Nightwings

by Robert Silverberg

  Elegro sighed heavily. He steepled his fingers, bowed his head, quirked his lips. This was plainly unique to him. While he pondered, an inner door opened and a female Rememberer entered the room, carrying a small turquoise music-sphere cradled in both her hands. She took four paces and halted, obviously surprised that Elegro was entertaining visitors.

  She made a nod of apology and said, “I will return later.”

  “Stay,” said the Rememberer. To myself and the Prince he said, “My wife. The Rememberer Olmayne.” To his wife he said, “These are travelers newly come from Roum. They have delivered Basil’s shawl. The Watcher now asks apprenticeship in our guild. What do you advise?”

  The Rememberer Olmayne’s white brow furrowed. She put down her music-sphere in a dark crystal vase; the sphere was unintentionally activated as she did so, and it offered us a dozen shimmering notes before she switched it off. Then she contemplated us, and I her. She was notably younger than her husband, who was of middle years, while she seemed to be hardly past first bloom. Yet there was a strength about her that argued for greater maturity. Perhaps, I thought, she had been to Jorslem to renew her youth; but in that case it was odd that her husband had not done the same, unless he prized his look of age. She was surely attractive. Her face was broad, with a high forehead, pronounced cheekbones, a wide, sensual mouth, a jutting chin. Her hair was lustrous black, contrasting most vividly with the strange pallor of her skin. Such white skin is a rarity among us, though now I know that it was more common in ancient times, when the breed was different. Avluela, my lovely little Flier, had displayed that same combination of black and white, but there the resemblance ended, for Avluela was all fragility, and the Rememberer Olmayne was strength itself. Below her long slender neck her body blossomed into well-set shoulders, high breasts, firm legs. Her posture was regal.

  She studied us at length, until I could scarcely meet the level gaze of her widely spaced dark eyes. Ultimately she said, “Does the Watcher regard himself as qualified to become one of us?”

  The question appeared aimed at anyone in the chamber who cared to reply. I hesitated; Elegro did likewise; and at length it was the Prince of Roum who replied in his voice of command, “The Watcher is qualified to enter your guild.”

  “And who are you?” Olmayne demanded.

  Instantly the Prince adopted a more accommodating tone. “A miserable blind Pilgrim, milady, who has wandered here on foot from Roum, in this man’s company. If I am any judge, you could do worse than admit him as an apprentice.”

  Elegro said, “And yourself? What plans have you?”

  “I wish only refuge here,” said the Prince. “I am tired of roaming and there is much thinking I must do. Perhaps you could allow me to carry out small tasks here. I would not want to be separated from my companion.”

  To me Olmayne said, “We will confer on your case. If there is approval, you will be given the tests. I will be your sponsor.”

  “Olmayne!” blurted Elegro in unmistakable amazement.

  She smiled serenely at us all.

  A family quarrel appeared on the verge; but it was averted, and the Rememberers offered us hospitality, juices, sharper beverages, a night’s lodging. We dined apart from them in one section of their suite, while other Rememberers were summoned to consider my irregular application. The Prince seemed in strange agitation; he bolted down his food, spilled a flask of wine, fumbled with his eating utensils, put his fingers again and again to his gray metallic eyeballs as though trying to scratch an itch that troubled the lobes of his brain.

  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. The little indentation 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 t
hings, 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 schoolmate. 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 pin-pointing 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.

  Then I was instructed superficially in the techniques of the field. Through cunning simulation I was shown Rememberers at work with vacuum cores digging through the mounds of the great ruined cities of Afreek and Ais. I participated vicariously in the undersea quest for the remnants of the civilizations of the Lost Continents; teams of Rememberers entered translucent, teardrop-shaped vehicles that were like blobs of green gelatin and sped into the depths of Earth Ocean, down and down to the slime-crusted prairies of the former land and with lancing beams of violet force, they drilled through muck and girders to find buried truths. I watched the gatherers of shards, the diggers of shadows, the collectors of molecular films. One of the best of the orientation experiences they provided was a sequence in which some truly heroic Rememberers excavated a weather machine in lower Afreek, baring the base of the titanic thing, lifting it on power-pulls from the soil, an extraction so mighty that the earth itself seemed to shriek when it was done. High aloft they floated the ponderous relic of Second Cycle folly, while shawled experts prodded in its root-place to learn how the column had been erected in the first instance. My eyes throbbed at the spectacle.

  I emerged from these sessions with an overwhelming awe for this guild I had chosen. Individual Rememberers whom I had known had struck me generally as pompous, disdainful, haughty, or merely aloof; I did not find them charming. Yet is the whole greater than the sum of its parts, and I saw such men as Basil and Elegro, so vacant, so absent from ordinary human concerns, so disinterested, as parts of a colossal effort to win back from eternity our brilliant yesterdays. This research into lost times was magnificent, the only proper substitute for mankind’s former activities; having lost our present and our future, we had of necessity to bend all our endeavors to the past, which no one could take from us if only we were vigilant enough.

  For many days I absorbed the details of this effort, every stage of the work from the collection of specks of dust in the field through their treatment and analysis in the laboratory to the highest endeavor of all, synthesis and interpretation, which was carried out by senior Rememberers on the highest level of this building. I was given but a glimpse of those sages: withered and dry, old enough to be grandfathers to me, white heads bent forward, thin lips droning comments and interpretations, quibbles and corrections. Some of them, I was told in a hushed whisper, had been renewed at Jorslem two and three times apiece, and now were beyond renewal and in their final great age.

  Next we were introduced to the memory tanks where the Rememberers store their findings, and from which are dispensed informations for the benefit of the curious.

  As a Watcher I had had little curiosity and less interest in visiting memory tanks. Certainly I had never seen anything like this, for the tanks of the Rememberers were no mere three-brain or five-brain storage units, but mammoth installations with a hundred brains or more hooked in series. The room to which they took us—one of dozens beneath the building, I learned—was an oblong chamber, deep but not high, in which brain-cases were arrayed in rows of nine that faded into shadowed depths. Perspective played odd tricks; I was not sure if there were ten rows or fifty, and the sight of those bleached domes was overpoweringly immense.

  “Are these the brains of former Rememberers?” I asked.

  The guide replied, “Some of them are. But there’s no necessity to use only Rememberers. Any normal human brain will do; even a Servitor has more storage capacity than you’d believe. We have no need for redundancy in our circuits, and so we can use the full resources of each brain.”

  I tried to peer through the heavy block of sleekness that protected the memory tanks from harm. I said, “What is recorded in this particular room?”

  “The names of dwellers in Afreek in Second Cycle times, and as much personal data about each as we have so far recovered. Also, since these cells are not yet fully charged, we have temporarily stored in them certain geographical details concerning the Lost Continents, and information pertaining to the creation of Land Bridge.”

  “Can such information be easily transferred from temporary storage to permanent?” I asked.

  “Easily, yes. Everything is electromagnetic here. Our facts are aggregates of charges; we shift them from brain to brain by reversing polarities.”

  “What if there were an electrical failure?” I demanded. “You say you have no redundancy here. Is there no possibility of los
ing data through some accident?”

  “None,” said the guide smoothly. “We have a series of fallback devices to insure continuity of power. And by using organic tissue for our storage cells, we have the best assurance of safety of all: for the brains themselves will retain their data in the event of a power interruption. It would be taxing but not impossible to recapture their contents.”

  “During the invasion,” I said, “were any difficulties experienced?”

  “We are under the protection of the invaders, who regard our work as vital to their own interests.”

  Not long afterward, at a general convocation of the Rememberers, we apprentices were permitted to look on from a balcony of the guildhall; below us, in full majesty, were the guild members, shawls in place, Elegro and Olmayne among them. On a dais that bore the helical symbol was Chancellor Kenishal of the Rememberers, an austere and commanding figure, and beside him was an even more conspicuous personage who was of the species that had conquered Earth. Kenishal spoke briefly. The resonance of his voice did not entirely conceal the hollowness of his words; like all administrators everywhere, he gushed platitudes, praising himself by implication as he congratulated his guild for its notable work. Then he introduced the invader.

  The alien stretched forth his arms until they seemed to touch the walls of the auditorium.

  “I am Manrule Seven,” he said quietly. “I am Procurator of Perris, with particular responsibility for the guild of Rememberers. My purpose here today is to confirm the decree of the provisional occupational government. You Rememberers are to go totally unhampered in your work. You are to have free access to all sites on this planet or on any other world that may have bearing on your mastery of the past of this planet. All files are to remain open to you, except those pertaining to the organization of the conquest itself. Chancellor Kenishal has informed me that the conquest lies outside the scope of your present research in any case, so no hardship will be worked. We of the occupying government are aware of the value of the work of your guild. The history of this planet is of great significance, and we wish your efforts continued.”