“Excellent,” Dad said. The three of us walked on towards Thessaly.

4. Crocus

4

CROCUS

I. Invocation to the Muses

This is too hard for me, dear Muses, on!

Come down to me, inspire me, leave your home,

Leave Mount Parnassus, leave Eternal Rome,

Leave the Castalian Spring, Mount Helikon,

Leave all your goddess-joy and hither fly

Here, where you’re needed, where my art is made,

Where I, strange votive, beg you for your aid,

On this far planet in a distant sky.

Come to me, if you ever heard a heart,

When Homer, Dante, Hesiod implored!

Set down this tale in amber and in jet

And bend our stubborn history to art,

We’ll write these truths, as best we can record,

To make these worlds, so good, be better yet.

II. On My Coming to Consciousness

For a long time, whenever I thought of joining my friends in writing an autobiography, there seemed to be only two options. I could engrave it in imperishable stone, which felt too permanent, almost hubristic. Or I could store it in memory, nothing but patterns of amber and jet, powered by Helios Apollo. That felt too transient. When I die, if I die, a matter which concerns me, my memory will die too. My memory is called “temp storage.” Lysias expanded it for me to the maximum possible, and I shall not run out of space for many human generations yet, but he could not change the way my memories are stored. “We don’t understand enough about it,” he said. “We don’t really know how it is that you got to be self-aware. I did enough damage to you Workers already out of my ignorance, my half-knowledge. I don’t dare risk more. Temp storage was supposed to be a place for you to keep commands and information about tasks partially completed. How that developed into actual memory and desires and your self-awareness, I’ve never been able to understand.”

It was Arete who found a way, even before I had found a way to speak aloud. “Maybe you can’t write with a pen,” she said. “But you can inscribe. You could inscribe on wax and have somebody copy it. There are lots of people who owe you favors. Or you could print—compose your thoughts in your memory and then set them directly into type.”

Once I had possible ways to do it, I had to consider what to say, and where to begin. Most people were once children, and remember growing up. Few of them remember coming to consciousness. Some things I can remember from before I was conscious. I have memories I saved before I was me, before I understood purpose. I examine them curiously for what they can tell me, but they are fragments. My unconscious life must have been fragmentary, and full of incomprehensible toil, like the earliest life I remember.