by Octavia Cade
Not that Rosemary disapproved. On the contrary. Ruth’s interest in the favored coin-horse was at least an indication that the child was not completely insensible. If the coin-horse was the better animal, it was completely normal that Ruth should prefer it, and Rosemary would have been irritated had Ruth allowed sentimentality to influence her towards the living alternatives. Admittedly, Rosemary would have liked her daughter to have a more experimental taste; not to spend her life mooching around with one memory hanging on a chain between her breasts, but that was young people for you. Willful, spoiled. Had they only been able to afford a mediocre library Ruth would no doubt be champing like one of her charges to widen her experience. But with one of the finest libraries in the land at her fingertips, she slouched about like a deprived slum child of bygone times. For years Rosemary hadn’t been able to picture the barrenness of her daughter’s mental landscape without shuddering.
“I want it back!” Ruth wailed furiously. She actually stamped her foot, then slammed the door in her mother’s face.
Rosemary was forcibly reminded of her daughter as a small child. Tantrums had always been something Rosemary simply refused to tolerate, and even though she tried to stop it she could feel her already limited stock of good will towards her daughter slipping away. Any capitulation would simply encourage the girl to scream and snap the next time she wanted something. Briefly, Rosemary indulged in the fantasy of screwing a hook through her daughter’s upper lip—the one that curled so comprehensively in contempt—and leading her to the garden pond, giving her a good boot in. At least she’d be with her own kind.
She was used to her daughter’s tendency to settle stolidly into one interest, stuck firmly in an adolescence that Rosemary privately believed had gone on for far too long. Surely Ruth should have realized long ago that her mother paid no attention to histrionics? Unfortunately, it hadn’t seemed to stop her. Many times Rosemary had idly wished that she could cast every memory of Ruth’s tantrums, rid herself entirely of those unfortunate experiences, but no one would take them as trade, and there wasn’t room in the house to store them all. Except in the library, and Rosemary was damned if she would sully her treasures, if only by association.
Later, in the same library, she was forced to reconsider what she had traded away—and the possibility of getting it back. Was it such a silly idea? Granted, Ruth didn’t know the value of anything and couldn’t be trusted to make an accurate assessment if her life depended on it. Which it never would. And Rosemary had not made her initial choices lightly. Her grandmother’s coin was a rare piece in a library of polished rarity, but uncommonness alone was not a reliable indicator of worth. Under normal circumstances Rosemary would not have regretted its loss—both she and her agent had assessed the market value of the sapflower coin and its ability to hold as an investment, and Rosemary was certain of her conclusion. Trained since she could toddle to maintain and improve her family’s most valued asset, Rosemary knew she was an expert in her field; had known since she was younger than Ruth was now that in her ability to discern and to trade on that discernment she was a match for anybody. The sapflower coin was the better memory, and was undeniably worth what she had paid for it. She would not give it up—not for her grandmother’s coin, and not to placate her daughter.
These, however, were not normal circumstances, and the loss not a typical one. Rosemary might be able to give up a family memory without a qualm, but she was not so foolish as to give up the ability to influence her successor. Ruth might not be the best or the brightest, but she was sharp in her own way. Grasping, determined. She had learned to ride, adjusted memories to her abilities. And ultimately, she was what Rosemary had to work with. An only child, damn her blank fish eyes.
Rosemary breathed deeply, willed patience into the set of her shoulders and tried to picture her retirement, picture herself handing over responsibility not to a single-minded-and-memoried idiot, but to a well-rounded person who could be trusted to carry on the work of her ancestors.
At heart, Rosemary was a businesswoman. A woman who knew an opportunity for a good bribe when she saw one.
She leafed through the cases of a far shelf, locating one bound in blue leather. Rosemary took it to the bone yard and held it out to her daughter. “Tell you what,” she said, “you want your grandmother’s requiem? This is Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, the first recorded musical memory of our time. It’s not the most difficult piece I could have chosen, but you’ll have to work to learn it. When you can, if you can, I’ll see about getting your grandmother’s coin back.”
Ruth gazed at her speculatively, then uncovered the coin and threaded it carefully onto her necklace. Holding it against her breast, left hand curled over the outer surface, her eyelids, half-closed, began to flutter, and with her right hand she began to slowly pick out notes. Rosemary watched her with some surprise, a hopeful stirring of pleasure.
Ten minutes later, she raided the petty cash, and tied on her hat for a trip back into town. Ruth might be determined, but she was also—if the thumping from the direction of bedroom and bone yard was anything to go by—outrageously short on talent. Rosemary was going to need earplugs.
Bargain
The bulk of Rangitoto loomed over them from the window, the perfect curve of the shield volcano sweeping up through pohutukawas and old lava fields, cracked and black in the sun. Rosemary could hear the birds, the kakarikis and saddlebacks calling to each other in bright flashes. Behind him, soft lights and muted sounds and needles, sketching jagged patterns of footsteps.
“It’s only for show,” said Netro, of the last. “Old technology. I like to keep it around to demonstrate how far the field has come.”
“And so no one can sneak up on you?” said Rosemary, but he had cameras for that, set over the front door and not too carefully hidden about the house.
“I prefer my guests to know that they’re being watched,” he had said, when he had seen her noting their presence.
Netro had not been what she had expected. Her coins—including her grandmother’s—had sold expensively; they were collector’s pieces that few could afford unless they were in the business of curation, as Rosemary was. Netro clearly was not—she had seen his library, and it was significantly smaller than her own, on a par with what was to be expected from those with a moderately high income and no professional interest. During the negotiations for the sapflower coin, he had specifically requested her grandmother’s requiem, which indicated a special and specific interest.
And yet he did not seem to care for music. There were no instruments in the house that she had seen, no players or speakers or visible recordings. Instead rocks and computers and pick-axes, heavy boots by the door, dust and little hammers and polishing cloths. Certainly a focused collection, but it was unusual for someone to amass coins of a particular type and not have the interest, the same subject matter, apparent in their surroundings. Rosemary could see the man in front of her with a specialized collection of coined geology, but not of music. She looked again, more carefully, studying the artwork on the walls for clues. There were none: just photographs of volcanoes, professionally done and well—if simply—framed. Rosemary recognized some of them: Ngauruhoe, White Island, Tambora, Krakatau.
“Have you been to any of them?” Netro asked, noting her interest.
“I went to White Island when I was a child,” said Rosemary. “In person, I mean. We visited some of the others by coin—Vesuvius, I remember, as part of a history module at school.” Education was often done by imprinting, with specialized recorders able to insert permanent memories, unlike currencies that were fleeting experiences only. “But my grandmother was composing an operetta on the Tarawera eruption, and wanted to see an active volcano. She took me along with her.”
The boat ride towards the island, how she had run along the deck, short legs pumping as the boat thumped through heavy seas, squealing with delight as the deck fell out from under her. Her grandmother had stood in the bow of the boat, her f
ace towards the volcano and her eyes closed. I want to listen to the island, she said when Rosemary asked her. I want to hear it coming closer to me.
“And you kept the memory?” said Netro.
“Of course,” said Rosemary. “I didn’t purge her from my mind, if that’s what you’re implying. We had a very good relationship—I was closer to her than I was to my parents, to be honest.”
“Yet you sold me one of the defining moments of her life,” said Netro.
“It wasn’t her life,” said Rosemary, frowning. “It was mine. She was dead. While she might have planned her funeral, she didn’t live it. I did.”
“Yet it didn’t matter enough for you to keep,” said Netro. “Even though you say you loved her.”
“I loved her,” said Rosemary. “Her. Not the shell of what she left behind, not her things, not her music.”
“You didn’t like her music?” Netro questioned. “She wasn’t called the finest composer of the last century for nothing.”
“Called it by her peers, certainly,” said Rosemary. “But you know as well as I do that the general population found her music too difficult. Oh, they were fond of her, certainly, and her early work especially. But the later pieces . . . ”
“You didn’t like them?”
“If you must know, I didn’t,” said Rosemary. “I found them a little too ponderous, a little too depressing. I’ve always preferred the lighter pieces. She said I had music hall taste, but you like what you like, and my grandmother’s later work . . . ”
“Gave you a headache?” said Netro.
“Let’s just say I can admire the craftsmanship, if not the finished product,” said Rosemary.
“And now you want it back.” A voice like a scalpel, probing for weakness. Predatory in its way, Rosemary felt, although she could not yet justify characterizing it as such simply from tone and timbre. That level of dissection was beyond her.
Hard hats and gas masks. Rosemary had never held either of these in small hands before—the hat she chose was yellow, the child-sized versions available in a range of bright colors. She practiced with the gas mask, putting on the smell of plastic and rubber and glass, getting used to the weight on her face when she strapped it on, the way it made her feel as if she was falling forward, as if gravity had shifted slightly about her.
“I have more use for it now than I did before,” admitted Rosemary.
“I wasn’t aware that music was a particularly useful thing,” said Netro.
Rosemary snorted. “Everything’s useful if someone else thinks it is, if someone else wants it.”
“If someone else wants it,” Netro repeated. “It’s a question of desire, then. I want it. You want it back. What will you give me for it?”
“I will of course return the sapflower coin in exchange,” said Rosemary.
“Yes, yes,” Netro interrupted, dismissively. “But what else? There’s a question of the inconvenience, you see.”
“I understand,” said Rosemary. “I do not ask for the return of all the coins I gave you—you could keep the rest as profit.”
“Useful, as I’ve already spent them,” Nero observed. “But what if I too wanted them back? What would happen then?”
Sulphur crystals, yellow and white and furry like moss; fumaroles boiling and twisting, steam bubbling up and the air moist and humid around them, the tiny edge of pressure against her chest with the wet air and the heat and the smell, and how it felt breathing it all in, and Nana, it’s like being on another planet!
Rosemary looked at him in amusement. “Are you going to tell me that the desire to keep hold of what you have will lead to the ruin of society?” she said. “Because, charming as that view may be, it won’t change my mind.”
“I’m not trying to change your mind,” said Netro. “I’m trying to tell you my price. You traded me nine coins for the sapflower. I have kept one—your grandmother’s—and traded the rest to other collectors. I can tell you where they went, and I’d like for you to get them back.”
“I’d say you shouldn’t have sold them if you wanted to keep them, but I fear that would be hypocritical,” said Rosemary. “But if I may ask—why do you want them back?”
“I don’t have any daughters that need bribing, true,” said Netro. “And I don’t particularly want them back. It’s what you’re going to do to get them that I want.”
“And what would that be?” said Rosemary, levelly. “Understand I may choose not to do it.”
“Then you won’t get what you want,” said Netro. “This is my only offer. I’m not open to further negotiation—you are the one that wants something from me. It’s a question of desire, you see. You have it. So do I, of course, but yours is more pressing.”
“What I want,” he continued, “is for you to trade your own memories—single copies; you won’t retain the originals—for those eight coins. Trade the coins you make for them, not the coins you have. And when you return with those eight, you will add a ninth—the single experience of your journey. That is the coin I really want.”
Rosemary looked at him silently for long moments, then looked at the rest of the room. Looked at the photographs and cameras and instruments, the mechanisms and lenses and outputs of sight, and then she smiled, very softly.
“And now I know what you want,” she said.
The remnants of mines from a time when sulphur was dug out of the steaming earth. Stone buildings, their cobbled walls crumbled, were open to the sky and giant wooden beams, their surfaces corrugated and corroded with salt, lay as if carelessly thrown. But what Rosemary liked best was the giant cogs, some fallen flat on the ground and some still suspended, or balanced upright like giant mirrors with the glass smashed out. The teeth were orange iron, rusty and rough, blunted by the elements and the iron’s own decay. Rosemary pressed her palms over them, scratching her skin and turning it orange.
“Yes,” said Netro. “I like to watch. That is my desire. Do you think that your knowing this puts me at a disadvantage?”
“I think that is what you would like me to think,” said Rosemary.
“I think I would like to tell you a story,” said Netro. Carefully, he poured Rosemary a cup of now-cool tea that had been steeping as they talked. The porcelain of the cups was translucently fine.
“Some years ago, not long after I had left school, I was out in the field, monitoring a volcano that was somewhat intermittently active. I was part of a small team at the field station, and on that team was another young doctor. She wasn’t beautiful, not really, but her back had a lovely smooth curve to it and I liked to look at her. She didn’t realize how much until I left a recording of what I could see on her bed.”
“I imagine she was just thrilled with you,” said Rosemary.
“She never knew it was me,” said Netro. “She left not long after.” He smiled at Rosemary; a sweet cold leer.
“That’s what I want from you,” he said. “I want you to do this thing for me, I want you to sell yourself to do it, and I want you to know that I’m watching as you do.”
The walk up to the crater, holding tight to her grandmother’s hand, passing giant mounds of earth from a long ago landslide. Passing yellow chimneys of crystals; passing steaming, acrid vents and discreet instruments and peering over the crater walls down into the lake. Just look at that, honey, said Nana, her grip tight and sweaty with excitement. Have you ever seen anything like it?
“Are you going to tell me I’m a lecher, now?” said Netro. “Stamp your feet, refuse to work with me?”
Rosemary took a sip of the cool tea, willing herself not to react. “Don’t be juvenile, dear,” she said, in as bored a tone as she could manage, feeling an inward twinge of satisfaction as he stiffened slightly in his chair. “I get enough of the amateur dramatics at home.” She placed her cup back on the table, a precise, quiet movement. “Neither of us are children, and if you think you can manage to shock me, you might consider that there are dusty corners of my library that are signific
antly more shocking than you can ever hope to manage. I’ll admit there is some originality in your approach, but the base desire, such as it is, is a very common one.” She gave him a slow once-over, rejoiced internally at the slight coloration of his cheeks. “Very common.”
“Too common for you, I take it?” said Netro, and his tone was sulky.
“We all deal in commonalities when we must,” said Rosemary. “Including me, so—very well, I consent.”
If she wanted the coin, she had little choice.
Can you hear it? said Nana. The way the earth sounds, the hiss and bubble and crunch of it all? The way the sea sounds, the way the wind blows, the sound of the iron and the sulphur and that warm lake? Can you hear the petrels and the gannets and what they’re saying to each other? Can you hear what the miners said, Rosemary, and the echoes of the muttonbirders?
And Rosemary, small and stolid, answering, No, Nana, of course I can’t. The miners didn’t have coins, not like us. Poor things.
Aoraki
Three brothers, triplets: the keepers of the least of the coins that Rosemary was to retrieve.
“And you want three coins, summing to the total of the one you have?” she clarified. It was a fair request, and one she was quite happy to accommodate. Three less valuable memories would likely leave her less impoverished than one valuable one, and given that there were three of them, it would be easier to tailor their requests than to try and produce a single expensive coin that they could all agree on. They had told her, chuckling, of how long it had taken them to agree on the coin they had traded off Netro, and she was not inclined to experience that for herself.
“Yes,” said the youngest, his body twisted and confined in a bright yellow wheelchair. “We don’t get out much, and those buggers won’t share.”
“Bitch, bitch, bitch,” laughed the middle brother, round and jiggling, from the sofa. “Never happy, he is. Give him something to complain about, will you?”