Spin State - Chris Moriarty [177]
“Infinite, actually,” Cohen called from the garden, where he was restaking a wind-tousled dahlia. “It’s a folded database.”
Li stared, breathless. How could anyone—any ten people—have that many memories? What a weight of the past to be buried under. She walked through the rooms, tentatively, running her hands along the wood but not quite daring to open anything. The memories were grouped in rough categories, and as Li worked her way through the place she began to see hidden links, make telling connections. In the arcade along the fringe of the garden, a whole long wall was given over to a mosaic of books, films, paintings, each compressed into a tiny, emotion-laden point of color. Another room seemed to contain only memory upon memory of Earth, most of them collected in the final few years before the Evacuation. Then came a white, silent room that was entirely empty. As she penetrated deeper into the complex, she saw that most of the memories in the outer rooms were other people’s. Cohen’s own memories were concentrated in the sunny, quiet arcade along the garden’s southern exposure. And in the garden itself were people—all the people Cohen had ever known during his long, long life.
“Come look at these,” Cohen said.
She went.
“All these are Hyacinthe.” He gestured at a narrow row of drawers just inside the door. “The person, not the network. They should be quite easy for you to access. Go ahead, have a look.”
She opened the drawer he pointed to. It was empty. “What—?”
He smiled. “What’s the closest sense to memory?”
Li blinked. “Smell.”
“So?”
She bent over the drawer and sniffed. It smelled of cedar, and of the old-fashioned furniture wax that infused every piece of wood in Cohen’s realspace house. She had a ridiculous momentary image of one of his impeccably dressed French maids getting down on her immaculate knees to scrub at the floors and baseboards of the ethereal memory palace. Then she caught the smell underneath the other smells: the smell of the memory itself.
The room around her disappeared. She stood on a steep scree slope, her face warmed by the golden sun of pre-Migration Earth. A glacier snaked away like a river below her. Behind her loomed a near-vertical wall of rock and ice whose very shadow was like a little death. She turned and craned her neck to look up the soaring granite column above her. This was the Walker Spur of the Grandes Jorasses, her oracle told her. The most spectacular route up the most beautiful rock face on the planet. Given the state of the glacier winding below her, this couldn’t be much after the turn of the twenty-first century. Italy lay south, on the other side of that colossus. To the west, the Mont Blanc glittered under a sky blue enough for the most cautious climber to gamble on.
“Planning on helping?” someone said behind her.
She turned and saw a woman crouched on the slope below her coiling a brightly colored climbing rope. She handled the rope expertly, without wasted motion, lean climber’s muscles bunching and flexing under her sunburned skin. Lucinda, Li thought. Her name is Lucinda.
Lucinda looked up, her eyes (which Li somehow knew were blue) hidden behind mirrored glasses. Li saw her own doubled reflection staring back out of the lenses: a dark, narrow-faced greyhound of a man that could only be Hyacinthe Cohen himself.
“I love you,” Li heard Hyacinthe saying in a voice that was kissing cousin to Cohen’s voice. And she shivered, because she knew that love. She felt the heat of it, remembered living it. Remembered not just this moment, but everything. The whole life of a man who had died two centuries ago.
Lucinda just grinned up at her with the warmth of a shared joke, and said, “I know.”
“Interesting,