by Sword Stone Table- Old Legends, New Voices (retail) (epub)
“Tell me true, then, what it would mean for me to be Emrys and kill Merlin.”
“I can only tell you that this is not the first time. This is not death. Before you were Merlin, you were Myrddyn. Before Myrddyn, Ambrosius.”
Merlin’s stomach dropped. He had no memory of these names. No connection to them.
“To what purpose? What is gained by this? Have we…?” He looked up at the lights around them. “Morgana, have we had this conversation before?”
“No, not that I remember. But I’m not sure I would.” Her specter moved away, uncanny in the silence of its footsteps. “And it’s not for us to say, Merlin! It’s so the story can progress, every iteration of Arthur to get closer to Avalon.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t, but I believe. Every change in your story, every change in his, in mine, is to be closer to where we need to be for our dream, Merlin.”
Merlin sighed and lay back on the solid rock beneath him. He felt grounded by the nature all around. His soul, he knew, was tied to Arthur’s—to Arjun’s. How many times had he made this choice, to give it all up for his king? Arjun was the One True King. And that was his reason for being—not knowledge. Not experience.
“I’ve sent him to you, Merlin. I trust in him, and I trust in both of you together.”
“I am sorry for the way it was then, Morgana.”
“I know.”
She flickered once. And was gone.
Merlin closed his eyes and brought his fingers up, ghosting them across his face.
From the forest, he heard a voice calling out, “Emrys!”
He considered, and Emrys decided.
FUTURE
A Shadow in Amber
Silvia Moreno-Garcia
But in her web she still delights
To weave the mirror’s magic sights
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Lady of Shalott” (1832)
The sun sets, red as blood, the smog helping paint the sky an unnatural shade of crimson, birthing a sickening beauty. From this distance, so high above, the beams of cars and the glimmer of buses become a river of silver and gold, quickly pulsing in the dusk. She can’t hear the traffic rushing by; it’s just a distant buzzing, drowned by the music in her apartment.
She likes it this way. Seven years she’s spent on the top floor of this building and she has not missed the city outside, with its pollution and vile manners. They kidnap women in this city. They kidnap everyone, but the city seems to hunger most for the soft flesh of women. They march, sometimes, the women: far below in the streets demanding protection, asking that the violence cease, but it doesn’t cease. It never does.
It’s a river of corpses, below, between the silver and gold.
She could, it’s true, go out with bodyguards or live in a distant country house, far from the turbulent dangers of the metropolis, but she has chosen to instead inhabit this nacreous tower with its concierge, its elevators, and the wall-to-wall screens that can project an infinity of views, from the forest to the ocean. She tends to orchids in delicate glass containers and she rests on a low bed of silken sheets, eating pomegranate seeds.
She exists in this hallowed abode of her own making. Everything in here—from the extravagant chandelier, which brings to mind dozens of tiny jellyfish suspended in the air, to the wine tucked away in the mirrored sideboard—has been picked by her, to accommodate her taste. She has cocooned herself. But once in a while a speck from the outside must be allowed into this inner sanctum. Once in a while Mr. Delgado comes by with his briefcase under his arm.
Today is one of those days and he shuffles in, a few droplets of water dripping from his plastic beige trench coat, smiling at her.
“Sorry I’m late,” he says. “Traffic was a killer and then your building’s security staff is quite thorough. They slowed me down.”
“They get paid to be thorough.”
“Well, but we know each other by now.”
“Do we,” she says, her voice flat.
She sips her wine—a bit of alcohol helps the process—but does not offer him a glass or smile back. She stands at the balcony’s window and looks at the river of silver and gold while he opens the briefcase and arranges his equipment.
“There was a little mishap, I should say that. I know you wanted that opera, but the recording was damaged. So I brought other stuff.”
She spins around. “I only want the performances at Bellas Artes, I’ve told you that.”
“Yes, I know. That’s why I brought alternatives.”
She walks toward the glass table where his briefcase rests, where he’s hooking up wires and metal plates, and stares at him. “Alternatives. I know the stuff you peddle. I will not partake in a cheap pornographic spectacle.”
The city, aside from violence and grime, offers dubious pleasures. It’s a city of shadows and crooked angles, of danger and simmering violence. The people who sell memories mostly deal in coarse moments. Furious fucking in a bathroom stall, or the more obscure delights of seeing a man being beaten to a pulp. Why would she pay for that?
“I wouldn’t bring such content to you. There are art galleries here, a little theater—and this. Something very special: the beach.” He holds up a tiny metal case the size of a fingernail.
“The beach.” She grimaces. “Who do you think you’re dealing with? Do I look like I have an interest in experiencing the joy of sunbathing in Mazatlán? Oh, let me guess: a spring break in Cancún with a trove of gringitas drinking a yard of tequila.”
Delgado makes a placating motion with both hands. “It’s nothing like that. When have I failed you?”
“Clearly you did: tonight.”
“No. If you’ll trust me just this once, I promise, you’ll see it really isn’t anything like that.”
“Well, what is the memory exactly, then?” she asks.
“That’s like me trying to tell you the color of an aria and you know it.”
He’s not wrong. To describe a memory is to do it an injustice. It can be broken down into the ingredients, but it’s the taste that lingers. It’s the taste that matters. There are memories and there are memories: some people simply don’t imprint strongly onto the machine, and it’s like watching a movie on a TV set with the picture scrambled.
True memory makers are valuable, as are worthwhile memories and the peddlers who can distinguish the prosaic from the refined. Delgado deals in the refined.
“If you don’t like it, I’ll give you three sessions free. How’s that?” he says.
She eyes him skeptically. “Very well,” she says, if only so he’ll at least owe her a favor.
She lies down on the white couch, and he continues his preparations, connects the bits of the machine and attaches the electrodes. She stretches out her wrist, and the needle slides into her skin, delivering the proper agent, and her eyelids flicker.
The memory comes fast and furious. She is running, feet feverishly moving across the rocks, wind in her hair. Her body is young, the body of a man in his prime, lean and eager. The wind tugs at his hair and his hair is in his face and ahead of him only the sky, with the sun high, licking his skin.
I want to die like this, he thinks. To die, diving into the sea.
He leaps!
God, how he leaps; it shocks her. The strength of the legs, the muscles straining, and then the body falling, falling, quick as an arrow. He hits the water, slicing through it, and then the muscles are moving again, the body bobbing up as he emerges.
As he bursts through the surface, he laughs and looks up at the sharp cliff from which he just plummeted, and he throws back his head with such wild joy that she knows, in that instant, what it is like to live forever.
When she wakes back in her living room, blinking and staring at the ceiling, she has to take a minute to compose herself
. She pays Delgado for his services, and he packs his suitcase and leaves.
* * *
—
Six days she waits. Six days is all she can take.
It was her mother who had loved opera, who played Tosca and Carmen for her as a child. The modern music of the world does not interest her, only these old things, these old songs that rise to the heavens. She loves when Maria Callas sings Madama Butterfly because it’s different: it’s not music, it’s something else, undefinable. It goes through you like a sword, that music.
It’ll break your heart, that moment when she says, “Tutto questo avverrà, te lo prometto.” Nothing else is as exquisite as when she hits that note. Nothing else enraptures her; only those beautiful lamentations and the swelling of the strings.
She plays her music, and on the great screens she projects the images she enjoys, distant vistas of deserts or waterfalls that have nothing in common with the alleys piled high with trash or the rats spilling from sewers.
She checks her messages. There’s one from a company inviting her to a holographic performance of Luciano Pavarotti. These days they can make anyone perform onstage, mimicking flesh and blood, from Elvis to the classical singers. But she won’t have that; it is tacky. She prefers the memories, illegal and expensive, but much more enthralling if what one wants is to experience a performance.
“Play Lucia di Lammermoor, the Callas recording,” she says, and the music fills the apartment. She shakes her head.
“No. Play ‘L’amour est un oiseau rebelle,’ ” she orders, but as soon as the familiar voice begins to sing, her head is shaking again. “Switch to Mirella Freni. No, Joan Sutherland. No. Stop.”
The apartment goes silent and she messages Delgado. It is the seventh day.
* * *
—
He arrives promptly, trailing water again. It’s summer and the rains have inundated several of the subway stations. But what does it matter to her? It’s just a story in the news, something she idly sees on her mobile device and swipes away.
He comes in bearing that scent of filthy water and mutters about protesters: Reforma was blocked from the Diana up to god knows where. He shakes his umbrella, runs a hand through his hair while she holds her glass of wine and eyes him skeptically.
“I brought several things. And another recording of the young man, like you said. So you have options.”
He sounds false, as if he knows very well she did not even consider the other memories, that she meant to see only more of the young man. She sips her wine while he settles himself in, and when he is done, she sets the glass by the couch and lies down.
In slips the needle and in seeps the memory.
She’s riding a motorcycle. The day is blazing hot and sweat trickles down her back. Traffic is heavy, but the motorcycle glides around the cars and he has few worries. Just the girl, the girl he loves and who doesn’t love him back. For a moment his hands tighten around the motorcycle handlebars as he thinks about her.
So he dashes forward, speeding and turning a corner and letting thoughts drain from his mind, the rumble of the motorcycle and the noises of the city playing an orchestra as he conducts his strange dance.
He arrives at his destination and grabs the messenger bag. Because ultimately this is just an ordinary day for him, just another day of the traffic and the sun and the motorcycle, of amusing himself by seeing how fast he can get to a destination and break his previous record.
He walks into a building, and as he holds the door open for someone to step out, for one brief instant, she sees his face reflected on the surface of the glass.
He is a man of preposterous loveliness. Not handsome, but beautiful and lazily nonchalant in that beauty as he glances at his reflection. And if it were just that, if it were just beauty, she would shrug it off. But there’s something beneath that beauty, in the dark eyes, the impression of an unknown abyss, of a stillness and a sadness in that stillness.
He’s like the songs she likes to listen to; like the dramatic operas where singers throw themselves onstage and press their hands against their heart.
The memory ends shortly after that and she’s on the couch. Delgado fusses around, taking her pulse, looking at her.
“How many fingers?” he asks.
She does not reply. He repeats the questions and she raises a hand, raises three fingers at him.
“You okay? Can you speak?”
“Yes. I…I didn’t sleep well last night,” she lies.
“Why didn’t you say so? You know you’re not supposed to plug in if you’re tired.”
“I’m just a little tired, not exhausted.”
“Still. I’ll have to stick around a bit longer, then, to make sure you’ve surfaced okay.”
“I’m talking now, am I not?”
He shrugs, but he still lingers. It irritates her. She hired Delgado because he is reliable and careful. She’d heard stories of people who slipped into a memory and never slipped out because the technician was an idiot or the equipment was faulty. That is why she pays for the best. When you’re dealing in illegal merchandise, don’t go for the bargains.
But she doesn’t want him to be here now; she doesn’t want him to be careful and watchful and staring at her face. She’s afraid the slightest gesture will give her away. It’s the little things that always do. She sits up and twists a bit of hair around a finger that has escaped her chignon.
“Get me some water if you’re going to be flapping around.”
He does, returning with a glass, and she takes a sip. She does not look at him as she speaks. “What’s he called?”
“Who?”
“The memory maker, who else?”
“It’s confidential and I don’t really know. People who work with me don’t use their real names.”
“You must call him something.”
“You can call him Lancelot, if you want. I do.”
“And who are you, Merlin?”
“Merlin is the guy who fell asleep in a cave and yet you’re the one who’s been sleeping. It wouldn’t work.”
“The sleeper has awoken, in any case, so you may go.”
She hands him the glass.
* * *
—
By the sea he walks at night, the waves lapping at his toes, and there’s the taste of salt on his lips and a sad smile like the waning moon. The girl he loves is married; married, in fact, to his best friend. It is a delicious agony to sit with them at dinner or to visit their home. To see her from afar and be unable to speak a word.
They’ve been drinking on the beach and now they walk, he and his small coterie of friends. Ahead of him goes the girl. Her husband has draped an arm around her shoulders. Lancelot walks a few paces behind them, stepping on the footprints she’s left behind. Every few minutes she turns her head a little, she looks over her shoulder at the young man, her smile shy, like a fluttering butterfly.
So he keeps walking behind them, he keeps following her footsteps, while the sea roars and their friends prattle on.
When she rises from the memory, like foam upon the shore, she lets the warmth of his emotions rest in her chest, and she takes a deep breath. The glass chandelier on the ceiling catches a reflection, making her blink.
“Tell me his birthdate,” she says, her mind still hazy, naked.
“I can’t. It’s personal information.”
“Does it matter? It’s not as if a single date would expose him.”
Delgado shrugs, removes the electrodes, begins packing the equipment. “Still. There’s an expectation of privacy.”
“You’re suddenly a stickler for details.”
“Fine. How old are you?”
She turns her head and looks at him. “Are we trading information?”
“Maybe.”
“Thirty-five.”
“He’s nearly fifteen years younger than you.”
She drapes her left arm across her forehead and looks at the ceiling. She doesn’t remember being that young; she can’t recall what it was like to be twenty. Her youth was a mirage; it skimmed her body. She was born old and did not rue it.
“You don’t look thirty-five,” he adds, misjudging her.
“You don’t need to flatter me. I’m no big-eyed waif anymore; I haven’t been for a long time and I don’t mind. I’m curious, that’s all.”
She extends her right arm so that he may check her pulse, then he asks her to sit up and flashes the light in her eyes.
“It’s the zodiac; it’s why I wanted to know. He strikes me as a Leo, but I could be wrong.”
“You believe in that nonsense?”
“My mother had a natal chart made for me and I used to consult an astrologer religiously.”
Delgado tucks away the flashlight. “Back when you were a big-eyed waif?”
It bored her, the stars and their houses. She gave it up. She has given many things up. The constant in her life, the long thread that ties it all together, is the music. The operas that chart her years like the rings on a tree. There, when she was thirteen, that was when she went to see Onegin, and then at twenty-one it was Don Giovanni.
“Back when the world was flat.”
He chuckles at that. “I’m a Gemini, by the way. What does that say?”
“You should find yourself an astrologer and ask them, Mr. Delgado,” she replies.
* * *
—
A memory of night swimming and a memory of the motorcycle, also at night. But also a memory of smoking cigarettes, lying lazy, in bed, while in the apartment next door there is a party and the music makes the room vibrate, leaking through the wall. In a corner there’s a canary in a cage.
On her gigantic video panel she projects vistas of the ocean and she plays Atys, and then she purchases another moment of the man’s life.
