6. Memory.

Yet he had memory of that life, of that name, and of many lives before that one, some which had come before, others which were yet to be, and others that never were nor would be. He was many lives in the great neutrality of being both foot and path and observer.

Closing his eyes, he observed with a certain interest that nothing was invisible to him. Every current of water and movement upon the bridge still played through his mind. As he breathed, he could taste motes of people who had lived, some of them centuries before, and turned into dust. These memories tickled against his own. He had been some of those people.

Opening his eyes again, he observed that it was sunset. The body that carried him suggested fatigue and hunger, in a distant voice.

But first he must remember. In the life he had led, and the ones that had preceded it, and in the ones that had never been and would never be, were a medium to communicate a great thing he had learned, a thing that would allow him to deliver others from suffering. This was his one task, to which a thousand million lives traced back.