Trading Rosemary (10 page)

Rosemary could not fathom it. To destroy all that experience—to do it deliberately, knowing the loss to society, to knowledge . . . it was beyond her. She found it offensive, viscerally so. His plans for his library made her want to vomit.

Surely he could not be serious.

She rather suspected that he was.

The loss would be so
permanent.
Trading in memories meant personal loss—the loss of private experience. Yet those memories would still be available to the wider public. They would sift through the population, never really dying, spreading ideas and emotions and empathy.

It was as close to immortality as she was likely to get.

To toss that away, to deprive others of it . . . that would be hard to forgive if the biologist was doing it to something he didn’t love. But to something he did, even if the memories had driven him to his limits . . .

There was blood on her skirts.

Her fingernails had dug into one palm, the other clutching the jacket containing the ice coin. Carefully, she unwrapped it, tipped it into her bloody palm—

(felt the water chill about her feet)

(felt the air sharpen)

(saw the sea darken)

—and wondered how the blood might change the scent of it: whether it would wash off, whether it would give a faint metallic note to underline the fragility of the moment. It was her favorite coin.

“Nothing could make me destroy you,” she said.

“I will not be like him,” she said.

“I
preserve,
” she said, and was surprised to hear in her voice a twinge of uncertainty.

“I do,” she said, but in her mind was empty hillsides and empty kitchens, and gaps where birds and births and clocks should be. In their absence, other memories had assumed prominence, and she could fill the gaps with new ones of her choosing, recreate herself in the mold she most preferred.

She held the bloody hand, the bloody coin out over the water. If she let it drop, there would be substitutes.

She could let it go, if she wanted.

She could.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t go through with it,” said Rosemary.

“Isn’t it a bit late for that?” said Netro. “You’ve got all the coins. You’ve traded for all of them.”

“But I have not made the last,” said Rosemary, “and I’m not going to.”

“I could take an action,” said Netro, but both knew it was a hollow threat. Rosemary could certainly be required to pay a sum equivalent to what she had promised, but the type of mental rape that accompanied a forced memory extraction was not one any court or mediation would countenance. She could not be compelled to give up her own memories.

“Are you worried about what I’ll think?” he said. “About what I’ll do with your coin when I have it?”

Rosemary resisted the urge to roll her eyes. She was the one at fault; she was the one breaking contract. There was no need to compound her error with rudeness. “No,” she said, in as considered a tone as she could manage. “Truthfully, I didn’t spend waste a lot of time wondering what you would think of my actions.” Not a lot of time.

(The night she gave away her dragon, she had laid on the heights and cried for fear, hiding her face in the tussock so he would not see the pity on the face of the porters.)

(Looking away from her knuckles, white about the railing of the boat, as it lunged and thumped through the waves, and her vomit becoming food for the gulls.)

(Declining to help shatter a statue, in case the face looked a little too like her grandmother—her daughter—for comfort.)

(The contempt she felt—contempt for whom?—at giving away her daughter’s birth to a woman who could not keep her own bargains, her own vows.)

Rosemary was unaccustomed to worrying about what people thought of her memories. She certainly did not judge others on theirs—in a society that circulated memory as currency, such judgment was considered the height of prudishness. Even as pieces of herself were stripped away, enough independence remained to behave properly.

She wondered if the brief flashes of discomfort she had felt at the thought of his scrutiny were simply proxies for what she thought of herself. It was discomforting to think that her judgment had failed her. Surely the person she was now was worth as much as the person she was then—she would not judge another so, who had traded part of themselves for profit. It was absolutely normal behavior. And yet . . .

Perhaps it was not his opinion she was worried about. Perhaps it was her own.

“Not worried, then,” said Netro. “But there’s a difference between caring what I think and wanting me to see it in the first place. I think you don’t want me pawing through your memories. You certainly don’t like me very much—don’t bother to say otherwise. And when you don’t like someone, it’s a perfectly natural desire to not give them what they want. Even if it’s a little childish.
Juvenile,
even.”

“No,” said Ruth. “I’m not interested, and I don’t care! You don’t care about anything of mine, why should I spend any more time in this horrible dusty library for you!

It never ended. Rosemary had sat through dance recitals, when Ruth was five, pink and pretty in a tutu. She had sat through swimming lessons at seven and gymnastics at ten and gone to endless interminable performances of drama club through her daughter’s teenage years. She had shopped for uniforms and cut oranges and sewed costumes, run lines and checked homework and organized horse floats and ribbons and polish, and she had done it all with the best grace that she could manage.

She had had enough.

“You are twenty-three years old,” she said to Ruth. “You do not need me sitting on the sidelines at every damn gymkhana or jump meet or whatever it is they call it. I have done my dash!”

“You’d come if you wanted to,” said Ruth.

“I don’t want to,” said Rosemary, definitively.

“You’d come if you loved me,” said Ruth, and Rosemary was silent.

“Fine, then!” said her daughter. “Fine! See if I care!”

She flounced out of the library, leaving Rosemary to irritation and doubt and blessed silence—and the fantasy of stuffing her daughter’s face into the fishpond, sending her off to be with her own kind. Remembering again the swimming lessons, where Ruth had learned to hold her breath and hug the bottom of the pool like a pike, bottom dwelling and snapping from beneath, doing her level best to hurt and hamstring.

“Fine
,
”
she said, under her breath.

“No,” said Rosemary. “I don’t like you. It’s true. And if I were a lesser person, perhaps that would influence me to break our bargain. But I have traded with worse than you—”

(a potter at his wheel, turning and shaping, gouging pieces out of clay and tinting it blood red and burning)

(a woman writhing on her bed, given over to madness and despair and dragging her husband down with her)

(a biologist by the ocean, forging his anger into fires and making the world less than it had been in blind revenge for a wrong past righting)

“—with worse than you,” Rosemary repeated, “and I have not flinched from it. So please, do not flatter yourself. Don’t even try. This has, in the end, nothing to do with you.”

“It has everything to do with
you,
” said Netro. “Your daughter. Flesh of your flesh, bone of your bone—and she will not forgive you for this.”

“She will not,” said Rosemary, knowing it to be true. “But she is a grown woman and that will be her choice.”

“Do not think that she will relent,” said Netro. “In her place I would not. I do not! Desire is a needy thing, and it rules us all. Look at you—look at you! You have the ice coin in your hand, and you gave it up once before, and now you keep it. Not because it’s worth more, and not because it will fuck over that brat of yours, but because you
want
to.”

“I do want to,” said Rosemary. “But there is more to life than want. It’s not the important thing, in the end.”

“Then what is?” said Netro, sneering. “No. Don’t tell me. Happiness? Discovery?
Love?
Because if you do this, you’ll be throwing all that away. You told me, when last we met, that I was childish.
Juvenile.
And now you’re going to wallow in sentimentality, dress it up as a virtue?”

“Of course not,” said Rosemary, strongly tempted to tell him he was being as silly as ever. “Those things are important, true, and they’re nice to have, but they are in themselves part of your precious desire—the desire to be happy, to know fulfillment.”

“So what if they are?” said Netro. “Desire is the driving force of our society. If anyone should realize this, it’s you.”

“It’s because it’s me that I know differently,” said Rosemary. “You ask me what is more important than desire? I tell you, it is duty.”

“I so want to be a good mother to you,” said Rosemary to her daughter. The little girl was asleep in her arms and snuffling, and Rosemary breathed in the new baby scent of her, traced the small mouth, the creases in the small ears and the tiny, perfect eyebrows.

“You’ll have to be patient with me,” she said. “I’m still getting used to this. I got all the coins. All the taking-care-of-baby coins. They were supposed to be a help.”

And they had been, to an extent. Rosemary was well versed in baby-sitting techniques, but it was different with her own child. Surely the coin babies had never been this small? But Ruth had cried and cried, and nothing Rosemary knew was enough to soothe her. Upset herself, she had taken Ruth into the library, reasoning that what calmed her would surely calm her baby, but Ruth was inconsolable.

Rosemary, in desperation, had pulled at the shelves, knocking coins and cases to the floor, until she found the most soothing coin she owned, a flat blue disk imprinted with floating in a calm sea. She had pressed it to Ruth’s skin, and the child had hitched her breath in surprise, had stopped squalling and drifted in Rosemary’s arms as the disk rose and fell on the little chest.

“All I want to do is look after you,” said Rosemary. “That’s my job now.”

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” said Netro. “Duty? Are you mad? Have you forgotten why you came to me in the first place? It was out of duty, madam. Duty to your daughter and your legacy both. And now you’re going to use that same duty to get out of the obligations you yourself incurred?”

“You see the contradiction, then,” said Rosemary. “You are not the only one. I see it too. But I have also come to see that my duty and your desire . . . they are opposite sides of the same coin, yes? I desire to do my duty, it’s true.”

“But you’re not doing it,” said Netro. “Do you not have a duty to your daughter? To improve her prospects, to give her every advantage? To make her happy?”

“I do,” said Rosemary. It was true. Ruth would suffer for this decision—she would feel betrayed, she would lose trust in her mother. Rosemary had not always been a perfect parent, but she had always kept her promises. This would be the first time that she had broken them—and Ruth, of all people, had kept her part of the bargain, had put away her horses and learned what Rosemary had required her to learn, albeit with sulks and stubbornness and resentment. She had grown, or been forced to grow, and Rosemary was under no illusion that she would not relapse under the disappointment.

(“It’s no fun having to practice all the time—I’ve got better things to do!”)

(“I don’t understand those stupid verbs, why can’t everyone just speak the same language? I’m dropping out now. So what if it makes my grades look bad!”)

(“It’s not like I thought it would be. I don’t want to do it anymore.”)

(“You promised it would get better!”)

“And what about your library? There’s generations of work there, and let’s face it, your daughter shares neither your desire nor your sense of obligation. Don’t you have a duty to it, to train her as your replacement, to keep improving what you have?”

“I do,” said Rosemary. That was true too. The library, one of the finest in existence, would also suffer from this decision. Its value would decrease—not distressingly so, as it was already of astronomical worth and the loss of her grandmother’s coin, while substantial, was dwarfed by the remaining coins. Still, a loss would be felt, and Rosemary would be the first in a long line of caretakers to preside over a decrease of this magnitude. It was an acceptable loss when balanced against the value of the sapflower coin, but against the triviality of her recent journey the scales of trade were distinctly unbalanced. She could already hear the voices of her factor, her lawyer, her insurance agent. Her grandmother.

(“Are you sure this is the best decision you could make, long term?”)

(“I know this is a little uncomfortable, Rosemary, but have you considered the fact that your daughter might not be the best person to leave the library to?”)

(“It’s not like you to break a contract. You might have left yourself open to a malpractice suit. Shall I look into it for you?”)

(“Are you sure you know what you’re doing, darling?”)

“I do,” she repeated. “And perhaps if I’d done my duty differently, I’d have a better heir and a better library. Goodness knows I’ve desired both long enough. It was certainly in service to both that I undertook this farce in the first place.”

“But perhaps,” said Rosemary, “perhaps I also have a duty to myself.”

After the citric tartness of the sorbet, the heat of the day pulsed more oppressively than usual. Rosemary fanned herself with the menu, irritated. Sweat beaded slowly down the column of her throat and settled in the hollows above her collarbones; the back of her linen shift was sticky with damp. This was not the way that she wanted to return home, flustered and overwhelmed by the sun. Her daughter the pike was fresh, ready to snap from the cool corridors of the house while Rosemary swam, sluggish with sweat, a tempting target for those bony, resentful jaws. Rosemary had hoped that the lemon sorbet would cool her palate and her temper, sweeten her mood, make her more charitable.