by Octavia Cade
It was as close to immortality as she was likely to get.
To toss that away, to deprive others of it . . . that would be hard to forgive if the biologist was doing it to something he didn’t love. But to something he did, even if the memories had driven him to his limits . . .
There was blood on her skirts.
Her fingernails had dug into one palm, the other clutching the jacket containing the ice coin. Carefully, she unwrapped it, tipped it into her bloody palm—
(felt the water chill about her feet)
(felt the air sharpen)
(saw the sea darken)
—and wondered how the blood might change the scent of it: whether it would wash off, whether it would give a faint metallic note to underline the fragility of the moment. It was her favorite coin.
“Nothing could make me destroy you,” she said.
“I will not be like him,” she said.
“I preserve,” she said, and was surprised to hear in her voice a twinge of uncertainty.
“I do,” she said, but in her mind was empty hillsides and empty kitchens, and gaps where birds and births and clocks should be. In their absence, other memories had assumed prominence, and she could fill the gaps with new ones of her choosing, recreate herself in the mold she most preferred.
She held the bloody hand, the bloody coin out over the water. If she let it drop, there would be substitutes.
She could let it go, if she wanted.
She could.
Breaking
“I’m sorry, but I can’t go through with it,” said Rosemary.
“Isn’t it a bit late for that?” said Netro. “You’ve got all the coins. You’ve traded for all of them.”
“But I have not made the last,” said Rosemary, “and I’m not going to.”
“I could take an action,” said Netro, but both knew it was a hollow threat. Rosemary could certainly be required to pay a sum equivalent to what she had promised, but the type of mental rape that accompanied a forced memory extraction was not one any court or mediation would countenance. She could not be compelled to give up her own memories.
“Are you worried about what I’ll think?” he said. “About what I’ll do with your coin when I have it?”
Rosemary resisted the urge to roll her eyes. She was the one at fault; she was the one breaking contract. There was no need to compound her error with rudeness. “No,” she said, in as considered a tone as she could manage. “Truthfully, I didn’t spend waste a lot of time wondering what you would think of my actions.” Not a lot of time.
(The night she gave away her dragon, she had laid on the heights and cried for fear, hiding her face in the tussock so he would not see the pity on the face of the porters.)
(Looking away from her knuckles, white about the railing of the boat, as it lunged and thumped through the waves, and her vomit becoming food for the gulls.)
(Declining to help shatter a statue, in case the face looked a little too like her grandmother—her daughter—for comfort.)
(The contempt she felt—contempt for whom?—at giving away her daughter’s birth to a woman who could not keep her own bargains, her own vows.)
Rosemary was unaccustomed to worrying about what people thought of her memories. She certainly did not judge others on theirs—in a society that circulated memory as currency, such judgment was considered the height of prudishness. Even as pieces of herself were stripped away, enough independence remained to behave properly.
She wondered if the brief flashes of discomfort she had felt at the thought of his scrutiny were simply proxies for what she thought of herself. It was discomforting to think that her judgment had failed her. Surely the person she was now was worth as much as the person she was then—she would not judge another so, who had traded part of themselves for profit. It was absolutely normal behavior. And yet . . .
Perhaps it was not his opinion she was worried about. Perhaps it was her own.
“Not worried, then,” said Netro. “But there’s a difference between caring what I think and wanting me to see it in the first place. I think you don’t want me pawing through your memories. You certainly don’t like me very much—don’t bother to say otherwise. And when you don’t like someone, it’s a perfectly natural desire to not give them what they want. Even if it’s a little childish. Juvenile, even.”
“No,” said Ruth. “I’m not interested, and I don’t care! You don’t care about anything of mine, why should I spend any more time in this horrible dusty library for you!
It never ended. Rosemary had sat through dance recitals, when Ruth was five, pink and pretty in a tutu. She had sat through swimming lessons at seven and gymnastics at ten and gone to endless interminable performances of drama club through her daughter’s teenage years. She had shopped for uniforms and cut oranges and sewed costumes, run lines and checked homework and organized horse floats and ribbons and polish, and she had done it all with the best grace that she could manage.
She had had enough.
“You are twenty-three years old,” she said to Ruth. “You do not need me sitting on the sidelines at every damn gymkhana or jump meet or whatever it is they call it. I have done my dash!”
“You’d come if you wanted to,” said Ruth.
“I don’t want to,” said Rosemary, definitively.
“You’d come if you loved me,” said Ruth, and Rosemary was silent.
“Fine, then!” said her daughter. “Fine! See if I care!”
She flounced out of the library, leaving Rosemary to irritation and doubt and blessed silence—and the fantasy of stuffing her daughter’s face into the fishpond, sending her off to be with her own kind. Remembering again the swimming lessons, where Ruth had learned to hold her breath and hug the bottom of the pool like a pike, bottom dwelling and snapping from beneath, doing her level best to hurt and hamstring.
“Fine,” she said, under her breath.
“No,” said Rosemary. “I don’t like you. It’s true. And if I were a lesser person, perhaps that would influence me to break our bargain. But I have traded with worse than you—”
(a potter at his wheel, turning and shaping, gouging pieces out of clay and tinting it blood red and burning)
(a woman writhing on her bed, given over to madness and despair and dragging her husband down with her)
(a biologist by the ocean, forging his anger into fires and making the world less than it had been in blind revenge for a wrong past righting)
“—with worse than you,” Rosemary repeated, “and I have not flinched from it. So please, do not flatter yourself. Don’t even try. This has, in the end, nothing to do with you.”
“It has everything to do with you,” said Netro. “Your daughter. Flesh of your flesh, bone of your bone—and she will not forgive you for this.”
“She will not,” said Rosemary, knowing it to be true. “But she is a grown woman and that will be her choice.”
“Do not think that she will relent,” said Netro. “In her place I would not. I do not! Desire is a needy thing, and it rules us all. Look at you—look at you! You have the ice coin in your hand, and you gave it up once before, and now you keep it. Not because it’s worth more, and not because it will fuck over that brat of yours, but because you want to.”
“I do want to,” said Rosemary. “But there is more to life than want. It’s not the important thing, in the end.”
“Then what is?” said Netro, sneering. “No. Don’t tell me. Happiness? Discovery? Love? Because if you do this, you’ll be throwing all that away. You told me, when last we met, that I was childish. Juvenile. And now you’re going to wallow in sentimentality, dress it up as a virtue?”
“Of course not,” said Rosemary, strongly tempted to tell him he was being as silly as ever. “Those things are important, true, and they’re nice to have, but they are in themselves part of your precious desire—the desire to be happy, to know fulfillment.”
“So what if they are?” said Netro. “Desire is th
e driving force of our society. If anyone should realize this, it’s you.”
“It’s because it’s me that I know differently,” said Rosemary. “You ask me what is more important than desire? I tell you, it is duty.”
“I so want to be a good mother to you,” said Rosemary to her daughter. The little girl was asleep in her arms and snuffling, and Rosemary breathed in the new baby scent of her, traced the small mouth, the creases in the small ears and the tiny, perfect eyebrows.
“You’ll have to be patient with me,” she said. “I’m still getting used to this. I got all the coins. All the taking-care-of-baby coins. They were supposed to be a help.”
And they had been, to an extent. Rosemary was well versed in baby-sitting techniques, but it was different with her own child. Surely the coin babies had never been this small? But Ruth had cried and cried, and nothing Rosemary knew was enough to soothe her. Upset herself, she had taken Ruth into the library, reasoning that what calmed her would surely calm her baby, but Ruth was inconsolable.
Rosemary, in desperation, had pulled at the shelves, knocking coins and cases to the floor, until she found the most soothing coin she owned, a flat blue disk imprinted with floating in a calm sea. She had pressed it to Ruth’s skin, and the child had hitched her breath in surprise, had stopped squalling and drifted in Rosemary’s arms as the disk rose and fell on the little chest.
“All I want to do is look after you,” said Rosemary. “That’s my job now.”
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” said Netro. “Duty? Are you mad? Have you forgotten why you came to me in the first place? It was out of duty, madam. Duty to your daughter and your legacy both. And now you’re going to use that same duty to get out of the obligations you yourself incurred?”
“You see the contradiction, then,” said Rosemary. “You are not the only one. I see it too. But I have also come to see that my duty and your desire . . . they are opposite sides of the same coin, yes? I desire to do my duty, it’s true.”
“But you’re not doing it,” said Netro. “Do you not have a duty to your daughter? To improve her prospects, to give her every advantage? To make her happy?”
“I do,” said Rosemary. It was true. Ruth would suffer for this decision—she would feel betrayed, she would lose trust in her mother. Rosemary had not always been a perfect parent, but she had always kept her promises. This would be the first time that she had broken them—and Ruth, of all people, had kept her part of the bargain, had put away her horses and learned what Rosemary had required her to learn, albeit with sulks and stubbornness and resentment. She had grown, or been forced to grow, and Rosemary was under no illusion that she would not relapse under the disappointment.
(“It’s no fun having to practice all the time—I’ve got better things to do!”)
(“I don’t understand those stupid verbs, why can’t everyone just speak the same language? I’m dropping out now. So what if it makes my grades look bad!”)
(“It’s not like I thought it would be. I don’t want to do it anymore.”)
(“You promised it would get better!”)
“And what about your library? There’s generations of work there, and let’s face it, your daughter shares neither your desire nor your sense of obligation. Don’t you have a duty to it, to train her as your replacement, to keep improving what you have?”
“I do,” said Rosemary. That was true too. The library, one of the finest in existence, would also suffer from this decision. Its value would decrease—not distressingly so, as it was already of astronomical worth and the loss of her grandmother’s coin, while substantial, was dwarfed by the remaining coins. Still, a loss would be felt, and Rosemary would be the first in a long line of caretakers to preside over a decrease of this magnitude. It was an acceptable loss when balanced against the value of the sapflower coin, but against the triviality of her recent journey the scales of trade were distinctly unbalanced. She could already hear the voices of her factor, her lawyer, her insurance agent. Her grandmother.
(“Are you sure this is the best decision you could make, long term?”)
(“I know this is a little uncomfortable, Rosemary, but have you considered the fact that your daughter might not be the best person to leave the library to?”)
(“It’s not like you to break a contract. You might have left yourself open to a malpractice suit. Shall I look into it for you?”)
(“Are you sure you know what you’re doing, darling?”)
“I do,” she repeated. “And perhaps if I’d done my duty differently, I’d have a better heir and a better library. Goodness knows I’ve desired both long enough. It was certainly in service to both that I undertook this farce in the first place.”
“But perhaps,” said Rosemary, “perhaps I also have a duty to myself.”
Burning
After the citric tartness of the sorbet, the heat of the day pulsed more oppressively than usual. Rosemary fanned herself with the menu, irritated. Sweat beaded slowly down the column of her throat and settled in the hollows above her collarbones; the back of her linen shift was sticky with damp. This was not the way that she wanted to return home, flustered and overwhelmed by the sun. Her daughter the pike was fresh, ready to snap from the cool corridors of the house while Rosemary swam, sluggish with sweat, a tempting target for those bony, resentful jaws. Rosemary had hoped that the lemon sorbet would cool her palate and her temper, sweeten her mood, make her more charitable.
Ruth, as expected, had not understood. Had bitten back hard with the pleasure of injustice, wallowing in it, scaly belly scratched and scraping on the rocks of indignation. Had no child ever had such an overbearing mother, ever been so persecuted? She had fulfilled her part of the bargain, after all, and now her mother was welshing. Ruth’s entitlement was greedy and great—and unfulfilled. She would not listen, would not understand. Would not even touch that which Rosemary had, at the last, refused to give over, even at the cost of her own impoverishment.
Rosemary had stared at the sulking, wailing girl and tried to find an ounce of sympathy within herself, tried to think back to when Ruth was an infant in truth and not by choice, cocooned in the warmth of her mother and responding with kicks to her voice. She could not remember the beginning of it. That made her slightly uneasy, the loss of that shared experience, but then was that a reasonable attitude to take? Ruth, for all her blustering, could not remember it either, and wouldn’t have chosen to if given the choice. The girl had, after all, bartered her earliest memory for that of a classmate, swapping fishes for horses in a deal that set her on the path of her own obsession.
Rosemary had left before saying something she would regret. Something else. There was only so much impassioned bereavement that one could withstand before wishing another joy of it. In the cafe, cooled, Rosemary wondered if she had taken the wrong tack. She was partly in the wrong, she admitted it. But did that excuse the reaction, the underlying sense of pleasure she got from her daughter at being able to kick, at finally having a decent excuse to fully vent her resentment, her hysteria?
Halfway home, girded and once more reasonable, Rosemary knew that she had and was and that it did not. The piercing siren shriek, the shocked and sympathetic glances of her neighbors, the gathering crowd, and the half-ashamed, half-defiant look on the face of her daughter as white plumes spiraled from the windows of the library gave Rosemary to understand, in a split moment, that between them they had ruined their relationship beyond repair.
“You stupid, stupid, melodramatic little bitch,” she said to her daughter. “I should have slapped it out of you years ago, but you’d only have enjoyed it.”
“I wouldn’t have been the only one,” said Ruth, sniffling, for once the center of attention and perhaps not liking it as much as she had anticipated.
“No,” said Rosemary. “You wouldn’t.” Yet a part of her understood what Ruth had done. Had she herself not taught her daughter to value the library above all things? Ruth had learned well, had valu
ed that same library—even its destruction—over her mother, her family, her duty. It was perhaps the only reason that Rosemary did not smack her hard across the mouth as she pushed past her, ignoring the cries of the crowd, and into her home, though her palms itched.
She thought she heard Ruth call after her, but refused to listen.
Smoked filled the corridors, and the walls were warm to the touch but Rosemary was more irritated than afraid. This was her library, whether it was whole or in ashes, the extension of herself, the repository of her memories. She could not comprehend that it could be a danger to her. One of the benefits of having the resources Rosemary possessed was that it gave her a thorough hold on her emotions. Having experienced so much—able to pick, choose, and disassociate—she was able to keep control over her feelings when necessary: a form of pre-production editing that kept fear in check. She was also too cross to care, determined to retrieve the coin she had kept, the fresh clear scent of it—a symbol to Ruth that she was not to be intimidated, was not to be bullied or to stand in sorrow and repentance, clutching her daughter to her breast. Rosemary liked to think she had learnt more of duty than that.
The cover glowed red with ash, fringed and crumbling to the touch. Rosemary’s fingers burned as she scraped the smooth sapflower disk from its mount, the surface heated though not yet to melting point. Ignoring the pain, the burnt imprint of the coin on her flesh and the floral scent that overrode the sweet smell of scorched flesh, Rosemary caught and kept it, turned to go amidst heat and chaos, but halted at the door, unable to leave without taking one last look. Sparks dropped off the ceiling beams, guttering in the thick carpet and leaving little round black marks—but some fell on the fringes and caught, adding a musty smell of burning hessian to the smell of the room. Most of the shelves were alight, and she knew exactly what was burning, and how irreplaceable it was. The door handle was almost too hot to touch and she had to grip it with the folds of her skirt, but she paused for so long that the skirt scorched and her burnt fingers smoked. It hurt to breathe, but she couldn’t stop herself from gasping—trying to get enough oxygen, trying not to cry or give way rising, unprofessional, unedited panic.