Asimov's SF, Oct/Nov 2005

by Dell Magazine Authors

At last they came to a place she recognized as Volunteer Park. Glancing around, she saw that the elegant old mansions surrounding it had been burned to the ground, leaving only the rubble of charred and smoking stone and hulks of twisted metal. The giant led her through hemlock and cedar to one of the park's small meadows, where three tall stands of bleachers had been erected. She sat beside him on the lowest rank. She thought there must be a few hundred people sitting on the bleachers—all of them, except for the giants, women.

  A woman sitting alone just above them leaned forward and greeted her. The giant who had brought her—her giant, she now—seeing the others—thought of him—took her hand. She no longer remembers what the woman said to her, only that it was trivial and meaningless, as were her own responses. The smalltalk between them constructed a background, like the bleachers and the grass and the deep green screen of the trees, shielding their eyes from the destruction only a few score yards away. All that mattered, really, was the way his enormous palm (so smooth and dry, not like any palm she had ever known, so distinctive in its texture she can remember it exactly, yes so exactly that she would know it blindfolded), and the long, strangely bony fingers with too many knuckles, stroked her hand. That was all he did, stroke her hand. (Perhaps he stroked, too, a little of the underside of the wrist, that soft delicate place ringed by the creases she had once heard called longevity bracelets.) She doesn't know how long this went on. Only that within seconds the most powerful sexual sensations she had ever felt were pumping through her body, pounding in an almost painful pulse in her pelvis, holding her hovering at the brink of orgasm, where all that is wanted is the final, ultimate trigger.

  How long did they sit there? I do not know. Only that she experienced paroxysms of pleasure that went on and on, just sitting there on the bleachers, having her hand stroked. All the while the world was ending, burning down, the atmosphere so heavily filled with thick particles from the ash of synthetic and natural materials alike that the sun was blotted out entirely, the sky a ceiling of smoke of every shade of gray mixed with every putrid color imaginable.

  I do not have it right, the extraordinariness of the time spent on the bleachers. I cannot get it right. I've already ruined it by writing it down so poorly. The details—the small things that are all-revealing—where are they? Instead, I have a new memory crowding in on me, the first memory, other than what I've already written, that has come to me since I woke. I must write the new memory down. But I must also finish the above.

  Very quickly: an unknown amount of time passed, and then the giant left me, and such a wrenching moment that was, like waking from a warm dream of tropical paradise to find oneself naked in the middle of a blizzard in the Arctic Circle in the dark dead of winter. Jerked to my senses, aching, I looked around for him, but he had gone. I wanted to get up from the bleachers to seek him, but frozen again into icy paralysis, I could do no more than shift my legs and flutter my hands in my lap. Constantly my eyes searched what I could see of the park; I barely endured the chatter of the woman sitting above me. All afternoon I sat there, caught in interminable agony. Not fearful at having lost a protector, no. Not wondering at all what he had wanted with me, for I was completely incurious about him and uninterested in anything but the sensations he had called forth in me. No. I cared only for his return, wanting it more than life (which had of course lost all its attractions anyway)—for the pure, unthinking, selfish animal pleasure he had the power of granting me.

  The next I knew, I awoke here, in this cold place, alone. I have one hope, and one thought. Nothing else matters to me now in the least.

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  3.

  Bower tells me that by putting into words every scrap and fragment of memory that flits through my mind I may rebuild at least the most general part of my memory, if not discover a consciousness of who I am—or rather, have been.

  Bower insists that consciousness of who I am is not something I need to discover, but is already implicit, for the simple reason that I can speak and write sentences saying “I.” He—it, rather—tells me that the pronoun “I” in his language translates as “the consciouness-that-perceives-itself-as-one-that-is-speaking.” I suppose it is true that if one can say “I,” one is technically, at least, a consciousness. But perhaps the sense that I require for comfortable existence is not merely technical.

  Apart from that, I am not sure I believe that articulation of memory will bring me a greater sense of reality of being someone in particular. Having articulated my most solid, important memory, I find the memory now feels different. It has lost its texture, somehow. Previously, that memory did not exist in the form of words saying “I this,” or “I that.” There were the textures of feeling—from a wild, wild wanting to the coldest and emptiest despair. There was the smell of the chemical stench, that I could yet remember, and the feel of that hand stroking mine. But all without verbs or adverbs, all floating in my mind as bits of being that belonged uniquely to me. In the process of telling, I've lost the smell. Which may be a good thing—only it was all that I had that made the End real. I've even lost the feeling in my body—that had been there with me, since I woke—of wanting. It is now, clearly, “all in my mind.” Well, of course it always was that. Only now ... since I haven't been dreaming and lack the company of even one other soul, the loss of the sense of the reality held within my mind leaves me utterly blank and empty, but for words.

  Words, indeed. Words keep coming—in the form of questions. I interrogate myself as to precisely what the nature of those sensations were, I continue to demand of myself that I remember exactly what happened when (which I am now not so certain I got right when I wrote it all down), to the point that I am now asking myself whether there even was an End of the World!

  I could, simply, be mad.

  I tap these words into the keyboard that feels so familiar to me I could swear that it must always have been mine.

  Yes, yes, there is Bower. Bower uses words and offers a certain thin presence. But Bower's words come as a mechanical voice issuing from quadraphonic speakers embedded in the very fabric of this room, and Bower's presence is a holographic icon that hovers above the screen where the words I tap out appear so that I may correct any typos or inaccuracies at the moment of writing them (though not later, for I do not know how to alter what I wrote earlier, and Bower says that I must not).

  The icon that is Bower is gesturing now. The voice that is Bower tells me that I must put down the new memory, the one that interrupted my telling of the old. I must not, that extremely flat, machine-like voice says, let the memory slip past me.

  Slip through my fingers. Evade me. Get away from me. Escape.

  To Bower, it seems, I am a capturer of memories. A captive who captures memories. And who then, by telling them, makes them unreal.

  Listen, Bower. I feel as if by speaking it I've lost what little memory I had, rather than gained mastery of who I have been. Are you stealing my memories, Bower? Are you stealing my sense of reality? Is that the point of the exercise? Is that why I have been brought here?

  How paranoid that sounds. Perhaps I am mad. Having made up Bower. Thinking I hear mechanical voices, believing I see holographic images. Perhaps I am not writing on a keyboard but am tapping my fingers on a tabletop, putting it all into words—losing all that I care for—to humor a delusion.

  If I remembered my name, would it be the same thing? Would I then lose all chance of ever discovering myself?

  Bower may know my name. And simply be withholding it from me. For whatever reason. Which may serve me well, inadvertently. Because I think now that I do not want to be called by a name, names being such all-defining functions.

  Bower, listen. I will get to the memory you are demanding when I'm ready. All that matters, you told me when I first sat down at this keyboard, is that I write out words. You said that anything I chose to write would be acceptable. Since I am the one generating language here, and not you, since I am the one saying “I"—and belie
ve me, Bower, it has not escaped my notice that you tell me nothing of yourself, not even whether you are an independent consciousness speaking through a machine, or simply a machine—since I am the “I” in these words, it is my will that operates in this exercise, not yours (even if it is ultimately your will that I write here at all).

  The matter of the human hand caressed to such effect by the so very large, so very other hand strikes me now as absurd. (As though I cannot believe in my own passion! Which has, indeed, vanished, as though the absurdity made it disintegrate under scrutiny.) Those bleachers in the park—a park in my memory, Bower, and yes it's true that that other kind of memory increases through my having articulated its specificity—giving me Volunteer Park, which I remember not in January, which is when I was there at the End of the World, but in the spring, when the rhodies and camellias and azaleas are so dazzlingly brilliant against clean, sparkling blue sky—dogs chasing sticks, bare-chested young men throwing Frisbees, couples sprawled in the grass, the old relic of a water tower solid among the cedars and hemlocks, the city spread grandly across the western horizon, the panes of glass in the conservatory glittering with sun—that texture is there, now, and is something I have gained from the exercise, rather than lost. But the texture of reality of that January scene—no. I do not believe it now.

  If I dreamed, I might be able to say with some certainty that all I've described of that January so far is as a dream now. I can't say it, though, since I have no memory—which is to say, personal knowledge—of what it is to dream, and to know how the memory of a dream compares with the memory of real life.

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  4.

  So no, Bower, it simply will not do to describe the fragment that drifts hazily through my thoughts, a fragment that alone makes me feel in my body and in my heart, a fragment that grants me a sense of reality for even possessing it. Before destroying it, too, a fragment that fits nowhere but simply is, I want to make a test. I want to describe what I remember since I woke in this particular place. I want to see if describing it changes the feel of it—a place I cannot lose, since I am here, now, at the moment of writing. These more recent memories, which make up my consciousness of who I am now, and what life I am living (if this is, indeed, a life, being empty of all but the stark physical fact of my organism's functioning, empty of social relations, empty of the things that make life worth living at all), these I will put to the test, since they all fit so neatly and make the greatest sense—and bring me no emotional affect whatsoever. Thus:

  She woke in utter blankness, to the flat sterile white of artificial light. The blankness was blankness of thought. Her first thought was a comment on her perception of a sound like a cymbal being lightly tapped in a fast, unvarying rhythm. Next, a mechanical voice spoke to her: “Are you conscious? How do you feel?"

  She looked around the room and saw that, apart from her and the apparatus in which she was standing, it was empty. The voice issued from nowhere in particular. It sounded, simply, there, outside her body, quietly nearby, but closer neither to one ear than to the other. She said, “There is a noise in my ears, like a drum-set cymbal,” and felt briefly, sharply irritated by it.

  "There's little ambient noise in this room,” the voice said. “You're not used to the quiet, that's all. You won't be bothered by it for long."

  And that must have been true, for with the voice's posing the next question, all perception of the noise vanished. “Are you emotionally distressed?” the voice asked.

  She looked at the bareness around her and said, “Why would I be emotionally distressed?"

  "Do you know where you are?"

  She was, simply, blank, and so replied quite offhand, “In an empty room, I suppose."

  "What is the last thing you remember before coming to consciousness?"

  She looked around the room yet again, then touched her head (which she found had been denuded of hair), and examined as much of her body—which she discovered to be naked—as she could see. Nothing struck her, except that her body was Caucasian and female and looked right to her own gaze.

  The voice said, “Will it surprise you to hear that you are no longer on your native planet?"

  She looked at her palm, at the grid scoring the Mound of Venus, at the abruptly short Life Line, at the messiness of the Heart Line. She felt neither surprised nor reminded of what she might already have known.

  She felt, simply, blank.

  "You were in a park,” the voice said. “You were sitting on bleachers. For a while there was someone holding your hand."

  Someone holding your hand. She continued to look at her palm, then turned it over and looked at the knuckles, at the creamy smoothness of the skin lightly covering prominent blue veins.

  She turned her hand over again and touched her wrist and ran her fingers up along the tendons. Oh ... yes. Yes, someone had been holding her hand. Her mouth filled with saliva. Her nipples burned. Her crotch became urgently moist and throbbing. She said, thinking only of how she needed shielding from the eyes she assumed must accompany the voice, “Where are my clothes?” And so saying, she remembered the clothes she had been wearing while sitting on the bleachers, the clothes she had worn at the End of the World.

  "I remember the bleachers,” she said. “I remember the End of the World.” So she wasn't on Earth? But that fit, didn't it, with the End of the World. There might no longer be an Earth suitable for human habitation, for everywhere there had been burning and pollution and the rolling-in of Nuclear Winter without the explosion (as far as she knew) of even one nuclear weapon.

  "Excellent, excellent,” the voice said.

  A doorway appeared in the wall. She passed through it into a second room that she found much like the first, except that it had a narrow bed dressed in white linen, a basin and toilet, a desk with a computer terminal, but no apparatus like that she had been standing in. A long, loose cotton robe lay on the bed. She put this on and thought, suddenly, to wonder if she knew her own name—and realized she did not.

  The room had no clock, and the computer had none, either (at least not a user-friendly one), so she never had any notion of the measure of time passing. She did not get hungry; she was fed from time to time through an injection into her buttocks administered by a robotic arm that came out of the wall for that purpose. Every now and then the doorway appeared and she went back into the first room and stood under the apparatus, to offer her head to the hood that came down over it and her body to the instruments that robotic arms coldly and silently applied to the surface and poked into the orifices of her body. She found it a bland existence, boring and unremarkable except for the exercise of her memory and the stimulation that produced. She should have been feeling pain, I know, but from the moment of waking she never did. Except for the single, imagistic fragment of memory she turned over and over in her thoughts, she was empty. The destruction and ugliness of the End of the World might have been something she had witnessed in another lifetime, so remote that she couldn't feel even regret for that little she remembered, much less nostalgia for the loss of all that she could not.

  And so it still is. I've lost the power of that first fragment of memory and am now empty of all but the new one. The desire I felt is nothing to me since telling it, even less, I imagine, than a story told by someone else would be. If he—it—were to walk into this bare white room now, I doubt I'd feel much besides indifference—unless, perhaps, I'd feel fear, for the cruelty in his face, for the threat in the sheer size of his body. Though fear—I don't know, I'm not sure now what exactly it is. I felt it before, when I held that first memory in my mind unspoken and raw, but it's faded now to the knowledge that I once felt something I know enough to label fear.

  It would be a novelty to feel anything independent of the stimulus of memory. Bower offers no stimulus whatsoever, and it, or whatever lies behind it, seems interested only in taking what it can get from me. Therefore, what I want most is to hold onto the second fragment of memory, raw an
d unprocessed, lest I lose what little I have of a life.

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  5.

  Bower, I'm tired of your pestering me. There's nothing to my existence but that little untouched scrap of memory. Let me tell you: it's the memory alone that makes me feel I even have a body! There's really nothing in my mind but that one living memory—and the frozen, dead remains of the old one. Dead, yes! As though embalmed. The kernel handed over, the hull that remains is only an empty reminder of its former contents.

  The experiment was ill-conceived, I see that now. Since I don't feel anything in this place, I had nothing to lose in the telling of any experience I might have had in it (if my waking, and my few movements here could even be described as “experience").

  Lo, an interesting thought: perhaps this place I've come to is really the afterlife so many people on Earth believed in! After all, it's a sort of limbo where nothing happens, where one can feel nothing, know nothing, do nothing but simply exist. Perhaps a few memories remain after we die, to be extracted one by one, as some sort of payment for having lived. And then, when all the memories that can be scrounged out of the consciousness have been delivered (and have thereby lost all meaning to the human who once owned them), existence simply ceases from sheer etiolation.

  Yes, that sounds plausible, considering the situation here.

  Oh dear, oh dear, really, Bower, I feel as though you're reading over my shoulder. I can see you—or rather your icon—out of the corner of my eye, jumping violently up and down, as though with impatience or outrage (while your voice, of course, is its usual flat mechanical self). No, Bower, I don't really believe that. I'm just joking ... What? What? Will you repeat that?

  Insert a pause here: for I've just taken time out for a vocal conversation with Bower (and for some reason, they want me to write only with a keyboard and have not given me the option of voice-input). The gist of Bower's expostulations is this: they are not stealing my memories. I am sharing them—as I should, according to Bower, since I owe them for saving me from extinction and for keeping me “safe” and fed and sheltered. Furthermore, it is Bower's belief that even if a memory loses its zing after having been imparted, the mere imparting of it—or rather, my very articulation of it in words that my fingers input by way of keyboard—will inevitably trigger a new memory, as, indeed, I've seen happen.