Memory Seed

by Stephen Palmer

  ‘But...’

  ‘Nothing nasty’ll live in that concentration of sugar. Quick, eat it!’

  He took the lamina and did as she did. Eventually he was laughing with the effort. The honey was crunchy sweet and slightly warm, a few degrees above the present temperature, and to Zinina it seemed like an omen of pure good.

  They wiped their mouths with kit tissues, relaid the hive, then continued. The sun was low, an hour away from setting, and they decided to turn back and walk into the light. This too was perfect for Zinina. She wanted to face the sun during these last moments.

  She listened: heard the surf, the squawks of a few gulls, caught creaks from pieces of driftwood. ‘I can’t hear any guns,’ she said.

  ‘Nor I.’

  ‘You know what that means.’

  He glanced at her. ‘What?’

  ‘Less people. I wonder how many are left now.’

  She looked out to sea. On the horizon two silhouettes lay, boats that had earlier left to take their chances at sea. Soon, Zinina thought, she too, and deKray, and the others, could be on such a boat. The Holists owned two, kept hidden under the Sud Bridge.

  ‘Perhaps citizens of the city have seen sense,’ deKray suggested. ‘No, of course not, I expect they shot one another.’

  ‘I want to be free to be me,’ Zinina said, squinting into the orange sun.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘I want to be free to be me. All my life I’ve had to do this, do that, check this and that, get food and water every day and check that too. It’s like I can’t be me. I’ve got to exist by toiling, not by discovery.’

  ‘Everybody else has that problem,’ said deKray.

  ‘I’m not talking about them, I’m talking about me. I want to sail to a new land and be myself.’

  DeKray paused before saying, ‘Throughout history most people have had to live without realising that they had needs. And that allowed them to be fixed into arbitrary classes ruled by persons who knew what their own needs were, and were lucky enough to be in a position to satisfy them. Selfishly, of course.’

  ‘So?’ Zinina interrupted.

  ‘Krayans are in no worse a situation. The majority of all past human beings lived in fear of death, either because they had to work to survive, or because of war, or because they had to spend all their time creating food. Our particular society is merely the final such society. It is only that which distinguishes it from any other society built upon scarcity. Do you see my point?’

  Zinina shook her head, wanting more explanation.

  ‘You have realised that you have needs, as have I. This is because we have had comparatively easy lives, and now live with a food hoard and a group of agreeable, clever people. What I am saying is that you are now, essentially, free to be you.’

  Zinina considered this. She still felt oppressed by the green. ‘You think so?’

  ‘Both of us have had time, have time even now, to browse amongst books or listen to music, and so unfold ourselves further. I would estimate that, at any one time, ten per cent of Krayans lived in a similar position. The rest–’

  ‘Did not know who they were.’

  DeKray looked out to sea. ‘I have perused many stories in four decades,’ he said. ‘I have read of societies that came very close to achieving the goal of allowing every individual within their aegis the opportunity of developing themselves to the full, all other needs taken care of. That is how I would have liked to have lived. But Krayans adapt.’

  ‘They do.’

  The sun was low and red as they approached the west point of the beach. Glare reduced much of the surf’s own luminosity, but many sprays glowed orange red as they hit the sand, and sometimes it was possible to imagine the ocean more substantial than the ground just because it seemed to contain more within it. Scudding clouds were red and orange, quickly fading to purple, then grey. The ocean glow began to strengthen, until it was lighting clouds. They stood with arms around one another, watching things floating in and trying to guess what they were. Zinina felt very close to deKray, and could tell that he felt the same.

  ‘I’m going to have an abortion,’ she said.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘I’m pregnant. So I have to go to the Rien Zir ladies and get a cup of tea.’

  DeKray took both her hands in his own. ‘If you truly are pregnant–’

  ‘I know I am, thank you.’

  ‘–then you must keep the child. It is wrong to abort, when so few people survive.’

  Zinina laughed, pulling her hands from his grip.

  ‘Uqallavaz tq, it isn’t any of your affair! It’s my affair, and I’m not staggering around Kray in its final months with a baby inside me.’

  ‘I think the decision is wrong.’

  ‘You can think what you like. I’m a woman and you’re only a man.’

  ‘I much appreciate your reminder,’ deKray remarked. ‘But I thought we lived on more equal terms.’

  ‘Not in this matter. Babies are women’s work. I’m drinking tea and that’s all there is to it, so don’t bother thinking up all them clever arguments.’

  DeKray shrugged. ‘Very well. Frankly, Zinina, I am astonished that I am fertile. I thought only a few men in the Fish Chambers possessed a high enough concentration of sperm. How ironic that I should be capable of impregnating you.’

  Saying no more they ascended the cliff path, pausing halfway up. Zinina glanced back at the beach. A few tears trickled down her face when sudden memories of happy days as a girl returned to her. She felt she was treading a last path – experiencing final, sad moments. She was leaving. This was the end of things.

  She gazed north. Despite the horror of the city, it was still possible to love it. More tears fell.

  Hastily, they made their way along Mossy Row, and then down flooded alleys until they were once more at the arched entrance to Driftwood Passage.

  Arrahaquen had still not returned. A moment of fear made Zinina shiver. Where was she? Still in Gwmru, or dead in some back alley?

  In the draughty bedroom Zinina fidgeted through the night while deKray slept, tensing at every distant clunk, listening for the voice of Arrahaquen at the front door, ready to rush downstairs to hear her news and see if she was well. But nobody arrived.

  Until dawn. At dawn, Zinina heard footsteps clumping up the stairs, and then Qmoet hammered at the door. ‘She’s back!’

  The two women raced downstairs, deKray following more sedately. Qmoet said Arrahaquen was in the washroom. ‘She all right?’ Zinina asked.

  ‘I don’t know, Zin.’

  Eskhatos and Ky were bent over Arrahaquen’s supine form in the washroom, the floor sopping where water had been spilled. She was naked. She seemed pale. Leather bags and cardboard trays of medical equipment lay everywhere.

  ‘Vomit, damn you!’ Ky cried angrily.

  ‘Ah!’ Eskhatos said, and then Arrahaquen seemed to spasm. She was suddenly sick.

  Zinina joined them. ‘She all right?’

  ‘Wipe that up,’ Ky said, pointing to the greenish fluid that Arrahaquen had brought up. ‘She’s alive, but city-distressed. She’s got a bad mouth infection, I dread to think from what, and under her nails are infected, and her toes. We made her vomit–’

  ‘I can see that,’ Zinina said, wiping the mess up with absorbent sponges.

  ‘–but her pulse is faint. Look at these dew marks on her skin. Green blobs. That means she’s lain for some time without protection. I’m going to have to excoriate her skin. Get me the carbolic soap and the loofah.’

  Zinina brought them. While Ky worked on Arrahaquen’s skin, Eskhatos, too infirm to do anything vigorous, used a hand pyuter to take her heart readings and also to make a brain scan. ‘Hmmm,’ she said, ‘things seem a little weak.’

  Zinina cleaned Arrahaquen’s eyes while Ky worked on her legs and belly. Arrahaquen was either half conscious or half asleep. Her skin was almost white and her lips and gums seemed pale, as if she had lost blood. Only the scar on her f
orehead, livid like a Cemetery berry on white gravel, seemed unchanged. Opening Arrahaquen’s mouth, Zinina saw that her throat was scarlet and inflamed. Her nostrils were exuding mucus at a terrific rate.

  ‘Now,’ Ky said, ‘let’s get her warmed up. Zinina, fetch an antiseptic pad and clip it in her mouth. Make it full strength. We’ll carry her next door and lay her on cushions.’

  This they did. A drip was improvised and she was fed antibiotics. Two heating blankets powered by battery were placed over her. Around her neck they tied a blood oxygen monitor and a skin electrograph. Then they waited.

  After an hour her eyelids fluttered. Zinina leaned over her. ‘Arrahaquen? You with us, eh?’

  ‘Yes,’ came the faint reply. Was that a smile on her lips?

  ‘Did you succeed?’ Zinina asked.

  At her side, deKray and Ky repeated, ‘Yes, did you succeed?’

  Arrahaquen whispered, ‘I’m not sure.’

  ~

  Graaff-lin sat in what had been her pyuter room. A tray of electronic oddments lay in front of her. One candle lit the room. The radio that she so urgently needed to build was not even one quarter completed, for nothing in her hoard of technological sundries had been of any use; the one thing that might have been – circuits impressed into perspex – lacked universal interfaces, and so their circuits could not be reached.

  She knew she was not well. She had enough food and water for a week, but she was experiencing spells of dizziness, and last night she had been sick. Some bug or other. Rumours of disease had come south with the breeze. Cholera was epidemic in the Carmine Quarter, blackening bodies into the Mercantile; the wizened corpses of victims apparently lay in the street. Typhus had appeared too. But people did not pass through her alley now, and so she could not overhear conversations.

  Still, she had collected seven machine pieces from the slime that blighted the city. Overnight they had merged into a unit. She suspected it was a message from her benefactors, who would perhaps provide soon an ecstasy along which a shot of hope could be flung.

  But, above all, she would not join the Holists, nor even live at their house.

  She had noticed that much of her thought was now couched in terms of what her mother Veerj-lin would have done; she surely would have expected her to reach the Dodspaat, and so constructing a radio had to be the correct plan.

  Tonight she would go out again to explore her temple for radio components. It was not too far away, but since the alleys between, lodged as they were between dangerous southerly parts and dangerous northerly parts, had become the most populous part of the city – or the least depopulated – her trip was far from simple.

  One hour after midnight she left her house. Shooting could be heard to the south and she noticed red flares on the Citadel tumulus. She travelled in short bursts, sizing up the alley ahead for doorways or alcoves in which to hide for a minute, examining windows for hints of light, always listening.

  The explosion knocked her off her feet, and she landed face up in a bed of algae. Rubble fell, splinters flew, chunks of green splatted against walls. A bright orange light had flared out. Shocked, but thinking, she ran away regardless of safety, until she skidded to a halt at a serpent alcove and hid within. A few hundred yards away lights flickered, then gunfire sounded. Voices shouted. More rubble fell.

  She must have triggered a mine. No doubt the Dodspaat had saved her from death; the thing had exploded only yards behind her. She felt her back. The Kray suit was scorched, melted in one place, and her skin hurt. Otherwise she was uninjured. Nothing had accidentally entered her mouth or nose, Dodspaat be praised.

  Fifteen minutes later, quiet resumed. She moved on. The temple was a few hundred yards away. She circled it through flooded back alleys until she came across a passage leading to a rear door – the entrance used during the search for Katoh-lin. The passage was empty. The door was closed, but unlocked. She entered the temple.

  Everything was burnt, black, smashed. Lamps had turned to charcoal and fallen to the floor, onyx was cracked and marble splintered, here and there lay bodies in robes. Graaff-lin could see the main concourse, and what had been the public entrance. She shone a pencil light to see only devastation and decay. Above to both sides the private chambers showed doors unhinged and windows smashed. Water dripped from the ceiling. Already green things were growing from holes in the walls.

  She moved left, toward the Dodspaat chambers. She thought she heard a yowl, but it was distant. The sacred chamber was empty, its luminous shells gone. Sadness and anger welled up in her, but she made an effort to suppress them, into her body it seemed, and she took several deep breaths in an attempt to regain her composure.

  In an ante-chamber pyuters too had died. They looked like heaps of plastic corpses, oozing fluids, their biological innards ruined and all data lost, while at the bottom of each stack pools of chemicals had merged and reacted, leaving red and black stains. Graaff-lin’s mind could not encompass this, and she walked away uncertain, as though her will alone could change what she had seen and return reality. The whole temple seemed a caricature drawn by Kray for the purpose of grinding her into the soil, having first trifled with her beliefs.

  She walked up to the balconies. Another yowl sounded; this time it seemed nearer, more real, and she paused to listen. The characteristic echoes of the temple, lingering and desolate, which had been engraved upon her mind since childhood, told her that there was something with her in the building.

  She explored a few rooms, keeping silent. She felt frightened. Her imagination devised things which might have made the noise, and that noise repeated in her head, lonely and eerie and lethal. The darkness seemed now to be an enemy, not an ally.

  She heard a noise – a clunk. She stood rigid at the door. Outside lay a marble balcony. She peered out and saw a woman.

  Some noise must have escaped Graaff-lin’s lips. The woman turned, shrieked and stepped back, hands reaching for the balustrade. A cat skreeked... then the marble gave way and the woman fell to the floor below, screaming. There was a thud, and crashing rubble.

  The cat skittered away, tinkling as it did, as though wearing a collar. Graaff-lin remained still.

  Silence returned.

  Some minutes passed before aches in Graaff-lin’s body forced her to move. She peered down into the concourse and saw amongst marble chunks the woman, dead, her robe spread around her, metal things glinting in the torch light.

  She resolved to investigate the intruder. But now she felt an overpowering need for a weapon, and she ran down the steps towards Mysrioque’s room, the room Katoh-lin had once occupied, where she found several cabinets standing charred. In one she found a heat rifle. Caring nothing for anybody else who might be in the temple, she tested it on a chair. It worked. Lights indicated seventy per cent charge.

  Back in the concourse she walked up to the woman, to discover that she was a priestess of Felis.

  Revulsion took her. She could not believe it – that the woman could have entered the temple – and she prayed to the Dodspaat for guidance. What had the woman done? Why was she here? Graaff-lin dared not think on this sacrilege.

  The robe was made of catskins sewn together with gold wire. Around her head was a fur headband. Her clothes too were catskin, shorn of fur and dyed ginger. The repugnant symbols of her religion hung on chains around her neck; cat claws in silver, whiskers sheafed by gold bands, a foot dangling from a quartz disc. Graaff-lin stamped on these, feeling sick, closing her eyes as she spat saliva upon them before making sure they were well greened.

  Scuffling sounds. She turned to see two metal-legged cats running towards her. She fired and they disintegrated into blood and steel.

  Then a fit took hold of her. Her mind became hot. She wanted only to annihilate all the cats in the temple. Ordinary restraint evaporated to leave a desire such as she had never known, a desire accompanied by sweating skin, dry mouth, involuntary speeches praising herself.

  She returned upstairs and began systema
tically to search the rooms. In the third a cat chewed a rat. She destroyed it, then screamed with joy. The omnipresent self that used to observe her, used to watch her little self to make sure she did nothing silly, or embarrassing, or wrong, this self had gone. She simply was not herself.

  Another cyborgised cat jumped at her. She vaporised it. Soon she had been through half the upper rooms. She returned to the concourse and went through that; went through all the ante-chambers, all the privies, all the meditation rooms, all the pyuter booths. Three more cats were destroyed.

  Then she returned to the body and vaporised that too, until the rifle’s glimmering rays faltered, went purple, and died.

  She could not remember what she had done.

  Then she remembered that there had been a purpose to her coming here: the acquisition of components. But since there was nothing left to salvage she knew that all she could do was to seal the temple. She ran upstairs and began barricading broken windows.

  The first hints of dawn had just appeared in a cloudy sky when she finished, and it was raining softly. At the concourse front, the main doors were already barricaded. She checked the rear doors, bringing furniture up to some so they would be too difficult to force, until one last door remained, the one through which she had entered.

  On this, a latch had broken. She took screws from pieces of wood, found a shard of metal with an edge, and repaired the latch. Darkness outside was receding. She did not want to spend the day inside the temple. Stepping outside, she noticed a machine chunk on the ground, which she put in her pocket. After checking her clothes and kit, she pulled the door shut. The latch clicked home. She pushed. It was firm.

  Now she was exhausted. Her eyes smarted. A twenty-minute jog awaited her, and she knew that by the time she reached home, if she did, it would be light enough for people to shoot with accuracy. She ran down alleys, splashing through them, until Hog Street lay ahead. She slipped, got up, ran on. As she waded through the alleys approaching her home, pulling the strings of algae away from her thighs with gloved hands, testing the ground underwater with a pole, she heard more gunfire and then an explosion, as though dawn had heralded some grotesque hunting season. At last she saw her house. Nobody was in sight; she had heard no voices here for days. She fumbled for her card, rushed inside, and locked herself in.