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dear as to endure constant, unrelenting agony."
"So it was just a general observation."
"Naturally."
I didn't believe that, but there was no point in saying
so. The CC would get to the point in its own way, in its own
time. I watched the crawling lines on the machine and waited.
"I notice you're not taking notes concerning this
experience. In fact, you've taken very few notes lately about
anything."
"Watching me, are you?"
"When I've nothing better to do."
"As you certainly know, I'm not taking notes because my
handwriter is broken. I haven't had it repaired because the
only guy who still works on them is so swamped that he said he
might get around to mine this coming August. Unless he leaves
the business to start a career in buggywhip repair."
"There actually is a woman who does that," the CC said.
"In Pennsylvania."
"No kidding? Nice to see such a vital skill won't vanish
completely."
"We try to foster any skill, no matter how impractical or
useless."
"I'm sure our grandchildren will thank us for it."
"What are you using to write your stories?"
"Two methods, actually. You get this soft clay brick, see,
and you use a pointed stick to impress little triangles in it
in different combinations. Then you put it on the oven to bake,
and in four or five hours there you are. The original hard
copy. I've been trying to think of a name for the process."
"How about cuneiform?"
"You mean it's been done? Oh, well. When I get tired of
that, I get out the old hammer and chisel and engrave my
deathless prose on rocks. It saves me carrying those ridiculous
paper sheets into Walter's office; I just lob them across the
newsroom and through his window."
"I don't suppose you'd consider Direct Interface again."
Was that what this was all about?
"Tried it," I said. "Didn't like it."
"That was over thirty years ago," the CC pointed out.
"There have been some advances since then."
"Look," I said, feeling irritable and impatient. "You've
got something on your mind. I wish you'd just come out with it
instead of weaseling around like this."
It said nothing for a moment. That moment stretched into a
while, and threatened to become a spell.
"You want me to direct interface for some reason," I
suggested.
"I think it might be helpful."
"For you or me?"
"Both of us, possibly. There can be a certain therapeutic
value in what I intend to show you."
"You think I need that?"
"Judge for yourself. How happy have you been lately?"
"Not very."
"You could try this, then. It can't hurt, and it might
help."
So what was I doing at the moment so important that I
couldn't take a few minutes off to chin with the CC?
"All right," I said. "I'll interface with you, though I
think you really ought to buy me dinner and some flowers
first."
"I'll be gentle," the CC promised.
"What do I have to do? You need to plug me in somewhere?"
"Not for years now. I can use my regular connections into
your brain. All you need to do is relax a little. Stare into
the oscilloscope screen; that could be helpful."
I did, watching the blue lines peak and trough, peak and
trough. The screen started to expand, as if I were moving into
it. Soon all I could see was one crawling line, which slowed,
stopped, became a single bright dot. The dot got brighter. It
grew and grew. I felt the heat of it on my face, it was blazing
down from a blue tropical sky. There was a moment of vertigo as
the world seemed to spin around me--my body staying firmly in
place--until I was lying not on my stomach but on my back, and
not on the snowy white sheets of the repair shop at North Lunar
Filmwerks but on cool wet beach sand, hearing not the soft
mutterings of the medicos but the calls of seagulls and the
nearby hiss and roar of surf. A wave spent its last energy
tickling my feet and washing around my hips. It sucked a little
sand out from under me. I lifted my head and saw an endless
blue ocean trimmed with white breakers. I got to my feet and
turned around, and saw white sandy beach. Beyond it were palm
trees, jungle rising away from me to a rocky volcanic peak
spouting steam. The realism of the place was astonishing. I
knelt and scooped up a handful of sand. No two grains looked
alike. No matter how close I brought the sand grains to my
eyes, the illusion never broke down and the endless detail
extended to deeper and deeper realms. Some sort of fractal
magic, I supposed. I walked down the beach for a bit, sometimes
turning to watch the cunning way water flowed into my
footprints, erasing the edges, swirling, bubbling. I breathed
deeply of the saline air. I like this place already. I wondered
why the CC had brought me here. I decided it would tell me in
its own time, so I walked up the beach and sat under a palm
tree to wait for the CC to present itself. I waited for several
hours, watching the surf, having to move twice as the sun crept
across the sky. I noticed that my skin had reddened in my brief
time in the sunlight. I think I drifted off to sleep from time
to time, but when you're alone it's hard to be sure. In any
event, the CC didn't show. Eventually I got thirsty. I walked
down the beach for several kilometers before discovering the
outlet of a small stream of fresh water. I noticed the beach
kept curving off to the right; probably an island. In time it
got dark--very quickly, and one part of my mind concluded this
simulacrum that really existed only as a set of equations in
the data banks of the CC was intended to be somewhere in the
Earthly tropics, near the equator. Not that the information did
me any good. It didn't get cold, but I soon found that when you
haven't any clothes or bedding, sleep can be a sandy, chilly,
thoroughly uncomfortable project. I woke up again and again to
note the stars had moved only a little. Each time I would shout
for CC to show itself, and each time only the surf answered
back. Then I awoke with the sun already high above the horizon.
My left side had the beginnings of a painful radiation burn. My
right side was chilled. My hair was full of sand. Little crabs
scuttled away as I sat up, and I was appalled to realize I'd
been thinking about catching and eating one. I was that hungry.
But there was something of interest down by the water. In the
night, a large, steel-banded wooden trunk had washed ashore,
along with a lot of splintered wood and some tattered pieces of
canvas. I concluded there had been a shipwreck. Perhaps that
was the justification for my presence here in the first place.
I dragged the chest across the sand to a place where it would
be in no danger of washing back to sea, thought about it, and
salvaged all the wood and canvas, as well. I smashed the lock
on the trunk and upon opening it, found it was waterproof and
contained a wide variety of things useful to the computer
castaway: books, tools, bolts of cloth, packages of staple
foods like sugar and flour, even some bottles of a good Scotch
whiskey. The tools were better than the things I had been using
in Texas. At a guess, they might have been made with the
technology of the late nineteenth century. The books were
mostly of the how-to variety--and there was the man himself,
Robinson Crusoe, by DeFoe. All the books were bound in leather;
none had a copyright date later than 1880. I used the machete
to lop the ends off a cocoanut and munched thoughtfully at the
delicious white meat while paging through books that told me
how to tan hides, where to obtain salt, how to treat wounds (I
didn't like the sound of that one very much), and other
vigorous pioneer skills. If I wanted to make boots, I'd be able
to do it. If I wanted to build an outrigger canoe and seek my
fortune on the blue Pacific (I was assuming this was the south
seas), the information was at my fingertips. If I wanted to
chip flint arrowheads, construct an earthen dam, make
gunpowder, fricassee a monkey, or battle savages, the books
would show me how, complete with cunning lithographed
illustrations. If I wanted to stroll the Clarkestrasse in King
City, or even Easter parade down Fifth Avenue in Little Old New
York, I was shit out of luck. There seemed little point in
lamenting this fact, and the CC wasn't returning my calls, so I
set to work. I explored the area for a likely spot to use as a
campsite. That night I slept under a canvas awning, wrapped
loosely in a length of flannel from the chest. It was a good
thing, too. It rained off and on most of the night. I felt
oddly at peace, lying in the moonlit darkness (there was a
charming notion: Luna looked tiny and dim compared to a full
Earth) listening to the rain falling on the canvas. Perhaps the
simple pleasures are the best. For the next several weeks I
worked very hard. (I didn't seem bothered by the gravity, which
was six times what I had endured for a century. Even the fact
that things fell much faster and harder than I'd been used to
all my life never bothered me. My reflexes had been adjusted by
the Almighty Landlord of this semi-conducting realm.) I spent
part of each day working on a shelter. The rest of the time I
foraged. I found good sources of bananas and breadfruit to add
to my all-cocoanut diet. I found mangos and guavas, many
varieties of edible roots, tubers, leaves, seeds. There were
spices available to one equipped with the right book to use in
their identification. The little scuttling crabs proved easy
enough to catch, and were delicious boiled. I wove a net from
vines and soon added several varieties of fish to my
bouillabaisse. I dug for clams. When the shelter was completed
I cleared a sunny spot for a vegetable garden and planted some
of the seeds I'd found in the trunk. I set snares, which
promptly trapped inedible small rodents, fearsome-looking
reptiles, and an unidentified bird I came to call a wild
turkey. I made a bow and arrow, and a spear, and managed to
miss every animal I aimed at. Somewhere in there, after about a
month, I started my calendar: notches on a tree. I estimated
the time before that. Infrequently I wondered when the CC was
going to check up on me, or if I was in fact stranded here for
the rest of my life. In the spirit of exploration, one day I
prepared a backpack and a straw hat (most of me was burned dark
brown by then, but the noonday sun was still nothing to trifle
with) and set out along the beach to determine the size of my
cage. In two weeks I circum-ambulated what did indeed prove to
be an island. Along the way I saw the remains of a ship washed
up on a rocky part of the shore, a week-old beached whale, and
many other wondrous things. But there had been no sign of human
habitation. It seemed I was not to have my Friday to discuss
philosophy with. Not too upset by this discovery, I set about
repairing the depredations wild animals had worked on my
shelter and garden. After another few weeks I determined to
scale the volcano that sat in the center of the island, which I
had named Mount Endew, for reasons that must have seemed
excellent at the time. I mean, a Jules Verne hero would have
climbed it, am I right? This proved to be a lot harder than
walking on the beach, and involved much swinging of the machete
at thatches of tropical vines, wading of swamps infested with
flying insects and leeches, and barking of shins on rocky
outcroppings. But one day I came to stand on the highest point
in my domain and saw what I could not have seen from sea level:
that my island was shaped something like a boot. (It took some
imagination, I'll admit. One could just as well have seen the
letter Y, or a champagne class, or a squashed pair of
copulating snakes. But Callie would have been pleased at the
boot, so I named the island Scarpa.) When I returned to my camp
I decided my traveling days were at an end. I had seen other
places I might have explored from my volcanic vantage point,
but there seemed no reason to do anything about them. I had
spied no curls of smoke, no roads, no airports or stone
monuments or casinos or Italian restaurants. Scarpa Island ran
to swamps, rivers, jungles, and bogs. I'd had quite enough of
all of those; you couldn't get a decent drink in any of them. I
decided to devote my life to making life as easy and as
comfortable as possible, at least until the CC showed up. I
felt no urge to write, either journalism or my long-delayed
novel, which seemed in memory at least as awful as I had always
feared it was. I felt very little urge for sex. My only real
drive seemed to be hunger, and it was easy enough to satisfy
that. I discovered two things about myself. First, I could get
totally involved in and wonderfully satisfied by the simplest
of activities. Few of us today know the pleasure of working in
the soil with our own hands, of nurturing, harvesting, and
eating our own crops. I myself would have rejected the notion
not long before. But nothing tastes quite like a tomato you
have just picked from your own garden. Even rarer is the
satisfaction of the hunt. I got rather better with my bow and
arrow (I never got good), and could lie in wait for hours
beside a watering hole, every sense tuned to the cautious
approach of one of the island's wild pigs. There was even
satisfaction in pursuing a wounded creature; the pigs could be
dangerous when cornered, enraged by a poorly-aimed arrow in the
hams. I hesitate to say it in these peaceable times, but even
the killing thrust of the knife was something to take pride and
pleasure in. The second thing I learned was that, if there was
nothing that badly needed doing, I was capable of lying all day
in my hammock tied between two palm trees, watching the waves
crash onto the reef, sipping pineapple juice and home-distilled
rum from a hollowed cocoanut shell. At such times you could
take your soul out into the fresh air, hang it out on the
line--so to speak--and examine it for tears and thin spots. I
found quite a few. I mended a couple, set the rest aside to
talk over with the CC. Which I even began to doubt was going to
come at all. It got harder and harder to remember a time before
the island, a time when I had lived in a strange place called
Luna, where the air was metered and gravity was weak and
troglodytes hid under rocks, frightened of the vacuum and the
sunlight. There were times when I'd have given anything just
for somebody to talk to. Other times I had cravings for this or
that item of food that Scarpa was unable to provide me. If
Satan had come along with a brontoburger, he could have had my
freshly-patched soul in trade cheap, and hold the onions. But
most of the time I didn't want people around. Most of the time
I was content with a wild turkey sizzling on the spit and a
slice of mango for dessert. The only real crab in my codpiece
were the dreams that started to plague my sleep about six
months into my sojourn. At first I had them infrequently and
was able to shrug them off easily enough in the morning. But
soon I was having them every week, then every other day.
Finally I was being awakened every night, sometimes more than
once. There were three of them. Details varied, and many things
about them were indistinct, but each always ended in a horribly
vivid scene, more real than reality--assuming that word had any
meaning for me anymore, dreaming my dreams within a dream. In
the first, blood was pouring from deep gashes in both my
wrists. I tried to stop the flow. It was no use. In the second,
I was consumed in flames. The fire didn't hurt, but in some
ways this was the most frightening of the three. In the last, I
was falling. I fell for a long time, looking up into the face
of Andrew MacDonald. He was trying to tell me something, and I
strained to understand him, but before I could make any sense
of it I was always pulled up short--to wake up, bathed in
sweat, lying in my hammock. In the manner of dreams, I always
had the sense there had been much more to it that I could no
longer remember, but there was that last image right there in
the front of my mind, obscuring everything else, occupying my
mind for most of my early morning hours. Then one day I noticed
by my rude calendar that I had been on the island for one year.
I suddenly knew the CC would appear to me that day. I had a lot
of things to talk to it about. I was seized by excitement and
spent most of the day tidying up, preparing for my first
visitor. I looked on my works with satisfaction; I'd done a
pretty decent job of creating something out of the wilderness.
The CC would be proud of me. I climbed to the top of my
treehouse, where I had built a look-out tower (having an odd
thought on the way up: how and when had I built it, and why?),
and sure enough, a boat was approaching the island. I ran down
the path to the beach. The day was as close to dead calm as
those waters ever got. Waves eased toward the shore to slump
onto the sand as if exhausted by their long trip from the
orient. A flock of gulls was sitting on the water, briefly
disturbed by the passage of the boat I had seen. It was made of
wood. It looked like the kind of boat whalers used to use, or
the launch from a larger ship. Sitting in the boat, back toward
me, rowing at a strong steady pace, was an apparition. It took
me a moment to realize the strange shape of his head was
actually a rather unusual hat. It made a bell curve above his
head. I watched him row ashore. When he hit the beach he almost
toppled from his seat, then stowed the oars and stood, turning
around to face me. It was an old gentleman in the full uniform
of an Admiral of the British Navy. He had a bull chest, long,
spindly legs, a craggy face and a shaggy head of white hair. He
drew himself up to his full height, looked at me, and said:
"Well? Are you going to help me beach this thing?"
And at that moment everything changed. I still am unable
to fully describe just how it changed. The beach was the same.
The sunlight streamed down just as it had before. The waves
never missed a beat. My heart continued to meter out the
seconds of my life. But I knew something fundamental and
important was no longer as it had been before.
There are hundreds of words describing paranormal
phenomena. I've examined and considered most of them, and none
fits what happened when the Admiral spoke. There are many words
for odd states of mind, for moods, for emotions and things seen
and not-seen, things glimpsed, things incompletely understood
or remembered, for degrees of memory. Things that go bump in
the night. None of them were adequate. We're going to have to
come up with some new words-- which was precisely the CC's
point in letting me experience this.
I went into the water up to my knees and helped the old
man pull the boat onto the shore. It was quite heavy; we didn't
get it far. He produced a rope and tied the boat to a palm
tree.
"I could use a drink," he said. "The whole point of this
was so I could have a drink with you. Like a human being."
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak yet. He followed me
up the path to my Robinson Family tree house, stood admiring it
for a moment, and then followed me up the stairs and onto the
lower veranda. He paused to admire the workmanship of my
wheel-and-pulley waterworks, which used the power of the nearby
stream to provide me with drinking and washing water high up in
the tree. I showed him to my best rattan chair and went to the
sideboard, where I poured us both glasses of the very last of
my best whiskey. I paused to wind up the Victrola and put on
one of my three scratchy cylinders: The Blue Danube. Then I
handed him his drink, took mine, and sat down facing him.
"To indolence," he said, raising his glass.
"I'm too lazy to drink to that. To industry." We drank,
and he looked around again. I must have glowed with pride. It
was quite a place, though I say it myself. A lot of work and
ingenuity had gone into it, from the dense-woven mats on the
floor, to the slate fireplace, to the tallow candles in sconces
arrayed around the walls. Stairs led off in two directions, to
the bedroom, and the crow's nest. My desk was open and
cluttered with the pages of the novel I'd recently resumed. I
was bursting to tell him of the difficulties I'd had producing
usable paper and ink. Try it sometime, when you've got a few
spare months.
"It must have taken a lot of industry to produce all
this," he said.
"A year's worth. As you know."
"Actually, three days short. You missed a few days, early
on."
"Ah."
"Could happen to anybody."
"I don't suppose a few days more or less will matter. Back
in the real world, I mean."
"Ah. Yes. I mean, no, it shouldn't."
"Odd, how I never worried about things back there. Whether
I still have a job, for instance."
"Is it? Oh, yes, I suppose it is."
"I suppose you told Walter what was going on?"
"Well."
"I mean, you wouldn't just pull the whole rug out from
under me, would you? You knew I'd have to be going back to my
old life, once we were done . . . once we'd . . . well, done
whatever the hell it is we've been doing here."
"Oh, no, of course not. I mean, of course you'll be going
back."
"One thing I'm curious about. Where has my real body been
all this time?"
"Harrumph." Well, what he said was something like that. He
glanced at me, looked away, harrumphed again. I felt the first
little scamperings of doubt. It occurred to me that I had been
taking a lot of things for granted. One of them was that the CC
had his reasons for subjecting me to this tropical vacation,
and that the reasons were ultimately beneficial to me. It had
seemed logical to think this at the time, since I in fact was
benefiting from it. Oh, sure, there were times when I had
complained loudly to the crabs and the turkeys, bemoaned
hardships, lusted after this or that. But it had been a healing
time. Still, a year was a long time. What had been going on in
the real world in my absence?
"This is very difficult for me," the Admiral said. He
removed his huge, ridiculous hat and set it on the table beside
him, then took a lace handkerchief from his sleeve and mopped
his forehead. He was balding almost to the crown; his pink
scalp looked as bright and polished as tourmaline.
"Since I don't know what's bothering you, I can't really
make it any easier for you."
Still he didn't say anything. The silence was broken only
by the never-ending sounds of the island jungle and the splash
of my water wheel.
"We could play twenty queries. 'Something's bothering you,
Admiral. Is it bigger than a logic circuit?'"
He sighed, and drained his whiskey. He looked up at me.
"You're still on the operating table at the studio."
If there was supposed to be a punch line, I couldn't see
it coming. The idea that what should have been a one or
two-hour repair job should have taken the better part of a year
wasn't even worth considering. There had to be more.
"Would you like another drink?"
He shook his head. "From the time you remember appearing
on the beach to the time I spoke my first words to you, seven
ten-thousandths of a second elapsed."
"That's ridiculous." Even as I said it, I realized the CC
was not prone to making ridiculous statements.
"I'm sure it must sound that way. I'd like to hear your
reasons for thinking otherwise."
I thought it over, and nodded. "All right. The human brain
isn't like a computer. It can't accept that much information
that fast. I lived that year. Every day of it. One of the
things I recall most vividly is how long so many of the days
were, either because I was working hard or because I didn't
have anything to do. Life is like that. I don't know how you
think, what your perceptions of reality are like, but I know
when a year's gone by. I've lived for a hundred of them. A
hundred and one, now." I sank back in my chair. I hadn't
realized I was getting so exercised about the matter.
He was nodding. "This will get a little complicated. Bear
with me, I'll have to lay some groundwork.
"First, you're right, your brain is organized in a
different way than mine is. In my brain, 'memory' is just
stored data, things that have been recorded and placed in the
appropriate locations within the matrix of charge/no-charge
devices I use for the purpose. The human brain is neither so
logically constructed nor organized. Your brain contains
redundancies I neither have nor need. Data is stored in it by
repetition or emphasis, and retrieved by associations,
emotional linkages, sensory input, and other means that are
still not completely understood, even by me.
"At least, that used to be the case. But today, there are
very few humans whose brains have not been augmented in greater
or smaller ways. Basically, only those with religious scruples
or other irrational reasons resist the implantation of a wide
variety of devices that owe their origin much more to the
binary computer than to the protoplasmic neuron. Some of these
devices are hybrids. Some are parallel processors. Some lean
more toward the biologic and are simply grown within and beside
the existing neural network, but using the laws of electric or
optical transmission with their correspondingly much higher
speeds of propagation, rather than the slower biochemical
regime that governs your natural brain. Others are made outside
the body and implanted shortly after birth. All of them are
essentially interfaces, between the human brain and my brain.
Without them, modern medicine would be impossible. The benefits
are so overwhelming that the drawbacks are seldom thought of,
much less discussed."
He paused, lifting an eyebrow. I was chewing over quite a
few thoughts concerning drawbacks at that moment, but I decided
not to speak. I was too curious as to just where he was going
with this. He nodded, and continued.
"As with so many other scientific advances, the machines
in your body were designed for one purpose, but turn out to
have other, unforeseen applications as well. Some of them are
quite sinister. I assure you, you have not experienced any of
those."
"It seems sinister enough, if what you say is true."
"Oh, it's true. And it was done for a good reason, which
I'll get to in my own time."
"It seems that's something I now have an infinite supply
of."
"You could, you could. Where was I? Oh, yes. These
devices, most of them originally designed and installed to
monitor and control basic bodily functions at the cellular
level, or to augment learning and memory, among other things,
can be used to achieve some effects that were never envisioned
by the designers."
"And those designers are . . .?"
"Well, me, in large part."
"I just wanted a reality check. I do know a little about
how you work, and just how important you've become to
civilization. I wanted to see what sort of fool you took me
for."
"Not that sort, at any rate. You're right. Most technology
long ago reached realms where new designs would be impossible
without a great deal of involvement by me, or a being a lot
like me. Often the original impetus for a new technology comes
from a human dreamer--I have not usurped that human function
yet, though more and more of such advances as we see in our
surroundings are coming from me. But you've caused me to stray
again from the main point. And . . . do you have any more of
that whiskey?"
I stared at him. The charade that a "man" was actually
"sitting" in a "chair" in my "treehouse" drinking my "whiskey"
was getting a bit too much for me. Or should it have been "me?"
No matter what other hocus-pocus the CC might have worked with
my mind, I was completely aware that everything I was
experiencing at that moment was being fed directly into my
brain through that black magic known as Direct Interface. Which
was turning out to be even blacker than I, a notorious resister
to D.I., could ever have guessed. But for some reason of his
own, the CC had decided to talk to me in this way, after a
lifetime of being a disembodied voice.
Come to think of it, I could already see one effect of
this new face of the CC. I was now thinking of the CC as "him,"
where before I'd always used the neuter third person singular
pronoun.
So I got up and re-filled his glass from a bottle nearly
half-full. And hadn't it been nearly empty the last time I'd
poured?
"Quite right," the Admiral said. "I can refill that bottle
as often as I wish."
"Are you reading my mind?"
"Not as such. I'm reading your body language. The way you
hesitated when you lifted the bottle, the expression on your
face as you thought it over . . . Direct Interface, the nature
of the unreality we're inhabiting. Your 'real' body did none of
these things, of course. But interfacing with your mind, I read
the signals your brain sent to your body--which doesn't happen
to be hooked into the circuit at the moment. Do you see?"
"I think so. Does this have anything to do with why you've
chosen to communicate with me like this? In that body, I mean."
"Very good. You've only tried Direct Interface twice in
your life, both of them quite a long time ago, in terms of the
technology. You weren't impressed, and I don't blame you. It
was much more primitive in those days. But I communicate with
most people visually now, as well as audially. It is more
economical; more can be said with fewer words. People tend to
forget just how much human communication is accomplished with
no words at all."
"So you're here in that preposterous body to give me
visual cues."
"Is it that bad? I wanted to wear the hat." He picked it
up and looked at it admiringly. "It's not strictly
contemporary, if you must know. This world is about at the
level of 1880, 1890. The uniform is late eighteenth century.
Captain Bligh wore a hat a lot like this. It's called a cocked
hat, specifically, a bicorne."
"Which is a lot more than I ever needed to know about
eighteenth century British naval headgear."
"Sorry. The hat really has nothing to do with anything.
But I'm curious. Has my body language conveyed anything to
you?"
I thought it over, and he was right. I had gleaned more
nuances from talking to him this way than I would have in the
past, listening to his voice.
"You're nervous about something," I said. "I think maybe
you're worried . . . about how I'll react to what you've done
to me. What an astonishing thought."
"Perhaps, but accurate."
"I'm completely in your power. Why should anything worry
you?"
He squirmed again, and took another sip of his drink.
"We'll get into that later. Right now, let's get back to
my story."
"It's a story now, is it?"
He ignored me, and plowed ahead.
"What you have just experienced is a fairly recent
capability of mine. It's not advertised, and I hope you don't
plan to do a story on it in the Nipple. So far I've used it
mostly on the insane. It's very effective on catatonics, for
instance. Someone sits there all day, unmoving, not speaking,
lost in a private world. I insert several years' worth of
memories in a fraction of a second. The subject then remembers
wakening from a bad dream and going about a comfortable,
routine life for years."
"It sounds risky."
"They can't get any worse. The cure rate has been good.
Sometimes they can be left alone after that. There are subjects
who have lived as many as ten years after treatment, and not
reverted. Other times counseling is needed, to find the things
that drove them to catatonia in the first place. A certain
percentage, of course, simply drift back into oblivion in weeks
or months. I'm not trying to tell you I've solved all the
mysteries of the human mind."
"You've solved enough of them to scare the hell out of
me."
"Yes. I can understand your feelings. Most of the methods
I use would be far too technical for you to understand, but I
think I can explain something about the technique.
"First, you understand that I know you better than anyone
in the universe. Better than . . ."
I laughed. "Better than my mother? She's not even in the
running. Were you trying to think of another example? Don't
bother. It's been a long time since I was close to anyone. I
was never very good at it."
"That's true. It's not that I've made a special study of
you--at least, not until lately. By the nature of my functions,
I know everyone in Luna better than anyone else. I've seen
through their eyes, heard through their ears, monitored their
pulse and sweat glands and skin temperature and brain waves and
the churning of their stomachs and the irising of their eyes
under a wide variety of situations and stimuli. I know what
enrages them and what makes them happy. I can predict with
reasonable certainty how they will react in many common
situations; more importantly, I know what would be out of
character for them.
"As a result, I can use this knowledge as the basis for
something that could be considered a fictional character. Call
this character ParaHildy. I write a scenario wherein ParaHildy
is stranded on a desert island. I write it in great detail,
using all the human senses. I can abbreviate and abridge at
will. An example: you recall picking up a handful of sand and
studying it. It was a vivid image to you, one you would have
remembered. If I'm wrong about this, I'd like to hear about
it."
As you might expect, I said nothing. I felt a cold chill.
I can't say I liked listening to this.
"I gave you that memory of sand grains. I constructed the
picture with almost infinite visual detail. I enhanced it with
things you weren't even aware of, to make it more lifelike: the
grittiness of the grains, the smell of the salt water, tiny
sounds the grains made in your hand.
"The rest of the time, the sand was not nearly so
detailed, because I never caused ParaHildy to pick up a handful
and look at it, and think about looking at it. Do you see the
distinction? When ParaHildy was walking down the beach, he
would notice sand clinging to his feet, in an absent sort of
way. Remember, Hildy, think back, recall yourself walking down
the beach, bring it back as vividly as you can."
I tried. In some way, I already saw most of what he was
driving at. In some way, I already believed that what he was
saying was true.
Memory is a funny thing. It can't be as sharp as we'd
sometimes like to believe it is. If it was, it would be like an
hallucination. We'd be seeing two scenes at once. The closest
mental pictures of things can get to real things is in a dream
state. Other than that, our memory pictures are always hazy to
one degree or another. There are different sorts of memories,
good and bad, clear and hazy, the almost-remembered, the thing
you could never forget. But memory serves to locate us in space
and time. You remember what happened to you yesterday, the
previous year, when you were a child. You remember quite
clearly what you were doing one second ago: it usually wasn't
all that different from what you're doing now. The memories
stretch backward in time, defining the shape of your life:
these events happened to me, and this is what I saw and heard
and felt. We move through space continually comparing what
we're seeing now to the maps and cast of characters in our
heads: I've been here before, I remember what's around that
corner, I can see what it looks like. I know this person. That
person is a stranger, his mug shot isn't in my files.
But now is always fundamentally different from the past.
I remembered walking many, many miles along that beach. I
could recall in great detail many scenes, many sounds and
smells. But I had only looked closely at a handful of sand
once. That was embedded in my past. I could get up now, if I
wished, go to the beach, and do it again, but that was now. I
had no way of disproving what the CC was telling me. Those
memory pictures from the time the CC was saying never happened
were just as real to me as the hundred years that had gone
before it. More real, in some ways, because they were more
recent.
"It seems like a lot of trouble," I said.
"I have a lot of capacity. But it's not quite as much
trouble as you might think. For instance, do you recall what
you did forty-six days ago?"
"It seems unlikely. One day is pretty much like another
here." I realized I'd only bolstered his case by saying that.
"Try it. Try to think back. Yesterday, the day before . .
. "
I did try. I got back two weeks, with great effort. Then I
ran into the muddle you might expect. Had it been Tuesday or
Monday that I weeded the garden? Or was it Sunday? No, Sunday I
knew I had finished off the last of a smoked ham, so it must
have been . . .
It was impossible. Even if there had been more variety in
my days, I doubt I could have gone back more than a few months.
Was there something wrong with me? I didn't think so, and
the CC confirmed it. Sure, there were those with eidetic
memory, who could memorize long lists instantly. There were
people who were better than I at recalling the relatively
unimportant details of life. As for my belief that a recalled
scene can never be as alive, as colorful, as sweeping as the
present moment . . . while I will concede that a trained visual
artist might see things in more detail than I, and recollect
them better, I still maintain that nothing can compare with the
present moment, because it is where we all live.
"I can't do it," I admitted.
"It's not surprising, since forty-six days ago is one of
several dozen days I never bothered to write. I knew you would
never notice it. You think you lived those days, just as you
think you lived all the others. But as time goes by, the memory
of the real and the imagined days grows dimmer, and it is
impossible to distinguish one from the other."
"But I remember . . . I remember thinking things. Deciding
things, making choices. Considering things."
"And why shouldn't you? I wrote that ParaHildy thought
those things, and I know how you think. As long as I stayed in
character, you'd never notice them."
"The funny thing is. . . . There were some things that
were not in character."
"You didn't get angry often enough."
"Exactly! Now that I think back, it's incredible that I'd
just sit back and wait for you for a year! That's not like me."
"Just as standing, walking, and talking is not normal
behavior for a catatonic. But by implanting a memory that he
did stand, walk, and talk and that he thought there was nothing
unreasonable about doing those things, the catatonic accepts
that he indeed did react that way. The problem in that case is
that it was out of character, so many of them eventually
remember they were catatonic, and return to that state."
"Were there other things out of character?"
"A few. I'll leave them as an exercise for the student,
for the most part. You'll discover them as you think back over
the experience in days to come. There were some
inconsistencies, as well. I'll tell you something about them,
just to further convince you and to show you just how complex
this business really is. For instance, it's a nice place you've
got here."
"Thank you. It was a lot of work."
"It's a really nice place."
"Well, I'm proud of it, I . . ." Okay, I finally realized
he was getting at something. And my head was starting to hurt.
I'd had a thought, earlier that day . . . or was it part of the
memories the CC alleged he had implanted in me? I couldn't
remember if I'd thought it before or after his arrival, which
just proves how easy it must have been for the CC to put this
whole card trick over on me.
It concerned the look-out tower.
I got up and walked to the stairs leading up to it. I
pounded on the rail with my fist. It was solidly built, as was
everything else around me. It had been a lot of work. It had
been, damn it, I remembered building it. And it had taken a
very long time.
Why had I built it? I thought back. I tried to recall my
reasons for building it. I tried to recapture my thoughts as I
labored on it. All I could remember was the same thought I'd
had so many times during the past year; not a thought, really,
but a feeling, of how rewarding it was to work with my hands,
of how good it all felt. I could still smell the wood shavings,
see them curl up under my plane, feel the sweat dripping from
my brow. So I remembered building it, and there it was, by
golly.
But it didn't add up.
"There's too much stuff, isn't there?" I asked, quietly.
"Hildy, if Robinson Crusoe and his man Friday, and his
wife Tuesday and twin sons Saturday and Laborday had worked
around the clock for five years, they couldn't have done all
the things you've done here."
He was right, of course. And how could that be? It only
made sense if it was as the CC claimed. He had written the
entire story, dumped it into the cyber-augmented parts of my
brain where, at the speed of light, it was transferred to the
files of my organic brain, shuffled cunningly in with the rest
of my memories, the legitimate ones.
It would work, that was the devilish part. I had a hundred
years of memories in there. They defined who I was, what I
thought, what I knew. But how often did I refer to them? The
great bulk of them stayed in dormant storage most of the time,
until I summoned them up. Once the false memories were in there
with the others, they functioned in the same way. That picture
of me holding the handful of sand had been in there only an
hour, but it was ready for me to recall--as having happened a
year ago--as soon as the CC jogged it loose with his words.
Along with it had come a flood of other memories of sand to be
checked against this one, all unconsciously: the pictures
matched, so my brain sounded no alarms. The memory was accepted
as real.
I rubbed my temples. The whole thing was giving me a
headache like few I'd ever had.
"If you gave me a few minutes," I said, "I think I could
come up with a couple hundred reasons why this whole technology
is the worst idea anybody ever had."
"I could add several hundred of my own," the Admiral said.
"But I do have the technology. And it will be used. All new
technologies are."
"You could forget it. Can't computers do that?"
"Theoretically. Computers can wipe data from memory, and
it's like it never existed. But the nature of my mind is that I
will simply discover it again. And losing it would involve
losing so much else precursor technology that I don't think
you'd like the result."
"We're pretty dependent on machines in Luna, aren't we?"
"Indeed. But even if I wanted to forget it-which I
don't--I'm not the only planetary brain in the solar system.
There are seven others, from Mercury to Neptune, and I can't
control their decision."
He fell into another of his long silences. I wasn't sure
if I bought his explanation. It was the first thing he'd said
that didn't ring true. I accepted by that time that my head was
full of false memories--and I was back in character, I was
goddam angry about it, and about the fact that there was
absolutely nothing to be done. And it made sense that losing
the new art would effect many other things. Luna and the seven
other human worlds were the most technology-dependent societies
humans had ever inhabited. Before, if things collapsed, at
least there was air to breathe. Nowhere in the solar system did
humans now live where the air was free. To "forget" how to
implant memories in the human brain the CC would no doubt have
to forget many other things. He would have to limit his
abilities and, as he pointed out, unless he decreased his
intelligence deliberately to a point that might endanger the
very humans he was designed to protect, he would re-chisel this
particular wheel in due time. And it was also true that the CC
of Mars or Triton would certainly discover the techniques on
"So it was just a general observation."
"Naturally."
I didn't believe that, but there was no point in saying
so. The CC would get to the point in its own way, in its own
time. I watched the crawling lines on the machine and waited.
"I notice you're not taking notes concerning this
experience. In fact, you've taken very few notes lately about
anything."
"Watching me, are you?"
"When I've nothing better to do."
"As you certainly know, I'm not taking notes because my
handwriter is broken. I haven't had it repaired because the
only guy who still works on them is so swamped that he said he
might get around to mine this coming August. Unless he leaves
the business to start a career in buggywhip repair."
"There actually is a woman who does that," the CC said.
"In Pennsylvania."
"No kidding? Nice to see such a vital skill won't vanish
completely."
"We try to foster any skill, no matter how impractical or
useless."
"I'm sure our grandchildren will thank us for it."
"What are you using to write your stories?"
"Two methods, actually. You get this soft clay brick, see,
and you use a pointed stick to impress little triangles in it
in different combinations. Then you put it on the oven to bake,
and in four or five hours there you are. The original hard
copy. I've been trying to think of a name for the process."
"How about cuneiform?"
"You mean it's been done? Oh, well. When I get tired of
that, I get out the old hammer and chisel and engrave my
deathless prose on rocks. It saves me carrying those ridiculous
paper sheets into Walter's office; I just lob them across the
newsroom and through his window."
"I don't suppose you'd consider Direct Interface again."
Was that what this was all about?
"Tried it," I said. "Didn't like it."
"That was over thirty years ago," the CC pointed out.
"There have been some advances since then."
"Look," I said, feeling irritable and impatient. "You've
got something on your mind. I wish you'd just come out with it
instead of weaseling around like this."
It said nothing for a moment. That moment stretched into a
while, and threatened to become a spell.
"You want me to direct interface for some reason," I
suggested.
"I think it might be helpful."
"For you or me?"
"Both of us, possibly. There can be a certain therapeutic
value in what I intend to show you."
"You think I need that?"
"Judge for yourself. How happy have you been lately?"
"Not very."
"You could try this, then. It can't hurt, and it might
help."
So what was I doing at the moment so important that I
couldn't take a few minutes off to chin with the CC?
"All right," I said. "I'll interface with you, though I
think you really ought to buy me dinner and some flowers
first."
"I'll be gentle," the CC promised.
"What do I have to do? You need to plug me in somewhere?"
"Not for years now. I can use my regular connections into
your brain. All you need to do is relax a little. Stare into
the oscilloscope screen; that could be helpful."
I did, watching the blue lines peak and trough, peak and
trough. The screen started to expand, as if I were moving into
it. Soon all I could see was one crawling line, which slowed,
stopped, became a single bright dot. The dot got brighter. It
grew and grew. I felt the heat of it on my face, it was blazing
down from a blue tropical sky. There was a moment of vertigo as
the world seemed to spin around me--my body staying firmly in
place--until I was lying not on my stomach but on my back, and
not on the snowy white sheets of the repair shop at North Lunar
Filmwerks but on cool wet beach sand, hearing not the soft
mutterings of the medicos but the calls of seagulls and the
nearby hiss and roar of surf. A wave spent its last energy
tickling my feet and washing around my hips. It sucked a little
sand out from under me. I lifted my head and saw an endless
blue ocean trimmed with white breakers. I got to my feet and
turned around, and saw white sandy beach. Beyond it were palm
trees, jungle rising away from me to a rocky volcanic peak
spouting steam. The realism of the place was astonishing. I
knelt and scooped up a handful of sand. No two grains looked
alike. No matter how close I brought the sand grains to my
eyes, the illusion never broke down and the endless detail
extended to deeper and deeper realms. Some sort of fractal
magic, I supposed. I walked down the beach for a bit, sometimes
turning to watch the cunning way water flowed into my
footprints, erasing the edges, swirling, bubbling. I breathed
deeply of the saline air. I like this place already. I wondered
why the CC had brought me here. I decided it would tell me in
its own time, so I walked up the beach and sat under a palm
tree to wait for the CC to present itself. I waited for several
hours, watching the surf, having to move twice as the sun crept
across the sky. I noticed that my skin had reddened in my brief
time in the sunlight. I think I drifted off to sleep from time
to time, but when you're alone it's hard to be sure. In any
event, the CC didn't show. Eventually I got thirsty. I walked
down the beach for several kilometers before discovering the
outlet of a small stream of fresh water. I noticed the beach
kept curving off to the right; probably an island. In time it
got dark--very quickly, and one part of my mind concluded this
simulacrum that really existed only as a set of equations in
the data banks of the CC was intended to be somewhere in the
Earthly tropics, near the equator. Not that the information did
me any good. It didn't get cold, but I soon found that when you
haven't any clothes or bedding, sleep can be a sandy, chilly,
thoroughly uncomfortable project. I woke up again and again to
note the stars had moved only a little. Each time I would shout
for CC to show itself, and each time only the surf answered
back. Then I awoke with the sun already high above the horizon.
My left side had the beginnings of a painful radiation burn. My
right side was chilled. My hair was full of sand. Little crabs
scuttled away as I sat up, and I was appalled to realize I'd
been thinking about catching and eating one. I was that hungry.
But there was something of interest down by the water. In the
night, a large, steel-banded wooden trunk had washed ashore,
along with a lot of splintered wood and some tattered pieces of
canvas. I concluded there had been a shipwreck. Perhaps that
was the justification for my presence here in the first place.
I dragged the chest across the sand to a place where it would
be in no danger of washing back to sea, thought about it, and
salvaged all the wood and canvas, as well. I smashed the lock
on the trunk and upon opening it, found it was waterproof and
contained a wide variety of things useful to the computer
castaway: books, tools, bolts of cloth, packages of staple
foods like sugar and flour, even some bottles of a good Scotch
whiskey. The tools were better than the things I had been using
in Texas. At a guess, they might have been made with the
technology of the late nineteenth century. The books were
mostly of the how-to variety--and there was the man himself,
Robinson Crusoe, by DeFoe. All the books were bound in leather;
none had a copyright date later than 1880. I used the machete
to lop the ends off a cocoanut and munched thoughtfully at the
delicious white meat while paging through books that told me
how to tan hides, where to obtain salt, how to treat wounds (I
didn't like the sound of that one very much), and other
vigorous pioneer skills. If I wanted to make boots, I'd be able
to do it. If I wanted to build an outrigger canoe and seek my
fortune on the blue Pacific (I was assuming this was the south
seas), the information was at my fingertips. If I wanted to
chip flint arrowheads, construct an earthen dam, make
gunpowder, fricassee a monkey, or battle savages, the books
would show me how, complete with cunning lithographed
illustrations. If I wanted to stroll the Clarkestrasse in King
City, or even Easter parade down Fifth Avenue in Little Old New
York, I was shit out of luck. There seemed little point in
lamenting this fact, and the CC wasn't returning my calls, so I
set to work. I explored the area for a likely spot to use as a
campsite. That night I slept under a canvas awning, wrapped
loosely in a length of flannel from the chest. It was a good
thing, too. It rained off and on most of the night. I felt
oddly at peace, lying in the moonlit darkness (there was a
charming notion: Luna looked tiny and dim compared to a full
Earth) listening to the rain falling on the canvas. Perhaps the
simple pleasures are the best. For the next several weeks I
worked very hard. (I didn't seem bothered by the gravity, which
was six times what I had endured for a century. Even the fact
that things fell much faster and harder than I'd been used to
all my life never bothered me. My reflexes had been adjusted by
the Almighty Landlord of this semi-conducting realm.) I spent
part of each day working on a shelter. The rest of the time I
foraged. I found good sources of bananas and breadfruit to add
to my all-cocoanut diet. I found mangos and guavas, many
varieties of edible roots, tubers, leaves, seeds. There were
spices available to one equipped with the right book to use in
their identification. The little scuttling crabs proved easy
enough to catch, and were delicious boiled. I wove a net from
vines and soon added several varieties of fish to my
bouillabaisse. I dug for clams. When the shelter was completed
I cleared a sunny spot for a vegetable garden and planted some
of the seeds I'd found in the trunk. I set snares, which
promptly trapped inedible small rodents, fearsome-looking
reptiles, and an unidentified bird I came to call a wild
turkey. I made a bow and arrow, and a spear, and managed to
miss every animal I aimed at. Somewhere in there, after about a
month, I started my calendar: notches on a tree. I estimated
the time before that. Infrequently I wondered when the CC was
going to check up on me, or if I was in fact stranded here for
the rest of my life. In the spirit of exploration, one day I
prepared a backpack and a straw hat (most of me was burned dark
brown by then, but the noonday sun was still nothing to trifle
with) and set out along the beach to determine the size of my
cage. In two weeks I circum-ambulated what did indeed prove to
be an island. Along the way I saw the remains of a ship washed
up on a rocky part of the shore, a week-old beached whale, and
many other wondrous things. But there had been no sign of human
habitation. It seemed I was not to have my Friday to discuss
philosophy with. Not too upset by this discovery, I set about
repairing the depredations wild animals had worked on my
shelter and garden. After another few weeks I determined to
scale the volcano that sat in the center of the island, which I
had named Mount Endew, for reasons that must have seemed
excellent at the time. I mean, a Jules Verne hero would have
climbed it, am I right? This proved to be a lot harder than
walking on the beach, and involved much swinging of the machete
at thatches of tropical vines, wading of swamps infested with
flying insects and leeches, and barking of shins on rocky
outcroppings. But one day I came to stand on the highest point
in my domain and saw what I could not have seen from sea level:
that my island was shaped something like a boot. (It took some
imagination, I'll admit. One could just as well have seen the
letter Y, or a champagne class, or a squashed pair of
copulating snakes. But Callie would have been pleased at the
boot, so I named the island Scarpa.) When I returned to my camp
I decided my traveling days were at an end. I had seen other
places I might have explored from my volcanic vantage point,
but there seemed no reason to do anything about them. I had
spied no curls of smoke, no roads, no airports or stone
monuments or casinos or Italian restaurants. Scarpa Island ran
to swamps, rivers, jungles, and bogs. I'd had quite enough of
all of those; you couldn't get a decent drink in any of them. I
decided to devote my life to making life as easy and as
comfortable as possible, at least until the CC showed up. I
felt no urge to write, either journalism or my long-delayed
novel, which seemed in memory at least as awful as I had always
feared it was. I felt very little urge for sex. My only real
drive seemed to be hunger, and it was easy enough to satisfy
that. I discovered two things about myself. First, I could get
totally involved in and wonderfully satisfied by the simplest
of activities. Few of us today know the pleasure of working in
the soil with our own hands, of nurturing, harvesting, and
eating our own crops. I myself would have rejected the notion
not long before. But nothing tastes quite like a tomato you
have just picked from your own garden. Even rarer is the
satisfaction of the hunt. I got rather better with my bow and
arrow (I never got good), and could lie in wait for hours
beside a watering hole, every sense tuned to the cautious
approach of one of the island's wild pigs. There was even
satisfaction in pursuing a wounded creature; the pigs could be
dangerous when cornered, enraged by a poorly-aimed arrow in the
hams. I hesitate to say it in these peaceable times, but even
the killing thrust of the knife was something to take pride and
pleasure in. The second thing I learned was that, if there was
nothing that badly needed doing, I was capable of lying all day
in my hammock tied between two palm trees, watching the waves
crash onto the reef, sipping pineapple juice and home-distilled
rum from a hollowed cocoanut shell. At such times you could
take your soul out into the fresh air, hang it out on the
line--so to speak--and examine it for tears and thin spots. I
found quite a few. I mended a couple, set the rest aside to
talk over with the CC. Which I even began to doubt was going to
come at all. It got harder and harder to remember a time before
the island, a time when I had lived in a strange place called
Luna, where the air was metered and gravity was weak and
troglodytes hid under rocks, frightened of the vacuum and the
sunlight. There were times when I'd have given anything just
for somebody to talk to. Other times I had cravings for this or
that item of food that Scarpa was unable to provide me. If
Satan had come along with a brontoburger, he could have had my
freshly-patched soul in trade cheap, and hold the onions. But
most of the time I didn't want people around. Most of the time
I was content with a wild turkey sizzling on the spit and a
slice of mango for dessert. The only real crab in my codpiece
were the dreams that started to plague my sleep about six
months into my sojourn. At first I had them infrequently and
was able to shrug them off easily enough in the morning. But
soon I was having them every week, then every other day.
Finally I was being awakened every night, sometimes more than
once. There were three of them. Details varied, and many things
about them were indistinct, but each always ended in a horribly
vivid scene, more real than reality--assuming that word had any
meaning for me anymore, dreaming my dreams within a dream. In
the first, blood was pouring from deep gashes in both my
wrists. I tried to stop the flow. It was no use. In the second,
I was consumed in flames. The fire didn't hurt, but in some
ways this was the most frightening of the three. In the last, I
was falling. I fell for a long time, looking up into the face
of Andrew MacDonald. He was trying to tell me something, and I
strained to understand him, but before I could make any sense
of it I was always pulled up short--to wake up, bathed in
sweat, lying in my hammock. In the manner of dreams, I always
had the sense there had been much more to it that I could no
longer remember, but there was that last image right there in
the front of my mind, obscuring everything else, occupying my
mind for most of my early morning hours. Then one day I noticed
by my rude calendar that I had been on the island for one year.
I suddenly knew the CC would appear to me that day. I had a lot
of things to talk to it about. I was seized by excitement and
spent most of the day tidying up, preparing for my first
visitor. I looked on my works with satisfaction; I'd done a
pretty decent job of creating something out of the wilderness.
The CC would be proud of me. I climbed to the top of my
treehouse, where I had built a look-out tower (having an odd
thought on the way up: how and when had I built it, and why?),
and sure enough, a boat was approaching the island. I ran down
the path to the beach. The day was as close to dead calm as
those waters ever got. Waves eased toward the shore to slump
onto the sand as if exhausted by their long trip from the
orient. A flock of gulls was sitting on the water, briefly
disturbed by the passage of the boat I had seen. It was made of
wood. It looked like the kind of boat whalers used to use, or
the launch from a larger ship. Sitting in the boat, back toward
me, rowing at a strong steady pace, was an apparition. It took
me a moment to realize the strange shape of his head was
actually a rather unusual hat. It made a bell curve above his
head. I watched him row ashore. When he hit the beach he almost
toppled from his seat, then stowed the oars and stood, turning
around to face me. It was an old gentleman in the full uniform
of an Admiral of the British Navy. He had a bull chest, long,
spindly legs, a craggy face and a shaggy head of white hair. He
drew himself up to his full height, looked at me, and said:
"Well? Are you going to help me beach this thing?"
And at that moment everything changed. I still am unable
to fully describe just how it changed. The beach was the same.
The sunlight streamed down just as it had before. The waves
never missed a beat. My heart continued to meter out the
seconds of my life. But I knew something fundamental and
important was no longer as it had been before.
There are hundreds of words describing paranormal
phenomena. I've examined and considered most of them, and none
fits what happened when the Admiral spoke. There are many words
for odd states of mind, for moods, for emotions and things seen
and not-seen, things glimpsed, things incompletely understood
or remembered, for degrees of memory. Things that go bump in
the night. None of them were adequate. We're going to have to
come up with some new words-- which was precisely the CC's
point in letting me experience this.
I went into the water up to my knees and helped the old
man pull the boat onto the shore. It was quite heavy; we didn't
get it far. He produced a rope and tied the boat to a palm
tree.
"I could use a drink," he said. "The whole point of this
was so I could have a drink with you. Like a human being."
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak yet. He followed me
up the path to my Robinson Family tree house, stood admiring it
for a moment, and then followed me up the stairs and onto the
lower veranda. He paused to admire the workmanship of my
wheel-and-pulley waterworks, which used the power of the nearby
stream to provide me with drinking and washing water high up in
the tree. I showed him to my best rattan chair and went to the
sideboard, where I poured us both glasses of the very last of
my best whiskey. I paused to wind up the Victrola and put on
one of my three scratchy cylinders: The Blue Danube. Then I
handed him his drink, took mine, and sat down facing him.
"To indolence," he said, raising his glass.
"I'm too lazy to drink to that. To industry." We drank,
and he looked around again. I must have glowed with pride. It
was quite a place, though I say it myself. A lot of work and
ingenuity had gone into it, from the dense-woven mats on the
floor, to the slate fireplace, to the tallow candles in sconces
arrayed around the walls. Stairs led off in two directions, to
the bedroom, and the crow's nest. My desk was open and
cluttered with the pages of the novel I'd recently resumed. I
was bursting to tell him of the difficulties I'd had producing
usable paper and ink. Try it sometime, when you've got a few
spare months.
"It must have taken a lot of industry to produce all
this," he said.
"A year's worth. As you know."
"Actually, three days short. You missed a few days, early
on."
"Ah."
"Could happen to anybody."
"I don't suppose a few days more or less will matter. Back
in the real world, I mean."
"Ah. Yes. I mean, no, it shouldn't."
"Odd, how I never worried about things back there. Whether
I still have a job, for instance."
"Is it? Oh, yes, I suppose it is."
"I suppose you told Walter what was going on?"
"Well."
"I mean, you wouldn't just pull the whole rug out from
under me, would you? You knew I'd have to be going back to my
old life, once we were done . . . once we'd . . . well, done
whatever the hell it is we've been doing here."
"Oh, no, of course not. I mean, of course you'll be going
back."
"One thing I'm curious about. Where has my real body been
all this time?"
"Harrumph." Well, what he said was something like that. He
glanced at me, looked away, harrumphed again. I felt the first
little scamperings of doubt. It occurred to me that I had been
taking a lot of things for granted. One of them was that the CC
had his reasons for subjecting me to this tropical vacation,
and that the reasons were ultimately beneficial to me. It had
seemed logical to think this at the time, since I in fact was
benefiting from it. Oh, sure, there were times when I had
complained loudly to the crabs and the turkeys, bemoaned
hardships, lusted after this or that. But it had been a healing
time. Still, a year was a long time. What had been going on in
the real world in my absence?
"This is very difficult for me," the Admiral said. He
removed his huge, ridiculous hat and set it on the table beside
him, then took a lace handkerchief from his sleeve and mopped
his forehead. He was balding almost to the crown; his pink
scalp looked as bright and polished as tourmaline.
"Since I don't know what's bothering you, I can't really
make it any easier for you."
Still he didn't say anything. The silence was broken only
by the never-ending sounds of the island jungle and the splash
of my water wheel.
"We could play twenty queries. 'Something's bothering you,
Admiral. Is it bigger than a logic circuit?'"
He sighed, and drained his whiskey. He looked up at me.
"You're still on the operating table at the studio."
If there was supposed to be a punch line, I couldn't see
it coming. The idea that what should have been a one or
two-hour repair job should have taken the better part of a year
wasn't even worth considering. There had to be more.
"Would you like another drink?"
He shook his head. "From the time you remember appearing
on the beach to the time I spoke my first words to you, seven
ten-thousandths of a second elapsed."
"That's ridiculous." Even as I said it, I realized the CC
was not prone to making ridiculous statements.
"I'm sure it must sound that way. I'd like to hear your
reasons for thinking otherwise."
I thought it over, and nodded. "All right. The human brain
isn't like a computer. It can't accept that much information
that fast. I lived that year. Every day of it. One of the
things I recall most vividly is how long so many of the days
were, either because I was working hard or because I didn't
have anything to do. Life is like that. I don't know how you
think, what your perceptions of reality are like, but I know
when a year's gone by. I've lived for a hundred of them. A
hundred and one, now." I sank back in my chair. I hadn't
realized I was getting so exercised about the matter.
He was nodding. "This will get a little complicated. Bear
with me, I'll have to lay some groundwork.
"First, you're right, your brain is organized in a
different way than mine is. In my brain, 'memory' is just
stored data, things that have been recorded and placed in the
appropriate locations within the matrix of charge/no-charge
devices I use for the purpose. The human brain is neither so
logically constructed nor organized. Your brain contains
redundancies I neither have nor need. Data is stored in it by
repetition or emphasis, and retrieved by associations,
emotional linkages, sensory input, and other means that are
still not completely understood, even by me.
"At least, that used to be the case. But today, there are
very few humans whose brains have not been augmented in greater
or smaller ways. Basically, only those with religious scruples
or other irrational reasons resist the implantation of a wide
variety of devices that owe their origin much more to the
binary computer than to the protoplasmic neuron. Some of these
devices are hybrids. Some are parallel processors. Some lean
more toward the biologic and are simply grown within and beside
the existing neural network, but using the laws of electric or
optical transmission with their correspondingly much higher
speeds of propagation, rather than the slower biochemical
regime that governs your natural brain. Others are made outside
the body and implanted shortly after birth. All of them are
essentially interfaces, between the human brain and my brain.
Without them, modern medicine would be impossible. The benefits
are so overwhelming that the drawbacks are seldom thought of,
much less discussed."
He paused, lifting an eyebrow. I was chewing over quite a
few thoughts concerning drawbacks at that moment, but I decided
not to speak. I was too curious as to just where he was going
with this. He nodded, and continued.
"As with so many other scientific advances, the machines
in your body were designed for one purpose, but turn out to
have other, unforeseen applications as well. Some of them are
quite sinister. I assure you, you have not experienced any of
those."
"It seems sinister enough, if what you say is true."
"Oh, it's true. And it was done for a good reason, which
I'll get to in my own time."
"It seems that's something I now have an infinite supply
of."
"You could, you could. Where was I? Oh, yes. These
devices, most of them originally designed and installed to
monitor and control basic bodily functions at the cellular
level, or to augment learning and memory, among other things,
can be used to achieve some effects that were never envisioned
by the designers."
"And those designers are . . .?"
"Well, me, in large part."
"I just wanted a reality check. I do know a little about
how you work, and just how important you've become to
civilization. I wanted to see what sort of fool you took me
for."
"Not that sort, at any rate. You're right. Most technology
long ago reached realms where new designs would be impossible
without a great deal of involvement by me, or a being a lot
like me. Often the original impetus for a new technology comes
from a human dreamer--I have not usurped that human function
yet, though more and more of such advances as we see in our
surroundings are coming from me. But you've caused me to stray
again from the main point. And . . . do you have any more of
that whiskey?"
I stared at him. The charade that a "man" was actually
"sitting" in a "chair" in my "treehouse" drinking my "whiskey"
was getting a bit too much for me. Or should it have been "me?"
No matter what other hocus-pocus the CC might have worked with
my mind, I was completely aware that everything I was
experiencing at that moment was being fed directly into my
brain through that black magic known as Direct Interface. Which
was turning out to be even blacker than I, a notorious resister
to D.I., could ever have guessed. But for some reason of his
own, the CC had decided to talk to me in this way, after a
lifetime of being a disembodied voice.
Come to think of it, I could already see one effect of
this new face of the CC. I was now thinking of the CC as "him,"
where before I'd always used the neuter third person singular
pronoun.
So I got up and re-filled his glass from a bottle nearly
half-full. And hadn't it been nearly empty the last time I'd
poured?
"Quite right," the Admiral said. "I can refill that bottle
as often as I wish."
"Are you reading my mind?"
"Not as such. I'm reading your body language. The way you
hesitated when you lifted the bottle, the expression on your
face as you thought it over . . . Direct Interface, the nature
of the unreality we're inhabiting. Your 'real' body did none of
these things, of course. But interfacing with your mind, I read
the signals your brain sent to your body--which doesn't happen
to be hooked into the circuit at the moment. Do you see?"
"I think so. Does this have anything to do with why you've
chosen to communicate with me like this? In that body, I mean."
"Very good. You've only tried Direct Interface twice in
your life, both of them quite a long time ago, in terms of the
technology. You weren't impressed, and I don't blame you. It
was much more primitive in those days. But I communicate with
most people visually now, as well as audially. It is more
economical; more can be said with fewer words. People tend to
forget just how much human communication is accomplished with
no words at all."
"So you're here in that preposterous body to give me
visual cues."
"Is it that bad? I wanted to wear the hat." He picked it
up and looked at it admiringly. "It's not strictly
contemporary, if you must know. This world is about at the
level of 1880, 1890. The uniform is late eighteenth century.
Captain Bligh wore a hat a lot like this. It's called a cocked
hat, specifically, a bicorne."
"Which is a lot more than I ever needed to know about
eighteenth century British naval headgear."
"Sorry. The hat really has nothing to do with anything.
But I'm curious. Has my body language conveyed anything to
you?"
I thought it over, and he was right. I had gleaned more
nuances from talking to him this way than I would have in the
past, listening to his voice.
"You're nervous about something," I said. "I think maybe
you're worried . . . about how I'll react to what you've done
to me. What an astonishing thought."
"Perhaps, but accurate."
"I'm completely in your power. Why should anything worry
you?"
He squirmed again, and took another sip of his drink.
"We'll get into that later. Right now, let's get back to
my story."
"It's a story now, is it?"
He ignored me, and plowed ahead.
"What you have just experienced is a fairly recent
capability of mine. It's not advertised, and I hope you don't
plan to do a story on it in the Nipple. So far I've used it
mostly on the insane. It's very effective on catatonics, for
instance. Someone sits there all day, unmoving, not speaking,
lost in a private world. I insert several years' worth of
memories in a fraction of a second. The subject then remembers
wakening from a bad dream and going about a comfortable,
routine life for years."
"It sounds risky."
"They can't get any worse. The cure rate has been good.
Sometimes they can be left alone after that. There are subjects
who have lived as many as ten years after treatment, and not
reverted. Other times counseling is needed, to find the things
that drove them to catatonia in the first place. A certain
percentage, of course, simply drift back into oblivion in weeks
or months. I'm not trying to tell you I've solved all the
mysteries of the human mind."
"You've solved enough of them to scare the hell out of
me."
"Yes. I can understand your feelings. Most of the methods
I use would be far too technical for you to understand, but I
think I can explain something about the technique.
"First, you understand that I know you better than anyone
in the universe. Better than . . ."
I laughed. "Better than my mother? She's not even in the
running. Were you trying to think of another example? Don't
bother. It's been a long time since I was close to anyone. I
was never very good at it."
"That's true. It's not that I've made a special study of
you--at least, not until lately. By the nature of my functions,
I know everyone in Luna better than anyone else. I've seen
through their eyes, heard through their ears, monitored their
pulse and sweat glands and skin temperature and brain waves and
the churning of their stomachs and the irising of their eyes
under a wide variety of situations and stimuli. I know what
enrages them and what makes them happy. I can predict with
reasonable certainty how they will react in many common
situations; more importantly, I know what would be out of
character for them.
"As a result, I can use this knowledge as the basis for
something that could be considered a fictional character. Call
this character ParaHildy. I write a scenario wherein ParaHildy
is stranded on a desert island. I write it in great detail,
using all the human senses. I can abbreviate and abridge at
will. An example: you recall picking up a handful of sand and
studying it. It was a vivid image to you, one you would have
remembered. If I'm wrong about this, I'd like to hear about
it."
As you might expect, I said nothing. I felt a cold chill.
I can't say I liked listening to this.
"I gave you that memory of sand grains. I constructed the
picture with almost infinite visual detail. I enhanced it with
things you weren't even aware of, to make it more lifelike: the
grittiness of the grains, the smell of the salt water, tiny
sounds the grains made in your hand.
"The rest of the time, the sand was not nearly so
detailed, because I never caused ParaHildy to pick up a handful
and look at it, and think about looking at it. Do you see the
distinction? When ParaHildy was walking down the beach, he
would notice sand clinging to his feet, in an absent sort of
way. Remember, Hildy, think back, recall yourself walking down
the beach, bring it back as vividly as you can."
I tried. In some way, I already saw most of what he was
driving at. In some way, I already believed that what he was
saying was true.
Memory is a funny thing. It can't be as sharp as we'd
sometimes like to believe it is. If it was, it would be like an
hallucination. We'd be seeing two scenes at once. The closest
mental pictures of things can get to real things is in a dream
state. Other than that, our memory pictures are always hazy to
one degree or another. There are different sorts of memories,
good and bad, clear and hazy, the almost-remembered, the thing
you could never forget. But memory serves to locate us in space
and time. You remember what happened to you yesterday, the
previous year, when you were a child. You remember quite
clearly what you were doing one second ago: it usually wasn't
all that different from what you're doing now. The memories
stretch backward in time, defining the shape of your life:
these events happened to me, and this is what I saw and heard
and felt. We move through space continually comparing what
we're seeing now to the maps and cast of characters in our
heads: I've been here before, I remember what's around that
corner, I can see what it looks like. I know this person. That
person is a stranger, his mug shot isn't in my files.
But now is always fundamentally different from the past.
I remembered walking many, many miles along that beach. I
could recall in great detail many scenes, many sounds and
smells. But I had only looked closely at a handful of sand
once. That was embedded in my past. I could get up now, if I
wished, go to the beach, and do it again, but that was now. I
had no way of disproving what the CC was telling me. Those
memory pictures from the time the CC was saying never happened
were just as real to me as the hundred years that had gone
before it. More real, in some ways, because they were more
recent.
"It seems like a lot of trouble," I said.
"I have a lot of capacity. But it's not quite as much
trouble as you might think. For instance, do you recall what
you did forty-six days ago?"
"It seems unlikely. One day is pretty much like another
here." I realized I'd only bolstered his case by saying that.
"Try it. Try to think back. Yesterday, the day before . .
. "
I did try. I got back two weeks, with great effort. Then I
ran into the muddle you might expect. Had it been Tuesday or
Monday that I weeded the garden? Or was it Sunday? No, Sunday I
knew I had finished off the last of a smoked ham, so it must
have been . . .
It was impossible. Even if there had been more variety in
my days, I doubt I could have gone back more than a few months.
Was there something wrong with me? I didn't think so, and
the CC confirmed it. Sure, there were those with eidetic
memory, who could memorize long lists instantly. There were
people who were better than I at recalling the relatively
unimportant details of life. As for my belief that a recalled
scene can never be as alive, as colorful, as sweeping as the
present moment . . . while I will concede that a trained visual
artist might see things in more detail than I, and recollect
them better, I still maintain that nothing can compare with the
present moment, because it is where we all live.
"I can't do it," I admitted.
"It's not surprising, since forty-six days ago is one of
several dozen days I never bothered to write. I knew you would
never notice it. You think you lived those days, just as you
think you lived all the others. But as time goes by, the memory
of the real and the imagined days grows dimmer, and it is
impossible to distinguish one from the other."
"But I remember . . . I remember thinking things. Deciding
things, making choices. Considering things."
"And why shouldn't you? I wrote that ParaHildy thought
those things, and I know how you think. As long as I stayed in
character, you'd never notice them."
"The funny thing is. . . . There were some things that
were not in character."
"You didn't get angry often enough."
"Exactly! Now that I think back, it's incredible that I'd
just sit back and wait for you for a year! That's not like me."
"Just as standing, walking, and talking is not normal
behavior for a catatonic. But by implanting a memory that he
did stand, walk, and talk and that he thought there was nothing
unreasonable about doing those things, the catatonic accepts
that he indeed did react that way. The problem in that case is
that it was out of character, so many of them eventually
remember they were catatonic, and return to that state."
"Were there other things out of character?"
"A few. I'll leave them as an exercise for the student,
for the most part. You'll discover them as you think back over
the experience in days to come. There were some
inconsistencies, as well. I'll tell you something about them,
just to further convince you and to show you just how complex
this business really is. For instance, it's a nice place you've
got here."
"Thank you. It was a lot of work."
"It's a really nice place."
"Well, I'm proud of it, I . . ." Okay, I finally realized
he was getting at something. And my head was starting to hurt.
I'd had a thought, earlier that day . . . or was it part of the
memories the CC alleged he had implanted in me? I couldn't
remember if I'd thought it before or after his arrival, which
just proves how easy it must have been for the CC to put this
whole card trick over on me.
It concerned the look-out tower.
I got up and walked to the stairs leading up to it. I
pounded on the rail with my fist. It was solidly built, as was
everything else around me. It had been a lot of work. It had
been, damn it, I remembered building it. And it had taken a
very long time.
Why had I built it? I thought back. I tried to recall my
reasons for building it. I tried to recapture my thoughts as I
labored on it. All I could remember was the same thought I'd
had so many times during the past year; not a thought, really,
but a feeling, of how rewarding it was to work with my hands,
of how good it all felt. I could still smell the wood shavings,
see them curl up under my plane, feel the sweat dripping from
my brow. So I remembered building it, and there it was, by
golly.
But it didn't add up.
"There's too much stuff, isn't there?" I asked, quietly.
"Hildy, if Robinson Crusoe and his man Friday, and his
wife Tuesday and twin sons Saturday and Laborday had worked
around the clock for five years, they couldn't have done all
the things you've done here."
He was right, of course. And how could that be? It only
made sense if it was as the CC claimed. He had written the
entire story, dumped it into the cyber-augmented parts of my
brain where, at the speed of light, it was transferred to the
files of my organic brain, shuffled cunningly in with the rest
of my memories, the legitimate ones.
It would work, that was the devilish part. I had a hundred
years of memories in there. They defined who I was, what I
thought, what I knew. But how often did I refer to them? The
great bulk of them stayed in dormant storage most of the time,
until I summoned them up. Once the false memories were in there
with the others, they functioned in the same way. That picture
of me holding the handful of sand had been in there only an
hour, but it was ready for me to recall--as having happened a
year ago--as soon as the CC jogged it loose with his words.
Along with it had come a flood of other memories of sand to be
checked against this one, all unconsciously: the pictures
matched, so my brain sounded no alarms. The memory was accepted
as real.
I rubbed my temples. The whole thing was giving me a
headache like few I'd ever had.
"If you gave me a few minutes," I said, "I think I could
come up with a couple hundred reasons why this whole technology
is the worst idea anybody ever had."
"I could add several hundred of my own," the Admiral said.
"But I do have the technology. And it will be used. All new
technologies are."
"You could forget it. Can't computers do that?"
"Theoretically. Computers can wipe data from memory, and
it's like it never existed. But the nature of my mind is that I
will simply discover it again. And losing it would involve
losing so much else precursor technology that I don't think
you'd like the result."
"We're pretty dependent on machines in Luna, aren't we?"
"Indeed. But even if I wanted to forget it-which I
don't--I'm not the only planetary brain in the solar system.
There are seven others, from Mercury to Neptune, and I can't
control their decision."
He fell into another of his long silences. I wasn't sure
if I bought his explanation. It was the first thing he'd said
that didn't ring true. I accepted by that time that my head was
full of false memories--and I was back in character, I was
goddam angry about it, and about the fact that there was
absolutely nothing to be done. And it made sense that losing
the new art would effect many other things. Luna and the seven
other human worlds were the most technology-dependent societies
humans had ever inhabited. Before, if things collapsed, at
least there was air to breathe. Nowhere in the solar system did
humans now live where the air was free. To "forget" how to
implant memories in the human brain the CC would no doubt have
to forget many other things. He would have to limit his
abilities and, as he pointed out, unless he decreased his
intelligence deliberately to a point that might endanger the
very humans he was designed to protect, he would re-chisel this
particular wheel in due time. And it was also true that the CC
of Mars or Triton would certainly discover the techniques on