Katharine’s skin took on the texture of Urradeth marble as she said, ‘I shall repeat the line one more time. You must answer or …’ She put her hand to her throat, and in a voice as clear as Resa’s evening bell, she recited:
The many men, so beautiful!
And they all dead did lie:
I remembered then that the Timekeeper had told me I should read his book until I could hear the poems in my heart. I closed my mind’s eye to the confusion of twisting black letters I was struggling to see. The remembrancers teach that there are many ways to memory. All is recorded, they say; nothing is forgotten. I listened to the music and rhyme of Katharine’s poem fragment. Immediately distinct words sounded within, and I repeated what my heart had heard:
The many men, so beautiful!
And they all dead did lie:
And a thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I.
The Katharine imago smiled as if she were pleased. I had to remind myself that she wasn’t really Katharine at all, but only the Entity’s re-creation of Katharine. Or rather, she was my imperfect memory sucked from my mind. I realized that I knew only a hundredth part of the real Katharine. I knew her long, hard hands and the depths between her legs, and that she had a submerged, burning need for beauty and pleasure (to her, I think, they were the same thing); I knew the sound of her dulcet voice as she sang her sad, fey songs, but I could not look into her soul. Like all scryers she had been taught to smother her passions and fears within a wet blanket of outer calm. I did not know what lay beneath, and even if I had known, who was I to think I could hold the soul of a woman within me? I could not, and because I could not, the imago of Katharine created from my memory was subtly wrong. Where the real Katharine was provocative, her imago was playful; where Katharine loved poems and visions of the future for their own sake, her imago used them for other purposes. At the core of the imago was a vast but not quite omniscient entity playing with the flesh and personality of a human being: at the core of Katharine was … well, Katharine.
I was still angry, so I angrily said, ‘I don’t want to play this riddle game.’
Katharine smiled again and said, ‘Oh, but there are two more poems.’
‘You must know which poems I’ll know and which I won’t.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘I can’t see … I don’t know.’
‘You must know,’ I repeated.
‘Can’t I choose to know what I want to know and what I don’t? I love suspense, my Mallory.’
‘It’s foreordained, isn’t it?’
‘Everything is foreordained. What has been will be.’
‘Scryer talk.’
‘I’m a scryer, you know.’
‘You’re a goddess, and you’ve already determined the outcome of this game.’
‘Nothing is determined; in the end we choose our futures.’
I made a fist and said, ‘How I hate scryer talk and your seemingly profound paradoxes!’
‘Yet you revel in your mathematical paradoxes.’
‘That’s different.’
She held her flattened hand over her luminous eyes for a long moment as if their own interior light burned her. Then she said, ‘We continue. This simple poem was written by an ancient scryer who could not have known the Vild would explode.’
Stars, I have seen them fall,
But when they drop and die …
And I replied:
No star is lost at all,
From all the star-sown sky.
‘But the stars are lost, aren’t they?’ I said. ‘The Vild grows, and no one knows why.’
‘Something,’ she said, ‘must be done to stop the Vild from exploding. How unpoetic it would be if all the stars died!’
I brushed my hair out of my eyes and asked the question occupying some of the finest minds of our Order, ‘Why is the Vild exploding?’
Katharine’s imago smiled and said, ‘If you know the lines to this next poem, you may ask me why, or ask me anything you’d like … Oh, the poem! It’s so pretty!’ She clapped her hands together like a little girl delighted to give her friend a birthday gift. And words I knew well filled the air:
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
I was free! The Solid State Entity, through the lips of a simple hologram, had spoken the first two lines of my favourite poem, and I was free. I had only to repeat the next line, and I would be free to ask Her how a pilot could escape from an infinite tree. (I never doubted She would keep Her promise to answer my questions; why this is so I cannot say.) I laughed as beads of sweat formed up on my forehead. I recited:
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
‘It is important,’ I said, ‘to rhyme “symmetry” with “eye.”’ I laughed because I was as happy as I had ever been before. (It is strange how release from the immediate threat of death can produce such euphoria. I have this advice to offer our Order’s old, jaded academicians so bored with their daily routines: Place your lives at risk for a single night, and every moment of the next day will vibrate with the sweet music of life.)
Katharine’s imago was watching me. There was something infinitely appealing about her, something almost impossible to describe. I thought that this Katharine was at peace with herself and her universe in a way that the real Katharine could never be.
And then she closed her eyes and said, ‘No, that is wrong. I gave you the lines to the poem’s last stanza, not the first.’
It is possible that my heart stopped beating for a few moments. In a panic, I said, ‘But the first stanza is identical to the last.’
‘No, it is not. The first three lines of either stanza are identical. The fourth lines differ by a single word.’
‘In that case, then,’ I asked, ‘how was I to know which stanza you were reciting? Since, if the first three lines are identical, so are the first two?’
‘This is not the Test of Knowledge,’ she said. ‘It is the Test of Caprice, as I have said. However, it is my caprice,’ and here she smiled, ‘that you be given another chance.’ And, as her eyes radiated from burning cobalt to bright indigo, she repeated:
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
I was lost. I clearly – very clearly, as clearly as if I did possess the memory of pictures – I remembered every letter and word of this strange poem. I had