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Authors: Steven Brust, Skyler White
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power of the Southern slaveholders so Eastern manufacturers could prosper? To preserve the Union? To defend the Southern homeland against invaders? To free slaves? To create a strong central government? Because a lot of pretty girls batted their eyelashes and convinced a lot of boys to go be heroes? To make a lot of national parks? When you get to a Why you don’t have an objective answer, so the Why, what Ray calls the alpha axis, floats around and you locate a memory using the other three.
In practice, if you’re Ray, you interpret these as numbers along the various axes and you simply concentrate on the place those numbers identify. For most of us, they’re locations, and we follow paths in the imaginary world we’ve created to interpret the Garden until the object appears. When I seed a memory, perhaps it’s a marble bust of Cicero on a pedestal in my atrium; but when Jimmy wants to graze it, he’ll climb stairs to the turret of a medieval castle and find a bottle of wine sitting on a table, which he’ll drink; to Irina it’s an actual garden, and maybe she’ll see a bright red rose which she’ll sniff, whereas perhaps Matt sees a multicolored stone in a rock garden and he’ll study its colors. It’s all the same memory, but how we reach it depends on us. And, however you say it, the memory is found by locating the Who, the Where, and the When, leaving the Why undefined and variable.
Once a memory has been seeded, except for stubs, it’s there forever. You can change the shape so it’s less obtrusive or your memory would get so cluttered you couldn’t find anything, but you can’t get rid of it, and you can’t move it without a deliberate act of will.
With me so far?
Next to where the bust of Juno had been was a ripe, red pomegranate. I knew that pomegranate; it contained Celeste’s penultimate memory, in which she reported on a just-completed piece of insignificant meddlework and spoke of going to see the “grandbratties.”
Between the pomegranate and the hole was nothing.
Celeste’s last memory was gone.
I stood there looking at where her last memory should have been, appearing to me as a kithara, and I knew what had happened. You can’t get rid of a memory once it’s been seeded. And there’s only one way it can move.
Who, Where, When and Why.
If the Why becomes known, one of the others becomes undefined.
I returned to the real world, turned off my cell phone, opened my laptop, and addressed an email to the group.
Ren
Phil was sleeping in his chair, the computer on his lap still open, mirroring his mouth in silent duet. For almost a day, I’d been certain Celeste was trying to assert her personality over mine, to swallow me up, or kill me, but it’d turned out to be Phil who was gunning for me. I considered hating him, but I went to the bathroom instead.
I turned the shower on and studied his shelf of tiny toiletries, letting the anger climb up my legs. I wanted my own goddamn shampoo. My hair is thin, and “rich conditioning formula” and “extra moisturizing” and “volumizing” all translate to limp and droopy on me. I wanted my shampoo and my spiky gel and my makeup and my fucking phone charger. I slammed the shower dial off, ran my fingers through my sad hair and crept back past Phil, still pinned to his chair like a butterfly.
I got my shoes and found his car keys, and went back to look at him again, a little embarrassed I wasn’t handling this better. Still, if he knew me so well, he should have known that running away isn’t out of my idiom. Broken mantel clocks stay broken, after all, no matter how much you didn’t mean to drop them, and your rage at that injustice does nothing for your terror of the holy hell you know you’re going to catch.
It wasn’t a long-term plan, but a room in a hotel that wasn’t The Palms under a name that wasn’t Renee Mathers felt closer to the back of Nana’s closet than anything else and would give me time to think. But not
In practice, if you’re Ray, you interpret these as numbers along the various axes and you simply concentrate on the place those numbers identify. For most of us, they’re locations, and we follow paths in the imaginary world we’ve created to interpret the Garden until the object appears. When I seed a memory, perhaps it’s a marble bust of Cicero on a pedestal in my atrium; but when Jimmy wants to graze it, he’ll climb stairs to the turret of a medieval castle and find a bottle of wine sitting on a table, which he’ll drink; to Irina it’s an actual garden, and maybe she’ll see a bright red rose which she’ll sniff, whereas perhaps Matt sees a multicolored stone in a rock garden and he’ll study its colors. It’s all the same memory, but how we reach it depends on us. And, however you say it, the memory is found by locating the Who, the Where, and the When, leaving the Why undefined and variable.
Once a memory has been seeded, except for stubs, it’s there forever. You can change the shape so it’s less obtrusive or your memory would get so cluttered you couldn’t find anything, but you can’t get rid of it, and you can’t move it without a deliberate act of will.
With me so far?
Next to where the bust of Juno had been was a ripe, red pomegranate. I knew that pomegranate; it contained Celeste’s penultimate memory, in which she reported on a just-completed piece of insignificant meddlework and spoke of going to see the “grandbratties.”
Between the pomegranate and the hole was nothing.
Celeste’s last memory was gone.
I stood there looking at where her last memory should have been, appearing to me as a kithara, and I knew what had happened. You can’t get rid of a memory once it’s been seeded. And there’s only one way it can move.
Who, Where, When and Why.
If the Why becomes known, one of the others becomes undefined.
I returned to the real world, turned off my cell phone, opened my laptop, and addressed an email to the group.
Ren
Phil was sleeping in his chair, the computer on his lap still open, mirroring his mouth in silent duet. For almost a day, I’d been certain Celeste was trying to assert her personality over mine, to swallow me up, or kill me, but it’d turned out to be Phil who was gunning for me. I considered hating him, but I went to the bathroom instead.
I turned the shower on and studied his shelf of tiny toiletries, letting the anger climb up my legs. I wanted my own goddamn shampoo. My hair is thin, and “rich conditioning formula” and “extra moisturizing” and “volumizing” all translate to limp and droopy on me. I wanted my shampoo and my spiky gel and my makeup and my fucking phone charger. I slammed the shower dial off, ran my fingers through my sad hair and crept back past Phil, still pinned to his chair like a butterfly.
I got my shoes and found his car keys, and went back to look at him again, a little embarrassed I wasn’t handling this better. Still, if he knew me so well, he should have known that running away isn’t out of my idiom. Broken mantel clocks stay broken, after all, no matter how much you didn’t mean to drop them, and your rage at that injustice does nothing for your terror of the holy hell you know you’re going to catch.
It wasn’t a long-term plan, but a room in a hotel that wasn’t The Palms under a name that wasn’t Renee Mathers felt closer to the back of Nana’s closet than anything else and would give me time to think. But not
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