Blue Mars (78 page)

He ran through another accelerando of thought on this issue, then
crashed blank on it. There he was, sitting in his apartment living room,
blanked, cursing himself for not at least trying to mutter something into his
AI. It seemed that he had been onto something—something about ATP, or was it
LTP? Well. If it was a genuinely useful thought, it would come back. He had to
believe that. It seemed probable.

As it did, more and more as he studied the issues, that the shock
of Maya’s amnesiac moment had somehow propelled Michel into the quick decline.
Not that such an explanation could ever be proved, or that it even really
mattered. But Michel would not have wanted to survive either his memory or
hers; he had loved her as his life project, his definition of himself. The
shock of Maya blanking on something so basic, so important (like the key to
memory restoration). ... And the mind-body connection was so strong—so strong
that the distinction itself was probably false, a vestige of Cartesian metaphysics
or earlier religious views of the soul. Mind was one’s body’s life. Memory was
mind. And so, by a simple transitive equation, memory equaled life. So that
with memory gone, life was gone. So Michel must have felt, in that final
traumatic half hour, as his self tumbled into a fatal arrhythmia, under the
anguish of grieving for his love’s death-of-mind.

They had to remember to be truly alive. And so ecphori-zation, if
he could figure out the appropriate anamnestic methodology, was going to have
to be tried.

Of course it might be dangerous. If he did manage to work up a
memory reinforcer, it would flush the system all at once, perhaps, and no one
could predict what that would feel like subjectively. One would just have to
try it. It would be an experiment. Self-experimentation. Well, it wouldn’t be
the first time. Vlad had given himself the first geronto-logical treatment,
though it could have killed him; Jennings had inoculated himself with live
smallpox vaccine; Arkady’s ancestor Alexander Bogdanov had exchanged his blood
for that of a young man suffering from malaria and tuberculosis, and had died
while the young man had lived for thirty more years. And of course there was
the story of the young physicists at Los Alamos, who had set off the first nuclear
explosion wondering among themselves whether it might not burn up the entire
atmosphere of the Earth, a somewhat disturbing case of self-experimentation,
one had to admit. Compared to that ingesting a few amino acids seemed no very
great thing, something more like Dr. Hoffman trying LSD on himself. Presumably
ecphorizing would be less disorienting than an LSD experience, for if all one’s
memories were being reinforced at once, consciousness would surely not be
capable of being aware of it. The so-called stream of consciousness was fairly
unilinear, it seemed to Sax on introspection. So that at most one might
experience a quick associative train of recollections, or a random jumble—not
unlike Sax’s everyday mentation, to tell the truth. He could handle that. And
he was willing to risk something more traumatic, if that was what it happened
to take. He flew to Acheron.

Up at Acheron a new crowd
was in place in the old labs, now vastly expanded, so that the
entire high long fin of rock was excavated and occupied—it was a city now of
some 200,000 people. At the same time it was still, of course, a spectacular
fin of rock some fifteen kilometers long and six hundred meters high, while
never more than a kilometer wide at any point; and it was still a lab, or a
complex of labs, in a way that Echus Overlook had long since ceased to be—
something more like Da Vinci, with a similar organization. After Praxis had
renovated the infrastructure, Vlad and Ursula and Marina had led the formation
of a new biological research station; now Vlad was dead, but Acheron had a life
of its own, and did not seem to miss him. Ursula and Marina directed their own
little labs, and lived still in the quarters they had shared with Vlad, just
under the crest of the fin—a partially walled arboreal slot, very windy. They
were as private as ever, withdrawn into their own world even more than they had
been with Vlad; and they were certainly taken for granted in Acheron, treated
by the younger scientists as local grandmothers or great-aunts, or simply as
colleagues in the labs.

Sax, however, the younger scientists stared at, looking just as
nonplussed as if they were being introduced to Archimedes. It was as
disconcerting to be treated in such a way as it was to meet such an
anachronism, and Sax struggled through several conversations of surpassing
awkwardness as he tried to convince everyone that he did not know the magic
secret of life, that he used words to stand for the same things as they did,
that his mind was not yet altogether shattered by age, etc.

But this estrangement could also be an advantage. Young scientists
as a class tended to be naive empiricists, also idealistic energetic
enthusiasts. So coming in from outside, both new and old at once, Sax was able
to impress them in the seminars Ursula convened to discuss the current state of
memory work. Sax laid out his hypotheses concerning the creation of a possible
anamnestic, with suggestions for various lines of experimental work on these
possibilities, and he could see that his suggestions had for the young
scientists a kind of prophetic power, even (or perhaps especially) when they
were quite general comments. If these vague suggestions happened to chime with
some avenue these people were already exploring, then the response could be
enthusiastic in the extreme. In fact it was a case of the more gnomic the
better; which was not very scientific, but there it was.

As he watched them Sax realized for the first time that the
versatile, responsive, highly focused nature of science that he was getting
used to in Da Vinci was not confined to Da Vinci alone, but was a feature of
all the labs arranged as cooperative ventures; it was the nature of Martian
science more generally. With the scientists in control of their own work, to a
degree never seen in his youth on Earth, the work itself had an unprecedented
rapidity and power. In his day the resources necessary to do the work would
have belonged to other people, to institutions with their own interests and
bureaucracies, creating a ponderous and often foolish clumsy scattering of
effort; and even the coherent efforts were often devoted to trivial things, to
the monetary profits of the institution in control of the lab. Here, on the
other hand, Acheron was a semiautonomous self-contained community, answerable
to the environmental courts and to the constitution of course, but to no one
else. They chose among themselves what to work on, and when they were asked for
help, if they were interested, they could respond immediately.

So he was not going to have to do all the work of developing a
memory reinforcer himself, not by any means; the Acheron labs were highly
interested, and Marina remained active in the city’s lab of labs, and the city
still had a close relationship with Praxis, with all its resources. And many
labs there were already investigating memory. It was a big part of the
longevity project now, for obvious reasons. Marina said that some twenty
percent of all human effort was now being devoted, in one form or another, to
the longevity project. And longevity itself was pointless without memory
lasting as long as the rest of the system. So it made sense for a complex like
Acheron to focus on it.

Soon after his arrival Sax joined Marina and Ursula alone, for
breakfast in the dining area of their quarters. Just the three of them,
surrounded by portable walls covered by batiks from Dorsa Brevia, and trees in
pots. No remembrance of Vlad. Nor did they mention him. Sax, conscious of how
unusual it was to be invited into their home, had trouble focusing on the
matter at hand. He had known both these women from the beginning, and greatly
respected both of them, Ursula especially for her great empathic qualities; but
he didn’t feel he knew them at all well. So he sat there in the wind, eating
and looking at them, and out the open window walls. There to the north lay a
narrow strip of blue, Acheron Bay, a deep indentation in the North Sea—to the
south, far beyond the first nearby horizon, the enormous bulk of Olympus Mons.
In between, a devil’s golf course of a land—hard gnarled eroded old lava flows,
riven and pocked—and in each hollow a little green oasis, dotting the blackish
waste of the plateau.

Marina said, “We’ve been thinking about why experimental
psychologists in every generation have reported a few isolated cases of truly
exceptional memories, but there is never any attempt to explain them by the
memory models of the period.”

“In fact they forget them as soon as they can,-” Ursula said.

“Yes. And then when the reports are exhumed, no one quite believes
them to be true. It’s put down to the credulity of earlier times. Typically no
one alive can be found who can reproduce the feats described, and so the
tendency is to conclude that the earlier investigators were mistaken or fooled.
But a lot of the reports were perfectly well substantiated.”

“Such as?” Sax said. It had not occurred to him to look at
organism-level real-world functional accounts, anecdotal as they invariably
were. But of course it made sense to do so.

Marina said, “The conductor Toscanini knew by heart every note of
every instrument for about two hundred and fifty symphonic works, and the words
and music of about a hundred operas, plus a lot more shorter works.”

“They tested this?”

“Spot checks, so to speak. A bassoonist broke a key of his bassoon
and told Toscanini, who thought it over and told him not to worry, he wouldn’t
have to play that note that night. Things like that. And he conducted without
scores, and wrote down missing parts for players, and so on.”

“Uh-huh. . . .”

“The musicologist Tovey had a similar power,” Ursula added. “It
isn’t uncommon in musicians. It’s as if music is a language where incredible
memory feats are sometimes possible.”

“Hmm.”

Marina went on. “A Professor Athens, of Cambridge University,
early twenty-first century, had a vast knowledge of specifics of all
sorts—again music, but also verse, facts, math, his own past on a daily basis.
‘Interest is the thing,’ he was reported to have said. ‘Interest focuses the
attention.’“

“True,” Sax said.

“He mostly used his memory for what he found interesting. An
interest in meaning, he called it. But in 2060 he remembered all of a list of
twenty-three words he had learned for a casual test in 2032. And so on.”

“I’d like to learn more about him.”

“Yes,” Ursula said. “He was less of a freak than some of the
others. The so-called calendar calculators, or the ones who can recall visual
images presented to them in great detail—they’re often impaired in other parts
of their lives.”

Marina nodded. “Like the Latvians Shereskevskii and the man known
as V.P., who remembered truly huge quantities of random fact, in tests and in
general. But both of them experienced synesthesia.”

“Hmm. Hippocampal hyperactivity, perhaps.”

“Perhaps.”

They mentioned several more. A man named Finkelstein, who could
calculate the election returns for the entire United States faster than any
calculators of the 1930s. Tal-mudic scholars who had not only memorized the
Talmud, but also the location of every word on every page. Oral storytellers
who knew Homeric amounts of verse by heart. Even people who were said to have
used the Renaissance palace-of-memory method to great effect; Sax had tried
that himself after his stroke, with fair results. And so on.

“These extraordinary abilities don’t seem to be the same as
ordinary memory,” Sax observed.

“Eidetic memory,” Marina said. “Based on images that return in
great detail. It’s said to be the way that most children remember. Then at
puberty, the way we remember changes, at least for most of us. It’s as if these
people don’t ever metamorphose away from the children’s way.”

“Hmm,” Sax said. “Still, I wonder if they are the upper extremes
of continuous distributions of ability, or whether they are examples of a rare
bimodal distribution.”

Marina shrugged. “We don’t know. But we have one here to study.”

“You do!”

“Yes. It’s Zeyk. He and Nazik have moved here so that we can study
him. He’s being very cooperative; she’s encouraging him. There might as well be
some good that comes of it, she says. He doesn’t like his ability, you see. In
him it doesn’t have much to do with computational tricks, although he’s better
at that than most of us. But he can remember his past in extraordinary detail.”

“I think I remember hearing about this,” Sax said. The two women
laughed, and startled, he joined in. “I’d like to see what you’re doing with
him.”

“Sure. He’s down in Smadar’s lab. It’s interesting. They view vids
from events that he witnessed, and ask him questions about the events, and he
talks about what he remembers while they’ve got all the latest scans running on
his brain.”

“Sounds very interesting.”

Ursula led him down to a long dimmed lab, in which some operating
beds were occupied by subjects undergoing scans of one sort or another, colored
images flickering on screens or holographically in the air; while other beds
were empty, and somehow ominous.

After all the young native subjects, when they came to Zeyk he
looked to Sax like a specimen of Homo habilis, whisked out of prehistory to be
tested for mental capacity. He was wearing a helmet studded with contact points
on its inner surface, and his white beard was damp, his eyes sunken and weary
in bruise-colored, withered skin. Nazik sat on the other side of his bed,
holding his hand in hers. Hovering in the air over a holograph next to her was
a detailed three-dimensional transparent image of some part of Zeyk’s brain;
through it colored light was flickering continuously, like heat lightning,
creating patterns of green and red and blue and pale gold. On the screen by the
bed jiggled images of a small tent settlement, after dark. A young woman,
presumably the researcher Smadar, was asking questions.

“So the Ahad attacked the Fetah?”

“Yes. Or they were righting, and my impression was that the Ahad
started it. But someone was setting them on each other, I thought. Cutting
slogans in the windows.”

“Did the Muslim Brotherhood often have internal conflicts this
severe?”

“At that time they did. But why on that night, I don’t know.
Someone set them on each other. It was as if everyone had suddenly gone crazy.”

Sax felt his stomach tighten. Then he felt chilled, as if the
ventilation system had let in the air of the cold morning outside. The little
tent town in the vids was Nicosia. They were talking about the night John Boone
had been killed. Smadar was watching the vids, asking questions. Zeyk was being
recorded. Now he looked at Sax, nodded a greeting. “Russell was there also.”

“Were you,” Smadar said, looking at Sax speculatively.

“Yes.”

It was something Sax had not thought about in years; decades; a
century, perhaps. He realized that he had never been back to Nicosia again, not
even once since that night. As if he had been avoiding it. Repression, no
doubt. He had been very fond of John, who had worked for him for several years
before the assassination. They had been friends. “I saw him attacked,” he said,
surprising them all.

“Did you!” Smadar exclaimed. Now Zeyk and Nazik and Ursula were
staring at him as well, and Marina had joined them.

“What did you see?” Smadar asked him, glancing briefly up at
Zeyk’s brain image, flickering away in its silent storm. This was the past,
just such a silent flickering electric storm. This was the work they were
embarked on.

“There was fighting,” Sax said slowly, uneasily, looking into the
hologram image as if into a crystal ball. “In a little plaza, where a side
street met the central boulevard. Near the medina.”

“Were they Arab?” the young woman asked.

“Possibly,” Sax said. He closed his eyes, and though he could not
see it he could somehow imagine it, a kind of blind sight. “Yes, I think so.”

He opened his eyes again, saw Zeyk staring at him. “Did you know
them?” Zeyk croaked. “Can you tell me what they looked like?”