by Linda Nagata
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.”
That was how my mother spoke of it. When the silver rose she would say that the goddess was dreaming again of the glorious days of creation, and certainly the silver brought with it both the beauty and the madness of dreams. It was an incoherent force, wantonly powerful, that entered our world at twilight and stayed until dawn, reshaping what it touched. In the course of a single night it might dissolve a hundred miles of highway, or the outer buildings of a failing enclave, or a player unlucky enough to be caught out after dark. In the same night it might build new structures within the veils of its gleaming fog, so that a columned mansion would be discovered in an uninhabited valley, or a statue of glass would be found standing in meditation amid a field of maize. But while the silver could both dissolve away the structures of our civilization and build them anew, it acted always as an impersonal force, never seeming aware that this was our world, or that we existed in it.
So we walled it out.
A silver flood might get past the protection of the temple kobolds that lived within the perimeter wall, but not without losing most of its strength. More temple kobolds guarded the orchard, and more existed in the temple itself so that the silver could never reach us. So my mother promised.
Every temple was an enclave, an island of safety in the chaotic wilderness of the world. The truckers had brought their vehicles into the courtyard; my father had closed the gate behind them. They would sleep in the guest rooms tonight, and we would all be safe.
I watched the silver lapping at the top of the wall, somehow eerily alive that night. I watched the first tendrils reach over the wall’s flat top. When they encountered the chemical defenses of the temple kobolds they smoked and steamed, rising as a fine mist into the air. But the advance of the silver did not stop. More tendrils spilled over the wall, and these were not turned back so easily. I watched first one, then many more, flow down the face of the wall, gathering against the ground like smoke on a cool morning.
I retreated from the window.
My fear must have shone because Jolly said, “It’s okay. It won’t come inside the temple. It can’t.”
That’s what Mama would say—but she didn’t know about my adventure in the well. She didn’t know I’d disturbed what was there.
Jolly left the window to sit beside me on the bed. Moki followed him, snuggling in between us. “How’s your hand?”
“Better.”
He was silent for a minute. I could smell the silver: a fresh, strong scent as I imagined the ocean would smell. “Do you … ever feel like you’re having a dream?” Jolly asked. “Even though you’re awake?”
I puzzled over his question, wondering where it had come from. “You mean like a daydream?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
I could see he was already regretting saying anything. “Never mind.”
“Are you having a dream right now?” I asked him.
Silver light glittered in his eyes.
“So what do you dream about?”
But he looked away. “Never mind. Go to sleep.”
I was tired, so I lay down again, wriggling about for a minute so the stars on my blanket gleamed brightly. I looked at Jolly, still sitting at the foot of my bed, gazing out the window at the silver, his hand moving slowly as he stroked Moki, who had fallen asleep in his lap. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I saw faint motes of silver sparkling over his hand. Then I was asleep, before even the stars in my blanket had begun to fade.
Moki woke me, his sharp high bark like an electric shock. I sat up. Jolly had fallen asleep where he’d been sitting. Now his head jerked up. I was astonished to see motes of silver dancing in his hair and over his hands and in the folds of his clothes. He turned to the window.
The silver light was brighter than I had ever seen it. Jolly was silhouetted in its glow. He rose slowly to his knees, staring out the window like someone mesmerized.
“Jolly!” I spoke past Moki’s frantic yipping. “There is silver on you.”
He looked at his hands. Then he swiped them against his pants as if to wipe the evidence of silver away, but the motes would not leave. “It’s too late,” he whispered. “I called it, and now it’s coming.”
At first I didn’t know what he meant. Then Moki went ominously silent, and a moment later the silver rose over the windowsill. It had rolled up through the orchard all the way to the temple. Now it spilled through the window and into the room: a luminous stream that spread in a smoky pool across the floor. Its fresh, crisp scent filled my
lungs and planted a quiet terror in my heart.
I crept backward, to the far corner of my bed, pulling my blanket of stars with me until I felt the wall against my shoulders. I could see no way to escape, for the silver had already rolled up against the door.
“Mommy!” I whispered it like a spell, a word with magical warding powers. “Mommy.” Too frightened to shout.
The silver started to rise. It inflated in ghostly tendrils that swirled toward Jolly, who seemed hypnotized by it, for he didn’t move. I reached out, grabbing a fold of his shirt where the silver motes were thinnest, and I yanked him backward. “Get away from it!” I whispered. “Move back. Move back.”
He seemed to wake up. Had he still been asleep? He scrambled into my corner. Moki came with him, barking frantically again. I put my hand over his muzzle and hissed at him to hush! I did not want Mama to wake. What would happen if she hurried to our room, if she threw open the door? She would be taken.
“Go away!” Jolly whispered. “I didn’t mean it.”
He had boxed me into the corner, put himself between me and the looming silver fog. Never had I seen silver so close. I peered past him, in terror, in wonder. It looked grainy. As if it were a cloud made of millions of tiny particles just like the silver motes that clung to him.
The cloud touched the edge of my bed.
Jolly started to creep away from me, moving toward it. “No,” I whimpered. “Don’t go.”
I grabbed his shirt again and tried to drag him back, but he turned on me in fury. “Don’t touch me! If the silver takes one of us, it’ll take the other too if we make a bridge for it to cross.”
“I don’t care!” I started to cry, but I didn’t touch him again. I held on to Moki instead, who was trembling in my lap. “I want Mama. I want Dad.”
“I do too,” Jolly said in a soft, shaky voice. Then a tendril of silver slipped across the bed and touched his knee. For a moment the tendril glowed brighter. Then it flashed over him, expanding across his legs, his torso, his arms, his face, all of him, in a raw second. For one more second he knelt on the bed like a statue of a boy cast in silver. Then the cloud rolled over him, hiding his terrible shape within a curtain of perfect silence.
I couldn’t breathe. Air wouldn’t come into my chest. I pressed myself against the wall and held on to Moki, wanting to scream, wanting it almost as badly as I wanted air, but I didn’t dare because I didn’t want Mama to come into the room and be stolen by the silver too. Even when the glittering mist began to retreat, leaving the foot of the bed empty, with ancient letters newly written in gold on the bed frame and on the stone floor, I stayed silent in my corner. I waited until the cloud had drifted out of the room—not out of the window, for the window was gone, and most of the bedroom’s wall with it, dissolved in the silver, just like Jolly.
I stared out at the orchard, wondering why the trees had remained unchanged, but silver was like that: sometimes it would leave things and sometimes it would change them, but it always took the players it touched, and animals too. I waited, until the last wisp still clinging to the ruined wall evaporated from existence. Then I screamed.
Chapter 2
If a child should ask, What is the world? a parent might answer, “It is a ring-shaped island of life made by the goddess in defiance of the frozen dark between the stars. On the outer rim of this ring there is mostly land, and that is where we live. On the inner rim there is only ocean. We have day and night because the world-ring spins around its own imaginary axis. At the same time it follows another, greater circle around the sun so that we see different stars in different seasons.” These are the simple facts everyone accepts.
But if a child should ask, What is the silver? the answer might take many forms:
“It is a fog of glowing particles that arises at night to rebuild the world.”
“It is a remnant of the world’s creation.”
“It is the memory of the world.”
“It is the dreaming mind of the wounded goddess and you must never go near her! Her dreams will swallow any player they touch. Do you want to be swallowed up by the silver? No? Then stay inside at night. Never wander.”
What is the silver? After Jolly was taken, that question was never far from my mind. I interviewed my mother, I consulted libraries for their opinions, and I asked the passing truckers what they thought. It was from the truckers I first heard the rumor that the silver was rising. The oldest among them had lived more than two hundred years, and they swore it was a different world from the one in which they’d been born: “The roads were safer in those days. The silver did not come so often, nor flood so deep.”
Sometimes their younger companions would scoff, but as I grew older, even the youths insisted they had seen a change. “The silver is rising, higher every year, as if it would drown the world.”
I began to keep records. I noted the nights on which the silver appeared, how often it touched the temple’s perimeter wall, and how often it passed over. That first year I kept count, it reached the orchard only once, but in the second year it breached the wall three times, and seven times in the year after that.
I was fifteen when I showed these notes to my mother. Her expression was grim as she studied them. “Kavasphir is a wild land,” she admitted, handing the notes back to me.
“Do you think the silver is rising?”
She was hesitant in her answer. “All things move in cycles.”
“I have heard the silver moves in a cycle of a thousand years. That it grows more abundant with time, until the world seems on the verge of drowning in it … and then it is driven back until there is almost no silver left and that is almost as bad.”
My mother said, “I have heard that too.”
I waited for her to elaborate, to explain why this was a foolish rumor, but she was lost in thought. It was night, and we sat together in her bedroom, the only sound that of the fountain playing in the garden beyond the open window.
At last I spoke again, my voice hushed. “Do you think it’s true?”
“It’s hard to know for sure.”
“But it could be?”
“The world is old, and most of our past forgotten. But fragments remain. In the libraries … and in the lettered stone and the follies the silver makes. There is enough to convince most scholars that the world has passed through many ages of history. Sometimes the silver was common. Other times it was rare. No one can say why.”
“No one has explained it?”
She shrugged. “Many have tried to explain it, but none in a manner to convince me. Players love stories, but they do not always love facts.” We traded a smile. “Don’t be afraid, Jubilee. Perhaps the silver is rising, but I don’t think we are on the verge of drowning just yet.”
What is the silver? Eventually I decided it must be all the things players claimed it to be. It was a remnant of the world’s creation: that was how it was able to disassemble solid objects, breaking them down into its gleaming fog while it compiled new objects in their places. It was the memory of the world, mapping the structure of everything it touched, so that it could bring ancient objects forward in time—to create meaningless follies in the wilderness, or to deposit veins of valuable ore in the exposed rock of the Kavasphir Hills. And it was the mind of a dreaming goddess, or at least of some savant of an ancient world far more learned than ours. This I allowed only because of a handful of legends. Mostly the silver acted in a way that seemed random, and unaware. Now and then though, there were stories of some tool or talisman brought forward through time, delivered at a crucial moment, as if someone beyond the silver sought to move the pieces …
But why only now and then?
I would look at the scar on the back of my hand, remembering the night Jolly was taken, and I would wonder.
I never told my mother how I got that scar. It was a strange mark: an intricate ridge of reddish tissue that didn’t fade as any normal scar would. I would look at it, and wonder: Had I caused Jolly’s death with my adve
nture in the kobold well? For neither I nor anyone else could explain why the silver had been able to breach the temple that night.
But if ever I got to thinking it might be my fault, I would remember what Jolly had said, a moment before the silver spilled over the windowsill: I called it, and now it’s coming. Those words were engraved in my memory, though how he—or anyone—could summon the wild chaos of silver I didn’t know.
There was much I didn’t know, but I swore it would not always be so.
I was never lonely in those years. By the time I was seventeen, the count of my younger siblings had grown to six and I had long since corrupted my nearest sister, Emia, and our oldest brother after her, Rizal, and made them my companions in many adventures that our parents did not approve. But I abandoned them that year, when my father’s brother came to live with us.
I haven’t said much about my father. In a sense, there isn’t much to say. He was a wayfarer who had traveled a third of the way around the ring of the world to find his destined lover, and during his years on the road he had many adventures, and many narrow escapes. Then one sunny day he found his way to the enclave of Halibury, and as he’d done in hundreds of enclaves before, he went to see the matchmaker.
That self-righteous old man wanted nothing more than to send this foreign ruffian on his way. But against all expectation, this Kedato Panandi turned out to possess the blood pattern that matched my mother’s. The matchmaker sent a note to her at Temple Huacho, giving the worst description.
My mother was not a young woman. She’d given up wayfaring ten years before. Having reached her late forties, she’d settled her mind to a single life. Now she read the matchmaker’s description and was afraid. The body speaks its own language. What if this stranger truly was a wicked man? And what if she loved him anyway? Such things happened. This was no perfect world.