A colorful, glowing figure with a flaming head stands in a cave in a snowy arctic landscape under the aurora borealis, with a polar bear and campfire nearby.

The Solace ofArtemis I read that every polar bear alive has mitochondrial DNA from a common mothe4, an Irish brown bear who once roved out across the last ice age, and I am comforted. It has been a long hot morning with the children of the machine, their talk of memory, of buying it, of buying it cheap, but I, memory keeper by trade, scan time coded in the golden hive mind of eternity. I burn my books, I burn my whole archive: ablaze that sears, synapses flaring cell to cell where memory sleeps in the wax hexagonals of my do<jmed and melting comb. I see him loping towards me across the vast ice field to where I wait in the cave mouth, dreaming my cubs about the den, my honied ones, smelling of snow and sweet oblivion. See more