Forest of Memory

by Mary Robinette Kowal

  At the time, I just cursed at him. I don’t even remember what I said; I was just so sick and angry that I ranted at him and called him half a dozen names, most of them more than once. Above the mask, his eyes were impassive. He didn’t flinch; he didn’t smile. He just bore witness to my rage. And I’ll give him that. He didn’t ignore me and go back to work; he waited until I’d wound down and run out of things to call him and whoever the fuck his bosses were.

  I stood there, shaking with anger, thinking again about how I’d been washed while I was asleep and imagining every possible violation. He looked down then, and I realized he was not as impassive as I’d thought. His hands were gripped into fists. He stretched the fingers out slowly, as if working the tension out of them. I am not certain—I might just be projecting this onto him—but I think he was not happy about having tagged me.

  Without a word, he turned and walked across the clearing to his bag. He pulled it open and rummaged inside for a bit before pulling out a book. A paper book, mind you, not a reader. He set it on the table and all he said was, “If you get bored.”

  The crazy thing—I mean the part that really makes me question my own mind—is that my first instinct was to take a Capture so that later I would have the provenance of the book, in case it was something I could put up for sale. How stupid is that?

  He slung the rifle over his shoulder, strapped teh small kit to his belt, and strode off into the forest.

  I spent the day trying to break into the cases where he stowed everything—and failing, because they were print-sealed and would, presumably, only open to him. Likewise, the robo-mule would not turn on—not that it would have been a terribly useful thing to have, since I could walk as fast as one of those in the woods, and they weren’t exactly stealthy. Great for packing gear though.

  Periodically, the forest would echo with the sound of the rifle. Sometimes one shot, then nothing for an hour. Sometimes four or five shots, clustered together. I had walked away from the clearing, but I started to worry that a) I would wander into the range of gunfire or that b) I wouldn’t be able to find my way back before Johnny returned.

  I wouldn’t want him to think I had tried to run away again, would I? I actually considered that. Can you imagine?

  The book. You’ll want to know about that. I did eventually pick it up, and yes, I read it, because I was bored. It was a third edition of Bashar’s book, A SYMMETRY FRAMED, fourth printing. Coffee stain on page 218 means that its owner had probably stayed up late reading. Pencil marks under key sentences such as “True power lies in positioning the fulcrum of events, not in grasping them by the lever,” and “Western capitalism was always unable to account for either the costs or benefits of naturally occurring systems, instead treating them only as inputs to human-designed industrial and economic processes.”

  The bottom of the book’s cover had been gnawed on by a puppy, much like the dictionary.

  Of course, I’d need to get it into a lab and show it to an AI to be certain, but I never had that opportunity with this particular artifact. It’s too bad, really, because it was loaded with wabi-sabi.

  Johnny came back in the evening, his gun slung over his shoulder. As usual, I didn’t hear him coming. One moment, I was alone in the clearing; the next, he was stepping out of the trees. Again, I jumped.

  “Would you STOP doing that?”

  “What?” He paused in the act of slinging the rifle off his shoulder and looked genuinely baffled.

  “Most people make noise when they walk. You’re like a freaking ghost.”

  “Ah.” His motion continued as if I hadn’t stopped him. “Apologies. Habits die hard, and silence is more useful in the woods than noise.”

  “Well, I’m getting tired of being frightened.” And that was true in more ways than one. The book might have helped me clarify my own position. It might have been a mistake, in fact, for him to give it to me. Bashar was very good at explaining how to use what power you had to achieve your goals. I was over halfway through teh book by then, past the place where the coffee stain was.

  “Again, I apologize. I’ll make noise when I come back tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow. We’re still going to be in these woods tomorrow?”

  “Probably for the rest of the week.” He pulled the clip from the rifle and checked the chamber before he leaned the gun against the table.

  “That many deer?”

  “Yes.” He thumbed opened one of the cases. Inside were rows of ammunition nestled in foam. He slid the clip into its place and shut the case again. I could hear the slight SNICK as it sealed.

  “Johnny, I need you to explain to me what I have to do with deer and why you are keeping me here.”

  “Or?”

  “Or I won’t cooperate when we get to whatever it is your bosses want me to do.”

  “We don’t need you to cooperate.”

  That stopped me. And chilled me.

  “You were in the way when I had work to do. I need you to be quiet about what you saw until I’m finished. My choices were to bring you with me, or to kill you.” He cocked his head and glanced to the left at his bosses, whoever they were, in his virteo projection. He shook his head, I think at them. “I took responsibility for you, but this has nothing to do with you.”

  “But . . . but you said we had something to discuss. My client list interested you”

  He stared, and the sun seemed to drop visibly lower in the sky while he thought. Then he shook his head.

  “Oh, come on.”

  “Have you eaten dinner?”

  “You can’t just change the subject”

  “Yes I can. You know I can. Do you want something to eat?”

  “Bastard.”

  “See. I was right. I told you I didn’t need a name.”

  I did not give him the courtesy of a laugh. I sulked, like a goddamn five-year-old. I sat down in the only chair and picked up his goddamn book and started to read. Then realized that it was HIS book, and I wanted to throw the thing across the clearing, but I didn’t because that would have done exactly no good. Nothing, in fact, that I could do would do any good at all. The utter impotence of my situation—the helplessness of knowing there were no good choices . . . The only one open to me, to wait, seemed like a surrender.

  He gave me a foil pouch of some other unmemorable meal. I’d had dried fruit and a trail bar for breakfast, a different forgettable pouch for lunch. Johnny still didn’t eat in front of me. Oh, no. That would have meant removing his mask, and that might have revealed who he was.

  Silent, resentful, I went to bed when full dark came. That night I didn’t sleep well at all.

  Despite that, the birds woke me again at dawn. I lay in the tent, glaring at the roof. If I could have killed them with my mind, I would have. Alas, the cheerful little bastards lived on.

  The inside of my mouth tasted as if something had died in it. Modern advances are all well and good for making sure your dental hygiene is in good order, but when you go days without brushing your teeth, there’s a bit of a buildup there. My breath stank. I stank. I’d been wearing the same clothes for days now.

  I crawled out of the tent hating everything and everyone.

  Johnny was awake, watching me again. I didn’t jump this time.

  “I need some clean clothes.”

  “Good morning.” He sat up. “I haven’t got any to give you.”

  I was so frustrated that the state of my clothes mattered more than it should have. “Is there a stream where I can wash them?”

  “They’ll be wet all day. Not enough sun to dry.”

  I asked him again. “Is there. A stream. Where I can wash them?”

  He rolled his eyes, and I just barely bit back a scream of frustration—and only then because in the dawn light the glow of his virteo projection was a little more visible. “Yes. There’s a stream about a half hour walk due east. There’s a bank closer, but walking due east will make it easier to find your way back.”

  “If I ge
t lost, you can always come find me.”

  He blinked the virteo off. “I can.”

  “You’re shooting things again today?”

  “Yes.”

  “Try not to shoot me.”

  He sighed and got out of the sleeping bag. “Believe it or not, Katya, that’s been the goal all along.”

  I grabbed some dried fruit from his bag and stalked off toward the rising sun to wash my damn clothes.

  To you, now, I will admit that this was a mistake. It left me with wet clothes in the early morning, and a walk back through the woods with the choice of either wearing said wet clothes, or adding scratches to my torso to my list of injuries. I opted to wear them. The technical fabric was good at wicking water away, though not in those volumes. Still, that was something, and they dried fast enough that by lunchtime I was only mildly damp. The gunfire that day had been mostly west of me. It stopped shortly after lunch, I think. I remember getting to the end of Bashar’s chapter on “self-actualizing interpenetrated communities” and realizing that I hadn’t heard anything for hours. Then I wenton to the next chapter.

  In all other ways, the day was exactly the same as the one previous, with one exception.

  I was sitting in my chair when I heard a slight rustle of leaves at the edge of the clearing. A deer stepped out of the woods. A buck. He lifted his head, under the crown of antlers, and his nostrils flared. Those delicate, velvet ears flicked back, listening to something behind him. He turned his head and regarded me. I sat, utterly frozen, in my chair. I fully expected Johnny to shoot the deer, but the woods stayed quiet around us. After a moment, evidently deciding I was not a threat, the deer crossed through the clearing. A few paces behind him, a collection of does and a younger buck trailed behind. I wondered if they had been tagged yet with Johnny’s nanodrives.

  In a few breaths, they were gone again, as if they had never been. I sagged in my chair and went back to waiting. I was so tired from my anger the previous night that I half dozed. I could be poetic here and say that I dreamed of deer, since no one can contradict me, but the truth is that if I dreamed, I don’t remember it.

  I awoke with a crick in my neck. I hate those.

  When I heard the footsteps in the woods, even as far away as they were, I was surprised, then pleased that Johnny had remembered my request not to frighten me. He made a tremendous crashing, compared to his previous progress. I stood, rubbing the ache in my neck, and picked A SYMMETRY FRAMED up from where it had fallen. The slight brown discoloration in the corner had added my own bit of decay to the book, though I’m not sure anything about my nap was graceful.

  I can’t say exactly what made me realize something was wrong. I think it was that his footsteps were so irregular. A set of five, rushed together, then a pause before another syncopated series of footsteps. There was a moment when I thought it wasn’t going to be Johnny at all, and I didn’t know if that would be good or not.When I caught sight of him, his camouflage made it difficult to make out his figure when he was at rest, but the erratic, weaving motion throu gh the trunks pulled at my eye.

  And then I saw the blood.

  In a forest made of browns and greens, blood is shockingly, artificially red.

  There is something about the sight of blood that makes me run toward someone to help, even someone I have good reason to hate.

  I ran toward Johnny. He had stopped to lean against a tree. This was what had made his progress through the forest so staggering and uneven. He was barely on his feet at all. The front of his shirt was stained a deep red, shading to brown and, in places, almost black. He had a hand pressed against his stomach, and his fingers were caked with blood.

  “What happened?”

  His voice was cracked and hollow. “Deer. Woke up angry.”

  I slipped an arm around him, and he let me. The rifle was slung over his back, and his handgun was at his waist. I could have taken either and fled, leaving him there. But I also couldn’t have.

  He let me take some of his weight, and we walked the last yards back to the camp. I eased him down into the chair. “Do you have a first-aid kit?”

  “Second trunk from the bottom.” He gestured in that general direction and beckoned. “It’s keyed to me.”

  I shoved off the other trunks and picked it up. The thing weighed more than I expected, and I staggered a little as I carried it to him. At his side, I dropped it with a thump. He bent forward to reach the print reader and toppled out of the chair. I reached for him, but my hands just brushed his coat. He hit the ground.

  Johnny grunted at the impact and tensed, his whole body freezing.

  By that point, I had knelt next to him and had my hands on his back. “What can I do?”

  He shook his head. Let his breath out. Tried to push up to his knees, but he was clearly spent. I helped him roll over instead. As he did, the damage was clearer. The deer had stabbed—no, wait. There’s a word for this, isn’t there? The deer had GORED him with its antlers. A rip in the cloth of his shirt was mirrored in his skin. I could see parts of his body you’re not supposed to see. I didn’t understand how he’d managed to walk back. Oh—and here’s the really insane thing. He still had the mask on.

  I dragged the case close enough that he could thumb it open. The seal gave with a hiss, and I opened the case to root through it. There was nothing I could imagine that would be able to deal with his horrific wound. “We need to get you to a hospital.”

  “Not sure that’s an option.”

  He clearly couldn’t walk out of here, and there was no way I could carry him. I cut his shirt out of the way and pressed a nu-derm pad against his stomach. It sealed against the skin, controlling the bleeding, but would do little to keep him alive beyond that. I had this crazy thought about making a litter out of the sleeping bag and trying to drag him out of the forest. As I turned to look for sticks, I saw the robo-mule. “I can strap you to that.”

  He stared at me and then at it. “Okay. Yes. Thank you.”

  “Can you key it to me?”

  “Yes.” He pointed to the cases again. “Grab the blue one and bring it to me.”

  That one was where he’d put the hard-body computer the other night. I grabbed the case. He opened it. To my surprise, he didn’t do anything with the computer; instead, he pulled out my earbud. “Once you get me on the robo-mule, start walking north. You should hit a road in a couple of hours.”

  Surely he didn’t have a couple of hours. “I can’t just leave you.”

  “Ah . . . but you have to get out of range to call for help.”

  “Out of range of what?”

  “Me and the d—my damper.”

  I don’t know, but I think he almost said “the deer.” I didn’t question him and probably should have, since I think his judgment was slipping. Seeing someone dying though . . .

  I pointed at the hard-body computer. “Can’t I just call out on that?”

  “Local network only. Gotta hoof it.” He held up his hand. “Help me up?”

  I got him to his feet and over to the robo-mule. We used the straps from the tent to improvise reins that he could grip. I used the luggage tie-downs to create a harness that would hold him on if he lost consciousness. We both thought that was pretty likely, all things considered. Apparently, he’d passed out on the way back to the camp. I had no idea how he was still alive. His breathing was pretty ragged by the time I was finished with the tie-downs.

  I told him he should take the mask off.

  He shook his head and tugged it higher on his face. “Got an NDA, and right now I really need my employer to stay invested.”

  “Surely they would understand—”

  Again he shook his head, stopping my protest with a gesture. “Not the sort that understands things like breathing difficulties.”

  You hear what he wasn’t saying? He couldn’t come out and say he was working for a nonhuman entity, but I think that was what he meant. Whether it was an AI or a corporation, I don’t know. But whatever he was doi
ng with the deer, they didn’t want it traced back to them, and that meant keeping Johnny unidentifiable.

  I should have thought of that, I really should have, before I left him.

  We got the robo-mule going, and once it was aimed and keyed to head north, I set out. At first, I was still close enough to hear it clomping through the woods, gyros whirring; then I left them behind. He’d said a couple of hours, and I was determined to try to get out of range as fast as possible. Every few minutes, I’d query to see if Lizzie was there. Not a thing. This surprised me, because I’d thought my data connection earlier had cut off when Johnny was close to me. I didn’t realize the range. So my calves and thighs ached from the pace I was setting. The forest added a whole new set of scratches to my growing collection. Too bad I can’t sell those as a unique experience . . .

  “Katya!” The call from Lizzie nearly dropped me in my tracks as all my systems came back online at once. One minute I was out of range; the next minute the full connectivity of my life slammed back into me. Messages, calendar alerts, namedrops, interest points—all of it flooding back in to demand my attention. I shook it all away and focused on Lizzie.

  “Here. Do you have me? I need emergency services.”

  “Yes. Yes, I have you. Where have you been? How are you injured?” The i-Sys almost sounded concerned.

  “I’m not injured—well, not seriously, but someone else is.”

  “Show me the injury, and I will have a medical patch assess it.”

  “I’m not with him. Send the emergency team to me, and then I’ll lead them to where he is.” With that, I realized I would need to keep walking north until they got a lock on me, or Johnny would catch up and I’d get cut off again. “Please hurry. He’s lost a lot of blood and was stabbed. Sort of.”

  “Complying. Emergency medical service is en route. Please be advised that this will be billed to your account if the patient is unable or unwilling to cover the charges.”