by M. J. Kelley
Palor leaned closer to Kene, gazing intently at him. “Fugues can’t control what they remember and what they forget. And what you give a Fugue, you lose. Loy thought his remari, his great contribution, was fixing the Fugue and being the first ever to do so. He thought he could teach her control. When he discovered he couldn’t, he did something worse.”
Palor slid off his bed, placing his knees on the ground. “These memories we carry, you’ve not seen the worst. For some, the worst can drain you, make you age. Loy, at the end of his life, thought he could rid himself of the worst and extend his final years. He became obsessed and used the Fugue to forget. He plunged all his worst, most damaging memories into her, telling her, ‘We begin with pain,’ telling her she was still being instructed. He evacuated from his mind all the pain he’d come to bear over his lifetime.”
After a long silence, Kene whispered, “What happened to him?”
Palor’s gaze met Kene’s. “He died of old age anyway, never completing the Fugue’s training, never fixing her, never extending his own life, no remari devoted to the remembrance. Ro sought an apprenticeship from me, but I turned her away. There is no known way to transform a Fugue.”
Palor placed his hand on Kene’s shoulder, and his mouth curved to a smile, yet, one that only expressed sadness. “She's a soldier now. Deliz requested another Parhata to help protect us, and they sent her. Come to spy on me. Probably for Alteiri or one of the other commanders. My authority does not include the Parhata. It doesn’t matter. Let her spy and report. Our progress is too far along.” Palor pushed down on Kene’s shoulders, guiding him to a sitting position. “I’ve never had children. I only have the memories of parents, and memories won’t always produce the right actions. I can give you memories of how I learned the human languages, but that will not enable you to speak them. I don’t know why, but it doesn’t work that way.” Palor lifted the kin from the ground. “Have I lied to you?”
Kene didn’t know what to say.
“I trust you, Kene. I have to trust you more than anyone living.” He pressed the kin against his own scar, closing his eyes. “I now know what to show you.”
Kene leaned forward as if in a trance. He closed his eyes, too.
He saw starships hidden in lakes on foreign worlds. Alarms rang in a small village, children lined up, as he experienced the overwhelming fear of the planetary evacuation. Clustered in a tight formation, hinged together, ships of varying sizes orbited a red, cratered moon half consumed in shadow, the ships awaiting yet another escape.
Left behind with a survey team, he hobbled across a ruined planet, his spacesuit’s headlamps piercing the murky atmosphere. Bodies emerged from the shadows—frozen in time like sculptures—horns and bony remains raised to the sky, skeletal arms reaching for stars, mouths agape, torsos half-buried in magma, doomed. His people died here, their remains now combined with the surface, their visible limbs now composed of a black, frothy scoria, tinted scarlet in his helmet beams.
What happened to them?
But as soon as the question materialized, he knew the answer: the boleeron.
He knew it would happen again and again on many other worlds as his people fled, seeking refuge, forever escaping, forever pursued by that violent race.
They fled world after world.
Then the memories shifted. Since Inlarah, his people had lasted the longest on Earth. Long enough to forget they were ever pursued. But the war. The war. Starships plummeted, bursting, throwing flames onto Australia’s sands, forcing new craters deep into the ground. In every country—weapons caches, technology centers, communication networks—all consumed in quick flashes. He saw satellites shattered against the starry night like flicks of streaking spark. The remainder of his people’s fleet waged final battles over the seas of Celebes, Timor, Arafura, Coral, and Tasman, defending his people on Australia and New Zealand. During these final days of the Great Earth War, he witnessed the last starships ignite above distant swells, their ancient bodies raining into the sea, sacrificed against an unknown weapon, one hidden even from the Memoriams’ mental reach.
Most of their precious new home—Earth—lay in ruin, their union with humanity severed.
Then Kene was in a male’s body only a little older than himself—inside a younger Palor. He and Loy strode away from the river, the green valley and the towers at their backs. Anthro, the encampment, did not yet exist. The trees and grasses guided their path as they journeyed until the city could no longer be seen. The forest darkened around them, and the sun set behind endless mountains.
They reached four rocks overlooking a dark valley.
Very cautiously, Loy approached the rocks and gestured for his companion to follow. Loy’s hand then passed over one of the rocks, and the second rock from the end immediately disappeared into the grass. A hole—all that remained. Loy entered.
Sticking a careful toe below ground, Kene found steps and descended into a dimly lit corridor. Light spread over them, but Kene couldn’t identify the source. The tubular hallway’s walls, ceiling, and floor self-illuminated. Loy walked far ahead, and Kene rushed to join him.
The passageway opened into a great, cavernous storage room. Inside this domed bay, a large big-bellied starship, the cockpit high in the nose tip, rested like a great celestial whale hibernating in a secret womb.
Kene’s gaze traveled the ship's surface, and he remembered the weapons installed over the course of their interstellar exodus. The name, etched into the hull with the fine curves and angles of the Anshahar language, was Essariah.
“I’ve been on this ship before,” Kene found himself saying.
“Many times,” Loy said.
“This ship is old.”
“Ancient.”
Kene approached the fuselage and put his hand on the surprisingly clean surface. The ancient ship seemed new, a lifeboat awaiting disaster, a vessel that had survived interstellar space. The only known starship to have remained intact after the Great Earth War.
Humans—and his own people—would raise armies to capture a vessel as rare as this. And Palor was showing him where it hid. As he touched the massive flank, the memory faded.
He opened his eyes.
Palor lowered the kin and then wrapped his hand around Kene’s neck, resting his forehead against Kene’s. Were their scars touching? Kene wasn’t sure.
Palor whispered, “You see? You see what I have for you? You’re the only one I can give this to.” He gently squeezed Kene's neck. “Memory is identity. We lose it, and we lose everything.”
Kene looked into Palor’s eyes.
“I was going to wait to show you. I’m glad I didn’t.”
Kene, who hadn’t touched another person in over a year, instinctively fell forward into Palor’s arms. His cheek came to rest on the old one’s shoulder.
Palor said, almost inaudibly, “Don’t run away again. We have to trust each other.”
Their embrace tightened.
“Only launch the ship, only lead others there as a last resort.”
Kene carried out a reconnaissance of Ro’s every move.
He spied on Ro and Deliz standing between the last two habitats near the forest, shaded as they spoke quietly in the mornings. Some nights, before dusk, Deliz and Ro sparred with wooden weapons in a dirt circle. Other times, they used their fists, bare boned hands impacting their rigid flesh. Deliz, towering over her lithe frame, collapsed with a blow to his neck. Again and again, she defeated him with bewildering speed.
Ro often wandered into the forest and climbed a great tree at the thicket’s edge. Kene spied on her from the bushes and ferns, watching her dangle in the high branches. She studied Naven endlessly from those trees. Once, he found her in the forest, a small kin in her hand, a size he’d never seen before. She squatted over a tiny animal—Kene didn’t know its type. The animal had soft, short fur and large black eyes. It was struggling among the leaves. Ro stood abruptly and strolled away, back into the woods. When Kene no longer heard her fo
otfalls, he emerged from his hiding place and cautiously approached the animal.
It had a round nub for a tail and large back feet. Its limbs rotated uncontrollably, pawing at the air as if trying to right itself. He grabbed a nearby stick and helped the animal onto its feet, but it still struggled, unable to coax its limbs to move in unison.
“It's broken.”
Kene jumped and spun around.
Ro stood behind him. “You follow me every day.”
Kene took a step back.
“So he’s warned you about me? And you’re afraid? Fear is born from what we don’t understand.” She moved toward him, her kin held out.
“What did you do to it?” Kene continued backing away from her.
“Here, take the other end of my kin. Press it to your scar. I’ll show you there’s nothing to fear from me.”
Panic ignited in him, and his senses heightened as fear took over. He turned and ran far into the forest until he hacked and coughed from the chill air. Then he stopped and listened. The Fugue hadn’t pursued him.
He never told Palor about Ro and the animal. But a few days later, he observed with dismay as Anthro’s porters erected a permanent habitat for her.
Kene’s will to escape, his doubt in himself, diminished like a fading tide, his apprehension soaking down into the sand. At night, instead of escaping the encampment and running along the river to the beach, he escaped into other people’s lives. He confronted the foreign memories pulsing through his mind. He jumped into the unordered array, wading through it and allowing himself to be immersed. Learning to process the memories, he gained new vigor, exhaustion no longer claiming him. And when he’d dug through all the ones he had, reliving his favorite lives, he found that he wanted more. But Palor warned him that bearing a lighter load at first was still the safest course. Too many imprints too fast could damage him, even kill him.
As his new Memoriam understanding blossomed, so did his body. Over the next seven years, his horns grew, no longer the budding, fuzzy nubs of his youth. He sought relationships with the others and came to know all Anthro’s inhabitants, but the relationships remained formal, the others keeping a respectful distance. Even Elma, the medic and his tutor in human languages, cast her eyes down when Kene asked her to play a game or take a walk, her response always: “I can’t.”
Palor grew old, his skin shriveling tight around his facial bones and emphasizing the ridge of his forehead that hadn’t been there years earlier. His eyelids drooped at times, and Kene often found him staring at the habitat’s plastic wall, lost in thought and unaware of Kene’s presence, until Kene softly touched his shoulder, the tap coaxing him back from reverie.
What favorite memories were you exploring, old one? Kene never asked, sensing that his travels through the remembrance were as private as his own.
Over the years, his people travelled from as far as Lakarta’s northernmost tip and Australia’s Victoria, arriving randomly in Anthro, seeking council with Palor. Others, sick and dying, elderly and frail, arrived too, sometimes in droves, hiking single file on the river trail, and Palor would place the kin between their horns, making their lives his own. Messengers arrived from the leadership council and envoys from the parliament as well as visiting commanders. He saw them all.
Marcus, the human messenger, aged too, retiring his duties to his daughter, Alta, now a young woman. Kene liked to watch for her with his back propped against the steep hill, looking over the valley for a reddish brown dot against the green. She blasted from Naven’s gates, her craft shooting across the fields, flattening swaths of meadow, the long grass blades whipping in her wake. He marveled at the craft, once mass-produced, now one of a kind. Two large air fans spinning and adjusting made up almost its entirety—giant engines with a seat placed on top. The craft sheathed her legs in tight troughs that gripped her muscles, sensing every pull or push and adjusting accordingly. She leaned forward, her arms forming a partial circle in front of her, forearms resting inside sleeves upheld by flexible supports. She flew over the river, the fans jettisoning water into the air, sometimes creating small, fleeting rainbows.
After parking her craft just outside Anthro, Alta would stroll through the encampment with tense muscles, as if bracing her body against some impending hurt. She rarely took her mask off. The blue veins in her arms and neck pulsed under her skin’s unique transparency. Short stubble covered her hornless skull, never allowed to grow longer than a fingernail. She distanced herself from these others—these aliens—moving away if any came near.
Kene spoke to her sometimes: “How is your day?” “Yours is lovely.” “Your journey are well to here?”—practicing his English. She never responded, but one time smiled, before treading away, her skinny frame stiffly upright as her hip bones swayed from side to side. He cursed himself for losing the token she gave him all those years before, wishing he still had it to show her, to remind her of her kindness. Before sleep overtook him, Alta drifted into his imagination along with the idea, the impossible coincidence—or destiny, he didn’t know which—of arriving on a planet with a species so genetically close to his own. A species they could reproduce with. The mystery inspired awe in him.
A loud noise broke Kene’s concentration, and his eyes blinked open. Above, a light breeze blew the forest’s leaves. Earlier, he had hiked to his usual spot near the small pond, a place where he processed the morning’s imprint. The noise sounded like a blast, an explosion echoing in the distance. He stood, listening. But no more explosions came. He thought he could hear yelling but wasn’t sure. He tensed, his body instinctively bracing.
He raced through the woods, between the trees, and hopped over rocks and felled trunks. As he got closer to Anthro, a metallic aroma entered his nostrils. People cried out and screamed. He saw villagers dashing between the habitats as smoke rose, a yellow haze in the air.
“Kene!” Someone called.
He sprinted up the slope. Smoke climbed the air in puffs from the encampment’s center. As he neared, he discovered it was Palor’s habitat. A crowd gathered around a body on the ground.
“Palor!” Kene pushed through the onlookers. Palor lay there, his skin bloodied, his eyes closed, and Ro leaned over him with a kin connected to both their scars. She opened her eyes, tried to stand, but then collapsed next to Palor.
She’s taken the remembrance. The idea stunned him, and, for a moment, he felt as if in a dream, his limbs immobile, frozen with shock. If she dies, we lose everything.
Deliz dropped down beside her. “The messenger. The human female was the last person with him.” Deliz felt for Ro’s pulse. “The habitat exploded, and we dragged Palor out. He was still alive. Ro acted when you did not respond. She said this would be the only chance.”
Kene wrenched himself out of his shock and then knelt, feeling Palor’s veins for life. “He’s dead.” Was the imprint complete? Kene met Ro’s exhausted gaze. “Ro has to rest.”
Deliz picked her up and carried her away.
A deep burn ravaged Kene’s insides. Blasts and acrid aromas from explosions—memories not his own—swirled with his senses. A welling of images and emotions shook within him, wanting to take over his consciousness and place him in a Memoriam trance. But he resisted the flood of memory.
Anthro’s inhabitants stood around him. Palor’s head rested in his hands, burn wounds slashed across his face.
“What now?” Kene whispered to Palor. “I’m not ready.”
Kene found himself squeezing Palor’s hands, searching again, even though he knew he’d find no life there. As he held onto his mentor, a memory forced its way into his consciousness. An old memory. A short child, crying as her mother placed her in the cryotube. The tube’s hatch closed, and it was dark. Then effervescent lights shone through the glass peepholes and landed on her pearly skin. Slowly the chamber’s atmosphere altered, providing a warm thickness for her to breathe, and her eyes fluttered to the rhythm of her heart. When she awoke, her mother and everyone she knew would be lon
g dead. She would have to let go.
Kene opened his eyes and slowly released the old man’s hands.
He stepped over the body and into the smoldering habitat. The floor burned his feet, but he barely noticed, grief dampening the pain to a numb throb. He brushed away ashes on the floor and smoking pieces of satchel to uncover Palor’s kin, glowing multicolored with heat. Wrapping his hand in his robe, he picked it up, warmth searing through the cloth. He held it hidden in a fold of his robe as he stepped back outside.
Could Alta do something like this? He didn’t want to accept it.
Now it was up to him to preserve peace with the humans.
“Find Alta,” Kene said to the gathered crowd. “But don’t hurt her. We’ll deliver her to Naven.”
In the morning, after cleansing his face with some water, Kene found a tiny child waiting outside his habitat.
“Ro’s awake,” she announced and led Kene to where she rested in Elma’s care.
“She’s still weak,” Elma patted Ro’s arm, “but conscious.”
Kene pulled a stool over to the bedside. “How are you feeling?”
Ro gazed up at him with a smug expression. His was a dangerous position. Not only did Ro know everything about Palor and have all the memories, but she knew everything Palor thought about Kene, all his plans for Kene. He had no idea where she stood, what she would do.
“I’m better.” Ro turned her gaze to the ceiling. “But how are you?”
Kene didn’t know what she meant. “In shock.”
“My mentor died long before my training was complete. It can change you, but you have to be strong and practice your gifts, and you’ll eventually master them, learning to control your memories.”
Kene stared at her.
“Your apprenticeship is over.”
A hot spark of fright overtook his body. “Imprint the remembrance on me.”