And yet… can I be sure of that? Can I be sure that I’m not somehow being directed by the ghosts I carry, that my work is not somehow improved by then-presence? Can I take sole credit for anything I’ve ever done?
“Oh, their personalities are in there,” my friend Melen says. “It’s just all subconscious. You’re not aware of it. You’re not aware of them. But they’re in there, those souls. In you. They may be dormant but they’re not comatose. Glaciers look dead and frozen, but they expand, contract, make forays and retreats— they breathe and move and behave. They influence you whether you know it or not.”
If Melen is right, it means that I have a microcommunity of ancient minds nesting under the floorboards in my head. A haunting of ancient minds, whispering to me in my sleep, influencing me, prompting me.
The thought of that blanks my sight white with rage.
Melen cannot be right. Melen is only a bearer, a fleshgiver, and knows nothing of quickening. The en-grammatic neuroencoding perpetrated on me by my quickener is inert, nonfunctioning, until my maturing body secretes the neurohormones that can stimulate the designated receptors. Children do not produce those hormones. I do not yet produce those hormones in sufficient quantity to wake Tollis’ ghosts. Until I step off the cliff of puberty, the pathways of the past are closed to me—and I am safe from them.
But I’m nearing the cliff. I can hear the winds whistling up out of the abyss. I have begun to have bad dreams. Dreams of places I have never seen, feelings I have never felt. Alien emotions, alien sensations, alien attitudes. There are monsters in me and they are shifting, stirring. I perceive them in brief bursts of firing synapses in the small hours, like looming shadows silhouetted by sudden glare, the eye-searing shock of lightning in the coal deeps of night.
They will wake. They will engulf me. They will submerge me. I will drown in them. Drown in ancestors.
Unless I get them first.
I want to blame it all on Tollis, but that would be unfair. Tollis was a victim, and can’t be faulted for the cruelty of others—or for possessing the memory of that cruelty. Tollis had no choice in what happened, and no choice about whether to remember it or not.
But I do.
The trouble with freedom of choice is that at some point you have to exercise it. Once I make this choice, there will be no going back. And I don’t have enough information to be sure I’m choosing correctly.
I have only external knowledge of Tollis: a lightleaf imprint of Tollis’ bearer, found in Tollis’ carryall and passed on to me by Arim (why carry an imprint of your bearer when you can just look in the mirror? yet people do); news stories I researched myself; and Arim’s verbal description of the stranger on the trolley platform. I know of Tollis’ trauma only through hearsay. The one who was Tollis, a dark, coarse-coated native of some mountainous northern land, with ice-shard eyes, a ready grin, and a burred accent, died when I was quickened. There is no one I can ask, “How many lives did you carry? How many did you pass on to me? Will you live quietly inside me once you’re freed, or will you enslave me to your foreign desires?” I have asked prepubescent and postpubes-cent quickener friends to describe their experience, and nothing they have said convinces me that they remain entirely themselves and have not become puppets of their forebears.
The news stories of Tollis tell little of the quickener
and focus predominantly on the horror. Quickener, bearer, one offspring, two parents, and two visiting siblings attacked in their Veranathor home, beaten and tortured, all but one killed. The details are gory and I don’t like to think about them. If I receive Tollis’ memories, I will have to live with that experience for the rest of my life, and it didn’t even happen to me.
For all I know, Tollis might have wanted to end it all that day. Who can say for sure that Tollis, standing on that transit platform, didn’t plan to jump under the trolley’s wheels, or ride it to an observation tower for a fifty-length dive? But there was Arim, full of me, standing beside Tollis on that station platform, and there was I, overeager then as now, tearing free of the pouch prematurely. Arim had no idea I was coming. Tollis simply happened to be the only quickener there. Stimulated past resistance by the pheromones and bloodscent, by Arim’s cries and mine, Tollis, willing or unwilling, slid my small body from the fleshgiver’s blood-slick claws and did what millennia of biological evolution compelled:
Quickened me. Electrochemically stimulated my brain to think, forging pathways that in other species’ young would take weeks to years of experience to form, forcing myelinization to flash-pave those pathways against erosion. My cardiopulmonary, sensory, and nervous systems, allowed to develop in safety within my fleshgiver’s pouch, were fully prepared for use; with the exception of the armor plating that would later form in my skin, physically I was already a fully functional miniature replica of Arim; but until Tollis quickened me, I lacked motor skills, coordination, spatial perception, tactical and strategic comprehension. Tollis bequeathed to me a full set of survival skills—enough, in the primitive, predator-rich environment that bred us eons ago, to keep me alive long enough to reproduce.
And then Tollis passed on life and spirit, memory and identity as well. Quickening me past bearing. Quickening me into a quickener.
That degree of quickening—soulgiving, the elder cultures call it—is death for the quickener. No one knows why, any more than they know why we sleep or why we dream; there are as many theories as there are sophists. No one even knows precisely how, any more than they know precisely how it is that we think at all. Consciousness and memory are hotly debated topics within the sophistries. But it seems to me that there’s more to this than neurotransmitters and electrochemical copying, or quickening wouldn’t kill you. There’s some sort of transfer of spirit, of soul, something profoundly more than mere brain chemistry….
Why did Tollis quicken me? It meant that that experience of torture and bereavement and rage would live on for at least one more generation. Was it ego, or sacrifice, or cowardice? Did Tollis feel it was preferable to continue suffering than go into oblivion? Did Tollis shy away from selfdeath when the void roared, and grab panicked, desperate hold of neural immortality? Or did Tollis courageously agree to live on with trauma rather than end a line of predecessors?
Allowing puberty to thaw the memories in me, and passing them on in turn, could be consigning Tollis to eternal damnation.
Denying the hormone surge of puberty could be wiping out millennia of ancestors.
I don’t know how many predecessors there were. How many were quickened by those who’d been quickened by those who’d been quickened before them. Everyone who knew Tollis, who could have answered my questions, is gone. By choosing suppression, it could be that I’d destroy only two of us—myself and Tollis—and one of those deaths a mercy to a tortured soul.
There is only one way to find out, and there is no way back from it. The only way to find out if something will break is to break it. The only way to know the future is to go there.
And so I sit here on a bench in sight of the entrance of a clinic that can excise these ghosts from me permanently, and make no move to cross that threshold.
Memory-murder. Killing the mind or minds I host. There’s no way to pass them along unsampled. There’s no way to give them to someone else to hold. If I die without passing them on, they die, too. And I will die without passing them on if I walk through that entry-way, because it will burn out the parts of my brain where the ghosts lie dormant. Someday, perhaps, there will be better therapy, temporary suppression, denial of integration; perhaps someday you’ll be able to let the ghosts wake, get acquainted, and then decide if you like living with them or not; perhaps someday you’ll even have the choice of storing predecessors and passing them on to the next child undamaged while you yourself forgo the next life for restful oblivion.