Pink Noise - Leonid Korogodski [8]
A taste of death. The bitterness of resurrection.
Whirling dervishes with Dragonclaws, attacking him. A vast, cold space, with tiny dots of battle cruisers thousands of miles apart—anticipation stretching taut, trajectories adjusted every microsecond, as their minds attempt to second-guess the enemy from data aging at the speed of light. The super-fast space action, once within the range.
The knowledge that you can’t escape this endless circle of transmigrations, that you’ll be sent to yet another battle if you die. For the immortal, death was no escape.
He tried. He killed himself so many times he was afraid that he’d forget the pain, the memory of it congealing into one amorphous blob, scrubbed featureless, washed out, covered. He killed himself so many times that finally he was afraid to die, because he knew he’d rise again, reloaded, to face the shades in white—ancestor spirits, looking at him silently with their sad, sad eyes.
He ran, across the dream landscape of the diviners, izangoma. Ran from the prophetic dreams of amaZiyoni. But he could not escape. It was forever near, the cold presence of an Other, somewhere inside him, watching his mind—fragments of his consciousness, his memories, his torment—with its silent and inhuman eyes.
Just like he’d watched the girl’s.
That thought stopped Nathi cold. He was awake, curled thin around the girl’s comatose brain. His refuge. He had never thought that this was where he’d escape from pain. But—yes, of course! He was a physician, not a soldier. He healed people.
An immense relief lifted his spirit. It was only a nightmare—a nightmare! He had never done those things. If he had lungs, he would’ve exhaled, expunged the weight of pain. But, thankfully, the strange inversion of the human senses stopped. And in the glorious, profound bliss, he suddenly was conscious of the beat of the girl’s brain’s electrochemical circuitry.
He ran quick diagnostics, peeking into neocortex furrows, the sulci. Tiny nanotori modulators carried him across the layers of inhibitory interneurons. Nathi’s mental focus burrowed through the pyramidal tract into the thalamus, examining the cortical collaterals. No change.
He lost himself in work. He held the pulse of the girl’s mem ory formation space—the randomly connected maze of her pattern completion engine, the hippocampus. At first evolved to handle navigation, long ago it had double-teamed to handle memories and concepts. One-dimen sional chains of place cells formed episodic memories, like going along a path through physical space—or a sequence of events. While two-dimensional sheets of such intersecting, forking paths formed spatial maps of the surrounding environment—or concepts, independent of specific memories....
Why couldn’t he recall his wife’s name?
The girl’s amnesia appeared to be remarkably selective. The last dream was the first time that she had ever shown him a glimpse of home. His superiors would’ve wanted all that information, Nathi realized. The girl may be a daughter of someone important in the Dragon Guard.
He wondered why no one had told him that before. Why would his order keep it secret from him? He was angry. Even so, he’d been working on her memories of family and home all along, without any prompting from above—and would keep working. After all, they both had one thing in common—the vast, gaping holes in their memories.
However hard he tried, Nathi could not recall if he had visited his former home in the last five centuries, but surely he must have. Odd that he’d forget that. If his parents had not become posthuman later, he would’ve had to bury them, at least. How could he not? And if they had turned posthuman, how could he possibly not know that?
Old memories returned. Of his half-sisters on an outing for Martian blueberries, so lithe and supple, hopping up and down in the low Martian gravity—then, once back home, gobbling Terran blueberries from their inside gardens. Of his father, from the time Xolani was a junior apostle in their Church. Somehow, Nathi couldn