CHAPTER EIGHT
The Forgotten Memory
II
“What’s a yyyyyyyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa…” Mom’s voice deepened as the moment stretched, and it continued to deepen as the moment continued to stretch, descending registers until the sound no longer sounded like a voice at all, only a wub-wub-wub-wub base-laden vibration.
Wub wub wub… wub………… wub……………………
In the few short hours since his initiation into Her Majesty’s service, Wilburn had grown accustomed to the feeling of the hive-connection, so much so that he’d stopped noticing it. Now, however, as the world around him decelerated to stillness, he became aware of it again, a buzzing energy running from his tailbone up the length of spine to the very peak of his skull, not quite a sound, but a vibration much like sound, unwaveringly steady and awake.
“Um, guys...?” Wilburn turned to Mom and Gramma. They sat shoulder to shoulder at the base of the old sycamore, their heads angled toward one another, Mom’s mouth frozen in a silent aaa. Wilburn was too alarmed to find it funny. He hurried over and waved a hand before Mom’s eyes. She didn’t blink. He grabbed her arm—he gasped. There was no warmth or softness in her flesh. Her arm felt nothing like an arm; it felt like stone. He touched her face. Stone. He touched her hair. Stone. He couldn’t budge a strand of it.
Wilburn glanced about in desperation, hoping to spot some clue, some solution to this nightmare. What he spotted was himself standing motionless by the fire, still holding the stick of weenies in the flames. The motionless flames. But… Wilburn checked his hand. He was holding the weenie stick. There were two weenie sticks, and there were two Wilburns, and the other Wilburn had been turned to stone just like Mom and Gramma and—yep—Thoralf too. The statue of the black horse stood some distance down the hillside, a sprig of grass protruding from his muzzle. What was going on? Well, nothing, of course—but why was nothing going on? A terrible thought occurred to Wilburn. Am I… dead?
……………………wub……………………
Wilburn jumped. He’d thought the wubs were finished. This last had been so bassy he’d more felt than heard it. Now he felt something else, a cold tickle on the backside of his eyeballs. He saw a shimmering like heatwaves, and then a geometric latticework of light traced itself in the air, forming a seven-sided polygon some seven feet across—a heptagon, with smaller heptagons within it, with more and more and more smaller and smaller and smaller heptagons within those, interlocking and receding to a single point of dazzling brightness at the center. A portal—yes, it had to be a portal. It was simultaneously flat, like a picture, and deep, like a corridor stretching into infinity… and out of that infinity came lumbering a shaggy, horned mountain of a creature.
Wilburn shrieked.
The creature cocked its head. It plodded toward him slowly through the fallen yellow leaves, which somehow didn’t crunch under its hooves. Wilburn stood his ground, breathing heavily. He felt a twinge of embarrassment about the shriek. This creature was no monster, he could see that now. It was an ox, big, but kind of cute, with cream-white, luxuriantly soft-looking fur that practically demanded to be stroked. The ox halted in front of him and stuck a hoof out. Wilburn looked down at the hoof. Then he looked up into the shaggy face, into the eyes, black as Wilburn’s own eyes and fathomless as outer space. In the background, the portal untraced itself and vanished.
“I know you…” Wilburn said.
“Hmm. So you say,” the creature replied, in a rich baritone voice. “I, for one, am not convinced. It seems to me you scarcely recognize me and have entirely forgotten our acquaintance.”
Wilburn nodded. But actually… he did remember something… he remembered... people… lots of people… chanting, in a circle… and… a fire… and… a white ox…
“Aha!” The ox made a hooking motion with its horns.
Wilburn felt a tug right at the center of his brain, then a sensation of unraveling, and then— “Whoa!” A brightly colored snake exploded out of the top of his head. But no, it wasn’t a snake, it was a rope, woven from fibers of rainbow light. “Coool.” The rope slithered beautifully through the air, lengthening and lengthening as it unspooled from Wilburn’s brain.
Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.
The ox observed the process keenly, nodding to itself. “Mmhm… Mmhm… Yep… Mmhm… Gotcha!” It flicked its horns. The rope ceased unspooling at once. The last section that had emerged from Wilburn’s head contained a tangle—a dreadful tangle. Not only was the rope itself tied in a complicated pretzel, but the tiny rainbow fibers of which the rope was woven were themselves snarled up in ferocious rat’s-nests. The ox gave an appreciative whistle.
“That’s my memory... isn’t it?” Wilburn asked. The ox nodded, ducking under the rope to study the tangle from the other side. “And where it’s all messed up… that’s the stuff I can’t remember?”
“Bingo.”
“Wow. How’d that happen?”
The creature scanned Wilburn up and down with an appraising eye. “I think we can rule out traumatic injury,” it said. “So, unless you’ve been ingesting powerful amnestic drugs of late…? No, you don’t even know what that means. Then, I’m afraid the only remaining possibility is sabotage.”
“Huh?”
“Someone has tampered with your memory, my boy. And I have a fair guess who. But what I can’t fathom is when… When did she have the opportunity? It must’ve been after the ritual… but I was there—I saw you telefract with Alfajean and Buttrom. And she can’t have traced you, can she…? Not to Dreamspace. No… so… hmm.” The creature shook its massive head. “We’ll see. We’ll just see, Wilburn. I think we may have gotten lucky. It appears this memory is recoverable.”
“You can fix it?”
“Not I. You must fix it. But I will assist as best I can.”
“Oh, all right.” Saying this reminded Wilburn— “Hey, what about them?” He gestured to his frozen family members and his own petrified replica. “Are they—er—are we… all right?”
“Right as rain,” the ox replied. “Nothing has changed for the others, you see, because you and I are in a private closed-loop sub-dimension of Higher Astral Sector-1 Parallelaspace, courtesy of an old friend of mine in the Temporal Infrastructure Maintenance and Engineering Department. This dimension contains nothing whatsoever save our two minds; hence, there is nothing here to obstruct our view of Real Life all around us. We can observe Real Life, but we are powerless to change it, because change happens in time, and this dimension begins and ends inside a single Real-Life instant.”
“But then… how come there’s two of me?”
The ox chuckled, low and rumbly. “That,” it said, pointing with its horns at the frozen Wilburn statue, “is your Real Life avatar, my boy. It is no more you than the clothing it wears. The locus of your awareness is not with your Real Life avatar at present, because it is here,” the horns pointed straight into Wilburn’s face. “This is your Astral avatar. It is not a body in the physical sense, but an idea of a body, a manifestation of your physiognomic expectations in metaphysical space. That stick you’re holding, for example—it isn’t wood. It is nothing more or less than the pattern of your personal experience of holding a stick. Were you to bite into one of those appealing looking sausages skewered on it, you would find the flavor, temperature and texture to be exactly as you expected, not because you would in truth be eating food, but because you would be directly experiencing your own expectation of the experience of eating food, you see?
“K….” Wilburn said uncertainly.
“Indulge me, if you will, in a brief exercise. Try imagining what it would be like if that stick were suddenly to vanish. Picture it. One moment, a stick in your hand… next moment, hand empty.”
“Holy smokes…” Wilburn boggled at his empty hand.
“Excellent, Wilburn, excellent. You have a strong imagination. Now, the key: there is no fundamental difference between that stick and your hand. Believe that, understand that, and you’ll be able wear any shape you like on the Astral Plane.” And just to prove it, the ox became an enormously fat pumpkin.
Wilburn hooted in delight. He wanted to be a pumpkin! He tried… he pictured himself growing fat and turning orange… but nothing happened.
The pumpkin became an ox again. “Something for you to practice later,” it said, “once you’ve remembered who I am and what transpired on your first Astral excursion. For now, I suggest you begin by loosening this loop, then pulling this wrap back through here…”
Untangling the memory proved a tedious endeavor. The rope was easy enough to manipulate, Wilburn found. All he had to do was choose which way he wanted it to move and it would move. The tricky part was figuring out where he had to move which part of the rope when; it was all too easy to tie extra knots by accident. The ox coached Wilburn through it, pointing out various twists and snarls with the tip of a horn and giving errorless advice. Even so the project seemed to take all day, or the equivalent, if time had actually been passing. Hours dragged by with the world embalmed in stillness, a permanent midday, as if the sun were printed on the sky.
Gradually, agonizingly, knot by minuscule knot, the chaos of Wilburn’s memory was untangled, until, with a final twist, the rope pulled straight, and then retracted back into his head. Wilburn nodded slowly. He remembered.
He remembered everything.