She is standing, up to her knees, in a pool of water. Her mother is there, up to mid-calf, and she is dragging something small and blue through the water. Those are the little girl’s clothes, and they have mud on them because she was chasing the animals again. There are others around her mother: her mother’s friends. One makes a joke, and the little girl knows it’s a joke because everyone laughs, so she laughs too—loudly—even though she doesn’t understand it.
And then the joke is over and she is back to wading and looking for interesting rocks. She has found one rock today, but there’s always the chance of a better one. She looks out into the river with longing eyes. She is not allowed to go out there, only to stand in this pool where the water is not so fast. She has always been fascinated with the water, with how it sparkles and hisses and splashes and how it shoots through her village and cleans their clothes. She wonders, often, how it leaves the village dirty but comes back again clean on the other side…
They are on the clean side now. She follows the water with her eyes, watches how it leaves here and travels through the village, and how on the far side it begins to bend upward. It curves uphill, into the forest, until it is flowing straight up. It doesn’t stop there, though. No, it continues upside down, stuck to the green ceiling of the world, until it runs above her on the other side of the sun. She can’t see it right now because the sun is there, and tonight when it turns into the moon it will be too dark to see more than a few gleams on the water on the other side of the world. But she knows it continues on the other side because she is standing in it. It makes a perfect and endless circle. Here, up to there, back down to here, back up to there…And if she were up there, she could look up and see her own village on the ceiling, and that is how things should be because that is how the world works—
And then she is underwater.
She is pulled to the surface, gasping. She clings to the brown arm that has seized her; she is shivering, her eyes wide. Her mother’s friends are laughing because she looked up too far and she fell down, and she is angry because they are laughing and now she is crying because she is angry and she hates that, she hates when her body does the wrong thing even once, let alone twice in a row: first falling over, and then crying when she doesn’t want to cry.
Stop it, she shouts at them, and they quiet. They give each other looks that she hates too, but she doesn’t know how to tell them to stop doing that so she buries her face in her mother’s clothes, and it’s not because she’s crying but if her tears get wiped off her face with the river water then that’s what happens.
You must keep your eyes on your side of the world, says her mother.
She makes a sound instead of replying, an angry sound.
I love you, says her mother.
She makes an angry sound again, but this time it’s in the grudging rhythm of the words. I. Love. You. And then she sighs into her mother’s damp clothing. It’s becoming more work to stay angry than to calm down, the way it always is when her mother holds her.
Behold, says her mother into her ear. The universe.
The little girl sits back in her mother’s arms to look at the rock she found under the water. It glistens as it shatters the sunlight into a thousand colors. Its round shape fits her hand perfectly, and she finds she has an almost uncontrollable desire to throw it. But no, it is her only rock. It is too precious to throw.
You imagine, says her mother, in your excruciatingly vague way, a galaxy that works differently than mine. You handwave the hard parts—making millions of species play nice for half a billion years, for example—and you pick two or three things that you, who are so gentle and wise, would change about it. Do you know the ramifications of such changes?
The little girl sighs. She plays with the thing in her hand. She flips it over and over, rubbing the smooth surface.
I am not commanding, says her mother. We are not bargaining. I am beyond that; I have formed your very nature. You are prepared, honed, and amplified, which means that I am merely telling you what you will do.
The little girl looks up from her rock. In the shadows of her mother’s hair, there is no face. There is only a tangled nest of glowing threads, each one finer and more delicate than anything she has ever seen.
Go, little Daughter, says her mother. Observer is waiting.
Sarya sneezes.
It’s a sudden and violent explosion, and uncomfortably biological. It results, a second later, in a disturbing mist upon her upturned face. She twitches that face, disgusted, but does not open her eyes. Reality is out there, and she doesn’t feel like dealing with it. As long as she keeps her eyes shut, the universe is no bigger than the inside of her own skull.
“I guess that means she’s alive?” whispers a familiar voice.
“The boss wouldn’t have left her with us if she was dead,” says the same voice from a different direction.
“Are you sure?”
“Now that you mention it…no.”
Something has happened. Something big, in a way that very few things are big. Something has died, or something has been born. The galaxy is different today than it was yesterday—or whenever she was last conscious—and she had something to do with it. But it’s hard to think about big things when you’re small, and that is what she is. She’s small.
And it feels amazing.
“Her fingers are moving.”
“So she is alive.”
“I thought that was already established.”
“I would have called it a working theory.”
Being small is incredible. Being small means you can focus on the small things. You can feel warm light glowing red through your eyelids, a breeze whispering across your face and through your matted hair. You can appreciate the ground you’re lying on, even if it’s rough and uneven and painful in spots. You can take pleasure in the simple drawing of a breath, like this—
Goddess. She did not expect that.
This is memory. This is the hard stuff, the undiluted primal substance that makes Memory Vault shadows seem gray and tasteless. This is a deluge of impressions she never dreamed were locked away somewhere in her brain: flashes of damp green and brilliant yellow, of trickling water and roaring heat, of a vast range of smells and tastes that cannot be classified into the one hundred forty-four categories of Category F food bars, of hands the same shape and color as hers plaiting her hair—
“She’s leaking,” says the voice. “Look at her eyes.”
“She’s Human. They leak from everywhere.”
“That doesn’t sound right.”
“It’s true. The boss told me.”
And then something crawls up Sarya’s right nostril.