Trading Rosemary (2 page)

But pike—with their numerous sharp teeth and bony jaws ever-ready as they slunk about bottom feeding, wanting to nip at her heels—she would kick, knowing even in her sleep that there was no need but unable to help herself, feet drumming on the wall at the side of her bed, kicking scaly flanks and angular jaws . . .

. . . and drumming in the ribs of her piscine child. And Ruth kicked back, bit back as she knew how, a pike to the end. Large-jawed, capable of holding and dragging, an endless weight that floated empty-eyed beneath her.

Her daughter the pike. She would not let go, and Rosemary’s heels could make no difference to her jaws. Yet she had birthed that pike, could not gainsay it growing, dominating the pond into which she had gushed, scale-slippery, from her mother’s body.

Rosemary knew pike and loathed them. She was careful to retain these memories, not try to sell them to those fish-dreamers who would have taken them— those who spent their lives swimming, or those who wanted to but could not. Who would want to be a fish?

But she had given birth to one, and so had to deal with her. The knowledge was useful to her, and better gained from permanent imprinting than from goldfish bowls placed around the house, tanks in the kitchen, and indoor pools of pike in the parlor.

At least that way the house did not stink of fish.

You had to be cunning with pike. Rosemary entered the bone yard, kept her shoulders back, expression open, and tried not to look as if she was taking shallow breaths. (She was.)

“I didn’t know you had become so interested in music,” she began, trying to make a connection.
Must encourage the girl.
“When did this start?”

“I’ve been interested for ages,” said Ruth, her upper lip twisting in well-contrived contempt. “As you’d know if you paid any attention,” she continued, her voice rising.

Rosemary resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “I paid attention when paying for a piano teacher for you,” she said. “Then the violin, then the clarinet. Each lasted three weeks, as I recall. I paid attention every time when, after only a little while, you said it was boring and you didn’t want to do it anymore. You wanted to spend more time with the horses.”

“I learn better on my own anyway,” said Ruth, returning to the house through the folding doors to her bedroom. Rosemary was surprised to see a piano had been wedged half-heartedly into a corner. She watched her daughter seat herself at the piano, watched her run her fingers over the ivory keys. Even at a distance, Rosemary could see the dust. She wrinkled her nose behind her daughter’s back.
It probably comes from those bloody animals.

“They don’t stink that badly!” cried Ruth bitterly. “I can
see
you, you know!”

Rosemary hadn’t known.

“You hate
everything
I like!” complained her daughter.

“I don’t,” Rosemary protested. “Play me something. I promise to like it.” If necessary, she would lie. Anything to bridge the gap that had become a chasm between them since Ruth had grown into womanhood.

But after hearing her daughter’s attempt at an extremely simple tune, Rosemary strongly suspected the horses had more musical ability. She couldn’t convincingly admit to liking it, and Ruth pounced triumphantly.

“I told you! I
knew
you’d hate it!”

“You’ve been trying to learn on your own?” said Rosemary cautiously, and Ruth shrugged, trying to look nonchalant.

“I might have borrowed some things from the library,” she said, and her tone dared her mother to make something of it.

Rosemary couldn’t help herself. “You actually
used
the library? For something other than horses? Why, Ruth, that’s wonderful!”

“I should have known that’s all you’d care about!” Ruth exploded. “That bloody library! Not Granny, not me. Get out. Just
get out.
”

“You can’t expect it to work immediately,” said Rosemary, moving towards the door in a state of stunned amazement. “The coins will give you the memory of playing, but they won’t magically improve coordination or finger movement, you know. You have to practice as well, like you did with the horses.”

Borrowed memories had been similarly limited when it came to Ruth’s horses. They could tell her how to fit a bridle, how to rub down a horse after a ride. They could even remind her how to keep her seat, although it took time for her body to adjust to what her mind remembered. But dealing with a horse as an individual . . . each one reacted slightly differently, liked different food, different scratching. To rely on the remembered reactions of another horse was foolish, and Ruth had learnt that the hard way, breaking several bones before she could bring herself to remove the condensed memories of one particular horse—a horse she had never seen or touched. A horse that meant more to her than any of the beasts currently inhabiting the stables that Rosemary had had built for her.

Not that Rosemary disapproved. On the contrary. Ruth’s interest in the favored coin-horse was at least an indication that the child was not completely insensible. If the coin-horse was the better animal, it was completely normal that Ruth should prefer it, and Rosemary would have been irritated had Ruth allowed sentimentality to influence her towards the living alternatives. Admittedly, Rosemary would have liked her daughter to have a more experimental taste; not to spend her life mooching around with one memory hanging on a chain between her breasts, but that was young people for you. Willful, spoiled. Had they only been able to afford a mediocre library Ruth would no doubt be champing like one of her charges to widen her experience. But with one of the finest libraries in the land at her fingertips, she slouched about like a deprived slum child of bygone times. For years Rosemary hadn’t been able to picture the barrenness of her daughter’s mental landscape without shuddering.

“I want it back!” Ruth wailed furiously. She actually stamped her foot, then slammed the door in her mother’s face.

Rosemary was forcibly reminded of her daughter as a small child. Tantrums had always been something Rosemary simply refused to tolerate, and even though she tried to stop it she could feel her already limited stock of good will towards her daughter slipping away. Any capitulation would simply encourage the girl to scream and snap the next time she wanted something. Briefly, Rosemary indulged in the fantasy of screwing a hook through her daughter’s upper lip—the one that curled so comprehensively in contempt—and leading her to the garden pond, giving her a good boot in. At least she’d be with her own kind.

She was used to her daughter’s tendency to settle stolidly into one interest, stuck firmly in an adolescence that Rosemary privately believed had gone on for far too long. Surely Ruth should have realized long ago that her mother paid no attention to histrionics? Unfortunately, it hadn’t seemed to stop her. Many times Rosemary had idly wished that she could cast every memory of Ruth’s tantrums, rid herself entirely of those unfortunate experiences, but no one would take them as trade, and there wasn’t room in the house to store them all. Except in the library, and Rosemary was damned if she would sully her treasures, if only by association.

Later, in the same library, she was forced to reconsider what she had traded away—and the possibility of getting it back. Was it such a silly idea? Granted, Ruth didn’t know the value of
anything
and couldn’t be trusted to make an accurate assessment if her life depended on it. Which it never would. And Rosemary had not made her initial choices lightly. Her grandmother’s coin was a rare piece in a library of polished rarity, but uncommonness alone was not a reliable indicator of worth. Under normal circumstances Rosemary would not have regretted its loss—both she and her agent had assessed the market value of the sapflower coin and its ability to hold as an investment, and Rosemary was certain of her conclusion. Trained since she could toddle to maintain and improve her family’s most valued asset, Rosemary knew she was an expert in her field; had known since she was younger than Ruth was now that in her ability to discern and to trade on that discernment she was a match for anybody. The sapflower coin was the better memory, and was undeniably worth what she had paid for it. She would not give it up—not for her grandmother’s coin, and not to placate her daughter.

These, however, were not normal circumstances, and the loss not a typical one. Rosemary might be able to give up a family memory without a qualm, but she was not so foolish as to give up the ability to influence her successor. Ruth might not be the best or the brightest, but she was sharp in her own way. Grasping, determined. She
had
learned to ride, adjusted memories to her abilities. And ultimately, she was what Rosemary had to work with. An only child, damn her blank fish eyes.

Rosemary breathed deeply, willed patience into the set of her shoulders and tried to picture her retirement, picture herself handing over responsibility not to a single-minded-and-memoried idiot, but to a well-rounded person who could be trusted to carry on the work of her ancestors.

At heart, Rosemary was a businesswoman. A woman who knew an opportunity for a good bribe when she saw one.

She leafed through the cases of a far shelf, locating one bound in blue leather. Rosemary took it to the bone yard and held it out to her daughter. “Tell you what,” she said, “you want your grandmother’s requiem? This is Beethoven’s
Moonlight Sonata,
the first recorded musical memory of our time. It’s not the most difficult piece I could have chosen, but you’ll have to work to learn it. When you can, if you can, I’ll see about getting your grandmother’s coin back.”

Ruth gazed at her speculatively, then uncovered the coin and threaded it carefully onto her necklace. Holding it against her breast, left hand curled over the outer surface, her eyelids, half-closed, began to flutter, and with her right hand she began to slowly pick out notes. Rosemary watched her with some surprise, a hopeful stirring of pleasure.

Ten minutes later, she raided the petty cash, and tied on her hat for a trip back into town. Ruth might be determined, but she was also—if the thumping from the direction of bedroom and bone yard was anything to go by—outrageously short on talent. Rosemary was going to need earplugs.

The bulk of Rangitoto loomed over them from the window, the perfect curve of the shield volcano sweeping up through pohutukawas and old lava fields, cracked and black in the sun. Rosemary could hear the birds, the kakarikis and saddlebacks calling to each other in bright flashes. Behind him, soft lights and muted sounds and needles, sketching jagged patterns of footsteps.

“It’s only for show,” said Netro, of the last. “Old technology. I like to keep it around to demonstrate how far the field has come.”

“And so no one can sneak up on you?” said Rosemary, but he had cameras for that, set over the front door and not too carefully hidden about the house.

“I prefer my guests to know that they’re being watched,” he had said, when he had seen her noting their presence.

Netro had not been what she had expected. Her coins—including her grandmother’s—had sold expensively; they were collector’s pieces that few could afford unless they were in the business of curation, as Rosemary was. Netro clearly was not—she had seen his library, and it was significantly smaller than her own, on a par with what was to be expected from those with a moderately high income and no professional interest. During the negotiations for the sapflower coin, he had specifically requested her grandmother’s requiem, which indicated a special and specific interest.

And yet he did not seem to care for music. There were no instruments in the house that she had seen, no players or speakers or visible recordings. Instead rocks and computers and pick-axes, heavy boots by the door, dust and little hammers and polishing cloths. Certainly a focused collection, but it was unusual for someone to amass coins of a particular type and not have the interest, the same subject matter, apparent in their surroundings. Rosemary could see the man in front of her with a specialized collection of coined geology, but not of music. She looked again, more carefully, studying the artwork on the walls for clues. There were none: just photographs of volcanoes, professionally done and well—if simply—framed. Rosemary recognized some of them: Ngauruhoe, White Island, Tambora, Krakatau.

“Have you been to any of them?” Netro asked, noting her interest.

“I went to White Island when I was a child,” said Rosemary. “In person, I mean. We visited some of the others by coin—Vesuvius, I remember, as part of a history module at school.” Education was often done by imprinting, with specialized recorders able to insert permanent memories, unlike currencies that were fleeting experiences only. “But my grandmother was composing an operetta on the Tarawera eruption, and wanted to see an active volcano. She took me along with her.”

The boat ride towards the island, how she had run along the deck, short legs pumping as the boat thumped through heavy seas, squealing with delight as the deck fell out from under her. Her grandmother had stood in the bow of the boat, her face towards the volcano and her eyes closed.
I want to listen to the island
, she said when Rosemary asked her.
I want to hear it coming closer to me.

“And you kept the memory?” said Netro.

“Of course,” said Rosemary. “I didn’t purge her from my mind, if that’s what you’re implying. We had a very good relationship—I was closer to her than I was to my parents, to be honest.”

“Yet you sold me one of the defining moments of her life,” said Netro.

“It wasn’t her life,” said Rosemary, frowning. “It was mine. She was dead. While she might have planned her funeral, she didn’t live it. I did.”

“Yet it didn’t matter enough for you to keep,” said Netro. “Even though you say you loved her.”

“I loved
her,
” said Rosemary. “Her. Not the shell of what she left behind, not her things, not her music.”

“You didn’t like her music?” Netro questioned. “She wasn’t called the finest composer of the last century for nothing.”