Teacher’s home was on the edge of town, in an older neighborhood. Not part of the Dimlit Halls, it was mostly where older spirits who were satisfied in their existence stayed, infusing the City with their memories. Brownstones lined the streets and laundry flapped listlessly from the lines strung between the buildings.

Not that you needed to dry laundry, but it was another memory.

“Hold, intruder!” June stopped as a short form in dirty coveralls with a colander on its head and holding a wooden sword jumped out before her. “What brings you to my kingdom?”

June paused, then smiled. “I must go to my Teacher! May I ask for permission to pass, Your Majesty?”

“Sure, June!” the figure pulled the colander off, revealing the face of a younger child, marks of smallpox still blemishing her skin. “Wanna play?”

“I’ve gotta go see Teacher. I think I’m in trouble.”

“Did you forget to do your homework?”

“Something like that, Mary.”

The girl put the sword down, the wooden blade sinking into the asphalt.

Well, dream that it’s a sword long enough, and it becomes a sword.

“Did you see Mom?”

June’s stomach dropped at the innocent words. She looked around, but nobody else was on the street. “No, Mary.” Because she’s long since Moved On.

“Oh,” Mary said. “I guess she’s still looking for me then.” She pulled her sword out of the street and waved it around. “I wish she’d waited a little longer, but she was in my room for a long time before I came here. But when you see her, remind her that she doesn’t have to cry anymore and—“ Mary looked to the side. “Did you hear that? Someone is trying to get into the kingdom!” Mary grabbed the colander and stuck it back on her head with her free hand, then took off down the street. “This is my kingdom, Jamie!”

June took a deep breath. She’d tried to tell Mary, but it didn’t help. Mary didn’t even seem to notice it when you told her that her mother must have Moved On. Well, she hoped she had. The alternative was that she wasn’t looking for her daughter or…

Yeah, she must have Moved On.

With that, June turned and headed down the street. The homes became more decayed, and the trees along the street changed. Now, their leaves were black, seeming to drink in the light. Not long after that, the street ended, becoming a dusty path, and the trees were now petrified. Behind her, June heard the dim sounds of the city, the bright lights rising up in to the sky. Here it was quiet and dark. But not like the Dimlit Halls.

Some things are hard for the earth to forget. June stared at the ziggurat at the end of the road. It had once been made of sunbaked brick, but now the memory of the long-lost physical remains gleamed under the moon, every part of it made dark basalt.

You know, Teacher could live down here, but… June shrugged. She’d come to him, after all. She started her walk up the steps, carefully stepping on the oddly proportioned steps.

They hadn’t been made for humans, after all. She passed the reliefs on both sides of the stairs showing oddly proportioned dinosaurs with spears and ropes, hunting another dinosaur, one of the great four-legged plant eaters. They wore harnesses rather than clothes, odd jewelry adorning them and what might have been hints of paint on their body.

At the top was the temple, or at least what might have been a temple. Two statues sat on each side of the stairs.

One had a smaller dinosaur at its feet, a leash held in the taller dinosaur’s claws. Its mate had no animal, but was holding up what had to be a torch, stylized flames rising from it.

Fire and domestication, June thought. The two things you need to continue to grow. Something so important you raised a temple to it. June had to admit that it made more sense than raising a temple to your local king.

Not that it had mattered. Teacher didn’t think they had lasted long enough to really spread out, and now the only thing remaining was this temple, made imperishable by the memory of an entire species.

But they were long gone. If any had come down here, they had Moved On long, long, ago.

“Thanks for the lesson, Teacher,” June muttered. Teacher lived here to make a point.

Sic transit gloria mundi. Thus passes the glory of the world.

He’d lived here before the Invaders, because June doubted anyone from her generation needed that lesson.

She walked into the upper chambers, ducking her head. Either the dinos had been smaller than their statues or they walked bent over. At least the inner chambers weren’t so tiny. Walking bent over all that time would be a pain.

Well, a mental pain at least.

“Teacher?” she called. “Sorry I’m late. I ran into some people on the way here.”

“Ah. Well, it is not as if we are outracing our mortality, now is it?” Teacher turned to look at her, or at least June thought he did. Teacher wore a cloak with a hood always pulled over his face. You could only see his eyes, a pair of bright blue orbs, while he didn’t walk—he floated. “Who did you meet?”

“Crazy preacher and Mary.” June walked over to one of chairs, this one made for humans and sat down in it, the soft cushions deforming under her weight. “Mary’s still waiting for her Mom.”

Stolen story; please report.

“There is little we can do about that,” Teacher said. “She has chosen to make those memories central.”

“Yeah, but she’s never going to Move On if she doesn’t—”

“And why should she?”

June blinked. “What?”

“Why should she Move On? Has anyone ever come back to tell us what that entails?”

“I—“ June fell silent. Teacher floated over to the chair opposite her and sat down in it.

“You came to me to learn the arts of shaping the matter of the Memory Lands. Do so consciously, not through the medium of shaping it like you did when you lived. But as I told you, being my student will not simply be about pragmatic arts, but learning how to think.” He paused and pointed at her, his fingers wreathed in shadow. “Did you expect to come here when you died?”

“I… no. I mean, I didn’t really think about dying and then I was too sick to really think at all.”

“At least you weren’t an atheist. Before you came here and asked to be my apprentice, I had a rather annoyed gentleman attempting to enlist me to prove that this was actually a computer-generated environment.” Teacher paused. “Not that he was entirely wrong, of course.”

“But that’s—of course he’s wrong!”

“Is he? Tell me, were you greeted by Christ when you passed away? Or perhaps invited to dine with Odin? The Memory Lands are not like the afterlife any of us hoped for or feared, and there is a somewhat obvious lack of gods. So if this is a natural state of affairs, why demand people Move On? Perhaps that destination ends with oblivion. Or something else. We do not know.” He shrugged. “As for young Mary, she has found contentment of a sort. We should not attempt to force her to take a path of our devising.”

Like Nancy? “What if they aren’t finding contentment? What if they’re running from something?”

“Then we can help them. Help them find their own way, rather than deciding what that way should be.” Teacher paused. “Trust me, deciding you know best can be a terrible thing, especially if you believe it. And with that, it’s time to stop avoiding your lesson.”

“Yes, Teacher,” Judy said with a sigh.

----------------------------------------

June stared at Teacher’s hands, and the flower growing in them. It was a rose. Not just a rose, but a beautiful rose, the scent rising up and filling the chamber.

“How am I doing this?”

“With memory.”

“With memory, yes. But, I am also keeping the memory to myself. In the living world, everything was made up of matter. Atoms, molecules, from the greatest star, down to the tiniest particle, matter behaved by rules, quite uncaring for what we thought. Not here. Here, the building blocks of our world are spiritual. Memory, not just our memory, but the memory of everything that came before.”

He pulled his hands apart, and the rose faded out. “And that makes memory dangerous. Or at least it can be. Our memory and self-image is who we are. You are warned about using your memories to create things ex nihilo.

“Yeah, when Sally and Hank gave me their memories for my birthday, they reminded me about that.”

“You have good friends if they gave you memories.” Teacher nodded. “Most of the dead make their memories the old-fashioned way. The baker uses the tools he remembered using, and so makes bread as he has always done, even though he might simply be able to call the memory into being—at the risk of losing that memory. Making it the old way, the way of the living, reinforces his memories.”

“But you don’t have to.”

“No. But we are learning how to copy our memories, to impose memories and thoughts on the spirit stuff of this world, without giving it up. Possibly even changing our own forms, without changing our self-image, at least not permanently. Eventually, you could change aspects of this world—well some. This temple, for example, is far beyond our power.”

“Why?” June asked. “Everything’s dead. They’ve Moved On or left for the Dim Lit lands long ago.”

“I do not know everything about this land, any more than mankind knew everything about the physical world. I can only presume that as the first species on Earth to look up at the stars, and see them as more than points of light, the very first species to ask: “who are we?” the universe took notice of them. Now let us commence.”

“Right.” June nodded. “What do you want?”

“Something minor. Nothing important.”

June nodded. What do I… A pencil. She used them all the time. June looked down at her hands and imagined a pencil sitting in her palms. She felt the way the wood felt, the little indentations where she had chewed on the pencil. Then she felt a pulling sensation, as if something wanted to take the memory from her.

No. June closed her eyes. She focused on the idea of two pencils. One in her mind, and one in her hand. The memory and what she was going to use.

There was a stress, a feeling like she was pressing against a glass plate. It would be easier to just use her memory. She didn’t need to have two…

No! June focused on the glass plate, pressing through it. Forcing it…

And suddenly she felt a snap and something fell into her palm. She looked down and there was her pencil, sitting in her hand.

“I did it! I did it!”

And then the pencil vanished.

June groaned.

“Yes, you did,” Teacher said. “Well done. Now that you know you can do it, you can practice creating an enduring memory. Remember, for now, only practice with minor memories. Important memories: have a life all their own and often resist this process. You’ll need to build up your skills.”

Great. When June had died, she hadn’t thought that school would be part of her afterlife. But even so… “Teacher?”

“Yes?”

“The ways of making yourself a body, a real body in the Living World. They’re…”

“Very difficult and very forbidden, though that might change.”

“Why?”

“Why are they difficult, or why are they forbidden?”

“Both.”

“Firstly, remember what I said about the difference between our world and the Living World. If you’re making a body, you are literally trying to impose your will upon the living world. It says interesting things for the structure of the universe, but it’s very difficult. That’s why possession, be it of a living creature or inanimate object, is easier… for some definitions of easier. There was a criminal attempt, some time ago, to create bodies that were intended for possession, an arrangement with a government agency. That is, why those techniques are forbidden. Whatever the short term benefit, in the long term, such interactions seldom played out well for all concerned.”

“And now?”

“If there are no more living humans, there’s no more worry about the dangers of interaction, is there?” Teacher spread his hands. “Everyone’s down here.”

“Right…” June shook her head. “Okay, can I try another memory?”

“That is why we are here, June…”

And with that, she got to work. That was another problem with being dead. Unlike school, you didn’t need to eat lunch and so there was nothing keeping your teacher from working all through the night…