Then we Homo saps come along, and sludge-wits that we are, almost every activity we invent for ourselves moves in a straight line. Step-by-step instructions, agendas for business meetings, timetables and milestones for working on a project. Our whole culture = first A, then B, then C. Binding the tiger with a chain of one link after another.
One thing at a time. Society pounds away at us, "It’s wicked-bad-sinful even to contemplate the possibility of experiencing everything all at once."
But I wanted everything — everything I said and did that night before Chappalar died.
I opened myself to the memories: not commanding them to come, because the commanding part of my brain wasn’t the nub I wanted to activate.
Open the inner eye. Just see what’s there.
Chappalar and me saying good night in front of the Vigil’s office. The dear funny sight of him bouncing through the grove of other office trees in our neighborhood. Me walking down to the transit station, where I caught a scuttler for home.
No sign of anyone following either of us.
Off the scuttler and heading for my home compound. Preoccupied, gloomily self-absorbed: worried about the link-seed bomb ticking in my head.
Sudden memories of a different time — don’t fight the change of subject, let it happen if that’s what my brain served up. The face of a senior student I’d known marginally, someone who died from data tumor early in mushor.
An imagined picture of scalding blood, squirting from his eyes. The horror his family must have felt. The horror my family would feel if it happened to me. Our kids, trying all their hard-won attitudes, arrogance, outrage, coolness, and finding nothing that shook the grief. My husbands and wives with a few more funerals under their belts, but still deep-struck because they depended on me… depended that I’d be the one in trouble, the one who needed close watching, the first one all eyes turned to when someone asked, "What shall we do tonight?" because Faye might’ve got one of her moods…
Moods. A torrent of moods flooding into me… not memory anymore, but Remembrance: touching all the moods I’d ever had, not just the night prior to Chappalar’s death, but all the angry moods before, all the guilty moods after.
Everything all at once.
Not data tumor. The deluge didn’t come from the datasphere but from my own mind, chagrins and shames I’d tried to squash down, and joys that I’d run from because they were undeserved, too good for someone like me…
My whole subconscious suddenly exploded to the surface, like an eruption of gas bursting out of deep ocean, wretched stinks and sweet lost perfumes, hates, loves, humiliations, triumphs…
Subconscious becoming conscious for one gasping moment of totality.
Then it was gone again, the ocean clapping back into place, subconscious plunging into drowned depths, the moment of revelation getting swallowed under heavy black water.
I opened my eyes. Tic was watching me closely. He hadn’t moved; but he must have known what happened by the look on my face. Softly he said, "Some proctors grow addicted to that experience. That moment of knowledge. They don’t enjoy it, but they have to look again and again. Others would rather die than repeat it. Wisdom lies between those two extremes: use memory as a tool, not a drug. But. Fanobo roi shunt, aghi shunt po."
An Oolom proverb: acting wisely is easy, until it ISN’T.
I said nothing. Speechless. Breathless. In the quiet, Tic’s goggles hissed out a puff of mist to keep his eyes moist.
"I didn’t tell anyone about Pump Station 3," I whispered. "Not by name. Chappalar must have mentioned it to someone. His lover. Maya."
Maya.
"Who is this Maya?" Tic asked.
"A human woman. I’ve never met her myself — just heard some of the other proctors talk about her. Chappalar said she was a hundred and ten years old."
"And Chappalar saw her the night before he was killed?"
"So he told me."
"Long-term friendship or recent acquaintance?"
"Recent, I think."
Tic raised his eyes to the ceiling a moment, then lowered his head again to look straight at me. "There’s no such woman in Bonaventure."
I was a hair away from asking, "How do you know?" but stopped myself in time. Tic must have used his link-seed to call the world-soul and check our city census database. The search wouldn’t take long — since Homo saps had only lived on Demoth half a century, there weren’t a lot of us aged 110. Sure, a few of Demoth’s original humans arrived in their fifties or older; but not many. Colonization was a sport played mostly by the young.
"She might not have told Chappalar her right age," I said. "Humans sometimes fudge how old they are."
"And a charming foible it is," Tic answered. "Never trust a species that tells the truth about everything — they’re either stupid, arrogant, or only interested in documentaries. But there’s no human, male or female, anywhere over the age of one hundred with a name that’s close to the word Maya… not on the voters’ lists in all Great St. Caspian." Oh. Pity.
"Maybe she lives elsewhere on Demoth," I suggested. "It takes next to no time for someone to travel here by sleeve…" Tic looked away again, then turned back. "No one fitting Maya’s particulars has taken the Bonaventure sleeve in the past two weeks."
I stared at him in great gaping shock. Sure, the Transit Board required sleeve operators to record who passed through when… but those records were kept confidential except by court order. Police could get warrants to track criminals; accident investigators could find the names of travelers splattered or spaced by malfunctions; but members of the Vigil had no authority to check the movements of private citizens. If I tried such a thing, the world-soul would stonewall me with information does not exist or is not validly accessible. It might also notify my superiors, who’d demand to know what in merry hell I thought I was doing.
"Transit records are tight-sealed," I told Tic in a low voice. "How can you search through them—"
"I can’t," he replied. "But the world-soul can. And Xe’s a dear old girl who’ll do her utmost to be obliging if you ask your questions persuasively. One: I am interested in locating a murderer, who is by definition a dangerous non-sentient creature. Two: we have honest reason to believe this Maya passed information, knowingly or not, to our murderer sometime between her evening with Chappalar and Chappalar’s death the next morning. Three: it’s my duty as a citizen of the League of Peoples to warn other sentients about potentially lethal risks… which means I should notify Maya she spoke to a dangerous non-sentient at least once and presumably may do so again. Four: I direct the world-soul to warn Maya posthaste. Five: the world-soul asks how to contact the woman, and I provide all the leads I can, including that she might have recently traveled on the Bonaventure Sleeve. Six: the world-soul anxiously replies it can’t send the warning because no woman fitting the criteria appears in the transit records." He shrugged. "Perfectly straightforward."
The shrug was a nice touch — Tic’s face looked wholly sincere, as if anyone could have strung together that chain of reasoning in the half second it took to link with the datasphere.
No thought at all of trying to impress me.
Whether or not I was impressed, I swore I wouldn’t show it. "So this Maya…" I stopped, struck by a thought. "Conceivably, ‘Maya’ is a nickname that has nothing to do with her real name. That would make it hard to find her in the city database or the transit records."
"Oh. True." Tic’s face darkened. Literally. Went a shade grayer in the gathering dusk. "Nicknames are such a flippant human custom. Impertinent. Jaunty. If you don’t like your old name, go through a proper rechristening like decent people instead of just deciding…" He fell silent a moment, his face distant. "All right," he said, after a few seconds, "the world-soul will phone every woman in Great St. Caspian over the age of one hundred, and tell her there’s an urgent message if she goes by the name Maya. It will do the same for anyone in the right age range who traveled here by sleeve recently. If there really is a Maya, we should flush her out."