The Book of the Ler

by M. A. Foster

  There was a small treehouse, with a sun-warmed platform all around it, and when they had both climbed the rope ladder leading up to the platform, she had let him catch her and wrestle her to the warm wood: touching and kissing each other lightly, childishly, like making leafprints in the fall. And then a sudden, hard embrace, and she had relaxed back on the rough wood, melting, heart pounding . . . was it pounding now?

  She couldn’t be sure, feeling the memory slip a little. Had the body-now responded to the memory? Had replaying it caused even a small sympathetic echo? Had indeed her heartbeat just now sped up, before the box could respond and damp it down again? She lost the image momentarily. Had it ever really happened? She went back, straining, and grasped the thread at the point she had left off, and remembered; just like it was happening now, she felt the wild surge of runaway loosed emotions, the whispers of skin on skin, the wet shoulder-kisses, the sudden warmths and hot flashes, little peaks of anticipation and the first touch there; then an awkward moment, followed by oneness. In the now she felt herself moving with the memory, flowing, an energy building within her greater than the box, and then she lost it, the sequence slipped away from her and swirled away quickly in the currents of her mind, fading into other erotic images, of lovers she had had, and paradreams of lovers she would like to have had. She did not know if these latter were real of imaginary. Now they were rock-hard and clear, now insubstantial and changeable as smoke, fading into other lineaments. Other images intruded as well; him again, afterward. She had let her mind go blank and had been idly following the motion of a leaf above, seen over his shoulder, and marveling at how the eye could follow and track such random motion, a leaf high in the sunlight, the strong light making it translucent and showing the pattern of veins inside.

  It whipped away, pushed and pulled by the press of other images, real and unreal. Yes, that one: once in an orchard, a walled garden, the Krudhen’s. There had been a rough wall, stone, unmortared, higher than their heads, and they had, after the invitations of each other’s eyes, casually stepped around into the garden, not even bothering to remove their overshirts, but pulling them up about their waists and joining their bodies while leaning against the rough, bumpy surface of the wall. Some people had passed meanwhile along the path outside the wall, but they knew that the passersby did not care, even if they had noticed anything. It was doubtful they did, for they had been subtle and quiet, making a game of it. That had not been him, but another, earlier, when she had been younger, and more reckless. . . . That one vanished, replaced by another: this boy dark-haired and dark-skinned as herself. They had been swimming in the river, the muddy Hvarrif, the rich summer water leaving a sweet summer scent on their skins as they sat on the banks in the sun and air-dried. He had been so shy and tentative, younger than herself, touching her thigh accidentally, brushing against her. Sudden cool touch of skin, warmth beneath; the moment became expectant, tense, the exterior details of the instant overwhelming in their clarity. Everything registered, the sun, the still air, the heat, the clangor of the July-flies in the trees, and she had reached for the younger boy, smiling. . . .

  And it vanished, leaving behind the bitter little backlash that revealed its true nature, that particular image; it had been a paradream, a projection, a hope, a fantasy, not real. She didn’t know if she had imagined it earlier, or had made it up in the box. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t real. She savored the memory of an unreal memory and smiled mentally to herself; knowing herself as well as she did, she knew why the last one had not been real, although the one by the wall in the orchard had been. She had never been so aloof and teasing, nor had her body-friends and lovers been so innocent or shy. That was a refinement she had added herself, internally, to satisfy some deeper fantasy. Unreal, unreal. She experienced a weird emotion composed of angry chagrin and wistful sadness. There would be no more embraces by the orchard wall, no more treehouses, even no more dreams of quiet seductions along the Hvarrif banks.

  That last incident broke the chain of emotional and erotic memories. She felt as if she had been on tiptoe, straining. She tried to flex her leg. No good. She couldn’t feel it. With no distraction, she began to drift back from the sense of sexual anticipation she had been on, aimless, frustrated. Regretfully. She had greatly enjoyed the few moments she had had in her life, particularly the last ten years, of the adolescent phase. And there would have been ten more of them, but for this, she caught herself thinking. There had been fewer such events for her than for most ler girls, for during all the time, she had been busy at many other things, too serious, too bound up in the Great Work. Now, she thought. Now it is time to make that decision. Time to commit oneself, time to end hesitating, time to cease waiting for a rescue that will never come because they will never know where I am. I’m getting lost in my own memory; it is a home no longer, but a labyrinth with neither way out nor way in.

  She approached the point she had been dreading; and now she was at it. Earlier, she had imagined what it would be like when she faced it: a mental image of a major forking in the path, a most remarkable intersection, a singular location at which choice, with all its terrors, was exercised. Perhaps symbolically, within this image, there would also be emblems of arresting significance: flashing lights, great illuminated signboards. Something resembling the forerunner motorways. But now that she was actually at the place, she saw with her imagination that the reality was nothing like that at all; her mind provided a symbolic image which fit better: not an intersection at all. The image was of a broad smooth road on level ground in undifferentiated country. There was not a landmark, not a reference, not even a post along the side of the road to mark the point. She was, she realized with a wistful sense of resignation, already past it and the choice had been made long ago. The solution was obvious. And in the middle distances, the road and the surrounding country alike ended, not with a change of conditions, but in an undefined yet total foggy nothingness. She had been on this path a long time; her life led here.

  I will not speak of it, I will not talk with them, I will not even wait for them to come for me again. I am . . . She groped frantically, trying to find the name she had mislaid, burying it under tons of hopelessly tangled data, real and unreal. There were hundreds of names, and she couldn’t decide which was hers; an impossible situation. Yes, apples. Something about apples. And this almost-recognition set off another train of memories and associations: apples. She could feel vividly the hard firm flesh of an apple, crisp, cool; biting the fruit, the juice had been sweet and acid on her lips. An autumn sunset, smoky orange somewhere, somewhen . . . she had been the chief player, the Center, and her team had won. And her opponent. The opponent had no identity, it was blanked into a dark shadow, a fog, a presence whose outlines gave no clue to its identity, but at the same time, she knew she could rip the curtain aside and see her antagonist in full open brightness; she could, but she recoiled from it, for she knew her opponent, in truth, better than she knew any other person, ler or forerunner, on Earth. Here an odd chuckling thought intruded, flashing by almost before she could catch it: On Earth or off it. Why was that significant? But before she could pursue it further, her wildly processing mind threw out another image: And there was metal, wood, artifice, there was a sense of a construct all around her, a sense of being-inside, a great, powerful machine, a device, a Daimon, perhaps. Yet neither machine nor Daimon, but something greater and different than either, something whose operation closely paralleled life rather than mechanics or electronics. Vanished, replaced: and once she had made bread at home with her insibling, and the warm air had been filled with the scent of dough and yeast. Another: Her first sexual experience, the first clumsy, awkward embraces (her partner had been as ignorant as she); they had felt like younger children trying to assemble some intricate toy, neither knowing where to begin nor imagining the results, but faithfully believing that if they could somehow accomplish it, they were sure to be astounded and amazed. Strange, vivid, sharply etched in her mind. And indeed they
had been. We had breathed so hard, so hotly upon each other’s shoulders. A sensation like climbing a steepening hill, ever harder, then over the top by surprise and a swift ballistic ride down, spinning, slowing. The odd, salty taste of another’s mouth, the oily-sharp scent of sun-warmed skin.

  Stop! She shouted into nothing, the furry all-embracing darkness that surrounded her. She could almost fleetingly feel her lips trying to verbalize the word in her own speech: muduraile! But the half-sensation was gone instantly, as in a nightmare when one tries to call for help, or to cry out to break the slow-motion spell, and nothing came out but incoherent, clotted throaty sounds. Croaks and gurgles. She returned to the dark. Very well, then. She formed letters of fire in the dark, sending them forth, changing their colors as they flew away into the night. The letters faded, leaving green afterimages which pervolved into an iridescent violet. She made the triple negative: Dheni, dheno, dhena. No, more no, most no. Her mind slowly responded to her Herculean efforts to bring it under control, giving in, tossing out one last image weakly: Metal, a machine, immense shifting fields of power. Metal, plastic, cloth, leather, wood. She almost had it, she could operate it and feel the control and the mastery, it had almost been hers, so close . . . and the Game. And the image was gone.

  She thought clearly. She had always had, all along, one escape. But it was a drastic, irrevocable one. With total recall, the ler mind had by compensation also gained the ability to trueforget, erase data, remove it. The one balanced the other. It was something rather more than forgetting in the old sense, as the forerunners referred to it. That, in truth, was merely mislaying data. But autoforgetting was erasure. It was easy and simple to start the process—one knew instinctively how to do that, like knowing how to imagine: it was so easy and natural that one had to teach the growing child to attend to reality. But that referred only to starting the process of auto-forgetting. Stopping it was only for the experienced and the learned, enormously difficult. One could master that only after one had reached deep into elder phase, the end of one’s third span5. Elders, she had heard, could do partials, forget certain sections of their memories, condense and resymbolize, making room for more raw experience . . . but she was not an elder; she was didhosi, adolescent, she had just celebrated her twentieth birthday this past summer. And so for her it could be only everything or nothing. She had heard that it was easy, fearless, painless. Like going to sleep. That one simply picked some point in any valid memory and undid the image, like picking a thread out of a weave: it then unraveled.

  And then the ego, the persona, would be gone, vanished, as if it had never been, save for the existential traces left behind on the lives of others, on the enduring physical pieces of the world. Yes, the ego would be gone, but the body would live on, protected by its autonomic responses. The protection of secrets had not been the intent of autoforgetting, but it was of a fact one of its by-products. An ultimate protection. And afterward, her human interrogators would return and discover that all they had was an infant in a twenty-year-old’s body. Hopefully, not knowing what to do with such a one, they would then return her to the people, where she would be cared for properly, washed, fed, and carefully raised to a functional persona again in the ten years remaining before she would become fertile, adult. So by then she would be conscious again, functional, a person able to breed, to be woven, to carry on the next generation as was the obligation of everyone. She felt a small pleasure in the midst of fear. And in the clear knowledge of what she had to do, there was also a confusion. She thought hard, bearing down on it. And I will come again in this body, this sweet flesh which has given me and others so much pleasure. . . . I? No, not I, I know that. It will not be me that inhabits this skin. No, another, one who does not exist now and who will not be borne of Tlanh and Srith. She will have another name. Not mine. I take my name with me into whatever place forgetties go. Yes, another. She will be childish and absentminded, but she will function; knowing what she is, the others will love her and help her. By the time the children weave, she will be virtually complete.

  She laughed to herself in her mind, wryly, suddenly seeing it clearly, without apprehension. Me, a forgetty. One who has autoforgotten: Lel Ankrenamosi. She had thought in the past of autoforgetting with dread and fear, feeling something unclean and wretched about being a forgetty. But there was something worse, a whole universe of somethingsworse. She balanced her distaste of the condition against what in her weakness she could reveal and therefore cause. Hobson’s choice it might have been, but it was still clear: I will be true to my oaths. Now!

  Without hesitation, she reached deep in her mind, to the very keystone of her being, her Klanh role, the pivot point of all that she knew, had lived. She strained, reaching, seeking the unraveling-place deep within the complex of mnemonic tangles, found it, a knot, a nexus, pulled, felt it loosen, and unhooked it. There was a sharp, piercing pain, an acute spike of intense energy, unbearable, over before it had really began. She instantly forgot that it had hurt. Stunned and now not knowing why, she reached again for the particular memory, which had been the time of her initiation. Initiation into what? She couldn’t remember. It was gone. There were only odd little pieces left, and they were fading. At the center of her mind there was an expanding blank void of un-knowledge; almost like what they called an image-reversed Game, in which one played absences, not presences. A void, expanding. Already she had to ask, most curiously, What Game? What had been the Game? It had been important to her, once. A puzzle, and something crucial was missing, the piece which could explain this odd lapse of memory. What was it? She stopped trying to remember and began to work on logic, working from the outside, filling in the center, and thus to recapture what it should have been. She could do it, but she found that as she did, the eradication process seemed to work faster than she could fill it back in; it was eroding her memory faster than she could fill it in at maximum effort. Useless to fight it; hopeless. Her awareness had been like a sphere, filled from the center, always expanding outward into the emptiness of ignorance and not-knowing, ordering. But she sensed now that she was different from everyone else in the world: she had an emptiness inside the sphere as well. And the void inside was growing, forcing her awareness first into a hollow ball, then a toroidal shape. There’s no stopping it now, she thought; I know what is doing this, but I no longer know how to start it. After a moment, she added, wryly, And I damn sure can’t stop it.

  She had no knowledge concerning how long the process would require to erase her mind. Nobody knew. Or if they did, they did not speak. Forgetties did not remember that they had forgotten. She felt tense, internally, and did not know why. Now she relaxed, letting the process play over awareness, like summer sunlight over one’s bare body, something from long ago. Now I will remember everything I can; all the sweet moments of my life. She scanned quickly through what remained of her memories, noting what was there, the good and the bad, the pleasant and the unpleasant. There was much of both; she had had her moments, but she had also known bitter disappointments, cruel reverses which had not been her fault, but existential, circumstantial. But not accident. She settled for a sample: Name fourteen6 of the most wonderful things that had happened to you. That was easy. Then, one at a time, she began to relive each of them through the magic of total recall, re-seeing, reknowing, rediscovering. Under them, though, she sensed the presence of something which had not been there before: a growing void of darkness, part of her, yet not part of her either. She could not remember now why this curious condition existed. She would have to speak to someone about it.

  Mornings were nicer. She had always loved the morning-time, of them all, she would always be the first of the children to wake up, seeing the firstlight turning the translucent panes of the windows of the yos deep violet. She would untangle herself from the others, for in cooler weather they all slept in a pile for warmth, and would then climb down out of the children’s compartment, into the hearthroom. There had been four of them. Two boys, two girls. An ideal le
r Braidschildren. But somehow something was wrong, there; she could no longer recall why. Now the hearthroom would be dim and dark, the hearthfire ashes dead or almost so. In her nightshift she would tiptoe barefooted through the yos, their home, and pass through the double entryway, pushing the doorflaps aside as she went. She would step gingerly out on the landing. The air would be cool, even in summer, and would bite at her skin through the thin nightshift, the skin beneath still sleep-warm and child-fragrant. This memory: it was winter and there was frost on the ground. Crystals of frost-heave at the bare patch by the creek. The creek by the house muttered quietly to itself, its sounds clean, precise, and clipped. The speech-of-winter. It always sounded like that in winter. In summertime its voice was rounder, looser, more flowing. She imagined that it spoke a language. No, someone had told her that. Recently. Who had it been? But the creek spoke: a running commentary on the nature of things, ground-water state, humus, moles, earthworms, new-fallen leaves of the season releasing their nutrient material to add to the rich forest soil. A sense of almost-freezing. The things water knew. She looked up. Farther down the creek she could make out the dim shape of the neighboring yos through the winter-bare brush, briars, and vine-tangles. In summer, it would have been completely hidden. And farther on, visible through a gap in the trees, was the lake, still and cold and deep blue in this early light.

  She scanned again, sensing that she was losing ground more quickly than she had imagined she would. No time for fourteen. Have time for one more replay. So let it be with him. That one will I hold, even to the end. Let it be last, and then nothingness. Even if now it is just a figment of my memory, never to be again. Suddenly, the phantoms were gone.