Forest of Memory Read online

  “I understand.”

  They were fast. Fifteen minutes after the call, during which time I made an attempt to answer the messages that Lizzie rated as urgent priority, a medchopper disturbed the forest with its rotors.

  From here, you can watch the public record of what happened, and I’m assuming you have. My cameras were working again. The medteam had their LiveConnects running the entire time.

  You can see the way they reacted to me, and the blood that covered me. I hadn’t realized how stained my clothes had become with Johnny’s blood.

  Once I reassured them, we retraced my steps. We got all the way back to the clearing. No Johnny. No robo-mule. The site was completely empty, and the ground had been churned by the hooves of deer. No trace of humans at all.

  The only thing that makes my story at all believable is that I was offline for three days. During that time I had moved from south of Salem northward by about 400 miles, close to Lake Chelan. The bike and cart were where I had said they were hidden, but I could have done that myself. And since mine were the only footprints the investigators found . . . well. It’s easy to see how it might have been a publicity stunt designed to raise the price on my merchandise by giving it a unique provenance.

  But the blood—that should be proof, shouldn’t it?

  It was blood from a deer.

  I REMEMBER seeing the ragged hole in his stomach and innards. I remember how gray his skin looked and how labored his breathing was. But those memories . . . they must be false, right? Something I THOUGHT I saw in the moment. Something that took advantage of the failability of memory.

  And why? That’s what is hard to understand. Why would he fake an injury or a death if all he had to do was let me go? And even then, why not use human blood from a blood bank?

  I have wondered . . . It has occurred to me that it might have been a message. Though that raises its own set of questions.

  I looked for him.

  After everyone had left, I went back into the woods. I remember standing by a stream and having Lizzie’s voice cut off. A deer stepped out of the trees and bent down to drink. Nothing else stirred except the water and the leaves. After a moment, the deer lifted its head, leaped across the stream, and faded back into the trees. A few minutes later, Lizzie’s voice came back as if we hadn’t stopped talking.

  I don’t know if Johnny lived, or what exactly he was doing with the deer. I don’t know what his plans were for me. If you had been hoping that I could give you answers to the deer die-off, I’m sorry that I can’t. I don’t even know what happened to me.

  I know that’s frustrating for you, so let me offer you the questions I’ve been asking myself.

  Have you been in the forest? Have you seen deer corpses? Or have you relied on what the net tells you about the die-off?

  Because I don’t think the deer are dying, I think they’re being taken offline, and the nanodrives they were injected with establish a nonhuman network. Changing the deer themselves wouldn’t be enough though, because the smart dust in the region would still report them, right?

  Unless those nanodrives are rewriting everything the deer comes in contact with. I’ve asked about that. It’s possible, and in a lot of ways it makes the fact that Johnny needed to tranquilize them make more sense. A transmitter—he could have just injected that from a distance. But if he needed time to make sure their systems recalibrated before releasing them . . . well.

  But that’s just a guess. It’s like Bashar says in A SYMMETRY FRAMED—“The land has an unwilling connection to us.”

  It makes you wonder doesn’t it?

  I was unconscious for over twenty-four hours, which is plenty of time to recalibrate someone’s system. With the client list I have, what would happen if I were released into the wild like the deer?

  What would happen if I were made an object of curiosity to attract a specific client?

  And my last question: What if they’re looking for you? Or people LIKE you?

  This typewriter is covered in dust. It’s part of its wabi-sabi. If the smart dust around me is mbeing rewritten, what about the dust ont his typweriter? The dust around you?

  Has your connection to the net dropped recently?

  That’s got you wondering, I expect . . . Think of it as a bonus with your purchase. I’ve given you the gift of uncertainty.

  About the Author

  Author photograph © 2012 Rod Searcey

  MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL is the author of The Glamourist Histories series of fantasy novels. She has received the Campbell Award for Best New Writer, three Hugo Awards, and two RT Book Reviews Reviewer’s Choice Award for Best Fantasy Novel. Her work has been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards. Her stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Asimov’s Science Fiction and Fact, and several Year’s Best anthologies as well as in her collection Scenting the Dark and Other Stories from Subterranean Press.

  A professional puppeteer and voice actor, Mary founded Other Hand Productions and has performed for LazyTown (CBS), the Center for Puppetry Arts, and Jim Henson Pictures. Her designs have garnered two UNIMA-USA Citations of Excellence, the highest award an American puppeteer can achieve. She also records fiction for authors such as Kage Baker, Cory Doctorow, and John Scalzi.

  Mary lives in Chicago with her husband, Rob, and over a dozen manual typewriters.

  Visit maryrobinettekowal.com.

  Also by Mary Robinette Kowal

  THE GLAMOURIST HISTORIES

  Shades of Milk and Honey

  Glamour in Glass

  Without a Summer

  Valour and Vanity

  Of Noble Family

  Word Puppets (short stories)

  Thank you for buying this Tor.com ebook.

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Begin Reading

  About the Author

  Also by Mary Robinette Kowal

  Newsletter Sign-up

  Copyright Page

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novella are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  FOREST OF MEMORY

  Copyright © 2014 by Mary Robinette Kowal; revised edition copyright © 2016 by Mary Robinette Kowal

  Cover art by Victo Ngai

  Cover design by Christine Foltzer

  Edited by Lee Harris

  All rights reserved.

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

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  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  ISBN 978-0-7653-8389-1 (ebook)

  ISBN 978-0-7653-8791-2 (trade paperback)

  Originally published as an audio book by Audible as part of METAtropolis: Green Space

  First Tor Edition: March 2016

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