Forest of Memory (7 page)

“Can you key it to me?”

“Yes.” He pointed to the cases again. “Grab the blue one and bring it to me.”

That one was where he’d put the hard-body computer the other night. I grabbed the case. He opened it. To my surprise, he didn’t do anything with the computer; instead, he pulled out my earbud. “Once you get me on the robo-mule, start walking north. You should hit a road in a couple of hours.”

Surely he didn’t have a couple of hours. “I can’t just leave you.”

“Ah . . . but you have to get out of range to call for help.”

“Out of range of what?”

“Me and the d—my damper.”

I don’t know, but I think he almost said “the deer.” I didn’t question him and probably should have, since I think his judgment was slipping. Seeing someone dying though . . .

I pointed at the hard-body computer. “Can’t I just call out on that?”

“Local network only. Gotta hoof it.” He held up his hand. “Help me up?”

I got him to his feet and over to the robo-mule. We used the straps from the tent to improvise reins that he could grip. I used the luggage tie-downs to create a harness that would hold him on if he lost consciousness. We both thought that was pretty likely, all things considered. Apparently, he’d passed out on the way back to the camp. I had no idea how he was still alive. His breathing was pretty ragged by the time I was finished with the tie-downs.

I told him he should take the mask off.

He shook his head and tugged it higher on his face. “Got an NDA, and right now I really need my employer to stay invested.”

“Surely they would understand—”

Again he shook his head, stopping my protest with a gesture. “Not the sort that understands things like breathing difficulties.”

You hear what he wasn’t saying? He couldn’t come out and say he was working for a nonhuman entity, but I think that was what he meant. Whether it was an AI or a corporation, I don’t know. But whatever he was doing with the deer, they didn’t want it traced back to them, and that meant keeping Johnny unidentifiable.

I should have thought of that, I really should have, before I left him.

We got the robo-mule going, and once it was aimed and keyed to head north, I set out. At first, I was still close enough to hear it clomping through the woods, gyros whirring; then I left them behind. He’d said a couple of hours, and I was determined to try to get out of range as fast as possible. Every few minutes, I’d query to see if Lizzie was there. Not a thing. This surprised me, because I’d thought my data connection earlier had cut off when Johnny was close to me. I didn’t realize the range. So my calves and thighs ached from the pace I was setting. The forest added a whole new set of scratches to my growing collection. Too bad I can’t sell those as a unique experience . . .

“Katya!” The call from Lizzie nearly dropped me in my tracks as all my systems came back online at once. One minute I was out of range; the next minute the full connectivity of my life slammed back into me. Messages, calendar alerts, namedrops, interest points—all of it flooding back in to demand my attention. I shook it all away and focused on Lizzie.

“Here. Do you have me? I need emergency services.”

“Yes. Yes, I have you. Where have you been? How are you injured?” The i-Sys almost sounded concerned.

“I’m not injured—well, not seriously, but someone else is.”

“Show me the injury, and I will have a medical patch assess it.”

“I’m not with him. Send the emergency team to me, and then I’ll lead them to where he is.” With that, I realized I would need to keep walking north until they got a lock on me, or Johnny would catch up and I’d get cut off again. “Please hurry. He’s lost a lot of blood and was stabbed. Sort of.”

“Complying. Emergency medical service is en route. Please be advised that this will be billed to your account if the patient is unable or unwilling to cover the charges.”

“I understand.”

They were fast. Fifteen minutes after the call, during which time I made an attempt to answer the messages that Lizzie rated as urgent priority, a medchopper disturbed the forest with its rotors.

From here, you can watch the public record of what happened, and I’m assuming you have. My cameras were working again. The medteam had their LiveConnects running the entire time.

You can see the way they reacted to me, and the blood that covered me. I hadn’t realized how stained my clothes had become with Johnny’s blood.

Once I reassured them, we retraced my steps. We got all the way back to the clearing. No Johnny. No robo-mule. The site was completely empty, and the ground had been churned by the hooves of deer. No trace of humans at all.

The only thing that makes my story at all believable is that I was offline for three days. During that time I had moved from south of Salem northward by about 400 miles, close to Lake Chelan. The bike and cart were where I had said they were hidden, but I could have done that myself. And since mine were the only footprints the investigators found . . . well. It’s easy to see how it might have been a publicity stunt designed to raise the price on my merchandise by giving it a unique provenance.

But the blood—that should be proof, shouldn’t it?

It was blood from a deer.

I REMEMBER seeing the ragged hole in his stomach and innards. I remember how gray his skin looked and how labored his breathing was. But those memories . . . they must be false, right? Something I THOUGHT I saw in the moment. Something that took advantage of the failability of memory.

And why? That’s what is hard to understand. Why would he fake an injury or a death if all he had to do was let me go? And even then, why not use human blood from a blood bank?

I have wondered . . . It has occurred to me that it might have been a message. Though that raises its own set of questions.

I looked for him.

After everyone had left, I went back into the woods. I remember standing by a stream and having Lizzie’s voice cut off. A deer stepped out of the trees and bent down to drink. Nothing else stirred except the water and the leaves. After a moment, the deer lifted its head, leaped across the stream, and faded back into the trees. A few minutes later, Lizzie’s voice came back as if we hadn’t stopped talking.

I don’t know if Johnny lived, or what exactly he was doing with the deer. I don’t know what his plans were for me. If you had been hoping that I could give you answers to the deer die-off, I’m sorry that I can’t. I don’t even know what happened to me.

I know that’s frustrating for you, so let me offer you the questions I’ve been asking myself.

Have you been in the forest? Have you seen deer corpses? Or have you relied on what the net tells you about the die-off?

Because I don’t think the deer are dying, I think they’re being taken offline, and the nanodrives they were injected with establish a nonhuman network. Changing the deer themselves wouldn’t be enough though, because the smart dust in the region would still report them, right?

Unless those nanodrives are rewriting everything the deer comes in contact with. I’ve asked about that. It’s possible, and in a lot of ways it makes the fact that Johnny needed to tranquilize them make more sense. A transmitter—he could have just injected that from a distance. But if he needed time to make sure their systems recalibrated before releasing them . . . well.

But that’s just a guess. It’s like Bashar says in A SYMMETRY FRAMED—“The land has an unwilling connection to us.”

It makes you wonder doesn’t it?

I was unconscious for over twenty-four hours, which is plenty of time to recalibrate someone’s system. With the client list I have, what would happen if I were released into the wild like the deer?

What would happen if I were made an object of curiosity to attract a specific client?

And my last question: What if they’re looking for you? Or people LIKE you?

This typewriter is covered in dust. It’s part of its wabi-sabi. If the smart dust around me is mbeing rewritten, what about the dust ont his typweriter? The dust around you?

Has your connection to the net dropped recently?

That’s got you wondering, I expect . . . Think of it as a bonus with your purchase. I’ve given you the gift of uncertainty.

Author photograph © 2012 Rod Searcey

MARY ROBINETTE
KOWAL
is the author of The Glamourist Histories series of fantasy novels. She has received the Campbell Award for Best New Writer, three Hugo Awards, and two
RT
Book
Reviews
Reviewer’s Choice Award for Best Fantasy Novel. Her work has been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards. Her stories have appeared in
Strange Horizons,
Asimov’s
Science Fiction and Fact
,
and several Year’s Best anthologies as well as in her collection
Scenting the Dark and Other Stories
from Subterranean Press.

A professional puppeteer and voice actor, Mary founded Other Hand Productions and has performed for
LazyTown
(CBS), the Center for Puppetry Arts, and Jim Henson Pictures. Her designs have garnered two UNIMA-USA Citations of Excellence, the highest award an American puppeteer can achieve. She also records fiction for authors such as Kage Baker, Cory Doctorow, and John Scalzi.

Mary lives in Chicago with her husband, Rob, and over a dozen manual typewriters.

Visit maryrobinettekowal.com.

THE GLAMOURIST H
ISTORIES

Shades of Milk and Honey

Glamour in Glass

Without a Summer

Valour
and Vanity

Of Noble Family

Word Puppets
(short stories)

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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novella are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

FOREST OF MEMORY

Copyright © 2014 by Mary Robinette Kowal; revised edition copyright © 2016 by Mary Robinette Kowal

Cover art by Victo Ngai

Cover design by Christine Foltzer

Edited by Lee Harris

All rights reserved.

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ISBN
978-0-7653-8389-1
(ebook)

ISBN
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(trade paperback)

Originally published as an audio book by Audible as part of
METAtropolis
: Green Space

First Tor Edition: March 2016

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