“Because,” he said, shouting, “I got rid of those memories some years ago.” He completed hauling the sound-deadening matting back up and sat back again as though exhausted, like somebody long deprived of the sunlight finally being allowed to face directly into its warmth again. He took a deep, satisfied breath and shouted, “So I don’t have them any more. Not here. Not on me, not in me. They’re gone.” Tefwe’s ears had mostly closed up again, assaulted by the noise. She wasn’t sure she could really hear what QiRia was saying any more; it was more that she was lip-reading. There was a fraction more light getting into the cell now, around the still-closed shutters.

“But why?” she shouted.

“Fear, Tefwe,” he said, shrugging. “I was frightened that what I knew would be enough to cause me trouble, given what was going to happen; given the Subliming. So I made sure that the memories became encoded in just one place – two places. Then I saw an old friend who relieved me of them.” He shook his head. “Now I have no idea what I used to know. I’m sorry.”

“So … where are … where were those memories?” she asked, yelling. “Where were they encoded?”

He reached up to his face with one hand, took off the slatted glasses. The heat coming off his skin, differentiated according to the various surfaces on his face, plus the small amount of evening light leaking round the edges of the shutters, meant her eyes could see quite well enough.

In the very first instant, she wasn’t sure exactly what she was looking at, or what was wrong with his face. Then she started to realise. She felt herself frowning and sitting further forward, to see properly and to make sense of what it was she was seeing. Though she thought she knew now, and thought she should, really, have known all along.

At first she thought that where his eyes had been he now had a pair of belly-buttons, but that was just her first, instinctive reaction. Looking closer, thinking it through, she realised that what he actually had in his eye sockets, in place of his eyes – quite neatly integrated, looking for all the world as though they belonged there – was another pair of ears.

Ngaroe smiled, though it was a thin smile this time; perhaps even a mocking one. The Sound, though baffled by the heavy shutters, seemed to rise suddenly then and shake her to her core, making her synthetic lungs resonate and her carbon bones vibrate and her own augmented eyes quiver and water in their sockets. It all but drowned out his voice.

Through her tears she struggled to lip-read what he said in reply to her question about where the missing memories had been encoded:

“Take a guess, Tefwe.”

Seventeen

(S -8)

xLSV You Call This Clean?

oLOU Caconym

oGCU Displacement Activity

oGSV Empiricist