Memory's Exile

by Anna Gaffey

  He found the mess hall again, and a recreation area, complete with health machines, consoles, vidscreens and game tables. One of the rec consoles flickered with green standby lights, so he logged on and poked around the ship’s mainframe and vid libraries, before he tired of it and reached into his pocket for the gem.

  The briefing slides layer opened first in a jumble of time and proof. Jake found he did not want to look at them, which bothered him. Normally he’d have wanted to be the first to pick an anomaly down to its basic threads. But the more he slid back and forth between the multiple Eos slides—their edges blurring together until it looked like a supernova welling up between his hands—the more immaterial he felt, as if he were so light and meaningless he could float through the walls of the Harmon.

  Given enough time and care, the human body adapted marvelously to unforgiving conditions. Likely because it made sense to base expectation on a comforting conclusion. He could place all his gems in that bin. Perhaps the serum would help him find his timely sea legs.

  He wouldn’t think about it. After all, he wasn’t head of Science yet. He was just a tourist, a time tourist along for the ride to an unknown planet. Where he could still possibly work to save humanity… The point is that tomorrow, you. Me. We’re doing it. We’re freeing the human race. A tremble in his fingers sped along the briefing slides, and the encryption layer opened into its perpetual curtain of code. For a moment, his body and mind stopped dithering between the confusing welter of his divided memories, the whirling, mixing vortex of before and after and present and past. He ceased to pull in two, or three, or infinite directions, and aligned solidly with this, now, where and when and what he was.

  Under closer focus, the encryption changed. It looked less like Jake’s handiwork and more like Kai’s: prissier, more precise. It was probably better Kai was still in cryo. Such a revelation would puff him up so that he wouldn’t be able to do anything other than pontificate with grand condescension to the rest of the Science team. Kai had gotten there first.

  On the station, such a realization would’ve thrown Jake into a fine rage. But he couldn’t summon a speck of righteous competitive fury. Trying only brought forth Kai’s wizened face, silent beneath the frosted cryo berth lid, or the expression of horror as the Leech drained him live on vid. The death and the cure, live, on the same gem.

  His hands were shaking again. That wouldn’t do; he’d have to see Lindy about something for that. Or he could try to raid the sickbay, though, if the lab were any indication, Lindy had probably locked it down just as tightly.

  Jake closed down the encryption, and trolled back through the Harmon network. Scavs, Vanna had said, and he could see it now, what had been staring him in the face. Bare-bones, obviously forged records with single postings and minimal community contributions. Conversely, the dossiers for the crew with legitimate Dome backgrounds were extensive and hilarious, a slew of unflattering images and snort-inducing records of postings for poor bastards he’d never met. Crewman Skala, for example, had obviously managed to piss off someone powerful, as he’d spent the three years prior “calculating the spread of dust fragments” off the southeast corner of Suez Dome. Chortling, Jake skipped to the next one, and found his own face scowling up at him.

  Christ, he’d forgotten what a mess he’d been in his most recent official image file. Taken right after he’d been released from The Bends, it showed him at his sickliest and sourest, his eyes shunted off to the left to avoid the camera, shifty and arrogant and completely terrified.

  He paged through the others. Most of the people he knew had blank, direct portraits: Santos, Nat, Lindy, Carmichael, Kai. The taciturn Elena and Vanna and Quinn. And Con.

  In the image Con wore his standard smirk, but his eyes were shadowed and rimmed with red. Jake flashed on disconnected bytes of him leaning against the wall in the station mess, saying something sardonic about drink and looking absolutely terrible, of his arms surrounding Jake in an embrace. Con, who had betrayed Jake and loved and saved him in a boiled mess of contradicting motivations and did not remember him. The Con in this picture still knew him.

  It’ll take more than a handshake.

  Armed with shaky balance, Jake left the rec area and found his way up to the flight deck and the cockpit doors. A screen flashing to the left of the doors warned him that flight was in progress and he should use the comm before entering. The door swung silently open at a press of his hand.

  The outer shutters were closed. The viewscreen shimmered across them, lighting the cockpit with a silver-blue glow. Connor Griffin sat at the port pilot’s station. He looked over his shoulder at Jake, his face lit harshly by the shifting red and blue lights. “Shut the door.”

  Jake pulled it closed and hovered near the doorway. The cockpit was warmer than the corridor, and filled with clutter. He could make out the flight deck cryo berths: drawers in the wall underneath the vast tangles of conduits and Heart hardware that flanked the doorway. A long dark shadow, presumably the copilot Redbear, occupied the far drawer.

  “We’re coming up on our three-quarters point.” Con plucked a holo of a bright, spidery cloud and set it floating in miniature above the comm screen. “The Tartarus nebula.”

  “Sounds charming.” And as though it’d been christened by a Historical Society committee fraught with eager creative types.

  “Yep. The rest of the crew should be waking in a few hours.” Con looked back again and gestured to the console alongside his. “You can sit down. Redbear won’t be up for a while.”

  Jake nodded and fumbled his way into the seat. It was covered in stiff, uncomfortable fabric, but he supposed pilots weren’t encouraged to get too cozy. The console controls were fairly familiar, if more complex than those of a shuttlepod. Various rubbish covered the console divide between their seats: ancient crumbling manuals, gems, tablet connectors, ration wrappers, a lurid-looking old-time novel (Death and the Savage Space Wastrel!) resembling one Jake had had on the station. The cover had a very similar crease…but that probably meant nothing. He fidgeted. “So.”

  “No.” Con adjusted a humming dial. “I still don’t remember.”

  Jake folded his arms and tried to look casual. Even inside the warmth, he was still freezing. “Rachel said you knew everyone on the ship. And you were fuzzy about the station crew, but especially me.”

  “Still the case.”

  Jake rubbed some of the sleep out of his eyes. “So how far back does that go?”

  “Pardon?”

  “I know you don’t remember anything that happened on Selas, but how about getting here? How about back on Earth? We knew each other then, too—”

  “Yeah, that’s what Santos said.” Con frowned. “But I don’t know her, either.”

  “Why would she make something like that up? Why would I?”

  “I don’t know. I’m out here in the middle of nowhere and I’ve lost my bearings. Forgive me if I don’t jump to trust.”

  “How would you know if I’m untrustworthy?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Con said mildly. “Because I don’t know you.”

  “Right.” The more Jake heard it, the more quickly it would lose its sting. Of course it would. “But you could.”

  A portion of the viewscreen hummed. Con turned his full attention to it and pressed a complicated pattern into the console.

  “You could.” Jake rubbed his hands together to wake them up. “I mean, I get it—it’s not pleasant. But this is you. Your past. A little pain and confusion to get a piece of missing memory back, I don’t think that’s a bad bargain. I know I’d take it. Hell, I did.” And you helped me.

  “A little pain and confusion, huh?”

  “Yes. Lindy says it’s a metabolic consequence of energy exchange. Which you probably already know about.” Of course he did. Why else would Con look so exhausted? Between the brain-suck of Selas and psychic communication, he’d probably had enough metabolic consequences for a while. Jake tried not to watch as Con stretched elab
orately, his arms over his head, the barest suggestion of pale flesh at his waist where his shirt had come loose. But he was wearing thin black gloves. His uniform cuffs were unbuttoned, but the sleeves rumpled and pulled full length, as if Con had had them rolled up before Jake had come in. As little exposed surface as possible. With a sinking feeling, Jake realized that he had been approaching Con from the worst possible direction. “Look, I—”

  “No, no. Please. Let’s clarify.” Con carelessly flicked a switch, and a flight path gleamed up onto the viewscreen.

  Jake averted his gaze and focused again on his own stupid hands strangling each other in his lap, the knobs of his wrists childishly sticking out of his sleeves. “All right.”

  “You’ll just give me my missing memories. Which are also your memories. It’s very convenient, and everything will be great. Back to normal for you.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Let me finish.” Con gave him a chilled smile. “I’ve read your dossier, Dr. Jeong. Even Santos couldn’t deny what was in there.”

  You were in there, hidden in between the lines, Jake wanted to say. Con under Jake under Con through Jake, a winding, circular twist of memory. “I don’t deny it, either. But there’s more to it—more to me than what’s in my dossier.”

  “That would be true for anybody.”

  “And you knew that before we went down to the planet. Hells, you knew more about me than I did.” And I still went with you.

  “Maybe.” Con shifted in his seat. “But how will I tell the difference between a true memory and a lie?”

  Jake had nothing to say to that. Not when he’d worried the same thing in the sickbay, with Lindy. Attempting to convince someone of the decisions you’d struggled against was one thing, but when that person demonstrated a higher level of common sense than you had, what could you do? You have scars in certain places, and I could have found that out in any medical dossier. You wrote me commtexts and sent me vids for ten years, and I could have hacked and falsified them, or created them from whole cloth.

  Maybe if he tried to connect Con’s struggle to his own brain, his own gap. It was difficult, though, trying to shut down the newfound continuous flow of remember? Remember this? And this? And this? A hand in his hair. Broken glass. Brown hair, Rebecca’s hair. Not now, he told her. Her mocking scowl. Con’s laugh. Warm skin.

  It was glorious and addictive after years of hopping the gap in his memories. Jake couldn’t turn it away even for a moment, and his possessiveness shamed him. He had to stop now, had to convince Con.

  Dark yellow liquid in a glass vial. The cold press in his elbow, sharp metallic sting-punch in his neck, stale recycled air. The smothering heat, the merge of blood. A cold glass container, solid and whole in the palm of his hand. Two red Kings and a true-blue Queen, Con in blue outside the bunker. The old Con had done this for him, had given Jake his past, and Jake had allowed it. He remembered his own paranoia, his waffling between trusting Con and pushing him away.

  But Con had followed him out of the darkness of the Bends, into space, to Selas. Jake had not done anything like that for Con. Not yet.

  Con was still waiting for him to answer.

  “You don’t, I guess,” Jake said finally. “But you did it for me. You helped me. Saved me, to be honest. I’m trying to even things out, not to hurt you.”

  He looked at Con, who had become engrossed in the niceties of the flight plan.

  They weren’t exactly beginning from the same point. Sure, Con had known and hidden things, and Jake had been unsure of his affiliations. But in Jake’s world, they’d been in contact, had been close for ten years. In Con’s altered perspective, they were strangers.

  After a while, Con hit a control on the forward console, and the viewshutters spread wide and shunted up. The Tartarus nebula loomed before them in a silent, frozen eruption of azure and scarlet and crystalline violet, spreading into the cockpit in a wave wide and slow as the cloud itself. It stole Jake’s breath, set his heart thumping and his blood crashing in his ears.

  “Look,” Con began. He was staring off into the blaze of light, his voice distant. The nebula stained his face stellar red. “If it matters, I…you seem like a decent person.”

  Surprised, Jake laughed, and laughed harder at the look on Con’s face. “Sorry. But you’ve convinced me. I really and truly believe you don’t know me.”

  Con tore his gaze away from the nebula. “I was being polite.”

  “It doesn’t suit you.”

  “Maybe it will from now on.” Con glared at him.

  That was better, something other than the calm tolerance he’d shown since Jake had entered the cockpit. Emotional Jake could work with, and he could certainly commiserate with the anger and fear that accompanied a fried mind. “You’re a plaguing tough sell.”

  “I didn’t lock you out, did I?”

  “Fine, sure.” Jake watched the nebula collide brilliantly with itself. Greens melded into blues, into a starburst of yellowing orange, and a glimpse of tiny sparkling silver points here and there. He thought of Con staring into a deep velvety bowl of sky, beyond the Dome, and waiting for the tidal wave of blue light. “What about that?”

  “What about what?”

  “The first time you saw the stars,” Jake gabbled, because this could be it, proof that they were known to each other. Something that might work, something that might still survive, something not intricately wound with Jake. “Your mother and that Defense guy, and she was so nervous because you were sneaking outside without a permit or permissions or something. But you still went. Through one of the abandoned tunnels and you had to wear pressure suits and you were impressed that my father had fixed it, had saved the Dome. I didn’t know anything about your family until you told me that. I mean, I still don’t. That’s pretty much the extent—”

  “Shut up,” Con said calmly. But his hands had curled into fists on the console.

  “I’m sorry—”

  “Shut up.” His eyes were no longer veiled. They were dark and ablaze.

  The nebula opened around them like a flower, enfolding them completely in shards of reddish light and plumes of dust.

  “What happened to her?” Jake asked.

  For a moment, he thought Con might reach across the divide and strike him, affirm their relationship as strangers. But the blazing moment passed. Con sighed and slouched back in his uncomfy chair. “She died. Not unusual for a woman her age, on Earth.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You said that.”

  “Yeah, but I’m being specific now.” He was, and he could commiserate. Clearly he hadn’t yet considered all the downsides to being crew on the Ship of Hopeful Outcasts Time Forgot. “It’s probably no consolation, but mine may as well be. My parents. My mother, anyway.” He had willed himself to avoid thinking of them at all, but Angelica spun into his mind. For a moment, Jake couldn’t breathe. She was finally, truly lost to him and he to her. They had not spoken in so long that he’d supposed that losing her wouldn’t hurt. It did.

  He tried to continue. “And—and Santos has family. Nat, Carmichael, too. I don’t know too much about your crew, but I assume they all came from families. We’ll never see any of them again, will we?”

  Con didn’t answer, but his brow had smoothed.

  “And we’re going to a backwater planet in the middle of nowhere, with uncertain support for life. Though I’m sure I could find leisure time to work on our own interdimensional engine. In between our desperate scrabble for continued existence.” Jake dug out the gems and rolled them around in his hands. “When I’m not slaving over some kind of encrypted message for our descendants to bumble across. To show them the serum.”

  Golden and blue, confessions, confusion, humanity tumbling in his palm. Perhaps if Jake loaded up the golden gem, Con would listen, would believe the unrepentant Silverman? Perhaps not. Jake had the sudden urge to shove both gems into the console’s vent slot, to hurl them together into the welcoming churn of
Tartarus like an infinitesimal golden asteroid. Not the most intelligent impulse he’d entertained, but it felt right somehow. A new beginning. He had had more than enough temporal, stellar, and physio-psych phenomena for several lifetimes. Certainly he’d had enough betrayal. Maybe even enough of Science.

  Something smacked against his chest, and Jake looked down to an unwrapped, banded deck of cards in his lap. “All right,” Con said. He cleared a flat section of the console divide.

  “All right what?”

  “I mean, all right.” Con patted the deck. “High card.”

  The card backs were typical red kaleidoscope with a strangely simple design: amidst the patterned jumble of vines and flowers was a sunburst above a shattered crescent, an arrow connecting the two. An odd, unfamiliar design, possibly religious? Though that didn’t seem like Con. “What are the terms?”

  “If you win, I’ll do it.” Con crossed his arms. “One memory. If I win, you wait.”

  “For how long?”

  Con shrugged. “However long.”

  Jake looked uncertainly at the cards. “That’s a big gamble for a single card draw.”

  “For who?” Con smiled, but it was guarded. “What do you want, a Grandfather Eights tournament?”

  Jake stripped the band off and set it on his knee. The plastic clicked against the metal. “All righty. But I want more than that if I lose. Lab codes. It’s all locked up. If you get me in, I can go mess around with stuff for a while, stay out of your hair up here.”

  “Sorry,” Con said, not sounding sorry at all. “Talk to Vanna. Her code supersedes mine.”

  “So there’s nothing in this for me, then?”

  Con laughed. “Shuffle.”

  “Probably a marked deck anyway.” Jake shuffled. The cards felt slick and new, and for a moment he thought he saw a shadow slip up through his fingers and insinuate itself into the pattern. In the shifting light and shade of the nebula, it was hard to tell the shadow from the light. They wove together like a seamless piece. Perhaps if he stayed inside the Tartarus, just floating through the color day in and day out, his eyes would adjust, and shadow and light would cease to matter. Or maybe he’d go crazy. He was unlikely to know the difference.