Asimov’s Future History Volume 6

by Isaac Asimov

  So much/or Spacer cuisine, he thought.

  The hospital was a familiar place to him now. Derec did not trouble with the waiting rooms, but went to the Friends’ Lounge and queried Ariel’s condition on the monitor. There had been a problem with that when they had discovered that she wasn’t in the system. Derec had professed ignorance of the ID tag, and it was assumed — he hoped — that it had been lost when they all crowded around to help Ariel during her collapse.

  Naturally he didn’t remember her number, and in their honest ignorance she and he had left other ID

  forms behind. Derec had promised to supply them with it next day, but so far had “forgotten” to do so the one time they remembered to ask him for it. They had had to input her with a dummy ID.

  Ariel was in a room with two robots. Here, in Intensive Care, people were either unconscious or so debilitated by their illnesses that they didn’t care that it was robots who waited on them.

  She was not raving today. At first Derec thought she was asleep, she lay so quietly. But then she moved, and a robot sprang forward to smooth the pillow behind her. She looked at it vacantly, closed her eyes.

  A faint sound behind him was Dr. Li. The woman shook her head sadly.

  “How is she, doctor?” Derec asked.

  “As far as the disease goes, the worst is over. She will live. But what you’re seeing now might be worse.

  She is gradually losing her memories.”

  Derec had had some of this explained to him. “I suppose she’s half in a hallucinatory state now.”

  “Yes, or something like an intense daydream. Perhaps a brown study would be a better analogy — one of those almost hypnotic states of concentration in which you don’t see what’s in front of you.”

  Derec had a vague flash memory of someone waving a hand in front of his nose, and nodded.

  Ariel was reliving her life as drowning people are popularly supposed to do. It wouldn’t take me long, he mused; J suppose I might have time for it. But Ariel....

  “Could I visit her?”

  Dr. Li frowned, looking sadder. “You could, but after today it will get worse.” She hesitated. “There’s always a shock for the loved ones, when the patient doesn’t recognize them. That will happen, you know.”

  Derec hadn’t thought of that, and the mere thought shocked him. “Then — can I visit her today?”

  “I’ll ask.”

  Ariel looked at him blankly, but it wasn’t a lack of recognition. It was more a lack of energy. “Oh, Derec. How are you?”

  What do you say to someone who may be alive tomorrow, but won’t remember you? If Derec’s memories had been a hundred years long rather than a couple of months, he still wouldn’t have had anything to guide him.

  “Well enough,” he said awkwardly. He drew near to the bed, touched it. She looked at him without much emotion.

  “Are you going to help them restore my memory?”

  “Of course. I’ll have to. And I hope you’ve been talking —?” He indicated the robots with a tilt of his head.

  “A little,” she said reluctantly. “I’m so tired all the time. And they keep me so full of drugs I don’t have the spirit. Besides, it doesn’t matter. It won’t help. It w-won’t really be me. Derec, it’s like dying. It’s just like dying. I won’t see you again — I won’t see anyone again — it’s all fading —”

  One of the robots sprang to the head of the bed and did something, and Ariel’s eyes closed. When they opened after a moment the horror had largely passed. Derec thought it was still there, though, masked by the drug.

  “That isn’t so, Ariel,” he said insistently. “Your memories are still there, in your brain. They merely need to be unlocked. We’ll —”

  She was shaking her head. “No, it’s all going. I’m dying, Derec. Whoever takes my place will be someone different.”

  Abruptly he said, “Am I different than — the man I was?”

  “Of course. And yet, you’re him.” She closed her eyes and tears trembled on her eyelids. The robot got busy at the headboard again.

  “Derec, I want you to know that I’ve always loved you. Even when I was most angry, even when I was most frightened. I never blamed you. For weeks I’ve watched, hoping you would never develop the final form of the disease. I guess you did, or you wouldn’t have lost your memory. Whoever cured you … didn’t have the … technology to restore … your memory …”

  She drifted off into sleep, and after a moment Derec choked down his impulse to cry out, to demand that they awaken her. Suddenly his lost memory seemed less important, what she knew seemed less important, than what she thought of him.

  “Farewell, Ariel,” he managed to say huskily, and stumbled out into the Friends’ Lounge, where he sat and wept for a time, quietly. He wondered vaguely if, in all his unremembered life, he had felt this sharp, poignant pain, and doubted it. Yet, he had known her in another life, and it had not been wholly a happy relationship.

  He’d had amnemonic plague; the emptiness in his head was proof enough for him. Had he gotten it from her — or given it to her?

  Presently he took a deep breath, let it out in a sigh that came from the bottom of his belly, and wiped his face on a tissue from the dispenser. Robots were probably watching him; within minutes Dr. Li and a weary-looking Dr. Powell entered the room.

  They sat and looked him over while he braced himself. Fortunately, they, like he, had more important things on their minds than Ariel’s ID tags.

  “I understand that Korolenko has told you a little about memory restoration,” Dr. Powell said.

  Derec remembered an exchange from an earlier visit. He nodded. “Memory traces are not memory. Yes.”

  “Quite so. A memory trace is the synapse — the nerve connection in the brain — that leads to the memory, which is stored in chemical form. It is these synapses that are being erased by the neurotoxin of the plague. The actual memories remain untouched.”

  They looked at him. If only you knew how much I know about this; he thought. “Right,” he said. “But since their addresses are unknown — to put it in computer jargon — the memories are as lost as if the records had been wiped.”

  “Almost,” said Dr. Li. “There are ghost memories flitting about the patient’s mind, and many little things will jolt a few of the memories loose.”

  “Smell is one of the subtlest and most powerful memory keys,” said Dr. Powell, nodding.

  Derec knew. “Yes.”

  “So. In what we loosely call a memory restoration, we merely supply new synapses as nearly identical to the old as possible.”

  “And in the functioning of the new memory traces,” Derec said, parroting what he’d been told, “the patient reactivates the old chemical memories.”

  “Quite so. The more accurate and detailed the new memory traces are, the more complete not only the restoration of the memories, but the restoration of the patient’s original personality. I hope you can see that.”

  It was an angle that had never occurred to him. He supposed he had the same basic personality as ever: pragmatic, problem-solving, not given to abstract thought, not artistic or poetic. An equable temperament. The engineering mind.

  Now that he thought of it, though, perhaps his personality was different. He had known Ariel in his former life. He must have had strong feelings about her. He did again. Not still — again. For if he had not met her since his memory loss, and had not continuously been practically in solitary confinement with her, he might well not have felt that way about her again.

  His parents, for instance. He no longer felt about them as he once must have done. His friends — all those parts of his personality were gone. If he acquired new friends, his emotional responses would be much the same, of course. His personality had not changed in any basic way, or so he supposed. He did not seem very strange to Ariel. Still, he was a new and different person from the old Derec, whatever his name had been.

  Perhaps Ariel was right; perhaps it was a form of
death.

  Yet —” If the memory traces are close enough to the original —?”

  “Ideally, it would be like copying a program into a blank positronic brain,” said Dr. Li. “The second robot would, for all practical purposes, become the old one.”

  “We always explain what’s been done to them,” Derec said absently.

  “Yes. But if the original was destroyed —” Derec frowned. “— the new one would, for all intents and purposes, be the same one in a new body.”

  True, it was not unlike shifting a positronic brain to a new robotic body. Derec had an uneasy flash. On Robot City there had been an accidental death, of a boy called David, which Derec and Ariel had investigated for the robots. This David had looked just like him He usually shrugged that fact off, but now he was jolted. Maybe the other was the duplicate — or was it himself?

  “In a human, of course, it is not quite so simple,” said Dr. Powell, not noticing his jolted expression. “We could activate a significant fraction of the locked memories without reactivating the old personality. It’s a matter of knowing which memories are important to the patient.”

  “How close can we come?” Derec asked.

  “It depends on how much we know. The robots are, of course, recording and analyzing everything she says, and there’s a tendency to relive the most important memories first and most often, till they’re gone. So we’re developing a good sketch, too crude to be called a diagram.”

  Derec nodded. “That’s where you need my help.”

  “Quite so. You know her better than we, or the robots, can hope to.”

  “Not well enough, I’m afraid,” said Derec steadily, wishing for some of that tranquilizer they were keeping Ariel on. “I’ve only known her for a few weeks.”

  And already married, their expressions said. Spacer morals. Derec didn’t enlighten them. “I can go into a lot of detail about our time together, but before that … she was a very private person.”

  Again, their expressions spoke for them: Spacers lived alone, on the surface, surrounded only by robots, and had few human contacts.... Not true, but try to explain. Besides, he’d had his own quota of chauvinistic nonsense about Earthers to lose.

  “Whatever you can do, you must do,” Dr. Li said heavily.

  “Uh … well … I can’t,” Derec said lamely.

  If he mentioned his amnesia, they’d be allover him. The question of their identities would arise in a way he couldn’t duck. The Terries would certainly be called in, and the Spacer embassy at the port would be queried. The whole house of cards would come down — next thing you knew, they’d have learned about Dr. Avery — and Robot City.

  That secret must be kept at all costs.

  “Why not?” Dr. Powell barked.

  “It’s … a matter of privacy, sir.”

  “Oh.” Greatly mollified. Spacers! “Well, there’s a lot more than you could do sitting here … why don’t you take all the material we have with you, go home, and do your dictating there?”

  Derec had been so used to having First Law-driven robots intruding on his life that he was startled by this easy acquiescence. A robot wouldn’t let anything be put into Ariel’s head without checking it over first

  “And the memory traces? Will they be kept private?”

  The doctors looked at each other. “Well, they have to be coded,” Dr. Li began.

  Dr. Powell said, “They use a technique modified from one used to implant synapses in positronic brains. Of course that can’t be used on human brains, but it’s based on the same idea, as it were. I don’t know the full details, myself —”

  “But it’s a matter of coding,” said Dr. Li. “We’re having a specialist come in from the Mayo. If he could teach you — perhaps you could code the more private portions …?”

  It took several conversations and a conference before it was decided to let Derec attempt coding memory traces for Ariel. His education stood him in good stead; he had the necessary background to do the work. Spacer! said the expressions again, this time with approval. Spacer education in robotics and computers in general was notoriously the best.

  The work called for the use of a good computer, and with some trepidation he revealed the existence of R. David during the conference.

  “Of course,” Dr. Powell said. “A Spacer would naturally have a robot in his apartment.”

  They seemed to take it quite for granted, and to be a little amused by it.

  “Scots sleeping with bagpipes,” someone muttered at the back of the room, a reference that sounded so funny that Derec meant to look it up, but forgot. He didn’t think of it again till weeks later … far too late to ask.

  So, once he was instructed in the technique — not simple, but not too hard to learn — of coding memories as synapses, Derec sat up, day and night, dictating his memories of his life with Ariel.

  “Any time she remembers something, playing the memory trace, there is a certain strong chance that she will unlock the actual memory of the event, or of part of it,” the expert told Derec. “Each such unlocked memory will be retained, and will strengthen the memory trace leading to it, and to the fields about it. All this was worked out at the Lahey within the past ten years.”

  She was a sharp-nosed, unpretty woman, tiny and quite dark of skin. The breeds of mankind, or races as they were called on Earth, remained far more distinct than on the Spacer worlds. Darla, her name was, and she knew her stuff. She seemed to be hundreds of years old; he supposed vaguely that she might be sixty or seventy.

  “Eventually, the personality that is recovered will be indistinguishable from the patient’s original personality, both to the patient and to the patient’s loved ones. But that depends on the accuracy of the memories, the accuracy of the coding, and the completeness of the memories.”

  The coding accuracy he could create by care and sheer hard work. The completeness of the memories he had little control over. At least, he thought comfortingly, the last weeks of her life must be very important, and those he could cover well.

  But the accuracy of the memories? How did he know what was important to her and what was not? Her moods had always been a mystery to him.

  He could but do his best, and try not to worry too much.

  Derec took to visiting the hospital every other day, and sometimes every third day. Whether he went or not, he always stopped at the public combooth mornings and evenings, on the way to and from the kitchen, to call and ask about her. The news usually was that she was doing well but was in no condition to talk.

  Derec knew it. His work went rapidly enough, but there was a lot of it. He slogged through it grimly. If not for the necessity of going out to call the hospital, he might not have gone near the kitchen until R.

  David was forced to take action to prevent collapse.

  He had one slight consolation. His own memories must also be locked away, unharmed by the plague. If only he could find someone who knew him as well as Ariel did before she lost her memories, someone he could persuade to come to Earth and dictate his memories … not likely, knowing Spacers. But there was that thread of hope that he might recover his memories … might recover himself.

  Nights were bad. He dreamed nightmares of Ariel not responding to the treatment and being as blank as he had been upon awakening. It was terribly important that she not lose her memories of him … and in the dream it was always his fault. His coding failed, or she was swept away in the flash floods through the drains of Robot City, or ….

  Robot City! It, too, haunted his dreams, and these dreams were even darker and more frightening than the nightmares about Ariel. Those he could understand; they sprang from a quite natural anxiety.

  But the Robot City dreams were different … they didn’t even seem like dreams. They seemed frighteningly real. In the mornings Derec’s hands shook, and he hoped the doctors never started asking serious questions. They’d know for sure he was crazy.

  He was dreaming that Robot City was inside him. He dreamed of g
leaming buildings rising on the lobes of his liver, great dark-red plains stacked above each other, or on his ribs, or inside his lungs, the buildings expanding and contracting as he breathed. Then the dreams seemed to become much clearer, and he “knew,” in the crazy dream way, that Robot City was in his bloodstream.

  Enclosed buildings, like space cities on lonely rocks, he thought. Yeah! But jeering didn’t drive off the frightened, helpless feeling, the feeling of being invaded and used.

  1 suppose that’s the source of this dream, he thought, trying to comfort himself. I’ve been moved and manipulated from the beginning.

  The next time he walked into the Friends’ Lounge, Korolenko brought him Dr. Li and an unsmiling.

  athletic young man with the look of eagles in his eyes.

  “Yes?” Derec said to the stranger.

  “This is Special Agent Donovan,” said Dr. Li, frowning slightly. “Of the Terrestrial Bureau of Investigation.”

  Chapter 11

  QUESTIONS!

  THE TERRY FOLLOWED him and Dr. Li to a more private conference room, where Dr. Li left them.

  The special agent looked Derec over intently, but not in a hostile manner. Derec braced himself, shaky.

  Above all, he mustn’t mention Robot City. Neither could he mention Aranimas and Wolruf. They’d consider him crazy.

  Any break in his story would mean endless questioning, queries to the Spacer worlds, questions about Dr. Avery, the discovery of Wolruf in orbit about Kappa Whale, perhaps the discovery of all that Dr.

  Avery was doing … not all of that bad, but it would take time! Worst of all, the investigation would ultimately uncover Robot City … and that secret had to be kept at all costs.

  Derec and Ariel had to get back there.

  “I must warn you that this conversation is being recorded, and that anything you say may be used against you. Further, you have the right to remain silent, if you feel that your interests might be threatened by answering. On the other hand, we have as yet no positive evidence that any crime has been committed. The Bureau has been called in primarily because you are allegedly a Spacer … diplomatic reasons, that is.”