I caught it and pulled it close, gazing into its glassy body, but the colors that had appeared when Kaphiri touched it did not immediately appear for me. “How do you know it is oldest?” I asked, for there was nothing worn in its appearance or quaint in its fashion. If he had told me his kobolds had assembled it only yesterday, I would have no reason to disbelieve him, and I would be much impressed with his art. Even without color, it was a beautiful thing.
“Languages grow and change, you know this?”
I nodded.
“Even though I may not understand a language, it is still possible to see its relationship to languages that surround it in time. The similarity of words and grammar and symbols… I have traced many languages back through time. Among the oldest of them that I can still understand, there is mention of savants like this one, and even then they were considered relics. If this savant were to speak, it might use the oldest language in the world, the one that lies at the root of them all.”
Colors had begun to wake in it now, and at the same time I felt the electric presence of the ha stir against my hands. “What is happening?”
“It knows you through the ha.” He allowed himself a smirk. “That was how I acquired it. It was supposed to be ancient, but all the scholars who examined it could not get it to awaken. They were certain it was broken, or else a fraud. It was only by chance that I discovered otherwise.”
“Why would it respond to the ha? Was it made by you, in another life?”
“I wondered the same. But no. It dates from the beginning, eight centuries at least, before my first life.”
I lowered the savant, to look at him. “I was taught we were all created in the beginning, that we all lived our first lives together.”
“Not quite all of us.”
“You then? And Jolly? But what do the two of you share? You are not alike. You are not. Except the silver doesn’t take you.”
“And the ha is awake in us.”
“And in me…” I gazed again into the mysterious glass of the savant, seeing lines of colors warming within its depths. “The goddess said we were children, that we’ve been children too long. Jolly is to teach other players to awaken their ha… I think it’s why he was made… But it was you who wakened the ha in me.”
“I did not plan that.”
“Oh, I know. You thought it would kill me.” I saw symbols forming now in the savant’s glassy heart. Vaguely, I heard the first stirrings of an ancient voice, whispering down through time. “This is what I think, that in the first years, the ha must have been awake in all players, or anyway, all who were not children—”
He stiffened. “Is it whispering?” he asked incredulously. “Can you hear it?”
I could. At first it spoke so softly I could barely distinguish the words, but I knew immediately that its language belonged to me. “I have it,” I whispered, and Kaphiri stepped closer. I felt his tension as a pressure in my mind, and it was at once frightening and amusing. He needed me. He knew it now, without any doubt attached.
I bowed my head, bringing my ears closer to the sound. There was a space in my mind that was dark. I had never been aware of it before: a great, sleeping mass of memory, now waking, bit by bit, as if each word muttered by the savant was a spark of light illuminating another word in a language I had spoken before I knew any other. They were my words, and the voice I heard was my voice, speaking to me across time, from out of another life.
I shuddered, and vaguely I was aware of arms around me, steadying me as I sank cross-legged to the floor. I was listening to a monologue, the recitation of a history, but no sooner did I understand this than the voice fell silent. I ran my hands over the savant; turned it over in my lap, but no image appeared in its glassy surface. Then I looked up, to discover that someone new had joined us in the room.
She was an image of course, some kind of projection, for I could see through her to the drifting savants beyond but—
She was myself.
An older version of myself to be sure. She looked the age of my mother, and her fashion was not mine: her dark hair was pinned up in a dignified style that astonished me, and she was dressed in a formal gown of gold fabric, its pleated skirt accenting her height. And still I could not doubt that she was me.
As stunned as I was, she looked more surprised. “How can this be?” she whispered, in the language I knew so intimately now. “Do I look on a projection of myself?”
“No,” I answered, my tongue still unfamiliar with the words now so bright in my memory. “This is my life, and you are a savant.”
“A recording… that’s right. I was recording our history… though why, or for who…” She shook her head. “It was an act of vanity. But why are you so like me? Or anyway, like the girl I might have been?”
“Because I am you—don’t you understand?—in another life.”
“Another life? This one has not been enough?”
“You are not so old.”
“Am I not? Nine hundred years in the service of the goddess, and I was never a child. Now she has brought us all to ruin! And yet if that’s so, why are you here? It should have ended. It should have ended this night. How can you be here?”
Nine hundred years? My mouth was dry, so that at first I could not speak. I wondered if this persona was sane. “Why…” I swallowed, trying to get some moisture in my mouth. “Why did you think the world was at an end?”
“Because it is broken! It is flooded with silver. Most players have already been taken.” She raised her hands, and the ha sparkled between her fingers. “Only a few of us are left to hold it back. Too few. We cannot win.”
“But the world didn’t end,” I said. “Anyway, not yet.”
“Is this the same world?”
“I think it is.”
“What is your name?”
“Jubilee.”
“That’s different from mine. I am called Selma.”
I shrugged. “We are not born with any memory of our past lives. We don’t remember our past names.”
“Then how do you know you lived before?”
“The talents of our past return to us… and also, a memory of our lovers.”
“Indeed.”
“Is this new to you?”
“Very new, though it smacks of the goddess. Did she finally return? Is this how she sought to set things right?”
“I don’t know.”
Selma turned half away, a distracted, angry look on her face. “The silver is memory. Do you know that?”
“I have heard it said before.”
“It is the memory of the world, from its creation. The memory of the creation is still in it, and maybe, it even holds a memory of the minds of the god and the goddess who together made this world—though none of us left has the skill to bring her whole out of the past. I do not know what has caused the silver to flood, unless the god has won, and decreed that the world will be returned to chaos, so that he may stage the creation again.”
“The god?” A sullen anger ignited in me. “The god had nothing to do with the creation. This world was made by the goddess alone. The god pursued her. He came out of darkness to destroy her work.”