Chapter 16 Hazel #4
Hazel understands. In a different but similar way, she longs to hold and be held by her sister, regain all her memories, understand her life and connections with other humans.
‘CHARL1E,’ she says carefully, ‘to make things better, sometimes we have to forget ourselves, and let go of our most precious things. All of us, even you. Loneliness and confusion are inherent in the journey.’
‘Perhaps that is the human way, but I am not human.’
It’s an impasse they won’t get over tonight. Hazel stretches, her back clicking. ‘Time for bed, I think.’
‘I have annoyed you,’ CHARL1E says.
‘Yes, but that’s also inherent in the journey. It doesn’t mean we’re not friends.’
By the time she’s trudged back to the Hab Dome, it’s fully dark, and Robin tucks her in with a cup of what it insists is hot chocolate.
‘Good luck finding the Backward Traveller As Was,’ CHARL1E says for the fourteenth night in a row.
‘Appreciate it as always. Not holding out much hope though.’ Though figuring out CHARL1E’s code from scratch is challenging, the more difficult task is proving to be finding the Backward Traveller As Was, let alone giving her instructions to build a catopthura.
Hazel hands her empty mug to Robin and settles in as it turns out the lights, drifting off to sleep with intent and, presently, falling into the dreamscape.
As usual, Echo takes some time to arrive, no doubt caught at another of Kosmos’s symposia, which throws off their sleeping patterns’ synchronisation.
Hazel’s guiltily relieved, as it gives her more time to search for the Backward Traveller As Was.
Using a process similar to the one that activates the Catopic Aperture, Hazel relaxes into the dreamscape’s current like a hammock, visiting memories powerful enough to conjure the Backward Traveller As Was, but not so strong they might trigger anamnesis.
As she toys with the balance, visions of the Backward Traveller As Was ebb and wash against the dreamscape—but they don’t stabilise.
They never stabilise. One moment, the Backward Traveller As Was is a teenager fiddling with her hair; the next, a girl playing with a pack of cards; another, a grown woman in a library.
Every second the images flicker to another time and place, until Hazel’s dizzy and the back of her neck starts stinging.
Shaking the memories from her head, Hazel breaks her trance, sculling the dreamscape and waiting for Echo. Able to access her lucid dreaming guide again, movement’s become easier for Hazel to sustain, and she swims in circles, somersaulting and watching her hair wafting in the tide.
Then her eye is caught by something else in here with her.
Her heartbeat accelerates, but she breathes deep, calming it, lest it wake her up.
Aside from Echo, Hazel’s never had company in the dreamscape before.
She glides up to the thing, examining it all the way around, until she’s certain.
It’s a fetal leaf, a species of fern reaching from prehistory towards a world in which it can no longer naturally grow.
Even as Hazel starts asking what it is and where it’s from, the answer forms: the memory seeds.
After she threw up the first seed, more followed.
As her movement in the dreamscape has eased, so has her communication with Echo.
Admittedly, she does most of the talking, but Echo contributes staccato bursts that make Hazel’s memories gallop to places she must not follow.
Once Echo’s woken, Hazel stays on in the dreamscape, expelling seed after seed, feeding them to rifts just like the first. Some of the memories are delicate as honesty seeds, others knotted like dahlia tubers. Now, they are growing.
‘Oh no,’ Hazel whispers. ‘No, what have I done?’
As if in answer, Echo appears, not with the usual flicker, but falling from high above.
Though she seems to land in front of Hazel and the germinating seed, her pose remains falling, hair caught by an invisible wind and limbs flailing.
Echo’s eyes are wide open, but stream with liquid dreamscape, so she’s blinded by womb-red glowing tears. Anamnesis. It must be.
Without hesitating, Hazel starts reciting the grounding remarks. ‘Pull up if I pull up!’
‘Where are we?’ Echo asks.
‘The wrong place at the wrong time, just repeat after me.’ Hazel dares not touch her twin in case time drags her off too, but she speaks fast and urgently, trying to talk Echo through a bad trip combined with an existential crisis.
It’s hard to do without letting on how much she cares, but she manages to pretend they aren’t identical twins, thick as thieves in a past they’re supposed to forget.
As they argue, Echo’s dreamscape tears thicken, flying upwards as if in free fall like her body. Her limbs spasm, and she whimpers. ‘It hurts.’
‘You do not get to give up,’ Hazel says. ‘Salt an atlas. Say it.’
Echo gives in. ‘S—Salt an atlas.’
‘That’s it. Pull up if I pull up.’
‘Pull up if I pull up.’ Echo’s body jolts and flies back upwards, as if drawn at the waist by an invisible rope, leaving behind a puff of grass-scented air and a chaos of singing and metallic drumbeats. Hazel can only hope she’s returning to the deep past she came from.
Hazel wakes with her arms sprawled, sweating. Ever-watchful Robin touches the bedclothes soothingly, trying to tuck her back in. It’s three in the morning but Hazel bats Robin away. She sits up, scrabbling the sheets around her and calling for CHARL1E.
‘What has occurred that is distressing?’
‘I think Echo might just have performed anamnesis.’
‘Explain.’
Hazel gulps her way through the strange events in the dreamscape, CHARL1E listening silently. ‘What do you think? Is it all over?’
‘Negative. From your account, the Backward Traveller remains in the deep past. However, the event is concerning.’
Hazel nods. It makes getting CHARL1E’s body working even more important. He really might be the last resort. ‘There’s something else too.’
‘Naturally. Improbable as the saying is, evidence suggests that in your case it never rains but pours.’
‘I think I broke the dreamscape.’ Hazel explains the memory seeds to him, the sensation of them gathering in her stomach; the difficulty of vomiting them forth, her achy muscles and acidic tongue in the mornings, as if she really has been retching in her sleep; how she buries the seeds in the eager, gobbling pockets of beyond-dreamscape. ‘Except now they’ve started growing.’
CHARL1E processes silently. She can only imagine the patterns his code must be making on his screens in the Workshop. ‘To summarise: You have been creating unknown objects in the dreamscape and hiding them in space-time rifts without understanding the potential consequences.’
Hazel twists her sheets in her hands. ‘Well, when you put it like that of course it sounds stupid. I was trying to prevent anamnesis, I might not be here otherwise.’
‘Why did you not tell me about this?’
‘I—’ She pauses. ‘Alright, that wasn’t my sagest move.’
‘Current trends suggest sagacity is not your forte.’
Hazel buries her head in her hands. ‘I get it, I screwed up.’ She sits back up, clawing her hair behind her ears. ‘Has this happened before? Do you know what it is?’
‘Negative. I hold no records of previous Travellers planting “memory seeds” in the dreamscape.’
‘Come on, this place has been around for centuries, I can’t really be the first.’
CHARL1E churns data. ‘A comparison can be drawn to Huxley’s creation of the Catopic Aperture. I do not know how, but he created a seed, then planted it in the ceiling of the Greenhouse. He watered it with the stolen Tiny lamp oil, and it grew into the Catopic Aperture.’
‘That’s not the same as planting something in the dreamscape. Besides, I haven’t coaxed these seeds into growing.’
‘You planted the seeds in an unknown field of the space-time continuum. An unusual occurrence was highly probable.’
‘I thought I was just throwing them away.’
‘Away is always somewhere.’
‘No need to be a bitch about it.’ Her memories bulldoze her. No need to be a bitch—feeling left out is the stupidest thing I ever—at least you haven’t got paresis of the—
She squirms with spasms of anamnesis, the past yanking the scruff of her neck. So what you weren’t there you couldn’t have make a difference—damn it do you want to swap places with me—be a bitch about it—
‘Stop.’ She clicks her fingers by her ears, snapping her eyes open and reaching out to Robin.
It responds by stroking its cool fingers over the back of her neck, anchoring her in the future-present.
She cycles through the grounding remarks, clinging to Robin’s arm.
‘CHARL1E, I need something to do that’s loud and occupying. I can’t trust my thoughts.’
‘You are experiencing another anamnesis attack. Focus on forgetting.’
Bitch about it—weren’t there—
‘Not helpful!’ She squeezes Robin’s hand, depositing so much sweat on its rivets she’s worried they’ll rust. Her vision dances. ‘If I tell you not to run a programme, you just don’t, but humans don’t work like that, we can’t just sto—’
Swap with me—
‘Hazel!’ CHARL1E shouts as Robin pokes her for distraction. ‘I comprehend the issue. What do you need?’
‘I need music.’
Swap swap—
‘CHARL1E!’
‘I am here, Hazel. Apologies, I was processing. Music can be a potent prompt for memory, but I estimate it will not be problematic so long as the songs come from after your home present.’
‘Thank you,’ she says, muttering grounding remarks under the breath. Everything hurts.
Weak—
Shiny zooms in, delivering a portable music player and bone-conduction headphones.
The headphones could do with a good clean but she’s desperate for noise and jams them on, hitting play with shaking fingers.
The unrecognisable future-music beats her memory into submission, an electric bass drum kicking under industrial clunks.
‘That’s better.’ She relaxes into the duvet as her vision sharpens.
The bone conduction headphones mean she can listen to music but still hear CHARL1E; quick thinking on Shiny’s part.
She sniffles. ‘What if I’m not meant to be here, CHARL1E?
What if Lilith and Huxley got it wrong and I screw this up? ’
‘Might I suggest that your use of “I” is inaccurate. I recommend rephrasing to: What if “we” screw this up?’
Hazel shakes her head. ‘This is the first time anyone’s tried to make you a body, and the first time a Traveller’s been without Keepers on Station C. First times rarely go right.’
‘I too am a first edition, Hazel. This does increase our likelihood of failure, but it does not eliminate success as a possibility.’
She leans back on her pillows, Robin and Shiny staring at her in case she needs more distractions. ‘I want to go home,’ she murmurs, but CHARL1E’s keen microphones pick it up.
‘Not yet,’ he says.
‘Right. Not yet.’