by Jeffrey Ford
“The Well-Built City,” I said.
“I would have used that title, but I can’t say it without laughing uncontrollably.” He reached out and put his hand on my shoulder. “Now listen. You must go to that place and find the memory book. I can tell you know what I am speaking of. Find in the book the page that begins with these three symbols: the eye, the hourglass, and the circle. When you have located it, burn it, but do not let the ashes fly away. Gather all of the ashes together and ingest them. I have calculated that once this strand of symbols has been obliterated from the mnemonic world, the disease that infects Below will be neutralized.”
“But I thought the memory book could not be kept in the memory,” I said.
“No, it can’t be kept in the memory palace. It’s too difficult to assign symbolic meaning to symbols that already carry a complex of assigned meanings. You are no longer in the specialized environment of the floating island, though. This is the country of things one cannot help remembering, the everyday memory, if you like. Here, it is not the meaning of the book that is preserved, only the book itself. Do you understand?”
I nodded in order not to offend, but I was never more unclear in my life. “Where will I find it in the city?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I must be going.”
“Wait,” I said. “If the time should come when I leave here and return to my reality, I want to find the ship that Anotine sails on.”
Scarfinati laughed. “Did you really believe that fairy tale?”
“It was a memory,” I said.
“If only every memory was truth,” he said. “Very little of that story has anything to do with what actually happened. That is why I didn’t want you to wake Anotine. I believe it will be less tormenting for her to believe the lie. Below wasn’t powerful enough at the time to carry out those achievements. Anotine’s mind never seized. He and she had a child together while they were studying at Reparata. I think he might have even loved the child, but it made him nervous because of his memory of his sister. He engineered some drug he would take in order for him to be calm enough in her presence to spend time with her. No, there was nothing miraculous about it. He simply stole the memory book and abandoned his family.”
“And what became of you?” I asked.
Scarfinati grinned. “He knew he wouldn’t be able to make off with the book while I was still alive. The night he left, he poisoned my dinner and slit my throat. With anyone else, I might have seen it coming, but I had begun to think of him as my son. I still want to save …”
The old man couldn’t continue, and I immediately saw the reason. A dark line of blood began to appear like a necklace around his throat. He brought his hand up to it quickly and gurgled some curse. Then he slowly got to his feet and staggered away into the night.
27
Anotine slept fitfully through the remainder of the night, occasionally calling out and at times waving her arms. As for me, I found it impossible to rest after my meeting with Scarfinati. If what he had told me was true, I could possibly save Anotine. But he, himself, pointed out that all memories are not truth. Besides that, he might have been a hallucination generated by the beauty. What were the chances of my meeting him so soon after my experience with the hourglass, and why, of all places, would he be relegated in Below’s memory to this forest? My thoughts revolved with no destination, like the Master in his chair.
By the time the sun rose, I was thoroughly confused, but in the end decided that if during our journey I were to come upon the fields of Harakun, I would enter the ruins and locate the memory book. Since the island had been destroyed, there was little chance I would be able to discover the antidote that Misrix had mentioned. One thing that Scarfinati had said stayed with me, namely that it was better to let Anotine believe in the fairy tale that had been projected by the hourglass.
When she finally awoke, I immediately confessed my having taken advantage of her through the night.
“I was so tired,” she said. “What dreams I had—Scarfinati and the weird goings-on at Reparata.” She shook her head.
I told her I was sorry again, but she seemed perplexed by my apology. The fact that she did not see my taking advantage of her as an affront to her dignity troubled me. It only stood to remind me that she was a mnemonic creation when what I wanted was for her to be a woman. The phenomenon that linked the sheer beauty to sex became like a snake swallowing its tail, breaking down, through repetition, my perception of her. If I ignored this, she remained absolutely real to me, and I loved her, but the minute the urge was upon me, I could not help myself from again seeing through the illusion.
“Come, Cley,” she said. “Let’s see what’s in this forest.” She reached out to take my hand and we began walking.
It was peaceful beneath the pines and oaks, sunlight filtering down in spots onto the carpet of fallen needles and leaves. In order to circumvent my troubled thoughts, I began pointing out for Anotine the different types of plants and mushrooms I was familiar with. She was truly curious as to what each of them might be used for, and I described in detail the physical illnesses and mental afflictions they cured.
“See here,” I said, bending low to snatch a rosy piece of flush fern from between the exposed roots of an oak. “This plant induces amnesia, a total forgetting. If you were to take it, you would remember nothing.”
“Have you ever administered it?” she asked.
“Once, to a young fellow who had lost his entire family in a fire. He was so grief-stricken, he could not continue with his life, and thoughts of suicide were always upon him,” I said.
“Did it work?” she asked.
“I was loath to give it to him, but he pleaded so pitifully that I finally prepared him a tea from it.”
“And did he find happiness?”
“He spent the next three years trying to find out who he had been and what had become of him. He discovered the names of his wife and children, but he could never acquire what they had looked like or any of the moments he had spent with them.”
Anotine asked no more questions after that, and realizing my mistake, I relented on my pharmacopic lecture. As we walked along, I saw her very subtly lift her hands, as if she were merely adjusting her hair behind her ears. When she did not think I was looking, I saw her wipe tears from her eyes.
We came across the path that Scarfinati had described to me. It wound through the forest with unnecessary turns and loops as if it had been forged by a drunkard. Nevertheless, I made a point of sticking to it. Anotine hummed the tune from Nunnly’s music box as we walked, and I lost myself for some time in the beauty of her voice and the haunting nature of that melody.
After midday, we came upon a small lake that the path cut across the middle of in a narrow land bridge. Being hot and tired, I suggested that we take a swim. Anotine said she had been feeling somewhat faint and agreed that it was a good idea. Leaving our clothes on the bank, we eased into the cool water.
I let myself slip down beneath the surface and slackened my muscles so that I sank slowly like a dead man. In that dark and quiet place, I remembered sinking in a similar fashion toward the bottom of the river at Wenau on the day that Below’s metal bird had exploded. This brought to my mind images of the settlement and my own humble home off in the woods. I saw behind my eyes all of my neighbors, and for the first time in what seemed years I thought about the situation I had left them in. Jensen and Roan, the women I had assisted in childbirth, all of the children I had always thought of in some part as my own, beckoned to me for help.
I carried these troubling images with me to the surface, but the minute I burst through into the atmosphere of Below’s memory and took a deep breath, I wanted only to find Anotine. Turning to look for her, I was startled when she appeared from under the water right behind me. She neither smiled nor spoke, but swam to me and put her arms around my neck. Her breasts gently pushed into my chest and her legs came up around my waist. The ends of her hair swirled on the surfac
e of the water in spiral patterns as I joined with her and moved toward the moment. Wavelets began to break against the bank, and in the midst of our passion, she told me one of her dreams.
“I was paralyzed in the present, trapped in a block of unmelting ice in the hold of a ship bound for nowhere. I could not breathe. I had no pulse or heartbeat, yet I could see through the clear substance that was my tomb. Time had no hold on me, and all that passed before me, I saw only in the present, so that I saw it all at once. The faces of the crew when they would come down into the hold to stare at me, Below when he would make his yearly visits, the monkey that was bought by the captain during one of the voyages, the destruction of the ship in a typhoon, volcanoes and krakens at the bottom of the sea, my rescue by a strange race of amphibious people, a great city of dripping mounds where my frozen image was worshiped, and you, Cley. You were there somewhere,” she said, climaxing with a sigh that sounded like dying.
When we finished, she swam backward away from me. “It was a love story bound within an instant,” she said, and then dived underwater.
The beauty had me in its clutches before I even climbed out of the lake. We dressed without drying off so that we would stay cool well into the afternoon. I felt refreshed and calm as we again began our journey along the twisting path. The effects of the drug helped me to remember the loss of my neighbors I had felt while floating beneath the surface of the lake. It all came back to me with the same vitality that my visions of Wood and the Fetch and the scenes from the hourglass had when wrapped in the afterglow of Anotine’s love. What I experienced this time was a single thought, but one so powerful that it caused me to stop in my tracks. What, I wondered, was to be our future? Were we destined to wander aimlessly through Below’s memory until it dissolved?
I turned to look at Anotine and in that very second, she put her hand to her forehead and fell into me with a great sigh.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I feel weak, Cley,” she said.
“Are you simply tired or are you ill?”
“I’m dizzy and I cannot feel my hands or feet.” Her eyelids were half-open and fluttering madly.
I quickly moved my hands beneath her arms and carried her off the path. Finding a moss-covered spot that looked soft, I laid her on the ground and knelt at her side.
“Just give me a moment,” she said. “I need to rest.” With this, her eyes closed and she either fell asleep or passed out.
I didn’t know whether to wake her or to let her sleep. “Anotine,” I called to her, brushing the hair away from her face. I was relieved somewhat to see that she was breathing steadily. Leaping to my feet, I began pacing around her. My instinct told me that there was something truly wrong. Although I kept telling myself that she was merely resting, I knew that what had happened carried deeper implications.
The beauty heightened my paranoia of being left alone, and I began to circle frantically. “Just sleeping, just sleeping,” I repeated aloud to myself. I changed directions and walked across to the other side of the path. While I still had my back to her, I heard a voice, not hers, say, “She’s not sleeping, Cley.”
I spun around and saw a misty figure sitting on the ground next to her. It was a man, someone familiar to me. I squinted, and this brought what appeared to be the ghost of Doctor Hellman into focus.
“Doctor,” I said, the hair on the back of my neck rising, my pulse quickening, “how are you here?”
“Nothing in the memory is ever really destroyed unless the mind that contains it is destroyed. I have suffered a mild erasure through a willful act of forgetting, but Below can’t eradicate me completely. Traces of me will exist as long as he does.”
The sight of him back from the dead brought tears to my eyes. I could barely continue in the face of this new assault on my reason. “I have been through too much,” I said to him.
“Listen, Cley. She is losing energy now that she is away from the island. We were designed as complex memory markers. You will lose her unless you do something.”
“What? I’ll do anything,” I said.
“Go to the ruins of the city and find the book,” he said. “Destroy the page as Scarfinati instructed.”
“How do you know about Scarfinati?” I asked.
“I now have all the knowledge of one who has died,” he said.
“But where do I go?” I asked.
“You must hurry,” he said. “I will wait with her, but I can’t remain for too long. My being here requires great effort. You must go—now.”
Anotine then opened her eyes. “Doctor,” she said weakly.
He smiled at her.
I walked over and knelt down. “I am going to leave you for a short time,” I said. “Do you understand?”
“Don’t go, Cley. Stay with me,” she said, a look of panic in her eyes.
“I’ll only be gone for a very brief time. I have to do something that will make you feel better.”
“Promise you will come back,” she said.
“I promise,” I told her. I reached into my shirt pocket and pulled out the balled-up green veil. Reaching down, I put it into her hand. “Keep this for me until I return. This is my promise to you.”
Her hand weakly grasped the veil, as I leaned over and kissed her. Before I could pull my head up, she put her arms around my neck and pulled me gently down again. I could feel her breath on my ear. “I believe in you,” she whispered.
“You must leave,” said the doctor. “Hurry.”
I stood and began running along the path. When I reached the first turn, I looked back at the scene of Anotine lying there with the shimmering form beside her. She seemed to once again be asleep and, just as he had appeared in the silver ocean’s tableau, keeping vigil next to Below’s failing sister, the doctor’s hand rested upon his beard.
The journey along the convoluted path to where the fields of Harakun came into view could have lasted minutes or hours. My panicked concern for Anotine, my astonishment at the sudden appearance of the doctor, the overwhelming uncertainty and weirdness of everything, boiled madly in a stew liberally seasoned with sheer beauty. I couldn’t think clearly as to what my purpose was. All I could remember is that I had to get to the ruins.
I left the path, passing over a fallen tree and through some underbrush which eventually gave way to the barren plain. My very first thought upon setting foot amidst the dry dirt and saw grass was, “What about the werewolves?” I had traveled an enormous circle only to return to where I had begun. The whole exercise seemed futile at that point, but if I didn’t continue, what else was I to do? “Damn the werewolves,” I thought, and took off toward the ruins in the distance at a pace that was more a stumble than a run.
The sun was still high and the heat was intense out in the open. I perspired past the point of sweating and felt myself beginning to parch. The soles of my feet burned in my boots, and my tongue had turned to cotton. The breezes were both a blessing and a curse, for although they were my only respite from the heat, they also made the saw grass shift, and then I thought werewolves were on the move.
Needless to say, the running did not last long, having early on given way to simple stumbling. I kept my sight fixed on the shattered column that was the Top of the City and advanced as best I could. The whole city wavered in a liquid mirage, making it appear a lost kingdom sunk into the sea. I swam through the heat with the determination of a salmon moving upstream, and finally, after hours, I walked headlong into a portion of the fractured circular wall and bounced back onto my rear end.
Following the wall around, I found a place where there was a gaping hole and entered the ruins. I laughed out loud at my success as I moved into the shadows of the rubble to rest and cool off. The beauty had long been sweated out of me, as had all my fear and confusion. I knew now I had to find the book and find it quickly. There was no time to delay, since the afternoon would soon begin to turn to night. I had promised Anotine I would return, and that is what I intended to do.
> When I felt that some of my strength had returned, I left my hiding place and started up a street that I knew would lead me to that part of the city where Below’s lab had been located in the ruins of my reality. I hadn’t even taken twenty steps before I heard behind me an odd sound, something lightly tapping on the coral pavement. Before I turned, the smell had already permeated the air. There was the sound of growling. Greta Sykes, I thought, and saw in my mind’s eye the lean, savage figure of the wolf-girl: silver fur, head studded with metal bolts, and, burning in her eyes, the desire to tear my heart out.
28
Greta rose up on her back legs in order to lead me through the remains of the city as her prisoner. She walked behind me and a step to the left, slightly hunched, the tips of her long claws resting on the back of my neck. I could tell from the sounds she was making, beastly guttural rumblings, that it was a great effort for her not to kill me. I remained silent and followed the direction her claws dictated. At any other time I might have been unable to walk from fear, but in this instance there was something I feared far more than death. I had to get the memory book, and I knew she was leading me directly to it.
When we arrived at the laboratory, she shoved me through the entrance, and I tripped and fell to my knees. Looking up, I saw that the place was almost exactly as it had been when I visited it with Misrix to search for the antidote. The only difference now was that everything was intact, the glassware was unbroken, holding the various colored powders and liquids that, upon my previous visit in the other world, had been strewn across the floor and walls. The lighthouse contraption that projected intermittently the images of birds was there as was the operating table and metallic chair. Nests of wiring lined the ceiling, and, over the edge of one of the tables, I could see a stern female face framed by wild hair, staring down at me from where it floated within a huge glass jar.