"As far as you can remember?" A squidge of emotion flickered across his face; but thanks to those blasted goggles, I couldn’t tell which emotion it was. "Ms. Smallwood… you realize your link-seed can delve into—"
"I know," I interrupted. "They explained at mushor."
The same way my link-seed could package up memories for the police, it could rummage through my mind for forgotten minutiae stashed below the conscious threshold. The process wasn’t perfect — our brains are lazy buggers who adjust memories for easy storage, throwing away some details and approximating others with images that are already in our mental cupboards. Still and all, the night in question was recent enough that I shouldn’t find too much distortion.
"It’s rather imperative for us to be sure on this," Tic said. "If you explicitly told anyone you were going to Pump Station 3…"
"Yes!" I snapped, "I know it’s important!"
He peered at me owlishly through his shaded goggles. Then he asked, "Stick or bag?"
"Excuse me?"
"When I was a dewy-eyed novice," he said, "my mentors took the direct approach in helping me deal with my fears. Whenever I hesitated to use my link-seed, they either hit me with a stick or put a bag over my head. I hated the bag most, so that’s what they usually used." He sighed dramatically. "Such barbaric days — I swore I’d be more enlightened. By which I mean I’m giving you the choice. Stick or bag?"
I boggled at him, wondering if this was just a joke. So far as I could see, he didn’t have either a stick or bag… but then, he wore the usual Oolom tote pack, a flat ort-skin pouch positioned at groin level, held in place with straps up around the neck and down to the ankles. The pack was just big enough to hold some escrima rods, and a sack or two.
Even as I watched, his hand drifted down toward the tote pack’s zip-mouth.
"No stick, no bag," I said jump-quickly. "I’ll do this. Just give me time."
"At your convenience." Tic folded his hands in front of him: the picture of a man willing to wait.
Waiting for me to invoke my link-seed demon. To tweak fate’s nose by hooking up again.
Look. This is getting stale for me too — the constant whining about my link, "Oh, woe, what if my brain goes splat?" You must be saying, "Snap out of it, honey. The seed is a gift, not a curse. And anyway, the thing is so thoroughly twined around your neurons, you have no choice but to live with it."
The same words I kept saying to myself.
I hated the fear. It was so daft childish — to train seven whole years, then melt into drippy dread when I finally got what I wanted.
Crazy. Witless. Typical Faye.
But you don’t want me moaning how screwed up I was. Either you’re sick of that too, or you don’t believe me. Just a middle-class drama queen, blathering about her dodgy past when she seems pretty damned functional. Good health… addiction-free… loving family… not overly crippled by depression, neurosis or psychosis. Not even ugly with freckles anymore. Stop complaining, bitch.
Fair enough.
But hating the way you get the mopes doesn’t make it easier to step clear of the past. Or the present. Or the future when it scares the bejeezus out of you.
Fear is fear. Pain is pain. Even when you know you’re being boring.
It bored me too. Frustrated me. I kept telling myself, "Get over it!"
Words, words, words. Words don’t make willpower… and anyway, willpower isn’t the right tool for some jobs. Instead of holding on with white willpower knuckles, sometimes you have to let go.
So. There, in my office, scared of the world-soul Xe, worried about Tic’s sanity and shamed by his question, "Stick or bag?"… I finally threw myself back on my Vigil training. Meditation. Acceptance. Discipline without discipline. Like I’d been working on for seven years.
Down into my center — the part that breathes if you just get out of its way.
Don’t see this as an apocalyptic transformation; don’t think I grappled down my fear for all time. Nothing is ever so easy. But I sheltered back into my training and let myself take a step.
Forward.
The mind is a bottle filled with sugar syrup, salt water, and vinegar. Empty it.
The mind is a book filled with poetry, laments, and curses. Click delete.
Empty bottle.
Empty book.
Empty mind.
If you dip your hand into the sea, then scoop it out again, what do you have? No more than a sheen of wet over your palm. You can’t capture handfuls of water by strength; you can’t possess it. But if you dip your hand into the briny and leave it there — if you let yourself feel the cold and smell the salt — then who’s to say you aren’t holding the whole ocean?
Don’t seek, don’t avoid…just observe. If you want to activate a shy part of the brain, let the rest fall silent. When the consciousness shuts up, quieter voices may speak.
Memory isn’t linear… except tiny patches, ten seconds here, half a minute there. Only flicky-brief flashes where you can track through a sequence of events without skipping ahead, without finding other memories dragged in by association. The meat of your brain squirms against linearity, terrified of falling into some autistic steady state that locks out the world.
Then we Homo saps come along, and sludge-wits that we are, almost every activity we invent for ourselves moves in a straight line. Step-by-step instructions, agendas for business meetings, timetables and milestones for working on a project. Our whole culture = first A, then B, then C. Binding the tiger with a chain of one link after another.
One thing at a time. Society pounds away at us, "It’s wicked-bad-sinful even to contemplate the possibility of experiencing everything all at once."
But I wanted everything — everything I said and did that night before Chappalar died.
I opened myself to the memories: not commanding them to come, because the commanding part of my brain wasn’t the nub I wanted to activate.
Open the inner eye. Just see what’s there.
Chappalar and me saying good night in front of the Vigil’s office. The dear funny sight of him bouncing through the grove of other office trees in our neighborhood. Me walking down to the transit station, where I caught a scuttler for home.
No sign of anyone following either of us.
Off the scuttler and heading for my home compound. Preoccupied, gloomily self-absorbed: worried about the link-seed bomb ticking in my head.
Sudden memories of a different time — don’t fight the change of subject, let it happen if that’s what my brain served up. The face of a senior student I’d known marginally, someone who died from data tumor early in mushor.
An imagined picture of scalding blood, squirting from his eyes. The horror his family must have felt. The horror my family would feel if it happened to me. Our kids, trying all their hard-won attitudes, arrogance, outrage, coolness, and finding nothing that shook the grief. My husbands and wives with a few more funerals under their belts, but still deep-struck because they depended on me… depended that I’d be the one in trouble, the one who needed close watching, the first one all eyes turned to when someone asked, "What shall we do tonight?" because Faye might’ve got one of her moods…
Moods. A torrent of moods flooding into me… not memory anymore, but Remembrance: touching all the moods I’d ever had, not just the night prior to Chappalar’s death, but all the angry moods before, all the guilty moods after.
Everything all at once.
Not data tumor. The deluge didn’t come from the datasphere but from my own mind, chagrins and shames I’d tried to squash down, and joys that I’d run from because they were undeserved, too good for someone like me…
My whole subconscious suddenly exploded to the surface, like an eruption of gas bursting out of deep ocean, wretched stinks and sweet lost perfumes, hates, loves, humiliations, triumphs…
Subconscious becoming conscious for one gasping moment of totality.