there’s never been any silver underneath any of

them.”

“This is a temple,” Jolly said.

Well it certainly was and Tico had never been in a temple before. What did he know about temples?

Nothing except the silly rumors he’d heard in Xahiclan of wells a hundred feet across. But Tico was

proud of his ignorance. He shrugged; his lip thrust out in a pout. “Your well is still boring to look at.”

This was too much for me. To belittle the well was to belittle the life my mother had made for all of us

and that I could not bear. “Come with me, then,” I said, and I started to climb carefully over the mound.

“If you want some excitement, then come with me and see the silver—unless you’re afraid.”

Jolly’s eyes widened when he saw what I was doing. “Jubilee!” But the well lay between us, and he

could not stop me.

I looked over my shoulder at Tico. “What’s the matter? Don’t you want to come?”

Warily he asked, “What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to climb down the well. That’s what you have to do to see the silver.”

“But I can see the silver outside any window. It’s rising tonight. My dad said so.”

I edged closer to the well’s dark throat, placing my feet carefully so as not to crush the lumpy shapes of

dormant kobolds that lay buried beneath the surface of the mound. “But it’s in the well too. Always.

Night or day. Don’t you want to see it?”

I didn’t expect him to follow me. I thought fear (or wisdom) would get the better of him, and he would

run away and then Jolly and I could have a good laugh together. But Tico was a gift to his parents, and to

me. “Okay,” he said. “You go first.”

Of course I had never climbed down the well. I had no idea if the silver really could be seen at the

bottom, or even if there was a bottom, but Tico was watching me with a wicked smile. He knew I was

lying. He was only waiting for me to give up and admit it, but how could I? I glanced at Jolly. He was my

big brother. He was supposed to keep me out of trouble, but he only looked at me with merry eyes,

saying, “The chimney bends about ten feet down, but if you wriggle past that, you can keep going for

almost thirty feet.”

I could not hide my astonishment. “You’ve been down the well?”

“Sure. How do you think I know about the silver?” He looked past my shoulder and his smile widened to

a grin. I turned to see Tico fleeing the well room. The sound of his footfalls faded in the direction of the

dining hall. “He won’t tell on us,” Jolly said. “He’d only get himself in trouble.”

Tico was already forgotten. I turned back, to glare at my brother. “Have you really been down the well?”

I didn’t want to believe it. I didn’t want to believe he’d done something so momentous without me. And

he didn’t want to admit it. I could see that at once. “Youhave gone down it!” I accused.

He looked askance. “Only one time. When you went with Dad to Halibury.”

That was the time my father had taken me to see the matchmaker. Jolly was oldest and he should have

gone first but our father wouldn’t take him—not until he knew what Jolly’s talents were. My own special

talent was languages. I had a knack for them that had been clear by the time I was six. Naturally my

brother had been jealous, and he must have been bored too in the days I was away—but that was

months ago! He should have forgiven me, and confessed. I wondered what other secrets he kept. “You

should have told me.”

“Why? You would only want to go yourself.”

“So?”

“So it’s dangerous. You reallycan see hints of the silver down there.”

“I’m not afraid.”

“Jubilee—”

He was only a year older than me. I knew I could keep up with him. I always had. “You can follow me,

Jolly, if you want to, but I’m going.”

I lowered myself into the well’s dark throat. The shaft sweated a cold dew. Knobs of jade stuck out

from the narrow walls as if they had been put there on purpose to make a ladder. I moved cautiously

from one to the next. Jolly and I had climbed every tree in the orchard; we had scaled the wall around the

temple at a hundred different points; and we had even climbed up to the roof once, when my father was

away and my mother was busy with the new baby. But the shaft was a new experience for me, and I

didn’t like it.

I could feel my shirt getting wet, and crumbles of dirt trickling past my collar. The smell of dirt was

strong. Beneath that though, there was something else: a sharp scent that made me think of knives, or

melting glass. The walls were tiled with the shapes of dormant kobolds. I could see their legs folded

against their machine bodies, and their scaled abdomens, but the complex mouthparts that decorated

their beetle faces were only half-formed.

I had never seen an unfinished kobold before. I stroked the back of one. Then I pried my fingers into the

dirt around its pupal shape to see if it could be freed. It popped loose with surprising ease. I almost

dropped it, but managed to catch it with my left hand, while my legs held me propped against the wall.

“You shouldn’t do that,” Jolly said.

I looked up at his foreshortened figure braced across the well’s throat, and I made a face. Out of sight in

the well room, Moki was whining anxiously, wondering where we had gone. It was a lonely sound, and

did not help my mood, but I had things to prove. So the pupal kobold went into my pocket and I

continued down.

The bend in the well shaft was just as Jolly had described. I wriggled past it, leaving behind the friendly

light of the well room. I felt the shaft open out around me and I had the feeling I’d entered a secret

chamber. It was warmer here, and it was dark enough to make me breathe hard. I couldn’t see the

shapes of the pupal kobolds in the walls anymore, but I could feel them, bumpy-smooth, like river rocks

under my hand. The sharp, glassy scent had grown stronger.

Jolly was wriggling past the bend now, so I started down again to get out of his way. “Where’s the

silver?” I asked softly.

“Farther down. It’s trapped in the walls.”

“It can’t get out, can it?”

“I don’t know.”

My hands trembled. The temple protected us from the silver. But it was night—the time when silver rose.

And I wasn’t exactly in the temple; I wasunder it.

“Did you climb down at night?” I asked Jolly. “Or during the day?”

“At night.”

Okay. I bit my lower lip. It was only thirty feet or so to the bottom. That’s what Jolly had said. I climbed

faster. The sooner I touched bottom, the sooner I could come back up.

It was too dark to see anything.

I couldn’t believe Jolly had climbed down here by himself.

Or maybe I could believe it. Jolly was like that. I would never have done this alone—and that was a hard

knowledge to bear.

I slipped. I slid only a few inches and then I caught myself on a knobby rock. But now my eyes were

playing tricks on me. Was there a gleam in the walls of the shaft? Yes…like threads of light beneath the

black soil, but not silver threads. Their color was bronze. I brushed my fingers over them and some of the

covering soil crumbled away. The light grew brighter, and closer to silver in color, but the texture was

wrong. “Jolly?”

“Yeah?”

“Is this what you meant? Is this the silver?” It didn’t look much like silver to me.

“Tiny veins in the wall?”

“Uh-huh.”

“That’s it.”

I felt a little calmer. I could handle this. I started again for the bottom, moving faster now. I wanted this

adventure to be over. I wanted to be out in the temple’s sweet artificial light. But to get there, I had to

touch bottom first.

The well came to an abrupt end. Still clinging to the walls, I felt around with the thin soles of my shoes,

but I could not discover any further passage. I was a bit disappointed. Despite my fear, it would have

been fun to find a new passage, and venture just a little farther than Jolly.

“Where are you?” Jolly called. His voice sounded far away. I glanced up, and saw him silhouetted

against a patch of gray. He had come only halfway down from the bend. His black shape hung there like

a giant spider.

“I’m at the bottom.”

“Then come back. And hurry. Mama’s going to be looking for us soon.”

“In a minute.” Gingerly, I lowered my weight to the floor. Something brittle crunched under my feet and I

half expected the shaft to give way and drop me all the way through the world to the ocean.

Nothing so dramatic happened. All around me I could see the tiny veins of embedded light glowing in the

walls. They were everywhere at the bottom of the shaft, like luminous spiderwebs under the dirt. Or

maybe they were just easier to see there, so deep down inside the world. I traced their tangled paths with

my fingers. “This doesn’t look like silver,” I said. I looked up at Jolly. “Are you sure it’s not just a

mineral?”

“I didn’t dig it out.”

My father had once shown me a grotto near our home where silver could be seen even in the daytime.

He had not allowed me to go inside, but standing at the grotto’s entrance I could clearly see the silver

tucked into the crevices and the hollows of the rock. It had looked just like silver looks in the night:

cottony tufts of luminous fog. These gleaming veins didn’t look anything like that. Instead, they looked

like strands of metal. “I don’t think this is silver.”

“Jubilee, come back up.”

I scraped experimentally at the dirt. I was still angry with Jolly. How I would love to prove him wrong! I

scraped harder, but it hurt my fingernails. That was when I remembered the pupal kobold in my pocket.

My fingers slipped around it, exploring its hard shape, and the way its abdomen came to a sharp point

like a tiny pick. I pulled it out, and—gently at first, but with more force at every stroke—I used it to

scrape at a vein.

Jolly must have guessed what I was doing. “Jubilee!” He started down toward me.

I kept scraping. Little streams of dirt rattled to the floor. The line of light beneath my excavation

brightened. Encouraged, I stabbed my little weapon hard into the vein, and something popped. It was a

tiny sound, like a clucking tongue, far away. Then a spurt of glowing silver slurry shot out across my hand

like a pulse of blood. Or acid. My hand burned as if someone had laid a wire of red-hot metal across its

back. I dropped the pupa and screamed a little half scream, bit off at once because worse than a burn

would be Mama finding out what I had done.

“Jubilee?” Jolly whispered, a note of panic in his voice. “Where are you? What’s wrong?”

“I’m okay!” I said. “Go back up. Go back up.” My hand hurt so badly. I whimpered, expecting a cloud

of silver to ooze out of the wall at any moment to engulf me. The traceries of light still gleamed, while the

vein I had attacked wept tiny drops like luminous quicksilver.

“Jubilee?”

“I’m coming!” I climbed frantically toward his voice, knocking loose the pupal cases of several

half-formed kobolds in my haste.

I kept my hand hidden from Mama. The wound was a livid red trench that ran from the knuckle of my

little finger to the base of my thumb. After a few minutes it stopped hurting, but I could hardly bear to

look at it and I certainly didn’t want to explain where it had come from. So I said good night with my

hand thrust deep in my pocket. Then I hurried to the room I shared with Jolly, shut the door firmly, and

crawled under my blanket of stars. I lay in the dark, staring at the trees beyond the open window, their

leafy branches bathed in a pale gleam. I was terribly tired, but my guilty conscience would not let me

sleep. After a few minutes, Jolly came in, with Moki following at his heels.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He walked to the window. Pale light shone across his face. “The silver’s deep tonight. It’s almost over

the wall.”

I crawled to the foot of the bed to look. Kneeling beside him, I leaned out the window.

Temple Huacho was built at the summit of a softly rounded hill. I looked down that slope, past the

orchard my mother had planted, to see a luminous ocean lapping at the top of the perimeter wall. The

silver’s light filled all the vales so that once again our hilltop had become an island, one of many in an

archipelago of hills set in a silvery sea, though all the other islands were wooded. Ours was the only one

where any players lived.

The oldest stories in existence, the ones brought forward again and again through time, tell us that in our

first lives we came from beyond the world. A goddess created this place for us and the silver was her

thought: a force of creation and destruction that could build the bones of the world or melt them away.

She brought us out of darkness to live in her new world, for it was her hope that each of us might gain

talents in our successive lives so that someday we would grow beyond this world and ascend to Heaven

too.

The goddess had made the world in defiance of darkness, but the darkness was an angry god and he

pursued her and sought to slay her world. A great war fell out between them and while he was cast back

into the void, she was broken, her existence reduced to a fever dream with the silver the only visible

remnant of her creative power.

We call it silver, but other languages have named it better. In one ancient tongue it is the

“breath-of-creation.” In another it is “the fog of souls,” and in a third, “the dreaming goddess.”

Linda Nagata - Memory

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