The Deep - Rivers Solomon Page 0,10

but feel sorry for Ayel and any others who were overwhelmed. They didn’t know how to live with this pain. Yetu had become accustomed to it, its sharpness blunted by time.

“I’m here! I’m alive!” said Ayel, surprised by her own existence.

Yetu sent her back to the other wajinru and carried on. Pressure built up inside her as she called the History to the forefront. She and her people were lost in a bubble of agony. It went on and on.

There was no way to measure the passing of time, or whether time was passing at all. But traditionally the first part, where Yetu handed over the memories, lasted for hours, and the next part, where the wajinru soaked up all the memories, days. And though not all of it was suffering—there were times of true happiness, joy, whole decades of bounty—the sad moments were totalizing. So, arrested by the images, they were paralyzed. Through Yetu’s machinations, the wajinru experienced the rememberings like they were living out their own memories. They were the ancestors.

Piece by piece, Yetu showed them their past, filled them with it. Soon, she’d give them all of it. It would be theirs, and she would be free from it, for a little while.

For a short time, the History would be outside of her. It was their people’s one concession to the historian: three days of emptiness while they processed the rememberings.

Yetu rushed it as much as such a thing could be rushed. The people would not get the release they needed if she skimped. And any piece she left untold, she would keep. But she didn’t want to keep any of it. She wanted to live how she had lived before she turned fourteen, before the History replaced Yetu with all the wajinru who had proceeded her.

“Hold on, hold on, hold on,” she whispered under her breath, startling the wajinru. They swarmed around her, connected to her every thought.

“Yes, hold on,” they said, feeling her struggle.

“Please, please,” she said. She had to hold on a bit longer, then she’d get some peace… for a bit. Then another year wasting away as she neglected her own self for the History. Maybe she would finally die. Maybe that was for the best.

Yetu remembered, remembered, and remembered. She called to the memories, drew them to her, then pushed them out to her people one by one in an unrelenting torrent. Not quite sequentially, but a complete telling of their story, with some sections rearranged as necessary.

She remembered the first mothers, the images of their floating bodies as seen by their children or other wajinru. She remembered whales, their gigantic, godlike forms. She remembered shelters made of seaweed and carcasses. Castles, too, made out of the bones of giant sharks. Kings and queens. Endless beauty, endless dark. Then death, so many deaths. Looming extinction. The History of the wajinru included triumph and defeat, togetherness and solitude.

As always, the unfolding of the rememberings was influenced by Yetu’s own recent experiences. She couldn’t let go of what had happened a few days ago with the sharks. She couldn’t distance herself from it now. She couldn’t forget as easily as her amaba did that she’d been so close to being eaten.

“Listen!” called Yetu to the wajinru. “Listen and remember, I command you,” she said, her voice growing louder with rage and sadness, with every wild emotion she could no longer contain. This was her chance to let it explode out of her, and she would luxuriate in the combustion. They would feel pain, but she would feel release.

“Listen and remember, I command you,” she repeated, then showed them the remembering that had possessed her a few days prior. It was the first remembering she’d ever had, and soon it would be their remembering too.

“Let it overtake you,” she shouted, strained voice piercing the water.

They gave themselves over to it, copying Yetu’s ecstatic movements. She shook her head back and forth so fast and so hard that she lost her sense of equilibrium as the remembering overwhelmed them. They all watched together in the remembering as hundreds of sharks gathered to share a feast of bodies that looked so much like them, just like wajinru.

“They’re killing us!” someone screamed.

Shrieks and sobs erupted throughout the womb as they saw their brethren, sistren, and siblings gobbled alive by massive white sharks. “Wait!” someone called. In the remembering, they swam closer to the site of the slaughter, putting themselves in danger of becoming victims of the massacre. “Wait!