by M. A. Foster
Being ler, she possessed almost total recall; therefore she could also replay at her leisure pleasurable experiences, moments of beauty or sweetness in her past life. She could also project daydreams, imagined and desired scenes about herself, in the future or the past. With the memory, she could remember far back, virtually to infancy, but back of that was a feared region in which the smoothly cycling lines of memory became tangled and confused, and further back knotted, and further, blurred. The infant did not remember the womb because it had not been awake. Now, here, in this dark place—this box, this sensory deprivation unit—the lines of time had once more become confused and blurred, and she sensed that another womb had been imposed upon her. The lines were uncertain. She slept. She dreamed.
Like the rest of the lermen, her memory had always been a resource to her, a close friend, a reference. She knew that the farther up the evolutionary ladder a creature had climbed, the more it projected itself into the awareness of time. People, the natural humans and the forced ler alike, had been a giant step forward in this dimension. Yet now and here in the unmeasurable and unknowable time of the box, her memory, from overuse, had come to resemble some ancient recording—full of the noises of boredom and weariness. Scratchy and worn. The fidelity of reproduction was slipping and random noise was gradually swamping coherences. Information theory and the brain. Memory in living creatures was not a static thing, fixed in specific sites, like some mechanical computer, but a dynamic, living, moving quantity, a flying body of abstraction moving through the billions of cells and synapses exactly as a bird in the medium of air, dependent on the motion to define it in its function. Holistic.
But it was also like a recording in this way as well: in replaying the good parts so often, she had allowed herself the habit of skipping to the best scenes. This was fine, but after so much use, the scenes, extracted more or less from the matrix of reference which had made them meaningful, had become progressively more shallow and, in the end, less good. Some of them had become almost tiresome. She would find herself saying as she reviewed them, “Yes, and so what?”
As for the daydreams, the imaginings, the fantasies, she had found that it had become steadily more dangerous to allow herself to do this. Berlethon, she called them in her own language, paradreams. Her dreams and paradreams were becoming stronger and steadily more clear, all the while her realities were growing weaker. As her memories of the real which had been were slowly sinking into a morass, a quagmire of noise, the projections were becoming more clear and even reasonable.
At first the projected paradreams had been like dreams; the individual scenes had been highly detailed, but the scenes had permutated one into another with disregard for the laws of causality and consequence. That, after all, was what distinguished them from realities. Now, however, in the box, it was the memories of the real which had become the anticausal phantoms with the illogical shifts, while the projections had become the logical ones, vibrant and electric. Reality had become faded and meaningless. In the normal environment dreams were the mind’s algorithm for sorting and placing experiences in an orderly and accessible manner in the flying holistic patterns of memory. All well and good; but there was no provision made in the program of a living brain for a zero environment. So the process of filing and sorting went on unimpeded, using that which had already been placed as an arbitrary input, feeding on images which had already been sorted and placed, resorting and re-filing. At each transfer the images lost both fidelity and coherence. At every transfer noise gained on coherent content.
From the first she had encouraged visions which had been erotic in content; in her own cultural reference as it applied to her own phase, adolescence, such activities, their recollections, and their projections, were neither considered reprehensible nor undesirable, but rather encouraged by all, part of growing up. Affairs, trysts, meetings, rendezvous of variable duration, and the gatherings, where participation was not limited to a single pair, were all part of an elaborate process that instructed one in care for one’s fellow creatures, intimacy, consideration. Knowledge came later; it was important to learn to relate with others and to learn to tolerate others, in view of the conditions which would come with parent phase.
So she had naturally thought of these adventures; they were pleasurable in a direct bodily manner and helped greatly to pass the time. But now, of course, they had become the worst offenders against the rule of reality. They ran away with her. In these, so great had become the confusion that she had been forced to invent an elaborate mental procedure to segregate the real and the unreal, a complication that added further waves of its own, further elaborations. Just as there was no ultimate end to the definition of meaning, and no final fraction of a transcendental number, so there was no real limit to the process of elaboration. None whatsoever. And so now she was in very deep water, being carried away from the shore by the undertow at an alarming and increasing rate. Had there ever been a shore? Had there ever been such a thing as a shore? The very projections that in the beginning of her dark journey had helped save her mind, where a lesser one would have broken, were now the very elements contaminating it.
The forerunners who had remanded her to this place and into the box knew little or nothing. They certainly did not know who she was, or else she suspected they would not have been so polite. They would not then have waited for the box to work its terrible magic on her. No, more direct methods would have been used. But their questions had reassured her of that; that they knew nothing. They did not know the right questions to ask. But they were suspicious, and of more than just the incident of the Museum. Somewhere there were other things that bothered them; there had been noises in the night, and they knew not the source, nor why. Or had it been just the settling of the house, the wind in the trees, a natural event? Obviously she had some connection with the vandalism in the Museum; at the least, she appeared to be the only suspect they had. And why those particular devices? But those questions did not bother her; she expected them. At another point, however, they had pursued other topics. For example, they had asked, quite casually, who were the ler players of the game Zan? What was the significance of the Game? Were the players free of other obligations, save self-support? Apparently they had several lines of inquiry going, and since she had been close to hand, they had tried a few at her. She had felt chill dread at these questions, and hoped that her projected ignorance had convinced them. Ah, indeed there was a rich area in herself for them to mine. They were closer to it than they realized; and not to solving little vandalisms, either. It was partially fortune that they did not press her there. But it disturbed her, even now. The other players needed to know this line of inquiry, the Shadow needed to know . . . and there was no way for her to tell anyone. For once set in motion, the forerunners would not ever come to a complete problem halt until they had followed every line out. Yes, they were great completers, but after all that was the true meaning of intelligence: following through. She was ler, but she had no contempt for humans. To the contrary.
Her mind wandered. After a fashion, they had been kind enough with her. They did not believe they were causing her particular harm by placing her in this sensory deprivation unit. Almost casually, yet they had no idea of the effects of it on her. Perhaps among their own kind they were pleasant enough persons. At home, or in some warm tavern, with friends, or lovers. She had heard that they did not have lovers, at least openly. And did they have taverns? She now realized that for all her previous trips outside she knew in actuality very little about how they lived, what their dreams were.
So as the interrogation had continued, she had begun to see into the basic surface smoothness of her interrogators, just as a glassy surface of water meant deeper channels; there were things they wanted to know, they had her, and she knew. Indeed did she know. And that, no matter what the cost, not a word of it could be told. The worth of it was simply too high: it was easily worth perzhan1, one hundred and ninety-six, of her lives. It really was not even worth arguin
g about, even with herself, even in the box. However it went. She thought, with a certain irony, that the people who talked the most about sacrifice were always the ones who knew they would never have to make that decision. She did not particularly worry about pain, for she knew from the box that they had more sophisticated methodology at their disposal, once they had an idea who she was. That was more important than the business at the Museum. And once put into use, she was sure that these methods would leave more permanent scars on her, figuratively, than flesh would hold: they would be inside. So she kept the silence.
At times like this, when she had to reaffirm basic quantities to herself, she allowed herself the luxury of recalling the secret, as she had come to call it. It was her only remaining source of comfort, but she only allowed herself to recall it in full when her mind felt clear, for she had no way of knowing if she was talking or not. She took great comfort in seeing how successful it would be, now that it was almost complete, how much it meant for all the people. Just a few more years. She saw the part she had played in it, more minor than it should have been, but who after all could have foreseen the exact circumstances, ridiculous as they were, and who could argue intelligently against the Great Rule, even though somewhat disadvantaged by it? But what of that? She had used the traditions herself back against the problem, and aided by a rare stroke of good fortune, had come close to regaining her place, which should have been hers by right, unquestioned. She had almost made it back . . . and now, in the box in an alien city, it pained her to know, as she had known all along, that she was not to make the contribution she knew she was capable of. They had planned things to a nicety, the elders who had guided it from the Beginning, but reality had slipped them a cruel twist. They could not have foreseen this situation, with its ironies of the best and the worst misplaced. She thought bravely, But I have kept the faith where no one else was ever tried. Of course, it wasn’t consolation. She recalled the drama Damvidhlan, Baethshevban, and Hurthayyan2 again. Yes, she was sure of it; the plight and fate of Hurthayyan had indeed analogously applied to her, to include a match for the identity of Hofklandor Damvidhlan. But who or what did Baethshevban equate with? She could not be entirely certain, for it did not match a person, but rather a diffuse something, an emotion from many directed to one. And coveted, now seized. Zakhvathelosi.
She could easily recall the image in her memory of the human interrogator, and his superior. The interrogator had been as bland and featureless as his surroundings, distinctly unremarkable, but the superior had been another matter; he had been tall and rather bony, and his face was angular enough to deserve the term “hatchet-faced” without further explanation. His ears protruded after the fashion of jug handles and his jaw was long and equine. His hair was sandy-colored with reddish overtones, cut brushy short and springing out in odd little tufts at unexpected places. In her eyes, more accustomed to the smoother and softer lines of the ler face (which correspondingly appeared childish in the human frame of reference), he had been primitive, raw, rough-cut, homely, in fact, as an oak post. But she remembered him with dread and fear, homely as he had been, for she knew that when they came back for her, after they judged she had had enough time in the box, he’d come with them and she’d talk to him in the mode of intimacy, just to have contact with someone, some stimulus. Citizen Eykor, they had called him. She would start talking and would not be able to stop. Something would slip in her relief and the tale would start, and it would never end. She suspected she could not survive the box; she knew she couldn’t keep the silence if they took her out and started questioning her again. A spasm of fear passed through her, gripping her momentarily; perhaps she would love him, just for talking to her after the box. Yes, that was possible. He would reassure her, probably reaching to touch her shoulder, not realizing the overtly sexual connotations of the gesture in her reference . . . and this could not be, must not be; it must not even be allowed to approach the potential to be. There was nothing she could share with Citizen Eykor, and less she could allow herself to say to him.
They must not know, not one word of it, she thought. The wave had felt the first intimations of the bottom underfoot and was beginning to steepen, after a fetch of miles and years. Centuries, really, so long had it been in motion. Yes. Let it happen in its time. Then it won’t matter what they know; in fact, we could even drop them off a copy of the Histories; let them try to duplicate it and follow them into the night. Then it won’t matter. But now? It would neither be fitting nor sufficient for her to return, broken, to the Mountain of Madness, the Holy Place, and say, to the Shadow, “I held out as long as I could, but I broke in the end. Yes, I spoke of it, and they know. They will be coming tomorrow or the next day, they will take it for themselves, and for us it will be gone forever.” And with our low birth rate and unstable genes we will be the wards of the forerunners forever, tied to old Earth with them. Intolerable.
She stopped that line of thought, for it led to hard choices. Choices whose solutions were all too obvious. She returned once more to the present. The zero noplace nowhen, a universe in which she was the sole inhabitant. She and her memory. She was quite nude, but she could no longer perceive any sensation whatsoever; what little the box had left her had quickly disappeared, dropped as recurring items of no consequence by her own mind, just as one ceased to hear a familiar clock, and began to wonder if it still ran. Hard to catch even in normal circumstances, in the box these reports from oneself simply vanished, leaving no ripples to mark the spot where they had gone under. She returned to her nudity, tried to sense it. In some way. She couldn’t. There was no body there! She thought in anger, I may not be able to feel it now, but I can remember it. You can’t take that away from me. It’s my body and it’s my mind, you hifzer dranloons3! She returned. Nude, yes, it was pleasant to be clothes-less, with someone exciting . . . something more than just pleasant, a thrill. With a body-friend, a lover. Much better a deeplover. As an adolescent ler, she did not perceive a rigid line of distinction between friends and lovers. Sex with friends of the opposite sex was just part of the relationship. However, she did differentiate between sex and affection. They might complement one another, or reinforce one another, in a relationship, but in the matter of degrees of each they operated independent of one another. Why not? One expressed one quantity, and the other something entirely different. Where a specific person was involved, one perceived degrees of intimacy, of both personal functions, elaborated by certain cultural reinforcements—for example, as the use of parts of one’s name with persons with whom one had such a relationship. The definitions were both complex and dynamic, possessing many variables simultaneously, and so one spent much of one’s adolescence learning the definitions. Many grew restive and questioned the elaborate distinctions, the subtlety, the hedging. But she knew very well what the use of it portended. Relationships among elders were highly structured, and so after the Braid years one remembered the definitions of one’s youth, and used an analog of them to enter the elder custom.
It was as a spectrum of many colors, each shading into the next, and no line anywhere which could be said to cause a definite distinction. It was, in fact, a smooth continuum which went from childish games in the woods to couples who lived together in emotional entanglements so interpenetrating that they lay somewhere along the very borders of sanity. I have been there. Having been to the place, with him, where the real and the unreal are segregated. I have no respect for those who imagine that the distinction is a casual one. Him. Was all; she had long since ceased to think of him-her-last as a name. One simply disregarded it. There had been two presences in the world. Herself and him. She felt a sudden constriction somewhere indefinable in her chest, gone before she could be sure if she had felt it at all. Whisked away by the box. She thought she could detect a trace of moisture in her eyes, open in the darkness. But the sensations were gone. Had they ever been?
Nude. Yes, that. She returned to the memory, a composite of many experiences, from which she could select t
he specific image she wanted. The sharp thrill of slipping out of her light summer pleth4, pulling it over her head, when their relationship had been new, turning to him smiling. Or awaking softly in the night, knowing warm breath along her neck, feeling warmth along her flank, weight . . . a wisp of memory drifted by; they had gone together down to a place they had made deep in the forests of the northeast reservation, a place where he had . . . what? It had slipped away, not forgotten, but mislaid, tangled in a thousand phantom alternatives, real and unreal, thrown up by her mind, running free. She made an effort of will: yes, down in the woods, far to the northeast, in a part of the reservation where hardly anyone made their home. This memory was a recent one, the summer just past, early in the season; the sensations came back, now vividly, now vague and evanescent, threatening to vanish in the next instant. She held on to them by a great effort of will. The rich odors of the damp forest earth, vines, and green leaves, the warm air heavy with the scent of flowers; the sunlight played in the shadows of the new foliage, the wind was in the crowns of the trees, and, listening carefully, one could hear the sound of running water. Together they had slipped their light summer pleths off over their heads, feeling the sudden rush of body feeling at the touch of cooler air, and the quick flash of goose-pimples which had disappeared as fast as it had come. He had looked deeply at her body, and she at his; he was thin, pale, and smooth, worked all over with a delicate tracery of muscle and sinew. They had laughed, and she had made him chase her running through the trees and vines and tangles, the flower scent strong in the air. The memory steadied, held firm, ran true.