In the fifth month of the year, in the museum at Alter Octavius, the linguist Peter Kareza collapsed on the central mosaic encircled by the motto Memoria sacra est, verba divina. His dying words were almost unintelligible, trailing off into a coughing fit, and then, silence. He was carried away and cremated quietly in a ceremony attended only by his mother.
Only three people heard his final words with any clarity. Two never thought of them again, and one dismissed them out of hand as complete nonsense. He thought of them once, thirty years later, but by then he had nearly forgotten the words themselves and remembered only their strangeness.
The biologist had crumpled to the floor, and the words came slurred out of his dribbling mouth:
“Loveliest of trees, the cherry now…”
In time, those who had heard him forgot his words altogether, and retained only the impression of madness and grief. For no one who heard him had the slightest idea what a tree was, nor did they recognise a syllable he spoke.
* * *
The museum in Alter Octavius was full of words that no one used anymore. Beneath the glass dome of the city it soared to unimaginable heights of piercing towers and honey-coloured stone, and plunged deep beneath the dry earth. Inside were vaulted rooms full of shining screens, galleries of words pricked out in dots on polished metal sheets a hundred feet long, but high in the towers were shelves, shelves upon shelves, each containing small glass globes which reflected the light and threw it back, many-coloured and shimmering, onto the stone walls.
These were the words that were never used. Each one was bottled up inside its own globe, to lie there on the shelf until some linguist came for it. A linguist would come for all of them in due course, but there were so many words, and so few people, that the task seemed an impossible one. Nevertheless it was a vital task, indeed a civic duty. The museum’s motto had been translated once by some scholar from the unknown language it was written in, and every linguist had it off by heart: Memory is sacred, words divine. Linguists were the conveyers of that sanctity, instruments of divinity; as far as there was divinity, that is to say, it lay in words.
Magdalena was a linguist, of a junior kind. No one had retired or died since she came to work at the museum, thus she occupied a peculiar place between student and scholar. She worked at the mercy of the department heads, yet at the same time was adrift, floating between nominal duties and her own whims.
She had always loved the museum, of course, since she had been a child, but the places one loves lose their power when confronted by familiarity. She had tried to regain that awe by wandering through the galleries filled with visitors, or circling the great hall puzzling out the words in the mosaic surrounding the figure of Blind Time. Nearly everything failed to reclaim that lost reverence – everything except for the towers.
These she visited every day, if only to look at the glass globes, to run her fingers along the dark shelves, to watch the way the sunlight moved across the arched windows. And perhaps once in a while, her work sent her here, and she could linger more than a few moments.
This particular day was one such. Franz Hall, a senior linguist, had become ill, and so his work fell to Magdalena – his work being the history of the word cradle, a noun.
She had lingered in that particular tower long enough, going aimlessly up one aisle and down the next, so when the clock struck three quarters she picked up the globe labeled cradle and removed the stopper.
The history of the word filled her mind immediately, laid out in labeled chapters which she could scan at ease. Franz had gone back as far as the Forty Years’ Peace, so she found that particular chapter and took out her tablet. Images of spaceships filled her mind, lined with small cloth hammocks. Then there were rough metal objects on curved rockers, next to sophisticated boxes mounted on springs. Magdalena took notes on spheres driven by invisible engines and metal trays hung off beams by ropes.
She skimmed faster, further back. Franz was slow, he had only covered two hundred years in three months. She scribbled a mess of notes, scrolling up and down the tablet screen to connect the observations.
And then, quite suddenly, the flow of information stopped. The history ceased, as though nothing more existed beyond that point. The succeeding chapters were completely blank.
Magdalena put her tablet down in disgust. One encountered these blocks often – corrupted data, from before the city. She flipped through three more chapters in vain, but even their titles were gone. There was nothing more, and she had advanced only a hundred years beyond Franz.
She was about to stopper the globe when one word pricked at her mind.
Linden.
She searched for the containing chapter but could not find it. Marginalia, perhaps? There were ghosts in the data sometimes, words that had been erased or never transcribed to the word-memory.
Linden. It was a nonsense word, referent to nothing Magdalena knew of. Two syllables, unexceptionable vowel count.
Linden.
It had a pretty sound, though. Like something alive, now she thought of it. Well, she had done with cradle; she might look it up somewhere.
* * *
“Does linden mean anything to you?” she asked the man at the next desk.
“No.” He was sufficiently roused to look away from his screen, pushing his spectacles up on his head as he squinted at Magdalena. “That’s not a word, though, is it?”
“I don’t know. It could be.”
If it was, and she could trace it back to an origin, they would give her a place; they’d have no choice. No one had traced a new word back in twenty years.
She pulled up the globe database and searched for linden. No result came up, so she typed in lindon, lendon, lainden, lind, lindan, with no effect. She sighed.
“Nothing come up?” the linguist asked.
“Nothing.”
“Shame.” He keyed in another line of notes on streetlamp.
Idly, Magdalena brought up the search history of linden. Only one person had ever looked for it before, a few months before her arrival at the museum.
“Who is Peter Kareza?”
“Was. Dead now. Before your time, I suppose. He came in one morning, collapsed in the great hall, and died then and there.”
“I did hear something about that.”
“Very sad. He was working on ships, had been for years. I think he’d nearly finished. Would’ve retired after that, I expect.”
“I see.”
Magdalena had typed up half her notes on cradle when one of the tower bells rang for lunch. All the linguists pushed back their chairs and filed out of the room, with Magdalena following, but when the group reached the stairs that led down to the great hall she made her way to the lift instead. She took it up to the archives, and stepped out into one of the towers. Circular shelves lined the room nearly to the top of the tower, but instead of glass globes they held rows upon rows of writing tablets.
The room was empty save for a single woman sitting behind a desk, her hands folded calmly atop it. She looked inquiringly at Magdalena.
“Can I help you?”
“Yes, please.” Magdalena pulled out her badge and gave it to the woman. “I’d like to look at Peter Kareza’s notes on ships, please.”
The woman raised her eyebrows.
“You do realise Peter Kareza worked on ships for nearly twenty years?”
“I don’t think I need anything more than the past six months.”
“I see.” The woman studied Magdalena’s badge. “What is your current subject of research?”
“Cradle.”
“Ah. You’re Franz Hall’s replacement. And what have ships to do with cradles?”
“Er…” Magdalena thought back to one particular globe-memory. “I wanted to obtain more information on cradles in the context of space travel in the early days of universal exploration.”
A corner of the woman’s mouth twitched. “Why not consult the ships globe? Or find the instance via computer?”
“I prefer… I’d prefer a particular interpretation…” Magdalena stammered. “I was told Peter Kareza had worked on ships for a very long time,” she said, at last, triumphantly.
The woman leant back and folded her arms. She deliberately avoided looking at Magdalena.
“You’re right,” Magdalena said eventually. “I’m lying. I’m a very bad liar.”
“I wasn’t going to mention it,” the woman said politely.
Magdalena came closer to the desk.
“I’ve found a word,” she said. “I think he might have found it too. But it isn’t anywhere; it hasn’t got a globe, not even a reference. I think it’s a new word.”
The woman said nothing.
“Linden,” Magdalena said quietly. “That’s the word. If I can find it – I – what is it?”
The woman’s face had changed entirely at the word. She seemed deeply disturbed, even going so far as to look over her shoulder. They were alone, of course.
“You’ve heard it?” Magdalena asked.
The woman looked down at her hands, still on the desk, now clasped.
“Peter Kareza is dead,” she said. “Do you know how he died?”
“Heart attack. Wasn’t it? Somebody told me that. Was it not true?”
“No, I think it was.” The woman hesitated, opened her mouth once or twice, then spoke. “I can give you the tablet, if you like. I know which one you’ll need. But I would caution you… I think there are answers. It’s quite possible there are. But I do not know if they are worth the knowing.”
Magdalena stood there, not quite sure of what to say.
The woman sighed.
“Wait here.”
She returned in a few moments with a worn tablet, which she set down carefully on the desk.
“Thank you.” Magdalena took it and smiled. She turned to leave.
“One more thing, before you go,” the woman said. She stood beside her desk, one white-knuckled hand stretched out for support.
“These words, we don’t understand them. Not really. We think we we’ve studied them to death, but we don’t know them at all.”
Magdalena smiled painfully, politely, and made a mental note to return the tablet via an anonymous slot.
* * *
Lunch was not quite over, so she took the tablet out into the courtyard to read. A few metal tables were set up on the dry, shifting earth, and one was unclaimed. Magdalena sat down in a rigid chair, while the weak yellow sunlight straggled down through the dome and very faintly warmed her skin.
Peter Kareza’s notes were meticulous. The globes were best at providing a broad overview, due to the quality of memories, and it took years of training to probe for specifics. But even then Kareza’s notes were remarkable; he provided facts, figures, descriptions of a kind almost unknown, each with chapter and layer references. He compared the colony ships of Karth (great, unwieldly metal hulks) with the miniscule war ships of New Prosper. He had described the formations used by the air ship fleet of the High Emperor Sargon Peer. He had set down the precise length and breadth a floating craft must be before it was considered a ship (these, apparently, sailed on oceans, bodies of water vast enough to drown a thousand cities).
The notes crept further and further back in time, until, suddenly, the perfect phrasing vanished. Thoughts – shallow, surface observations – were strung together by mathematical expressions. Whole sentences seemed to be missing, or perhaps they had only existed in the linguist’s mind.
And there it was, for the first time: Linden. Alone, at first, surrounded by white space, it began to appear more and more frequently. Fragments of sentences joined it: remember, ground, earth, water supply, material, support, potential deity? early exploration, possessed by colour, alive, root, they are the earth, they grow out of it, call me to memory.
Magdalena studied the ground. It was bare, as always, the top layer of dust shifting slightly. Nothing grew in it – what would grow in it anyway?
The notes on ships stopped altogether, and long stretches of blank space interspersed with illegible scribbles replaced them. Finally she came to the end, which was merely the word Linden scrawled as large as the tablet itself, and beneath it, neatly printed, another word: tree.
The bell that signaled the end of lunch rang, and in a moment the courtyard was empty. But Magdalena did not stir, only read the last two words over and over again.
Linden tree.
Linden tree.
What a tree was she could not conceive. Something alive, Kareza had thought – like an animal perhaps? She could not think of it as being anything like a cat or a dog, for neither of those grew out of the ground, as he had written.
Linden tree. It meant…
At the back of her mind something flashed, an instant of recognition gone as quickly as she identified it. There was nothing there, after all, nothing that understood these words.
Beneath them, she saw for the first time, Kareza had written a number. It was almost too small to see, but by squinting she managed. 245B-A.
Well, that was far more concrete. It meant a level, a room, a directory, possibly globes – the two-hundred levels lay below ground, but they did keep globes there sometimes. She was no senior linguist, but she could control a globe.
And yet… if she did…
New words, though. Not only one, but two – who had ever done as much, and in a single day? Admittedly, perhaps Kareza had, but look what it had done to him. Confusion! Incomprehensibility, borderline instability. The way those words were scrawled, as if there were no time.
Magdalena thought fleetingly of cradle, of notes that needed revision, clarification. And yet, whose notes were they? Franz Hall had begun them, she had completed them, but it was his word. She would receive nothing for her efforts. Perhaps another temporary job while someone had a broken wrist, but those words were not hers either.
Linden tree, now, you might say that those words belonged to a dead man – no, if a man is dead, though, he has nothing. The words were hers and hers alone.
All doors in the museum were open; that was a promise made (however real) to linguists and visitors alike. It could not fail to be true after this. Her name, Magdalena Byard, would be a key.
When she stood, her shoes were covered in a fine layer of dust. That scarcely mattered. If, or rather when, she succeeded, she would certainly buy new ones.
* * *
The door was hidden behind a pillar in the great hall, and as Magdalena shut it it clicked softly, silencing the hum of conversation from outside. She put her ear to the door and heard nothing at all through it, and on this side of the door only the hum of pipes and the occasional spoken murmur.
The way down – a wide set of concrete stairs – was poorly lit. She made her way down slowly. The first person she encountered coming up the stairs was no more than a shadow, and made her jump, but she soon learnt to keep to her own side, and to listen for their approach. Some linguists were noisier than others; some, lost in their own heads, moved like ghosts. In the low light no faces were visible.
The stairs curved down in a long spiral around a central atrium. How high above her the stairs ascended was anyone’s guess, but it was far enough that no daylight reached her here. Occasionally there were landings and doors, and Magdalena peered through these to see warm, well-lit rooms full of screens and terminals and people. But these grew less frequent as she descended, and at last she met no more people on the stairs.
Then the stairs ended abruptly, as did the light, and Magdalena stumbled forward with her hand pressed to the wall. After a few steps, she found a niche, with a box inside. Further fumbling ascertained that the box was full of torches. She took one, and flicked on the beam, which wavered through the darkness.
She seemed to be at one edge of a circular space, like a tower beneath the earth, with walls of mottled stone. A thin ledge ran along the sides, edged with a metal rail, but all beyond and below was darkness. The ledge was interrupted only by a smaller, spiral staircase that led downwards. A brass plaque on the wall next to it read 200, and next to that, unnecessarily, was engraved an arrow pointing down.
So down Magdalena went, clutching the cold iron rail of the staircase, straining to look ahead into the darkness. She went down and down and down in circles until she was aching and tired, unable to remember how long she had been descending. Too late she thought, perhaps I might sing to pass the time. She hummed a single note, which seemed to vibrate in the air, and echo back from the depths with a metallic edge. She was very careful not to make noise after that.
Time passed. Her fingers cramped from holding the railing, and she grew steadily colder. Yet what else could she do? She climbed further down.
The end of the staircase came so fast that she nearly tripped and stumbled onto the earth at the bottom, righting herself just in time. The tower? The well? had ended, and there was nothing here except for a metal door with a lock as big as Magdalena’s head, and another brass plaque next to it which read 245B-A.
At the sight of the lock she nearly gave in to despair. She was hungry and cold, deprived of light, and for what? A locked door. Peter Kareza had no doubt had a key – or perhaps he had none at all, and the dark drove him mad, and he rushed back up to the service only to die at seeing the light again –
In sudden anguish she rattled the door handle, and to her great surprise, the door swung open. The metal lock creaked, imperfectly fastened to the door (rusting, now that she looked at it), and the hinges wobbled, but the door was open, and Magdalena stepped through.
From some far-off oculus a shaft of light fell, tumbling uncounted depths until it illuminated the object at the centre of this well. It was white, the pure white of something long-dead, which colour Magdalena had never seen before. From a rough pedestal – a trunk – sprouted hundreds of tendrils – limbs – more spindly than the trunk, and tapering at the ends, for all the world like a wild head of hair.
Ah, this, Magdalena said to herself, is Linden.
But she realised, as she stepped forward, that this was not quite so. Linden it might have been called once. Tree, her mind whispered to her. This was a tree.
And she saw them then – trees. Rooted in the earth, drinking from the sky, growing green and dying brown, cut down by the thousands, yet many more left living, row on row on row. Plants too, not trees, not so large, but green everywhere. Holding the earth together, giving air and life.
Remember.
Call me to memory. Memoria.
Remember.
Her hand shaking, Magdalena touched the tree. It was smooth, and surprisingly cold.
Call me to memory.
And so, obediently, she remembered.
* * *
Once upon a time, people used to forget things.
This was far from extraordinary – they made light of it, wrote books about it, laughed about it. They forgot their shopping lists, forgot what terrible things they had done as children, forgot what fools they made of themselves in school.
But then, when they were old, they forgot their lives. They forgot where they had lived, they even forgot who their children were. They were hungry, they were thirsty, they could not remember they had eaten or drunk or slept only moments ago.
So doctors and scientists were put to work, to create a drug that would keep memory intact to the end of life. It would clear minds and keep families together. Anyone could use it, even children. They called it Reminiscence – all you had to do was take it once a day, and you would never forget anything ever again.
Which was the difficulty, of course. There are things forgotten for a reason, things that no one should remember.
The first case was a woman who complained of headaches and hallucinations. She remembered with absolute clarity incidents in the life of her mother and her great-grandmother, which had passed before she was alive. She had perfect recall of things which had never happened to her.
That was how it began. Soon there were hundreds of cases, then thousands. People remembered restaurants long since closed, words written on paper dissolved centuries ago, conversations that were only rumoured to have taken place. They recalled houses, palaces, temples, lost empires, machines, and monuments – and then, children long-dead and buried, lovers killed, murder, fire, fear, starvation, war, agony, and every single thought of everyone who ever lived, every last thing their eyes had ever seen.
The world went mad in a single night. Even those who had never taken the drug began to remember, and suicide rates quadrupled, kept on rising. People stood in the streets writhing, their hands over their ears, but nothing could shut out the memories.
They called it Memoria, and those who were sane enough entered the sickness into the medical dictionaries.
Memoria: a disease that appropriates certain properties of living matter in order to begin a process by which the human mind is able to access species memories, especially the memories of its direct ancestors. Originating as a symptom of the drug Reminiscence.
Memoria. Memory. We remembered, and we remembered too much. Now do you see?
They found that it spread via trees and plants, living things that grew out of the earth. So they destroyed them all, every last root ripped up, burnt, and the ashes they ejected into space. They built the domed cities then, scattered across the ruined earth. And they built the museums too, desperate to be remembered at some cost. Words could be cleansed of their worst associations, held up as shining examples of the past; with a little tampering, they could even be divine.
The influence of the drug faded over time, and people forgot. They forgot why the cities were built. They believed themselves fortunate to be protected, when anyone could see that outside nothing existed but a wasteland. They believed themselves privileged to be trusted with the words of the ancients, the means by which they could map out and explore a manufactured past.
The horrors receded. They forgot. But the memories are still there, and Memoria lives in your blood; you can waken it with a touch.
Now do you see? You must never know why you are here, because if you did, you would learn that you are utterly alone, yet always surrounded by the ghosts of your past and your mothers’ pasts; you stand at the edge of a precipice, and no matter when you jumped you would always find yourself at a height from which there is no falling, yet you will never reach the ground, and the air itself will whisper to you saying, do you remember, do you remember, do you remember…
Then Magdalena woke, or at least the voices seemed to recede, and she found herself saying, over and over with a tongue as heavy as a stone, wet and thick, “Forget, forget, forget, forget.”
They found her there much later, stretched out under the limbs of the tree, her voice long since dried away to nothing.
* * *
She opened her eyes.
They had taken her somewhere else, not the museum. This was an office with smooth stone floors, low chairs, and windows that looked out on a paved courtyard. She sat in one of the chairs, opposite a desk, at which one man sat writing. Another man stood at the window, and as she shifted he turned.
“Ah. You’re awake. Good.”
“Why –” Her throat was terribly dry, and she almost choked on the word. “Why am I here?”
“We found you. That is not a place for anyone to wake up in, so we brought you here.” He studied her carefully, with incongruously soft grey eyes in a hard face. “Do you remember where you were?”
“I – yes.” She shut her eyes again. The memories threatened to overwhelm her. The singer, the saint –
“Don’t let them in,” the man said. “Calm yourself, you’ll only make it worse. The tree feeds on your uncertainty.”
“Then that was a tree?”
He smiled. “Yes, that was what we once called a tree. The last of its kind.”
“Then all that – all I saw, that was true.” It was not a question.
The man nodded gravely.
“And now you understand why you must not remember. No one must remember.”
“Who are you?” she asked abruptly.
The man sitting at the desk looked up for the first time.
“That’s of no matter,” he said. “As far as most are concerned we have no names.”
“But you remember.”
“That’s correct,” the first man said. He came closer. He was quite tall, taller than the other man must be by far.
“Why keep the tree, then? Why keep it, if that’s how we remember?”
He shrugged. “It proves useful as a lure, on occasion. It attracts those who are unstable, more likely to question. More likely, if you will, to remember.”
“So that’s how Kareza died. Did you kill him?”
“Certainly not,” the man at the desk said. “When he left us he was in perfectly health. That is to say, physically. The strain on his mind, however… well, no wonder he went mad.”
Magdalena sat back in her chair.
“What are you?” she asked coldly.
“I understand you’re used to answers,” the tall man said. “But I’m afraid you won’t get them here. We ensure that the world stays sane, and need remember nothing.”
“Are we prisoners?”
“Mm. I presume you mean both prisoners of the city, and prisoners of your own minds, no? A difficult question, an interesting question… to which the answer, I’m afraid, is yes. Now here you are, my dear.”
The tall man handed her a glass of clear liquid. It looked like water, but did not move like it.
“What’s that?”
“It will help,” he said gently.
“Do you mean to poison me?”
“We never kill,” the man at the desk said. “There are too many dead.”
“What is it?”
“Drink,” the tall man said, firmly.
Obediently, almost absentmindedly, she did so, and he added, “We call it Lethe. Though I suppose the allusion is lost on you. It’ll help you forget; that’s what you want, isn’t it?”
“Why?”
“Why must you forget?”
She nodded, rather sleepily now.
“If you remember, if anyone remembers, we are all lost. You must be brave, and forget. To save us. To keep us from the dark. You understand, don't you?”
“I would like to forget,” she said, uncertainly.
“I know. And you shall.”
He opened the door for her as she left. She wandered down the path that led down to the street, uncurious of where she was. She thought she remembered something; she had surely come here for a reason.
It was gone. There remained only a niggling suspicion at the back of her mind that there was something important about a river, or perhaps it was a tower?
She could not remember. Strangely, it did not trouble her.
* * *
“Was it necessary to use Lethe?”
“No choice,” the tall man said. “She’ll survive it.”
“If not, it’s no great loss, I suppose.”
“Oh, no, it would be most unfortunate. I do hope I managed not to damage her mind. A fine one. Elegant, perhaps a bit Baroque. Refined architecture.”
“She’s not a cathedral, Ellis,” the man at the desk said, and groaned. “God! I can’t wait till I retire. I’ll get to live just like the rest of them for once.”
The tall man held up the bottle of Lethe. “Fancy an early start?”
The other man laughed.
“God, no!”
* * *
…it has led me to this conclusion. We are puppets of the things we cannot bear to consider, the things we banish from our minds because they would drive us mad. We have forgotten them because some part of us knows that if we ever remembered them, we would wake to horrors too great to comprehend. We are nothing in a world of gods and nightmares, and the gods know it. The nightmares know it. We are only the dreamers, and if we ever knew it, we would see that we hung over the abyss by a single thread, and we would destroy ourselves.
From the journal of Peter Kareza
Memoria sacra est, verba divina.
What an idea; it seems Bradbury-esque (if that's a word)!
This is exquisite writing. Very philosophical in nature too. I love stories with a psychological aspect. Thank you for sharing such a marvel.