I get the jar and swim to the shore on my back, holding it on my stomach, lighting a path through the blackness. Samara is relaxed, present, cutting through the water and getting ahead of me. I don’t know what’s going on or what we’re walking into or who might try to kill who tomorrow, but for the moment, I’m just glad to be here, off the Centauri III. Doing something real.
When I wade out with the light, Samara is already squeezing the water from her mass of hair, Jill snatching up her own light and pack, heading off to change behind a boulder a safe distance away. Samara turns as soon as Jill is gone.
“Can I see your ankle?” she whispers.
I glance at the boulder, Jill’s light shining behind it, sit where I am and stretch out my leg. The air is so much colder now that I’m wet. I’m shivering when she kneels down in front of me, running both hands feather-light over each side of my ankle. I watch her pause over the pinpricks and tiny bruises where Jill used the gel, where the infusion went in, only just touching them with a finger.
Her face is serious, concentrated, wet hair thrown behind her shoulders, that shirt clinging to everything it touches. And when she puts those eyes on me, I feel the weight of it, like I did before, and this time something twists inside my chest. An agreeable sort of pain.
Okay. I might be having an issue with objectivity.
“Does it hurt?” she whispers.
Yes. But aloud I only say, “A little. But I’ve walked a long way.”
“Are you certain? You’re not in pain?”
I think Samara might have noticed I’m having a little trouble with my breathing.
Jill comes around the boulder, zipping up her jumpsuit, and Samara drops her hands like my skin is hot. Jill must have changed like lightning, when I was expecting her to be back there at least five extra minutes, sanitizing. Or maybe I’ve been sitting here longer than I thought. Samara’s serene expression is right back in place.
“How’s the ankle?” Jill asks. She’s smiling, back to sweet and cheerful.
Oh no.
“It seems to have set well, Samara. For your first try.”
I close my eyes.
“I’m still interested in your training,” Jill goes on, laying out her wet clothes on a rock. “I thought about being a physician once … ”
It’s the first I’ve heard of it.
“… but it was the blood, you know, and that sort of thing that worried me. So until Beckett, you hadn’t done any practical applications of your skills?”
Samara pauses before she answers that one. But her voice is cool when she says, “It’s true that knowing can be different from doing. If I had done the procedure before, I would have known how hard to pull, and would have set the bone the first time.”
There’s another pause, and then Samara comes back with a question of her own.
“But how could training be practiced? You would need to wait a long time for someone to be sick, or hurt. And how could surgery be practiced before it needed to be done?”
Jill pounces. “You’re saying you can do surgery? Even though you’ve never done it?” She looks at me, triumphant, like she’s caught Samara at something. “So in New Canaan, after a few weeks of being told and looking at pictures, whatever you’ve learned after that makes you a physician? Is that right?”
And then I get why Jill is doing this. She wants me to see Samara as ignorant, or a liar. A local. Less than we are because the values of her culture are different. If Jillian thinks this is going to get her what she wants, she’s wrong. And the news for Jillian is that she wasn’t going to get what she wanted before I ever laid eyes on Samara. Jill’s smile is big.
“Is that right, Samara?”
“How else would it be?” Samara replies.
“Well, I’m sure different places have different levels of medicine. Some are more advanced, so some might need longer. Years even, to train … ” She blinks her big eyes at me once. “Other places are just going to be a little more pretech, that’s all.”
Samara shakes her head. “But only those with memory would ever train to be a physician. Isn’t it the same where—”
Her voice stops abruptly, and the silence hangs. “Where” what? Where we come from? Earth? Is that what she was going to say?
Then Jill asks sweetly, “What do you mean, ‘those with memory’?”
Samara looks at Jill like she’s the one that’s pretech. “I mean people with memory. The people who cannot forget.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You … ” Samara’s expression doesn’t exactly change, but I can see by the stillness of her body that she’s shocked. Her gaze darts to Jill, and then to me. “You don’t understand memory? You don’t have … Knowing?”
I lean forward, arms on my knees. “Tell me what it is.”
“Yes, tell us, Samara.”
Jill’s voice has a victorious tone, but Samara doesn’t even look at her. She talks to me, brows down. “Knowing means … that when information, or an experience, or a feeling enters your mind, it can never lessen or leave. The memory is forever. You don’t have this?”
I’m trying to wrap my head around it. “So a person with memory can never forget?”
Samara searches my face. What is she trying to find there?
Jill huffs. “So you’re saying that you have ‘memory,’ and that means you’ve never forgotten anything? Not once in your life?”
Samara doesn’t answer again, but I can see her shoulders hunch, drawing into herself. And I’m thinking, fast. About those signs in Canaan, “Without Memories, They Are Nothing” and “Remember Our Truth.” The way Samara seems to go away into her mind. Into her memories.
I lean forward. “How many of you can do this?” I see Jill’s mouth open from the corner of my eye.
“All of us in the city,” she whispers.
“What kinds of things do you remember? What you’ve seen? What you’ve heard?”
“It is every experience.”
I see Jill throw up her hands. I don’t care what she thinks right now. This is incredible. And it’s going to help me understand Canaan. Samara. Everything. “Have you always been able to remember?”
She stares at the ground without answering.
“How do you make it happen? Or does it not happen for some? Samara, is that why you asked if we had forgotten? Because some people don’t have it? Or because they lose it? Did the people of Old Canaan lose it? How far back does it go? How far back can you remember? Or wait … ” I see Samara opening the door in that column, telling me she remembered. “Is that how you knew there was a safe way through the caves? Is that how you know which way to go now?”
Samara’s eyes snap up to mine. “But you don’t need my memory to find a safe way through the caves, do you?”