The Mother's guest room was bright, cheery and furnished for the convenience of old women. There was a raised bed covered with knitted shagshay spreads; there was a multrum in a closet with gleaming steel handrails; there was a robot that one could summon or send scurrying about the wall shelves or vanities to fetch various things. At the far end of the room, by the window overlooking the Conservatory grounds, there was a little tea table and two high-backed chairs. She motioned for them to sit, facing each other, in these plush chairs. Of course, he would have preferred sitting crosslegged on the carpet by the fireplace; he could scarcely believe that she seemed to have forgotten this.
'I'm sorry,' she said as she gripped her hands together. 'I'm sorry, but this will be difficult. You have me at a disadvantage. I've been told so many things about us – you'll be thinking about these things while I try to remember.'
'You do not remember anything?'
She shook her head. 'No, nothing.'
He stared at her in disbelief, and his breath quickened, and he had the strange feeling of the hairs along the back of his neck pulling up, tingling. There was a tightness in his chest, a fiery knot in his throat that no amount of swallowing would undo. He had hoped that seeing him would help her remember, instantly, the way the shock of a sudden wind might recall cold, happy nights spent around the oilstones, talking with friends or playing with lovemates. He had hoped this too desperately, and clearly, so had she. Hope was written across her lovely, damaged face. Their eyes met, and she must have expected to see something familiar and comforting in this encounter, for suddenly she looked away, and her eyes were black and bitter with disappointment. There is nothing there, he thought. And this was an astonishing thing; this was a truth that made him want to scream and pull his eyes out of his head. They should have recognized each other, as they had at their first meeting and all their times together since then. Even if both their memories had been lost, it should have been as if they had known each other for a billion years and would honour this bond for ten billion years more. Only now there was nothing. Looking at him, he thought, she could not see him. Something inside her (perhaps in him, too) was blind.
She has been blinded, he thought, and with this turn of his mind, he began to rage against a universe that could engineer such a tragedy.
'Pilot, are you all right?'
He sat in his soft chair, knuckles pressed to his head. After a while, when he had caught his breath and could see again, he choked out, 'You ... were right. This will be hard.'
'I can only imagine how painful this must be for you.'
'And for you,' he said, 'isn't there a similar pain?'
'No, I don't think so. Mine is only the emptiness of forgetting. While you – what could be more painful than remembrance?'
He smiled and shook his head. 'Everything I remember about us is blessed. Truly. Shall I tell you the things I remember?'
'You have a remarkable memory, it's said.'
'Sometimes it is hard ... for me to forget.'
'Then tell me,' she said.
He swallowed three times, then said, 'There was a game you taught me, an art, a kind of telepathy like face reading – but not really like it at all. The object was to open the cells to signals from the cells of the other. After joining, for half a night in the lotus position, always looking into each other's eyes ... this becoming of the other person's cells. To become the other. We did this, once. Do you remember? It was the ninth of winter, and it was snowing all night, and when morning came you kissed me and said– '
'No, please.' Tamara held up her hand and shook her head.
'We found the place,' he said, 'where the thoughts stream before they become words, and our thoughts were the same, for a moment, then for half the night. Like two rivers flowing together. Wordless. But endless, too. When morning came, you said a thing to me that only I– '
'Please don't say any more.'
At the sound of panic in her voice, he suddenly paused. 'But why not?'
'I've decided it would be best if you didn't tell me anything.'
'But you must want to know,' he said. 'It must be terrible, not knowing.'
'Of course I want to know. But it's tiresome being told. I want to remember, for myself, if I'm to remember at all.'
'But that was my intention. To help you remember.'
'I don't think anyone can help me, after what's happened.'
'There are ways,' he said. 'The memories are always there. Onstreaming, like light. But with our minds, we close doors to them. We stand with perfect vision in darkened rooms. This is called forgetting.'
'Well, I suppose some doors are locked shut – forever.'
'No, that is not true. There is always a way to open a door. To find the key. The problem is finding the key.'
'If only I could believe that,' she said. 'I wish I had your faith.'
He smiled and said, 'Faith – I have been accused of being too much a disbeliever to have any place left for faith.'
'Have you?'
'Don't you remember?'
'Well,' she said, 'you must be the most faithful of all disbelievers.'
'You used to tell me that very thing.'
'Did I?'
'Yes, you did,' he said. 'I think you are remembering, now.'
'No, I'm observing.'
'Just that?'
'If I'm remembering at all, it's only what others have told me about you.'
'Are you sure?'
She cast him a icy look, then said, 'This is very tiresome, you know.'
'I am ... sorry. It is late and– '
'Please. I'm not at all tired. It's just that these remembrancing tricks have all been tried and nothing has worked.'
'Has a remembrancer attended you, then?'
'Of course. Thomas Rane – I believe you know him quite well. He was here this morning.'
'Looking for keys, yes?'
'Isn't that what remembrancers do? He tried his word keys, of course. And olfaction and gestalt, association memory, too. He even had me face a simulation that some cartoonist had made – a little vignette of you and me doing our work together. I'm sure it was meant to shock me into remembrance. It did shock me, but not as Master Rane had wished.'
As Danlo nodded his head, he happened to look down at the tea table. It was as black and polished as an obsidian mirror, though besmeared in many places with fingerprints. He saw his reflection there, dark, troubled and faint. Although it usually amused him to look at his own face, the sight of himself brooding over Tamara's disfigurement annoyed him, so he covered his reflection with the palm of his naked hand. Instantly, the top of the table began to change colours. It swirled with bands of indigo, chlorine and puce. He realized that this was probably a Simoom antique, a frivolous piece of technology designed by cetics to read the simpler emotions. Its surface was of pure chatoy, and it ran with colours as extravagantly as did the eyes of a Scutari. In a moment, one colour settled out and spread across the whole of the table. It was greige, the ugliest of all the yellows. He could not know which colours were coded to which emotions, but he knew what he was experiencing at that moment, and that was a blend of frustration and disgust.
He lifted his hand up from the table and watched it return into blackness. He said, 'In order to make his simulation, the cartoonist must have captured our basic images and voices, yes? Before permuting them.'
Tamara, he saw, had been staring at the table as a hunter studies the sky for signs of changing weather. He noticed that she was careful to keep her hands away from it.
'You're a beautiful man,' she said. 'And I'm a ... I'm a courtesan. The outlaw cartoonists are always slelling images of people like us to make their little simulations.'
'But Thomas Rane is no cartoonist.'
'Of course not. But who knows who he knows?'
'It is possible,' he said, 'that Bardo has recorded the images of various persons who have entered his house.'
'That shouldn't be a surprise,' she said.
'No,' he said. And then, 'But you say that even this simulation failed to excite ... your memory?'
'It failed utterly.'
'Perhaps there is some key element missing from these images.'
'Thomas Rane suggested the same thing. He thought it would be best if I saw you in person.'
'I had hoped ... that you would recognize me,' he said. 'That my voice would be familiar.'
'I wish I could say that it was.'
'Then ... I have failed, too.'
His voice, he thought, his true voice that vibrated from his throat as naturally as any animal's, should have been the simplest of keys. It should have unlocked her memory, or at the very least, the sound of it should have touched off inside her the deeper emotions.
She is deaf to me, he thought. Something has deafened her.
Tamara smoothed her hair away from her face and said, 'Thomas Rane even tried giving me kalla, but that did nothing to help me – it seems impossible to me now that I was ever enamoured of that particular drug.'
'Yes, you once had a taste for kalla.'
'No more.'
'But kalla brought you ... your first clear sight of the One Memory.'
'I know,' she said. She closed her eyes and pressed her knuckles to them. She was on the threshold of tears, but like an astrier mother attending her child's funeral she would not allow herself to cry. 'I know that I once had this unitary memory that everyone talks about. Saw it, quite clearly. I could hold it, relive it again and again. But now it's slipped away. I've only the slightest memory of the memory. It's very faint, like the glow left in the sky after the sun has gone down. I know it was important – the most important thing in the world. But I can't see why. I can't see it, and that's what bothers me. Because I really don't miss this memory, even though I know I should. This is what frightens me, Pilot. If I've lost this marvellous thing, I should mourn its passing, shouldn't I? What's the matter with me that I don't care? That I don't care that I don't care?'
He watched her press her fist into the pit of her belly. Her face had fallen waxy and white, as if she had eaten from a cache of rotten seal meat. He engaged her eyes, then. He smiled and said, 'I cannot believe ... that you do not care.'
'But I mustn't care, don't you see?'
She let her hand fall to the table, and its surface warmed to the colour of steel. Then Danlo touched the tabletop and it vibrated up into a pearl-grey. He reached out his hand to touch her fingers. She left her hand motionless to be touched. There should have been a connection between them, electric and instantaneous, the sure knowledge that the cells of his body were meant to join with hers. But her palms were cold with moisture; her fingers were stiff and unalive as if they had been caught in the open wind and there was nothing between them, nothing at all.
Tamara, Tamara, he silently lamented. What wind could ever blow so cold?
Now the table was as grey as ashes; they both stared at it, saying nothing.
After a while, she withdrew her hand from his. She sat quietly with her hands folded, resigned to her fate, looking very much like an image that Danlo had seen on one of Bardo's stained glass windows. It was an image of one of the Kristian martyrs about to be burned to death out of pride for her faith.
Not wind but fire, he suddenly thought. Not coldness, but burning.
Though her hands had suffered frostbite, they were as red as if she had plunged them into a pot of boiling water. He asked her if she remembered wandering the streets during the storm, and she nodded her head.
'I remember thinking I should find a warming pavilion or go inside. The snow was blinding me, and it was so cold my face was burning.'
Fire is the left hand of wind, he remembered.
'Of course, when I finally realized I had frostbite, it was too late. In another place, I might have lost my fingers and my nose. But the City has the best cryologists in the universe, if one can afford them.'
He drummed his fingertips against the table as he stared at her. He asked, 'Is your memory complete since you were brought here?'
'I'm sure it is.'
'But what do you remember in the period just before you were found?'
'I don't remember anything,' she said. 'There's a hole there – missing time.'
'How much time?'
'I really can't say.'
His fingers drummed faster, in waves from right to left. 'But on the other side of this hole – there is more memory, yes?'
'Of course there is.'
'What memory?'
She sighed and clutched the sleeve of her robe. 'I know what you're doing. But it's hopeless – Thomas Rane has already tried reconstructing the chronology. There are too many holes. Too much time has passed. Even in the best of times, of course, I could never have remembered my day to day activities over more than half a year.'
Danlo, who sometimes recalled every day of his life since he was four years old, could only bow his head in respect for her debility. In a low, solemn voice, he asked her, 'The holes in your memory go back more than half a year?'
'At least that far.'
'There must be a ... first thing that you have forgotten.'
'I believe the first hole has obliterated much of the night of Bardo's party.'
'The night we met?'
'It would seem so.'
'Strange,' he said. The table beneath him, he saw, was now turquoise on the verge of deepening into blue.
'It was the third or fourth time I'd been to Bardo's house,' she said. 'I remember drinking a glass of wine and chatting with a holist I'd once had a contract with. I remember the triya seeds popping and the smoke, and I remember meeting Hanuman and– '
'You remember meeting Hanuman?'
'Of course I do.'
'But he met you ... only minutes before I first saw you.'
Tamara squinted and rubbed the back of her neck. She seemed confused. 'I'm sorry, I don't remember seeing you.'
'With our eyes, we found each other,' he said. 'And then Hanuman presented us.'
She shook her head slowly back and forth. 'I remember looking at Bardo's bonsai trees and thinking how ill they seemed and then, when I turned around, Hanuman was standing next to me. He presented himself to me. Which was really a courageous thing for a journeyman to do; most journeymen won't even talk with a courtesan. But Hanuman was different. I've never met anyone with a better sense of himself. He was quite charming.'