The memory librarian, p.5
The Memory Librarian, page 5
“Job!” Seshet laughs and then, inexplicably, wants to cry.
Jordan looks halfway to tears himself. “Director,” he says, looking at the remains of his turmeric-stained rice instead of at her, “just trust this time, won’t you? I think you and Alethia have something very special.”
It’s out of character for him to overstep like this. Not just as her subordinate, but as her—friend? But Librarians are never simply friends.
“Jordan . . .” She makes her voice hard in warning, but he shakes his head like a stubborn toddler.
“Do something about it if you don’t want me to pry. You haven’t memory-suppressed me yet, I know it. I’ve been monitoring myself.”
She blinks in surprise. “You’ve been . . . who taught you that?”
Monitoring is an advanced technique for detecting changes and manipulations in one’s own memories. It is generally only taught to subdirectors, though Librarians of lower ranks can learn it at the discretion of someone higher up.
Jordan laughs with more bitterness than she had ever expected of him and wipes his eyes. “It was authorized, Director.”
She wants to ask him by whom, the question nearly off her tongue before she swallows it back down. Does she want to know? Was it Keith, trying to suborn her closest clerk? Or, worse, Terry, tinting every friendly eye on her with a subtle shade of treachery?
“What do you want from me, Jordan?” She can’t keep the distrust from her voice, any more than he can fail to hear it.
“Director. Seshet.” He drives her name on his lips like a stake through her heart. “You don’t need to control everything.”
Stung, her spine stiffens. “I don’t need—”
Somehow, his very intensity stops her. “If it’s love, just let it be. Please.”
She can’t help but think of Jordan’s warning when she visits Alethia that night, though she knows it shouldn’t matter. Jordan and Dee? What did she do to deserve the unfounded moralizing of children and artificial constructs?
“I missed you this morning,” Alethia says, greeting her with a kiss at the door to her apartment. She’s smiling, but her eyes are red-rimmed, puffy and bruised underneath. Without makeup or tailored clothes, her beauty feels more raw to Seshet, more familiar. She’s wearing an old T-shirt and pajama pants, perhaps the same ones from last night. She secures all the locks behind Seshet before heading to the living room. All the blinds are down here and in the kitchen, but something in Alethia’s mood stops Seshet from suggesting they raise them and turn down the lights. Alethia picks up a thick wooden pipe in the shape of a palm frond and flips open a lighter.
“Please tell me you won’t report me,” she says with a laugh, but the look in her eyes is a little too desperate, a little too real.
Seshet tries to lighten the mood. “Only if you share.”
She’s smoked weed a handful of times in her life—all with Terry, in fact, from one of his fancy vintage vape pens while they played some ridiculous old video game of his with a lot of guns and gore—but she’s willing to try again just to take the scared edge out of Alethia’s voice.
White smoke billows from Alethia’s nostrils in soft, gentle whorls. Oh, to be the smoke behind her teeth, she thinks. Silently, Alethia passes the pipe and the lighter. Seshet knows how to do this, she has a thousand memories to show her, but the greenly burning smell brings her back, like a hook in her heart, to something older, personal. A little girl playing in the fall leaves, watching wide, beloved hips move with the rhythm of the rake; the smell of those leaves burning, painting sigils on the sky.
She gasps and coughs on a different smoke, in a different year, with a different name. Where did that come from? But it was her own memory, she knows it in her bones. The memory of that little girl she forgot for so many years, the one who longed, more than anything, for the woman with the rake to come back home.
Alethia is thumping her on the back, sitting her down on the couch. She brings her a glass of cold water, which finally soothes the burning in her airway. Seshet wipes her eyes.
“Don’t know what happened,” Seshet says, pushing the pipe onto the table.
Alethia wags her eyebrows. “You have a hard time breathing around me?”
Seshet’s heart hurts. She leans back on the couch, closes her eyes against the fluorescent lights, her beloved’s blinding smile.
“You’re tired,” Alethia says. “Did you work today?”
“You don’t really get days off in my position. You?”
“I . . . went to the lab. I have a project I’m working on . . . anyway, I didn’t stay long.”
Seshet cracks open her eyes. Alethia is gazing pensively at one of the windows, as though she can see through the blinds.
“Did something happen?” Was she not careful enough last night? Did she disrupt Alethia’s emotional balance with her real-time dive into her dreams and memories? The sleep headsets have that functionality, but it’s not recommended outside of a specially equipped detention facility where the subjects can be closely monitored for side effects. Guilt washes over her, inexorable as unbidden memory. There is a difference, vital as a heartbeat, between what is permitted to her position and what is aligned with her soul. She knew that, once. She almost remembers it now, but the knowing slides, sinks into soft forgetting, is gone.
Alethia shakes her head as though shaking off a fly. “Tell me about your day. If you can, I guess. Did you bust any heads?”
Seshet sits straight up. “I don’t bust—”
But Alethia is already holding her hands up, palms out. “Sorry, sorry, babe. It was just a joke. You are the Director of this whole little town. Heads are sometimes busted.”
“If I have to order raids, it’s for the good of our community—”
“So you ordered a raid?”
“I never said—”
Alethia’s laugh stops her cold. “The poor things that get caught in that net. So many new Torches for the Temple.”
“Alethia,” she says, forcing herself calm though she feels as if she’s falling in midair, “you know what I am.”
Alethia blows out another lungful of smoke. In the hallway, someone unlocks their door and shuts it. Alethia keeps still until the hall has gone quiet again.
“Yeah, I know. I just wish I could see who.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Alethia taps out the ashes straight onto the coffee table and refills the pipe. “Who are you, Seshet-without-a-number? Who would you be if you weren’t Director Librarian? Who could we be, together?”
The vertigo is getting worse. Maybe the weed has finally kicked in. “Why are you asking me this, Alethia?”
She stares at Alethia, who keeps her gaze fixed on the window. “It’s just . . . you have a reputation, you know? You’re . . . kinder than most of them. Nothing happened to anyone we met that night at Cousin Skee’s. I was taking a chance, bringing you there.”
She feels sick. “What did you think would happen to them?”
Alethia meets her gaze at last, but now Seshet wants to turn away, to hide from the confusion and distrust she sees there. “I don’t know, Seshet. You tell me. What’s going to happen to whoever gets caught in that raid of yours?”
“Anyone going to one of Doc Young’s parties needs Counseling, Alethia!” Alethia flinches but Seshet persists. “Yes, even cleaning. It’s for the good of the whole.”
Alethia snorts. “The good of the whole,” she says, mocking. “My god, you sound just like them.”
I am them, she almost says, fast and hot. She swallows back the cheap shot. Seshet could ascend to elder council itself and she still wouldn’t be more than tolerated in New Dawn. She knows exactly what Alethia means.
“Alethia, what’s going on? What happened today? Why are you like this?”
“Maybe this is who I am, Seshet. I’m not your dream girl. I’m just a woman in way, way over her head . . .”
She buries her head in her arms. Seshet, shocked, puts a hand on her shoulder.
“Just go.” Alethia’s voice is muffled and Seshet pretends she didn’t hear. But Alethia raises her head a second later, so the words are clear as the new dawn light:
“Leave, Seshet.”
You can say this for our Director Librarian, Seshet-without-a-number, the woman who named herself after a goddess so she could not forget what she meant to become: she does not flinch.
Whatever the consequences, the moral accounting, the line drawn between the she who had not done this thing and the she who has—what is an official of New Dawn if not a professional consequence risker, moral accountant, line crosser? And Seshet has prided herself on being the best of them all.
This is her line, carefully marked in the sand before the tide of what she is drowns it in a sea of salt and noise: Alethia’s memories.
She sees herself as through a haze of love and longing: a tall woman of regal bearing and awkward gestures, tongue-tied, eloquent-eyed, no longer young but ageless. That woman walks into Alethia’s apartment. That woman says, with a pained smile, Only if you share.
She takes the memory and pushes, back behind the most painful moments of Alethia’s past, behind her grief over her father lost on the other side of that border wall, behind the conflicted shame and love she feels for her mother lost to cancer, behind her first memories, her shock when she realized that other people saw her as a boy, and further, behind her first cries in the light, behind her waiting silence in the liquid dark. She pushes, and when Alethia puts her headset on tonight, she will respond and pull, until not a trace of their meeting a few hours ago remains accessible to her conscious mind. It isn’t as good as a full Nevermind wipe, but it’s the next best thing. No one that Seshet has suppressed has voluntarily recalled those memories ever again. She knows the trick, you see. No one remembers everything. And what’s too painful to remember, you can simply choose to forget.
All Seshet does is use their own mental blocks as the bulwark against whatever she wants to hide from their consciousness. It’s like a wall of fire in one of Terry’s old video games with a treasure safely hidden inside. Here’s the trick: if the flames burn on the fuel of your own shame, not even mortal terror can make you brave the heat.
She sleeps for a while in her own workstation, visor still down, the floodplain of virtual space melding seamlessly with the dreamscape of her own memory-haunted mind. She does not know of what she dreams; those are locked away in the fastness of her own shame and regret. Just one follows her into craggy wakefulness, and it’s not so much a dream as a belch of repressed memory, inexplicably brought to life. The sway of her mother’s hips as she agitates the leaves. The girl in the grass. The crackle and burn.
“Dee,” she says, without thinking. Their argument feels far away now. The logic of it lost to her in a groggy sickness, the hangover of what she has done to the woman she is falling in love with.
“You don’t look so good, Seshet.”
Seshet tries to laugh, but it’s like wet ashes, it won’t come out. Dee is a child playing on the floodplain, now empty, waiting for the morning’s harvest. She has never known whether Dee acts the role of a child for her benefit, or for some arcane satisfaction of its own.
“Dee,” she says, coughing on something too silty for tears. You have a hard time breathing around me. No matter what else they have, Alethia won’t ever remember that. “Show me my old memories, won’t you? Show me my mother.”
Dee’s uncanny eyes go wide as a Kewpie doll’s. “Really? You never want to look at those.”
“I . . . remembered something. From my childhood.”
“But you can’t remember those, not as a primary memory. Not unless . . . Oh, Seshet.”
Seshet thinks she doesn’t deserve Dee’s understanding, its kindness. Even if it is an artificial intelligence fundamentally limited by New Dawn’s protocols, it understands her better than any human ever has.
“I must have suppressed it,” she says, out loud, for the first time. “That’s how they missed it in the Nevermind wipe.”
Humans repress their own memories, of course. They do it all the time. Headsets wouldn’t work, otherwise. Nevermind would just be a really trippy drug. The fact that New Dawn has weaponized this effect for its own purposes doesn’t mean that people don’t forget things for their own simple survival every second of the day. It’s not so surprising that she would have done so. But why remember now, after so much time?
Without another word, Dee pulls up a memory and rolls it over her in a full sensory wash. Ah, she has always liked this one. She is eight, and her mother has just come home from some mysterious trip overseas. She has brought back a suitcase full of treasure and she shows young Deidre the spoils, piece by piece. Here is the necklace of cowries she purchased on the beach from a boy no older than Deidre; here is the doll made of corn husks and twine with black beans for eyes; here is the program for the opera, red ink on cream paper that still smells of someone else’s cologne.
“I can breathe there, Deidre,” she says, a refrain the child recognizes. “Your memories are your own.”
“But when will you let me come with you, Mom?”
“When you’re older, honey. When it’s safer.”
Deidre never understood what her mother meant by that. Then her mother and father fought and her mother stopped going on her trips, stopped bringing back bounty. Just a year later, her mother abandoned them both.
The memory fuses with another and another: her mother doing the laundry, cursing at the old machine that always rocked during the spin cycle; her mother singing her to sleep, Remember, some old song from before memories were things you could hold in your fist like coin; her mother screaming at the top of her lungs from the top of a hill, “I own my own soul!”
“Why do you think she left us, Dee?” Seshet asks now, though she doesn’t remember this girl that she was, not really.
Dee shuts down the memories. “She wouldn’t have done it without a good reason, Seshet. I know it.”
Terry has come to Little Delta for an unofficial visit. The news rushes through the obelisk like water over a ruptured dam, but Seshet, sleeping in her office, is among the last to hear it. It’s Jordan, of course, who saves her. He spends five minutes arguing with her door monitor before Dee finally wakes her up.
“Oh god,” Jordan says, “I was beginning to worry you’d died.”
“The door monitor would have let you in if I were dead,” Seshet says, yawning. She’s still in last night’s street clothes, which look—and smell—days old.
Jordan grimaces. “That’s what it said. Thank you, Dee.”
“You’re welcome, Jordan!” Dee says, inordinately pleased. It doesn’t acknowledge most people—a precaution Seshet instilled in it early on—but Jordan has always been on its short list of friendly humans.
He tells her about Terry, which wakes her the rest of the way up, no need for the coffee he has so helpfully brought. She drinks it anyway.
“How long has he been here?”
“Half an hour,” Jordan says. “He’s taking a tour of the Counseling building.”
She closes her eyes briefly. So he’s seeing Keith before her. This is meant to send a message, but knowing Terry, it’s as likely to make Keith feel overconfident as it is to make Seshet feel undermined.
“And this morning’s crop?”
Jordan hesitates.
“Out with it, Jordan. Things can’t get much worse.”
“Over fifty percent are those junk memories,” he says in a small voice that means he still can’t believe it. “I don’t know how, Director, but they’ve gone from a blip to nearly overwhelming the system in less than a week.”
A little more than that, she thinks, not that it matters. “Exponential growth,” she says. “It’s a killer.”
She uses the shower in her office and puts on the extra work robes she keeps in the closet. She can’t afford Terry’s performative casualness, and she doesn’t bother to try.
She meets him, an hour later, as the perfectly composed Director Librarian of Little Delta, in her robes of office.
He’s wearing the hat of Arch-Librarian, but below the neck he’s all ironic hipster, reaching for meaning in the corporate branding of the past. This time it’s an Atari T-shirt, corduroy pants, and pink Vans. She has to grant him his point: in the hallways of the obelisk his peculiar style stands out even more than his vestments would.
“Seshet!” he says. “Good news! I’ve gotten my hands on the Japanese original of Final Fantasy III, remember I was telling you about that?”
She blinks at him. “Congratulations?” She’s never managed to keep track of all the video games he’s played in front of her, but she generally drums up enough interest in the moment to keep things pleasant. The weed helps.
He settles himself in one of her armchairs, crosses left foot over right knee, and balances his conical red cap on the end of one pink shoe. “I’d suggest we head straight to Greenfriars, but I guess the play-through will have to wait. You must be drowning in work. Don’t mind me, I just stopped by to say hello.”
Greenfriars is one of the New Dawn resort facilities, about an hour out of town, reserved for officials, their families, and select friends. She has never spent much time there.
“Hello, Terry. I’ve just had a pot of tea brought up. Would you like some?”
She pours the tea into two matching ceramic cups, marked with gold and lapis filigree in the sigil of New Dawn. The tea pours green and fragrant as fresh-cut grass, and she doesn’t offer him any sugar. Terry only ever drinks iced coffees thick as milkshakes with protein powder. He takes the cup from her with a sardonic lift to his eyebrows.
“Tea, that’s charming. So . . . how’s it going?”
She doesn’t prevaricate. “Doc Young is back in town. I’m waiting on news of a sting operation from the Standards office.”
“Good. And his remixer?”
“I’m not sure if MC Haze is with him this time, but it’s possible.”
He takes a tentative sip and grimaces. “Well, I’m sure it will be settled soon in your capable hands, Seshet.”
