The Wild

by David Zindell

  When Danlo finally found her, the sun had just risen above the mountains. From half a mile away he saw her standing down on the beach where the twelve flat rocks led out through the shallows to Cathedral Rock. It was a clear and windy day, and the spray from the breakers sparkled in the early light. The whole of the world seemed to be sparkling: Danlo’s diamond-hulled ship, and the golden dune sands, and Tamara’s beautiful hair which was flowing in the wind like a magic robe. The skin of Tamara’s body sparkled like white marble, for she had taken off her clothes, and she waded naked in the deepening waters. Her breasts and belly and golden pubes were dripping wet as if one of the waves had surged up over her. Danlo ran down the dunes and over the hardpack, but when he reached the ocean’s edge, he approached her warily. He stood in the rising tide at arm’s length from her. The water was so cold that it instantly penetrated the insulation of his boots and shocked his bones. ‘Please … come out of the water,’ he said. ‘It is too cold.’

  Tamara reached down into the ocean and scooped up a handful of water. She splashed her face with it and said, ‘But I’m not at all cold.’

  For a while, Danlo watched her playing in the water. In truth, she evinced no sign of cold. She seemed completely at ease, as if she had reincarnated as a seal or a hot-blooded whale. Apparently, her madness had left her. She seemed totally aware of the world around her, of herself, of him.

  ‘Tamara,’ he asked finally, ‘what did you remember?’

  She looked at him quickly, and her eyes were hot with anger. ‘I think you must know,’ she said.

  ‘I … almost know. But how can I know, truly?’

  ‘You’ve known for quite a while, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ he finally admitted.

  ‘Oh, Danlo – why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Some things cannot be told. They can only be lived. Or … remembered.’

  ‘My birth,’ she said. ‘My real birth. And then before – before my awakening in the other house.’

  ‘Do you … remember this time?’

  Tamara looked up the beach in the direction of the house that was an exact replica of the other house somewhere on this Earth. She said, ‘I really remember too much, you know. Too much – but not quite enough.’

  ‘But do you know … how you came to be, then?’

  ‘I remember certain things,’ she said. She turned her sad but lively eyes to look at him across three feet of churning water. ‘But there’s too much I’m beginning to understand only now.’

  ‘Please … tell me.’

  ‘But some things can’t be told,’ she reminded him. ‘My life. My whole, beautiful, short, short life.’

  ‘Please tell me about your blessed life,’ he said.

  In truth, her life was no more blessed or beautiful than any other life, although its entire span was much less than that of any other adult human being. It is a mystery of life that it always seems too short, for the mayflies of Old Earth as well as for the golden-winged Scutari seneschals who sometimes live a thousand years. Time, for all living things, is always strange, and Tamara could not quite understand how she had lived so deeply in so little time. In truth, there were three times in her life. The first time was the longest, though the least remembered. In this time of her quickening, she grew from a fertilized egg to a woman in only forty days. In the blue lagoon near her house on the tropical island – in a nutrient pool that the engineers of Fostora would have called an amritsar tank – the microscopic assemblers of the Solid State Entity accelerated the development of her body and mind. This was a time of floating in dense salt water and absorbing the sugars, lipids, and amino acids vital to her growth. As with the womb-state of a naturally-born human being, this should have been a time of love and peace and oceanic bliss. But the cells of her body were dividing explosively and unnaturally, like a barely controlled cancer, and she was growing much too quickly to know a moment of peace. And as for love, where was such a blessed thing to be found in an amritsar tank of cellular-sized robots and organic chemicals which the Entity had dumped into a few million litres of salt water? During this long and lonely time when the cells of her body knew no connection with any other living thing, it might have been best if she had remained unconscious. Much of the time, of course, she dwelt in this dark state of unknowing, but at other times she dreamed. And sometimes, when her eyes opened on the bright light streaming down through the lagoon’s blue waters, she was almost aware of certain talents, sensibilities, knowledge, memories and purposes that the Entity implanted in her explosively developing brain. Sometimes, in those rare moments of insight that fall upon people like shooting stars, she was almost aware of who she was and why the Entity had called her into life. But she was not quite a human being, not yet, and any awareness of herself as Tamara Ten Ashtoreth of Neverness would have to wait until the Entity imprinted her with the memories of the real Tamara.

  This imprinting occurred during the third time in her life, when she had been brought up to the house near the lagoon. In some ways, this was the strangest and most wonderful time she had known. It was a time of love and miracles. In less than a full day, the Entity had imprinted her with all of Tamara’s memories, or rather, with the memories of Tamara that She had read from Danlo’s mind. Because of the strangeness of this quickened consciousness – because of the time dilations as immense as those of a black hole – it was as if she had lived an entire lifetime in a day. It didn’t matter to her that her memory of Danlo’s deep blue eyes and his soulful flute-playing and all her other memories had never originated with her. It didn’t matter to her – then – that she remembered a life that she had never really lived. For when she had awakened in the fireroom remembering this lost life of glass jars and salt water that the Entity had fabricated, her love for Danlo had been reborn. This was the miracle of her life, of her real life, of all the time she had spent with Danlo since coming to this familiar house above the dunes on this cold and windy northern beach. It was the miracle of love. She truly loved Danlo; in a way, she had been created only for him, to love only him, and she sensed this as one of her deepest purposes. The whole of her life almost seemed one long and secret plot to bring them together so that they might kiss and embrace and create something marvellous out of love. It didn’t matter that this third time of her life was a merging of the unreal and the real. To her, the time of her imprinting and the time of love were all as one time: continuous, glorious and golden. This time was time, all the time of her life, and she hoped it would go on and on forever. That is, she had hoped this until her dreams began and Danlo insisted that she try to relive her birth.

  All living things, even the strangest and most alien, have a moment of birth. It is the moment of separation from the egg, from the brood-pod, from the silken cocoon, from the mother – or from an amritsar tank full of assemblers and salt water. It is a time of light and pain, and for Tamara this terrifying time was the second of the times into which her life could be divided. Lying on the floor of the meditation room, with the vase of pink rhododendrons, with thirty-three candles and Danlo’s dark blue eyes burning above her – deep in the attitude of recurrence, she had remembered emerging from the amritsar tank many days earlier and walking up to the house near the lagoon. She had remembered the salt water dripping from her new and naked body; she had remembered her sense of wonder that she had a body, that she was really she, whoever she really was. With perfect clarity she had remembered and relived the terrible pain of incarnation, and now, standing naked near Danlo in the deadly cold ocean, she was remembering it still.

  ‘It was so strange,’ she told him. Now the tide was rising higher, washing in waves against her thighs. The sun was a little higher, too, and the gulls were taking their morning flights, screaming above the rocks and the crashing surf. From far away came the barking of seals and the cold wind. The whole beach was alive with sound, and Tamara had to speak with much force so that Danlo could hear her voice clearly. ‘Life is strange, isn’t it? Simply being �
� and being aware. And it’s even stranger to be aware of being aware, and you can’t imagine what it’s like to have all this terribly beautiful awareness come into you all at once. There was a moment, Danlo. I was not, and then I was. Oh, I didn’t know who I was, not then, but I knew that I was I. I suppose in most people, this sense of the self crystallizing out of pure consciousness takes years. But for me, it happened in a flash. It was like a star coming alive with fire. It was like light bursting inside me. In a way, I was this light, this clear and beautiful light that let me see myself as I am. I remember seeing myself as I stepped out of the tank. My bare skin, the drops of water – the beautiful sun falling over my skin like burning drops of light. It was all so new. And I was so ignorant at first. I knew almost nothing. But in a way, everything. I had no concept that my skin was made up of cells, the cells of atoms. I had no words for these things. But I knew that I had cells, I could feel them living inside me, almost burning. And deeper inside, the atoms, vibrating like the strings of a gosharp – there was this immense sound inside me that I somehow knew was uniquely my own. I knew that I was these cells, these atoms. I knew that the atoms of my body were somehow different to the atoms of the water or the sand or any other thing. Because I could control it all. This part of the world encapsulated by my skin, I could will to move or not move. I can’t tell you what a sense of power I felt when I realized all this. It was like grasping a bolt of lightning in my hands. As soon as I left the water and stood on the beach and started walking up toward the house, I wanted to jump back in the tank, even though I knew I couldn’t do that, I must never do that. It all hurt, you know. The sand was as hot as fire, and it burned my feet. The sunlight hurt my eyes. Just looking at myself hurt – the sun was burning my skin red, and I could feel how fragile the cells of my body really were. Oh, Danlo, why does it all have to hurt so much? It’s all so terribly beautiful, and it all hurts so much that I could die. But I can’t die, I can never die, and that’s the strangest thing of all.’

  As the sun ripened the sky into a full and glorious blue, they stood in the ocean shallows holding this strange conversation. The waves were rising higher and higher against Danlo’s sodden kamelaika. He shifted his weight from right to left, trying to keep his blood flowing to his cold, throbbing feet. He listened carefully to what Tamara was telling him. She seemed to have come to a similar understanding about herself as had he. She thought it was only natural that she had forgotten her quickening in the amritsar tank and her strange birth. The imprinting of her memories, she told him, must have driven these two periods from her conscious recall, much as in infant amnesia where a child’s experiences and natural growth causes her to forget the early years of her life. She used this word ‘natural’ with sadness and great poignancy. It was as if in deducing that she was the child of the Entity’s hand, she regarded herself as something other than a natural human being. At the same time, she still couldn’t help seeing herself as Tamara Ten Ashtoreth, and this confusion of identities was clearly causing her much pain.

  ‘Love hurts most of all, you know,’ she said. ‘The way love inevitably wakes everything up and causes us to burn for ever more love.’

  ‘That is something that Tamara might have said.’

  ‘I know.’

  Danlo listened to the seagull chicks crying from their many nests out on Cathedral Rock. He said, ‘This must be hard for you. To be … and yet not to be. To not know who you really are.’

  ‘But I know who I am,’ she said. ‘Do you?’

  Danlo watched her as she splashed water over herself from her head to her thighs. Her whole body sparkled with this icy salt water.

  ‘You are not Tamara,’ he said at last. He winced in pain at the inevitable speaking of this truth. ‘You are not she.’

  ‘Am I not?’

  ‘You are not just Tamara. You have some of her memories but …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You are something other,’ he said. ‘Something more.’

  ‘I know – but what?’

  ‘It is hard to put a name to what you really are. You are the Entity’s child, yes? Her … starchild.’

  ‘I’m a woman, Danlo.’ She rubbed her wet hands over her breasts and belly, then down over her hips. ‘A woman who loves you.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. He could hardly hear himself speak above the thunder of the sea. ‘A part of you is a woman – I can see that you are. But another part is only my memory of another woman named Tamara. Which is the part that loves, then?’

  ‘Does it really matter?’

  ‘Yes, it matters,’ he said softly. ‘I do not want to be loved by the part of you that is only the ghost of my own memory.’

  ‘Because you think it’s unseemly to love yourself?’

  ‘No,’ Danlo said with a sad smile. ‘Because it is not real. Your memory of the first time we touched eyes … this blessed moment of love never really happened to you. And therefore, for us, it never really was.’

  Tamara was quiet for a moment, and then she said, ‘If I could, I would cark the cells of my body so that I was really she. I’d cark myself – I’d replace all the atoms that compose my heart and brain with new ones. But I don’t think there’s any power in the universe that could do such a thing.’

  ‘No,’ Danlo said. ‘But even if that were possible, it would not matter. My memories are still … my memories.’

  ‘And yet when Tamara’s memories of you were destroyed, you proposed to replace them with your own.’

  The cold from the water worked its way up Danlo’s legs, and he began to shiver as he nodded his head. ‘Yes, this is true. And in my life, I have done only one other thing as wrong.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘You do not remember?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I … wished a man dead. I saw him dying, in my hands.’ ‘You speak as if by such wishing you had actually murdered him.’

  ‘I almost did. In a way, this man is dead because of me. Just as Tamara would have been dead inside if she had imprinted my memories.’

  ‘Oh, Danlo.’

  ‘Truly – to cark one’s own memories into another’s mind is almost worse than murder.’

  Tamara stepped through the foamy white waves closer to him. She took his hand and pressed it lightly over her heart. Surprisingly, even though she was dripping icy water, her skin was warmer than his.

  ‘Am I so dead inside?’ she asked.

  ‘Most of what you remember about your life is unreal.’

  ‘Do you think I can’t distinguish the real from what is not?’

  ‘Can you?’

  ‘Oh, I really think I can. I think I’ve discovered something about the nature of memory.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘All the memories that were imprinted inside me,’ she began. ‘The time in my mother’s kitchen when I first wanted her to die, and the first time I saw you in the sunroom of Bardo’s house and wanted to love you until you died – all these things I remember as clearly as I can remember the shape of Cathedral Rock when I shut my eyes. I can remember all these unreal things about my life, even though I suppose I know they never really happened to me – at least to the cells of this body. I have all these beautiful memories, but I can’t relive them. That is the difference, you know. I found that out in the house. During the ceremony, the second ceremony, when I had finally fallen into recurrence, when I felt myself being born again – I knew that the real memories are those that can be relived, and the imprinted ones cannot.’

  Danlo pressed his hand into the warmth between her breasts and said, ‘This is true. The remembrancers have known this for a long time. This is why they forbid their students even the simplest of imprintings.’

  ‘You know this and yet you still offered to imprint someone with your memories?’

  ‘I … had fallen into love. I cannot tell you how much I loved her.’

  ‘Oh, I think I know.’

  ‘Yes – you have my memories,’ he said.

>   ‘I have something,’ she agreed. ‘Memory is so strange, isn’t it? I can see all these wonderful memories inside me, and yet there is a distance to them. I know they are memories. I’m not really seeing them, in the moment as I see you now.’

  ‘The way most people remember is not really remembering,’ Danlo said. ‘Remembrancing is different, truly. Especially recurrence.’

  ‘For one’s life to recur in a flash – how is this possible?’

  ‘I do not know. But the remembrancers say that matter is really just memory frozen in time. In recurrence, time melts away and we go back to ourselves. And then there is a flowing of our lives again.’

  She smiled at this and asked, ‘And what else do your remembrancers say?’

  ‘They say this: that difference between simple remembering and reliving one’s life is the difference between seeing a foto of an electrical storm and feeling a bolt of lightning sear one’s hand.’

  Now Tamara was no longer smiling. She took Danlo’s hand in her own, turned it palm upward to the sun and ran her finger over the lines and callouses. Finally she said, ‘I’ve felt the lightning, too, you know. There was my birth, and before that, the days in the tank. And here in this house, all these days we’ve had together. The flowers and the fire and the love. Do you think I can’t remember how your hands burned over me the first time we lay together? Isn’t this real?’