Dreamers

by James Gunn

  The Dreamers

  James Gunn

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  "The Volunteer,” published as IF I FORGET THEE copyright © 1980 by James Gunn, originally appeared in TRIAX published by Pinnicle Inc.

  To Steve Goldman,

  my best reader

  PREFACE

  Sometime in the late 1950s I ran across accounts of what was then called “chemical memory.” The way in which memory is transferred to the neurons in the brain for storage was mysterious at that time (and no one really knows today how the brain remembers). Robert Jordan and James McConnell, while still graduate students, began doing experiments with planarian worms at the University of Texas, studies that McConnell continued while a professor at the University of Michigan. His work and those of others was published in a publication whimsically titled The Worm-Runners Digest.

  Other researchers picked up the research: Holgar Hyden, George Ungar, David Krech.... All that, if the reader is interested, is summarized (in quotes from journal and magazine articles) in the middle channel of the Mnemonist's ruminations.. The final statement in that brief history, in the Mnemonist's last section, speculates about the future potential of chemical memory. Such speculations are the spark to the rocket of the writer's imagination.

  I included references to chemical memory in my novel Kampus, in which they became pills of instruction that students could pop instead of going to class—though there they became a metaphor for getting knowledge—or information—without having to work for it. But they also contained a central core of possibility: that learning itself could be encapsulated, so that one could learn to be a computer technician, say, or a surgeon by popping a pill. If that became possible, civilization would be transformed more radically than it was by the industrial revolution or by science.

  The Dreamers assumes that the chemical memory revolution has already occurred. All the everyday problems of existence have been resolved. Now chemical memory is being applied to the arts, and people have the opportunity to indulge themselves in the ultimate escape fiction: the living of other people's lives through memories that have been encapsulated for them.

  But there still will be a need for a few people who hold themselves apart from the common pool of pleasure, who must make decisions, create dreams, and supply the basic materials for the dreamers and their poppets.

  Even in the 1950s and early 1960s, the concept of chemical memory was viewed skeptically by most biologists and physiologists, and today has been discarded. An article in the January 2001 Analog by Kyle Kirkland, a postdoctoral scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, dismisses chemical memory and describes what scientists today think about the way memories are recorded in the brain. Synaptic physiology, he wrote, is one of the most important areas of neuro-science research. Just because you can't inject other people's memories, he goes on to say, doesn't mean that you can't replicate them. But chemical memory always was more potent in what it implied about the human condition than in what it might achieve in the real world. [Science fiction, editor John W. Campbell once wrote, exists in the gap between the laboratory and the marketplace.] Memory is what makes us individuals, and the creation of memories is what, when it structures our dreams, we call art.

  James Gunn

  The Mnemonist I

  Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know

  Are a substantial world, both pure and good.

  Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,

  Our pastime and our happiness will grow.

  —William Wordsworth

  The Mnemonist stirred on his protective pallet, moving dreamlike in counterpoint to the thoughts that were more real than the room and the cocoon of flesh that enclosed them. “The question is,” the Mnemonist said, “is dreaming, like REM sleep, essential to a healthy society, or is it so ultimately satisfying that the dreams will consume the dreamers?” This question, like others that occurred to him, occupied a peaceful spot inside his head surrounded by turmoil, like a curious island in a troubled sea of data.

  we are

  the music makers

  and we are

  the dreamers

  of dreams

  wandering by

  lone sea breakers

  and sitting

  by desolate

  streams

  robert thomson and

  james mcconnell were

  graduate students at the

  university of texas

  In 1953

  they started to teach

  the planarian worm

  because it was

  the lowest animal

  with synapses

  check

  pellet

  maker

  5

  generator

  2

  is

  running

  a bit

  rough

  The Mnemonist was like a spider at the heart of a web he had not spun. Slender tubes surrounded him, caressed him, nourished him with food and function, removed wastes, brought sleep and wakefulness. They adjusted themselves to his commands and to his unspoken needs and desires, such as they were. As the years passed, for instance, he slept less and less; now his moments of unconsciousness lasted no more than half an hour each period.

  world losers and

  world forsakers

  on whom the

  pale moon gleams

  yet we are

  the movers

  and shakers

  of the world forever

  it seems

  at its head end

  it had

  a concentration

  of nerve cells

  called a ganglion

  that could

  be thought of

  as a

  primitive brain

  a lost

  child

  is

  wandering

  on

  the third

  level

  of the

  crèche

  He was not uncomfortable. In fact, he seldom thought about that aspect of his existence. His life was information and decision and, most of all, the questions he asked to which stored data responded, but there were never any answers to the basic questions. He didn't know if he asked questions because he was a question asker—what once was called a philosopher—because questions were fed into his veins along with the information and the food, or because questions naturally emerged from the data.

  courage he said

  and pointed

  toward the land

  this mounting wave

  will roll us

  homeward soon

  in the afternoon

  they came unto a land

  in which it seemed

  always afternoon

  mcconnell continued

  training planarians

  at michigan

  he cut them

  in half

  and waited

  for the pieces

  to generate

  into

  whole worms

  cultivator

  421

  is

  destroying

  plants

  pull

  it

  in

  for

  overhaul

  His body twitched where it rested on the fluid-filled mattress, but he was used to it. In fact he scarcely thought of it as his body anymore; it was more like part of the room in which he resided, an extension of the console's tubes, a conduit for information and food, and sometimes a nuisance. The computer took care of it while he concerned himself with important matters. “Did the discoverers of chemical memory,” he asked, “have any notion of the potentials they were releasing?"

  they sat them down

  u
pon the yellow sand

  between the sun

  and moon

  upon the shore

  and sweet it was

  to dream

  of fatherland

  of child

  and wife

  and slave

  the original heads

  remembered

  but the old tails

  also remembered

  perhaps memory

  wasn't stored

  in the brain

  but was

  a biochemical change

  that took place

  throughout the body

  textured

  Protein

  Shaper

  716

  is producing

  irregular

  shapes

  replace

  the

  worn

  nozzle

  “What are the limits to the individual's ability to manipulate reality to his satisfaction?” the Mnemonist asked. His body was wrinkled and gray and wiry, like a spider's. His eyes were closed. He almost never opened them. There was never anything to see, and the only matters that interested him took shape inside his head or swam like small blind eels through his veins and arteries. The individual's personal power was one limit, he thought; the conflicting desires of others was another. And finally there had to be ultimate parameters within which reality permits itself to be manipulated. “Is the first limit a function of technology,” he asked, “and the second a function of population density? And if these are so, insofar as population density is dependent upon technology, do these two limits vary inversely?"

  but evermore

  most weary seemed

  the sea weary the oar

  weary the wandering

  fields of barren foam

  then someone said

  we will return no more

  and all at once

  they sang

  our island home

  is far beyond the wave

  we will no longer roam

  holger

  hyden

  at the

  university

  of goteborg

  suggested

  that

  memories

  might be

  molecules of

  ribonucleic

  acid

  generator 2

  may require

  a complete

  overhaul

  check the

  consequences

  of pulling

  it off the line

  and estimate

  how long

  an overhaul

  will require

  “If one limit to the manipulation of reality is a function of technology,” the Mnemonist said, “does the self-maintaining technology of this world provide nearly total independence from environment, and thus no meaningful limit at all?” His life system was a model of the urban center in miniature, the extensions of his nerves and his realm of action like the extensions of the urban center into the fields around it and under it, with their water and minerals and growing things. Like the urban center, he was a closed system. “If resistance to desires and consequences for action are lowered to the vanishing point, is only the final limit important? Do the parameters within which reality can be manipulated remain the final limit to human happiness?"

  hateful is

  the dark blue sky

  vaulted oer

  the dark blue sea

  death is the end

  of life ah why

  should life

  all labor be

  let us alone

  time driveth

  onward fast

  and in a little while

  our lips are dumb

  long molecules of

  dioxyribonucleic

  acid

  in the nucleus

  of the cell

  contain the complete plans

  for an animal

  parts are copied

  as molecules

  of rna go into the cell

  with instructions for

  the manufacture of protein

  lift

  shaft

  12

  is

  malfunctioning

  again

  check

  the

  controls

  and

  repair

  as

  necessary

  “On the other hand, does the easy and ultimate fulfillment of dreams result in enduring happiness?” the Mnemonist asked. His voice was rusty, like a bird cawing, in that reverberating room, but if he had not asked himself questions over the years, it might long since have withered into uselessness. Once it had uttered foolishness, but that had been long ago, in another lifetime. Besides, no one heard it but him. “Is there a fundamental perversity to the human spirit that, no matter to what gods man sacrifices, refuses him his heart's desire?"

  let us alone

  what pleasure

  can we have

  to war with evil

  is there any peace

  in ever climbing up

  the climbing wave

  all things have rest

  and ripen

  toward the grave

  in silence ripen

  fall and cease

  give us long rest

  or death

  dark death

  or dreamful ease

  george ungar

  discovered

  memory transfer

  accidentally

  while studying

  morphine addiction

  in rats

  when he injected

  brain extract

  from a

  habituated rat

  into a second animal

  he seemed

  to transfer

  the

  habituation

  the

  pellets

  are

  not

  at

  fault

  generator

  2

  is

  overheating

  pull

  it

  off

  the

  line

  now

  “Is the genetic code a biological mechanism for remembering?” the Mnemonist asked. His body twitched again. Such malfunctions were getting to be an annoyance; the console would have to handle matters better than that. He did not know how old he was: In the midst of all the data that flowed through his body and all the relationships his brain created between them, this personal fact had been lost with all the other facts about himself as other than a living memory machine and decision maker. His age and the condition of his body were irrelevant. At least they had been until recently. “Why shouldn't proteins carry memory? But what is the human body remembering?"