Those memories would never die, but live on. My fur fell to the muddy ground as I gave new memories to another.
The next morning I was awakened by an aerokrat with red hair. He handed me a pick.
“We’ll be breaking rock, today, whiffet,” he grinned. I was slow to stand up, so he yanked me to my feet with a shout, hurting my arms.
As I walked out into the sun, blinking, I knew, deep within me, that the longer we worked for the aerokratois, the sooner we would become just like them.
Then both would have true anakoinosis.
THRESHOLD
by Terry McGarry
THE SOUTHEASTERN VERANATHOR Center for Neurosuppression has been grown in the shape of a tree. It is not a tree—it is ordinary plant tissue designed to mimic the form of a broadly spreading warmwood. In older, more affluent parts of Verana-thor Island, homes are grown over generations from genuine hardwood stock, the earliest chambers burrowing farther from daylight year by year, the out-erwood hardening and darkening into an impenetrable encrustation of bark. Here along the sunny coast of the island state, professional accommodations are grown cheap and quick from production-grade cellulose, and the walkway I stand on winds among anonymous clusters of the simplest, most common designs: bulbous mushrooms, cylindrical stalks.
Why couldn’t one of those have been the place? Why must my destination stand out so sorely? This faux tree is a profound aesthetic deception: the intricacy of leafless branchings suggests the fractal density of the neurons they destroy here, while the gracious spread of boughs supersedes the technical with the hortitectural, making you forget that what goes on inside is illegal in every other nation on the planet.
This is the only place in the world where it is legal to evict ghosts from your own mind. This is the only place in the world where it is legal to reject immortality.
My name is Nethon. The community knows me as Tollisdela Nethon Arimthora, vocational ceramicist. Nethon is my selfname, Arim was my bearer, and Tollis was my quickener. It’s best to be clear on that, since naming conventions differ so widely and change over time. I don’t know where this record will ultimately end up, or who will read it. I’m not even sure why I’m making it. Procrastinating, I suppose. Enjoying the feel of my claws scoring the tablet putty. Enjoying being me, just me, alone with myself. Trying to decide if that feeling is worth committing murder for. Trying to decide whether or not it is murder.
I thought I’d know, by the time I got here. All that long way, loping past windfarms and moss refineries on four sore feet, I thought that when I stood in front of this entryway the decision would bubble up from inside me— truth and right chiming like a clear bell, calm and certain. But I’m more terrified now than I was when I set out from home.
And more lonely, in this shell of mortal flesh. It is a pleasant shell. Arim, who did not know Tollis personally and wants no part of this decision, has a muscular build and a beautiful glossy chestnut coat, pale shadow striping in the underparts, fur so thick as to afford barely a glimpse of dermal ossicle. Here in Veranathor, boasting is socially unacceptable—but you can praise the physical attributes of your bearer or the cleverness of your quickener, and it’s considered to amount to the same thing. That’s fine where my bearer and I are concerned, since we’re genetically identical. But until I reach puberty, I am me, not my quickener, or all the quickeners that came before mine.
I think I might do anything to stay that way.
I can’t let them strip my self from me. I can’t let them take over. They might outnumber me hundreds, even thousands to one. There’s no telling how many generations Tollis carried. They can impose their interests, their pursuits on me, shoulder my learning and my passions to the side. I am a talented ceramicist—not the best or brightest who ever lived, at least according to those who were around at the acknowledged height of the ceramic arts, but consistently original and pleasing. And I love my work. It is unique to me, imbued with my personality and no one else’s.
And yet… can I be sure of that? Can I be sure that I’m not somehow being directed by the ghosts I carry, that my work is not somehow improved by then-presence? Can I take sole credit for anything I’ve ever done?
“Oh, their personalities are in there,” my friend Melen says. “It’s just all subconscious. You’re not aware of it. You’re not aware of them. But they’re in there, those souls. In you. They may be dormant but they’re not comatose. Glaciers look dead and frozen, but they expand, contract, make forays and retreats— they breathe and move and behave. They influence you whether you know it or not.”
If Melen is right, it means that I have a microcommunity of ancient minds nesting under the floorboards in my head. A haunting of ancient minds, whispering to me in my sleep, influencing me, prompting me.
The thought of that blanks my sight white with rage.
Melen cannot be right. Melen is only a bearer, a fleshgiver, and knows nothing of quickening. The en- grammatic neuroencoding perpetrated on me by my quickener is inert, nonfunctioning, until my maturing body secretes the neurohormones that can stimulate the designated receptors. Children do not produce those hormones. I do not yet produce those hormones in sufficient quantity to wake Tollis’ ghosts. Until I step off the cliff of puberty, the pathways of the past are closed to me—and I am safe from them.
But I’m nearing the cliff. I can hear the winds whistling up out of the abyss. I have begun to have bad dreams. Dreams of places I have never seen, feelings I have never felt. Alien emotions, alien sensations, alien attitudes. There are monsters in me and they are shifting, stirring. I perceive them in brief bursts of firing synapses in the small hours, like looming shadows silhouetted by sudden glare, the eye-searing shock of lightning in the coal deeps of night.
They will wake. They will engulf me. They will submerge me. I will drown in them. Drown in ancestors.
Unless I get them first.
I want to blame it all on Tollis, but that would be unfair. Tollis was a victim, and can’t be faulted for the cruelty of others—or for possessing the memory of that cruelty. Tollis had no choice in what happened, and no choice about whether to remember it or not.
But I do.
The trouble with freedom of choice is that at some point you have to exercise it. Once I make this choice, there will be no going back. And I don’t have enough information to be sure I’m choosing correctly.
I have only external knowledge of Tollis: a lightleaf imprint of Tollis’ bearer, found in Tollis’ carryall and passed on to me by Arim (why carry an imprint of your bearer when you can just look in the mirror? yet people do); news stories I researched myself; and Arim’s verbal description of the stranger on the trolley platform. I know of Tollis’ trauma only through hearsay. The one who was Tollis, a dark, coarse-coated native of some mountainous northern land, with ice-shard eyes, a ready grin, and a burred accent, died when I was quickened. There is no one I can ask, “How many lives did you carry? How many did you pass on to me? Will you live quietly inside me once you’re freed, or will you enslave me to your foreign desires?” I have asked prepubescent and postpubes-cent quickener friends to describe their experience, and nothing they have said convinces me that they remain entirely themselves and have not become puppets of their forebears.
The news stories of Tollis tell little of the quickener
and focus predominantly on the horror. Quickener, bearer, one offspring, two parents, and two visiting siblings attacked in their Veranathor home, beaten and tortured, all but one killed. The details are gory and I don’t like to think about them. If I receive Tollis’ memories, I will have to live with that experience for the rest of my life, and it didn’t even happen to me.
For all I know, Tollis might have wanted to end it all that day. Who can say for sure that Tollis, standing on that transit platform, didn’t plan to jump under the trolley’s wheels, or ride it to an observation tower for a fifty- length dive? But there was Arim, full of me, standing beside Tollis on that station platform, and there was I, overeager then as now, tearing free of the pouch prematurely. Arim had no idea I was coming. Tollis simply happened to be the only quickener there. Stimulated past resistance by the pheromones and bloodscent, by Arim’s cries and mine, Tollis, willing or unwilling, slid my small body from the fleshgiver’s blood-slick claws and did what millennia of biological evolution compelled:
