Beneath Ceaseless Skies #67

by Brennan, Marie

  But I don’t remember.

  * * *

  They draw us into formation for the latest crossing.

  This is in the town square, in Jasper, because we need this much open space to accommodate us. I count over four hundred animates on one side of the square, with twice that many men on the other. A covered canopy shields the Chemist and his retinue from the sun. He sits on a throne of carved diamond, naked and strangely featureless save for long blonde hair, almost a clay prototype of everything that’s followed. His sons stand around him in their immaculate suits and black satin waistcoats, their oil-slick hair glistening.

  A bizarre distortion ripples in the centre of the square. Purple, pink, and silver. The Chemist leans across to Norton, his eldest son, and whispers something. Norton steps forward and orders a group of technicians to attend to the disruption.

  They circle it and probe with electric-blue hands, sinking fingers into the ripple, straining elbows and shoulders until chunks of color come away like rotting boards to reveal a golden sheen. Another group of technicians are busy assembling a cast iron apparatus nearby. Cogs and joints squeal. They adjust a brass gramophone horn. One of them buries his head inside that and yelps loud enough to jump the needle on an attached meter. He gives his colleagues a thumbs-up.

  I have seen this ritual many times before.

  A group of five animates shuffles forward to be tethered to the apparatus via cables anchored to sockets in the base of their stone spines.

  The mantis on my shoulder whirs. “Our time. Should be us.”

  “I haven’t purged the memories yet.”

  “You stall. You scared.”

  “What’s there to be afraid of? The next world can’t be any worse than here.”

  “Then why? Been too long.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Almost done. Have to be. Finish quick and we go.” The mantis sways in the breeze. “Otherwise total waste.”

  Each of the five animates hold their own mantis pilots in their hands. A couple of burped words from the technicians and the mantises are encased in pearly bubbles that could survive a direct hit from a Company shell. Everyone pauses, looks to Norton, who flaps his hand impatiently.

  The five animates clump into the golden nebula and vanish. The ends of their anchor cables float inside the distortion, dipping in time to a rolling gait. Then one slackens and drops to the ground. The technicians squawk and dive on it with knives.

  My mantis clicks. “He not ready.”

  Indeed. Still too human.

  The severed cable hisses across the ground to be swallowed by the glamour.

  * * *

  “Tell me something.”

  “I saw a failed crossing today.”

  “Yes. I saw it too. Nasty business, but preventable.” The psychiatrist (the one who loses patience with me easily) cracks his knuckles and leans heavily on one knee to stare me in the face. “It is the memories that tether you here. That and your old body, which we have long since freed you of. Some think they have fully confessed when in fact they have not. They put themselves forward for crossing and... well, we saw the consequences of that hubris for ourselves today, did we not?”

  “What happens to them?”

  “Best not go into detail. Suffice it to say, the Khoba-Hai do not tolerate human interlopers, even representatives of the Chemist. They believe humanity to be an infection, the carrying of which violates the terms of our agreement with them. But you know all this already, correct?”

  I catch the canny glint in his eye. “Correct,” I lie. I failed the test of working back from the One True Purpose. But I keep that to myself.

  The man says, “The final shard of memory can sometimes be so difficult to detect. It is like a glass splinter in the sole of your foot that you can never find. I gave that particular animate his clearance yesterday. I detected nothing left. Apparently I was wrong.”

  “Are you in trouble for that?”

  “Trouble is a relative term. Certainly do not worry yourself on my account.”

  “What’s your name?” I ask.

  He stiffens at the question. “That is none of your concern.”

  “I only want to know your name.”

  “And create more work for one of my assistants, when the time comes to perform the final wipe of your memories of this camp? No, I think not.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Tell me about her,” he says. His voice is sharp now. He hasn’t even bothered to open his notebook for me.

  “Who?”

  “Her!” They don’t even have a name.

  I blink and shrug.

  There’s a timepiece on the shelf, an antiquated series of runes and rails and counterweights from a place I’ve long since given away the name of. The psychiatrist turns to it sharply. “This is your penultimate session,” he snaps. “Either you come to me tomorrow with that final nagging scrap you seem so eager to cling to, or else I inform Norton that you are a dud. And you know what happens to duds.”

  “But I still have more to offer.”

  “No. No. I have picked you dry, my boy. You have nothing left for me, nothing, except her. Even then she is but a sliver of a memory. I can feel that. Would you risk everything for such a flimsy recollection? Are you that stubborn?”

  His rage frightens me. I almost blurt out the last thing I can truly call myself. Maybe he senses that, because he flashes yellow teeth at me.

  “Yes, say it. Say it!”

  “I really wish you had told me your name.”

  * * *

  I hear the squeak of rusting joints well before I see the mechanical dwarf round the alley mouth carrying another box of notes. I remain hidden until I hear it stop at the base of the stairs. When I step out I see a square of light falling across flagstones beyond the door. The sun is behind me, and my shadow darkens the threshold.

  The pygmy drops the box and spins, but I am too quick. I barrel down, catch it inside the room, and smash it to pieces before it can swing the door shut. Even so, the magic grease on the door must sense me because the steel slab begins to grind closed behind me. I grab the iron skull of the pygmy and wedge it between door and jamb, leaving enough space for me to pry my fingers in and rip the door open when I’m finished here.

  The room beyond is long and low and stacked with endless crates full of notes. Brick upon brick upon brick of memory spoken, transcribed, and left here to gather dust. She is in here somewhere. I rummage in the first crate and accidentally split the wood with my hands, spilling pages on the floor. My fingers are too blunt to re-gather all of them. I scrape the clip off one and paw it open.

  I see a name (Dr. Hemwood) and two numbers: HO 6445 (a date, maybe?) and 20031 (ID number), followed by scribble.

  “My dad used to take me camping. I always enjoyed that. Two (2) of us (me and my brother, Simon) and dad. He kept a sack of bottled beers in the stream to keep them cool, and one night he gave me a bottle to drink (my first ever) while he let my brother only take a sip (he was younger than me). I remember thinking it was no big thing. I stole another when dad was asleep, thinking he’d never notice, but he did, and he-”

  The scribble continues overleaf and I can’t turn the page.

  I open another one.

  “Dr. Francis / HO 6445 / 21118:

  “My friend and I, we lost touch. Don’t think it was anything in particular, just growing apart. Sad, when you think about it. Friends for so long, closer than kin, then bam, nothing. How does that happen?”

  And another:

  “Dr. Bell / HO 6445 / 2—-3:” Some of the numbers are smudged.

  “It was the first time I ever went to Old Pope. I know it’s just across the water by ferry, but it seemed a whole different place to me, you know? The people all talk different there, snootier, maybe. I never liked them. But the buildings were beautiful, real classy compared to what I’m used to.

  “I saw a parade for the Half-God there. What colors. Fuck that guy and all, but he know
s how to turn it on for his people. You can respect a guy like that, even if he is a queer. I can say that to you, right? I mean, you got no love for him, either, right? Say, can I get one of those? [animate requests a cigarette – concerning that it fails to realize it lacks the capacity to smoke => recommend twice-daily confessional]”

  Every word of it bursts inside me. I recognize things—places, names, feelings—in every scrawled sentence. My own memories ripped from me have left a void, and this trickle only serves to emphasize what I’ve lost. None of it is me, either. None of it sings to me. I might be Animate 2—-3 (there is a number scratched in the stone below my left shoulder blade which I’ve never been able to see –- the psychiatrists all use it to identify me), but because I don’t want to be I’m not. I have nothing to base that on. In the perfect dark you are whoever you want to be.

  I plough through other crates, scanning for any word that meshes with the image I keep, that last piece of me. Nothing. I find memories of conscription, of landing in the swampy coastal deltas, sex (tender, furious, and a bit of both), secret shames, regrets, the pleasures and pains of family. I find endless accounts of women; wives, girlfriends, sisters, daughters, mothers, but none of them are her. I know that.

  And when I see the size of the room, realize that all the crates here couldn’t possibly hold the transcribed lives of the hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of animates that most likely came before me, I know she’s not here. Maybe they burn everything when the room fills up. Maybe she’s gone. Maybe she never existed.

  A strange compulsion keeps me flipping through page after page after page. Each memory sticks to me even if I don’t want it to, so that by the time I accept I’ll probably never find her the mélange of memories is so thick I can barely think straight. The seams knit, the pieces melt into a coherent whole, and there’s a story to me once again.

  * * *

  “Are you ready to confess your final thoughts?”

  “Yes.”

  “About her?”

  “No. About something else.”

  “There is nothing else but her! Did you not listen to a word I said yesterday? This is your final chance to prove to me here and now that you still have some value to our operation.”

  “I found where you keep the notes.”

  A pause. “Notes? What are you talking about?”

  “The notes you make to steal our memories. I found where you keep them.”

  “You mean the repository?”

  “Whatever you call it. I found it.”

  The man licks his lips. “The location is hardly a secret. But the door is sealed against the likes of you. You cannot simply open it.”

  “I waited until one of your mechanical slaves opened it and I smashed him to pieces. The door tried to shut but I propped it open with his skull. When I was done I gathered all the pieces of him and threw them down the dry well in Jasper.”

  “Are... are you trying to provoke me? Is this some kind of a joke?”

  “I found boxes and boxes of your notes inside. I read as many as I could. I was looking for her, but I never found her. I guess you destroy all the old notes, once you run out of room.”

  The man flings his notepad to the floor and tries to stand, but I take him by the shoulders in my chipped hands and shove him back into his chair. He shrieks in pain, but the door to the confessional is sealed against a recent plague of mosquitoes. There is no one to hear him.

  “Pick up your pad and write what I just said.”

  He stares at me, eyes greasy with pain. I squeeze his shoulder, hearing ligaments creak, and he screams again.

  “Pick up the pad, or I’ll tear you apart.”

  He knows I can do it, too. He whimpers, one arm limp, the other hooking the pad and dragging it up onto his thigh. He fumbles in his breast pocket for a new pen.

  “Now write.”

  He does, quickly. I read through his blurring fingers and see he has captured everything I said, almost word for word. I release him and he flops in his chair. “Finished,” he gasps. “This will be the end of you.”

  “Better some kind of end than a lifetime of nothing.”

  * * *

  I am walking through the jungle.

  Norton and his two brothers keep pace, surrounding me in a triangle. Their immaculate suits look misplaced here. A rogue branch slaps Norton’s head and he smoothes the oiled hair along his scalp. A single mountain peak fills the sky before us.

  “I never liked that cretin Bailie anyway,” Norton says, glancing at me with a smirk.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “You don’t know?”

  “I remember hurting the doctor, but nothing about our conversation.” I fumble. “Maybe I was trying to escape.”

  Norton’s eyes cut to me again, sly, and he smiles, revealing perfect teeth. “If you don’t recall the particulars, then good for you.”

  The three of them chuckle.

  The past comes to me as we walk. I remember simple things, like drawing a picture or climbing the sagging tower over the Crocodile Channel. I remember laughing with friends and punching someone in the nose hard enough to spray blood down his shirt. I remember the smells of the bazaar in Diaspora, the taste of spiced manaka meat, the first time a woman made me quiver (and the first time a man did, too).

  I remember endless combinations of mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers. Children, too. I remember being hired and fired and hauled up in court under charges of rank embezzlement. I remember the fear of my first landing on the beach, of wondering how or when the Chemist would come for us. I remember insubordination, cowardice, heroism and finally, capture.

  Most of all, I remember a closed eye, the scent of hair and warmth and being home.

  Anything that comes next can’t be so bad.

  Copyright © 2011 Greg Linklater

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  Greg Linklater lives in Sydney, Australia, where he crunches numbers in an office so he can indulge his writing habit on the side. When he’s not scrabbling at the keyboard he’s either reading, tending to his pregnant wife, or wondering why he continues to support certain sporting teams despite the fact they only ever break his heart. A novel set in the same world as “Memories of Her” is occupying a large amount of his time.

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  COVER ART

  “Fly High,” by Tina Marie Lane

  Tina Marie Lane is a Environment Designer and 3D Artist with eleven years of professional experience in designing architecture and retail environments. Her freelance work delves into these areas as well as fantasy environments for games and literature. Recently her work has appeared in 3D Artist Magazine and can also be found at her website www.toyrocket3d.com. She fashions her worlds, both real and imagined, from Dallas, Texas.

  Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  ISSN: 1946-1046

  Published by Firkin Press,

  a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

  Copyright © 2011 Firkin Press

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