Somewhere East of Life

by Brian W Aldiss

  “Good night,” Madge Murray-Roberts said crisply to Burnell, and to her husband, “Don’t be late, Rob, darling, will you?”

  They watched her retreating figure until she entered the front door and switched on a hall light.

  The back seat of the Fiat was cluttered with tennis racquets and various items of sports gear. Burnell squeezed out and sat in the front with Murray-Roberts. They wove their way into less salubrious areas of the city, where the effects of the day’s sandstorm were still apparent.

  “You’re sure you want to do this?” Murray-Roberts asked. “I shouldn’t be on this kick if the ambassador was here. You know EMV’s illegal in this country.”

  “It’s a must,” Burnell said, fighting an internal fight to become more sober.

  “Your pal Dr. Haydar phoned after leaving you, just before the phone lines went down. I’d steer clear of him if I were you. He’s a known drug-runner across frontiers. We don’t have anything to do with him officially, but we have stretched points in his favor.”

  “So he gave you a name?”

  “Syria’s rather popular with Britain just now, can’t think why. Seems Britain’s popular with Syria too—again, can’t think why.”

  “They read Thomas Hardy.”

  “Bugger it, should have taken that last turning.”

  They were stuck in a traffic jam at a crossroads Burnell now recognized; he was becoming familiar with the geography of the city. A camel harnessed to a flat truck was being cantankerous and blocking the road. Burnell was glad of the momentary halt, having many things on his mind and not knowing which should take precedence.

  “Is your wife a teetotaller?”

  “Madge is a Cumbrian lass. She doesn’t get on with Russian food.” This remark was followed by a ruminative pause. “You were playing with fire, grabbing that girl singer the way you did. You’re not in Europe now, you must remember.” Another pause. “I’ve a rooted objection to having my tool sucked.”

  “You’re an unusual man, Robby,” Burnell murmured.

  Murray-Roberts was following his own obscure line of thought. He said nothing more until the traffic was moving again.

  As he steered through the evening rush, tooting with the best of them, past the camel-colored Iraqi tour buses rife outside the Hotel Jubilinaya, the first secretary explained that no one—not the embassy, not Dr. Haydar—could engineer an audience with the president, certainly not on matters as personal as a stolen memory; a stolen memory, he added, rolling out the words, “with considerable erotic element…”

  “Suppose Diyanizov had a copy of your memory, he’d not be likely to admit it. Maybe not even to his nearest and dearest, if he has any of that ilk. The exception being the Argentinian wife, of course.”

  “Your wife dislikes me.”

  “She’s a bit shy.”

  Chinese-built trams rattled along the center of the avenue as they eased their way down the long Ulitza Engleska. The name was a reminder that the British had once been here, in the dog days of Empire. A contingent of the British army had defeated the Red Army near Ashkhabad in 1918, and briefly occupied the area.

  Remaining of brooding appearance, Murray-Roberts condescended to say that because of the British occupation, almost a century past, one still saw fair-haired chaps about—not all Russian.

  Some owed their existence to the fruits of British loins from Glasgow and Liverpool, several generations ago.

  “What was the place like then, do you think?”

  Murray-Roberts gave a snort. “Prosperous.”

  After they passed a busy market, its fruit stalls illuminated by kerosine lamps, the street grew drabber, the pedestrians less willing to move out of the way of vehicles. The car slowed to a crawl.

  “It’s about here… Dog’s Piss Alley. My wife was married previously, you know.”

  “You’ve been here before, Rob?” Burnell stared hopelessly at the chaotic street scene.

  Murray-Roberts was deliberately non-committal. “I know the area. Bastard called Reggie. Went bust.”

  He turned down a side street where the tarmacadam gave out. The street appeared to be barricaded with posters and advertising signs for everything from athlete’s foot ointment and condoms to hair tonics, as little shop jostled with little shop. A clump of bamboo arched over the road. Men in tarbooshes sat relaxedly in front of their stalls.

  The Fiat pulled up next to a chaykhana from which music tinkled. The night was as purple as a bruise. As the two men climbed out of the car, Burnell stared restlessly about, looking for he knew not what. The theatricality of the scene almost persuaded him it had all been staged for his benefit.

  Smells of sweetness and dirt encompassed the people drifting arm in arm down the middle of the street, the stallholders, and the idlers who waited in doorways. Sometimes those doorways with their peeling paint sheltered sleepers wrapped in sheets like corpses. This appeared to be a foreign quarter; to Burnell’s ill-informed eye, most of the people he saw were Afghan or Pakistani. A woman looked down on the scene from her balcony, to which a flowering creeper aspired. What, he wondered idly, was her life like; to read her memory via EMV would be instructive.

  “What a dump, eh?” remarked Murray-Roberts.

  Burnell intimated that he recollected Iceland as being worse.

  A cart creaked by, bearing empty oil drums, with a musical note at every revolution of its wheels. Barefoot urchins ceased throwing sand at each other in order to throw it at the cart. Cicadas chirraped endlessly, out of tune with the cart wheels. The great noble hump of a mosque could be seen through trees. In the tight-packed street, an enviable sense of continuity with the past prevailed.

  Clearer-headed now, Burnell breathed in scents of cooking. Apart from the cables trailing like lianas along the line of shops, apart from the naked electric light bulbs which, woven among the stands of bamboo, cast bars across the pavements, this scene could belong to any date in the past—how many centuries? He lingered, enjoying both the durability of the scene and something responsive in himself which was not transient.

  “Let’s go,” said Murray-Roberts.

  Why did he like what Nastiklof had called “these scruffy places?” A Georgian in Tbilisi had talked about the poet Lermontov, and of Lermontov’s love of nature and the Caucasus. He had quoted a Russian writer’s verdict on the poet, that Lermontov had Vamour extra-terrestre pour la terre. Perhaps Burnell had that same crazed love—though less for nature itself than for nature where it became frayed round the edges. The scruffy places.

  He wanted to linger, despite his friend’s call. A woman sang in a high register from the chaykhana, while bats fluttered round an overhead lamp. Burnell experienced once more the melancholy romanticism of the East, that bottomless sense of joy and hopelessness, the drug so hard to cure once it had entered the system. People passing by were slow and courteous in their movements. Which one among them had ever thought of painting his house or insuring his car or engaging a gardener or buying a dog license?

  Perhaps he was still far from sober. This was a land of nightingales, sewers, and roses. Soon winter would fall. Everyone would freeze in their inadequate housing. He loved the place.

  It had been a good day, so full, so unexpected. And now an EMV shop. And who could say what might happen on the morrow, when he visited the Friendship Bridge. The lecture with that madman Nastiklof had been a lot of fun, at least in retrospect. Just as well, really, that the Russian had stopped his talk. At the mere mention of archetypes, the eyes of the students had started to glaze over: the closing of their minds had been almost audible. Funny how many people found the most important things in the world either boring or just beyond their compass. So much for their shagging compasses…

  And with that reflection went a familiar ground bass, the mixture of awe and contempt in which he held most things, himself included.

  He turned and followed Murray-Roberts down a narrow alleyway beside the teahouse. An animal slunk into the shadows.

&n
bsp; From the rear of the teahouse came normal culinary sounds, a rattle of metal utensils, knives being sharpened, plates being stacked, a waiter being yelled at. Taking a short break, a cook leaned against a side door. He was singing to himself and took no notice of two passing Europeans.

  At the end of the alley was a muddle of huts. Men could be discerned by the huts, waiting in the darkness for the millennium. To one side stood a large building constructed of breeze blocks. Fruit bats poured startlingly from an enormous quercus tree overshadowing the building. Murray-Roberts banged at a metal door.

  “This is it.” He had instinctively lowered his voice.

  “Although it’s illegal.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Although it’s illegal?”

  “It’s not difficult to buy off a magistrate or two… Where is he?”

  The metal door opened a fraction. Murray-Roberts said something in Turkic. The door closed again, and then was reopened. They entered.

  A beefy man with every indication of being a chucker-out, including the beetling brows, the steroid muscles, the statutory earring in his left ear, bowed to them and held out his right hand. Murray-Roberts deposited folding money—a wad of new-printed manats—in it.

  They had entered a large store, lit by flickering tubes of yellow neon. This was a shoddy plastic supermarket of dreamtime, a new Aladdin’s cave, rendered claustrophobic by head-high lines of racks dividing the space into narrow aisles, like the runs in a rat maze. Every rack was filled with the multi-colored plastic cases of e-mnemonicvision bullets. The bullets were arranged into categories and paraded in their thousands, their hundreds of thousands. They contained real memories, however acquired, from men, women, and children of all races and creeds. It would have been possible for an alien visitor from another galaxy, had it sufficient idle curiosity for the task, to patch together, from this shed alone, a history of the multitudinous human race: a history bizarre but possibly not bizarre enough to hold anyone’s attention for more than, say, a million years, Earth-time.

  Murray-Roberts moved down one of the narrow aisles without hesitation. Burnell followed like a faithful hound.

  At the far end of the building, near an emergency exit, was a glass-fronted office, the picture of untidiness. Ranked VDUs exhibited minuscule fragmentary replicas of the whole shop, implying theft was a popular sport here. Perched on a high stool sat a small wizened man in a yellow silk jacket. He climbed stiffly from his stool and greeted Murray-Roberts with courtesy, his Oriental face creasing in a smile of recognition. Murray-Roberts introduced him as Mr. Khan. Mr. Khan put aside a cigarette, coughed, and shook Burnell’s hand.

  Burnell explained his problem. Khan looked sad, and resumed his cigarette. Slowly, he indicated with his left hand, raising it to head level and drawing it through one hundred and eighty degrees, his immense stock. He spoke in hesitant German. Evidently the phrase “a needle in a haystack” had not occurred to him; but he spoke sorrowfully of the trade in which he engaged merely in order to support a numerous family.

  It was, he admitted, not the most honest of trades. To add to all his other problems, e-mnemonicvision had been banned throughout Central Asia because of a high pornographic content. Were the years of memory stolen from Burnell of high pornographic content?

  “I’m given to understand,” said Burnell, with a degree of reserve, “that what was saved from my stolen ten years for the entertainment of voyeurs was, firstly, my academic knowledge, and, secondly, my courtship and marriage.”

  Khan nodded. “High pornographic content.”

  He went on to say that memory-theft occurred all over the world, but mainly in a few centers where the technical skill existed; Hong Kong, San Diego, Buenos Aires, London, Budapest, Johannesburg, Djakarta, Copenhagen, etc. “Mainly the places you would expect.” He intimated that Burnell was fortunate; in inexperienced hands, the actual operation could prove fatal, leading to total amnesia or, in a number of cases, to permanent coma. “Called PVS,” Mr. Khan murmured, turning his eyes apotropaically to the ceiling.

  Some of the memories in his store had been legitimately obtained and properly produced. They issued, in the main, from the big EMV studios in Los Angeles, Tokyo, Munich, Paris, Bombay, and Singapore. Many people were ready to sell exceptional periods of their life memories for handsome sums. Thousands of memories, some renowned, represented fragments of real lives, happy, melancholy, crazy. Sad memories—deaths, suicides, maltreated pets and children—had enjoyed a great vogue with voyeurs in West and East a year or two previously.

  Many EMV voyeurs drove themselves mad, piling false memory on false memory before the previous ones had faded.

  No, he said, he had no facilities here to fix a memory permanently. His was just a store with voy facilities. Any memory you viewed here soon faded, like a headache.

  Khan shuffled over to the nearest rack. He gestured toward his stock, pointing here and there, explaining in his accented German. While legitimate bullets were labeled correctly, stolen memories were often deliberately mis-labeled, to foil detection. Stolen memory bullets generally contained a muddle of unedited material from various sources. It was impossible for any voyeur to know whose memory he was experiencing.

  Seeing Burnell’s expression, Khan raised a knowing finger and conducted him to a side table.

  Following instructions from their mutual friend, Dr. Haydar, Khan had set to one side six recently-acquired EMV bullets from his stock. He showed them to Burnell. Burnell picked them up with reverence. The bullets resembled tubes of acrylic or oil paint, having a blade end and a blunt end. Their cases bore the legend “Fabriqué en San Marino.” This, Khan said, meant almost certainly that the bullets originated from an illegal EMV studio in Budapest; it was the studio’s way of covering its tracks. The registration number was very likely fake. No, the name of Antonescu meant nothing to him.

  “Do you buy for President Diyanizov?” Burnell asked.

  Half closing his rheumy eyes, Khan gave him a sidelong glance. “Mem Herr, I am merely a poor store-owner. Ask me no such question. ‘Die Welt zerfallt in Tatsachen.’ But there are no facts in my store, only illusions.”

  “What’s he on about?” Murray-Roberts asked.

  “Believe it or not, he’s quoting Wittgenstein: ‘The world divides into facts.’ Rob, I’m going to have to voy these bullets.”

  Murray-Roberts scratched his head. “You’re not likely to find your stolen years. You know that? Also, keep the intensity low, take my tip. I’ve known poor wee buggers who’ve blown their brains out on EMV.”

  Burnell pulled a cheerful face. “Don’t worry. People are always blowing their private lives apart. It’s all a matter of lifestyle.”

  “Go ahead and good luck. Hope you will find your memory. I can always amuse myself in here.”

  His heart beating rapidly, Burnell sorted through the cases. Their titles, in Turkic, German, and English, suggested a slightly tangential acquaintance with at least the latter tongue. “Animals Sequestered with a Green.” “Not in My House Ran Any Rivers.” “In the Hat Warfare Jumper.” Other titles were equally informative.

  A row of e-mnemonicvision cubicles stood against one wall. Burnell hurried into the nearest. He seated himself in the chair, adjusting the projector over his head. He switched on according to instructions. A small panel with LCDs lit. He inserted the first bullet into the system unit and touched a couple of keys.

  His eyes closed. Almost immediately he lost any clear perception of his surroundings—an instance of how quickly short-term memory could decay. In what felt like the very marrow of his being, electric current stimulated the amacrine cells of his brain. It tickled. Next moment, the synaptic transfer was made, and the memory data digitally stored in the bullet flooded his cortex with mnemons.

  The vehicle was bumping across a scrub-filled plain. Every now and then, trees remained, deformed not only from drought. Their lower branches had been hacked away for fuel. The lone occupant of this desolate scene w
as a heavy bird which scuttled from their path and flew off.

  Burnell—or his substitute—was in the cab, driving. His hands were on the wheel, black, sinewy, holding tight as the brown country jarred past. Sitting beside him was another black, wrapped in a worn green cloak. His face was not remembered. Discomfort was remembered: discomfort and the dusty trail through a denuded land.

  The interior of the hut was dim. Dry heat and light outside, where the vehicle baked, then shadow as he stepped inside. Its details were too familiar to register. A greeting, a sense of relief, a sip of water. Flies buzzing—the very note of frustration.

  The world of memory was not like the real world. Nor was it like a movie shown in cinemas (though movies now tended to imitate the complexity and vagueness/pointillisme/sharpness of memory). Nor was it like scenes in novels or in paintings. It was its own art form, more curious than could have been anticipated: often a patchwork of association.

  If the impossible were achieved, and Burnell had been able to travel back to the early nineteenth century in his home country—say to the year 1834, when the Houses of Parliament burned down—he would have found it disorienting. He would have understood the speech of the people, but not their underlying assumptions, not many of their concerns. The taste of the food would have been strange. The very sound of musical instruments would be foreign to his ears. The look of everywhere and everything would have presented challenges.

  The present knew of the 1830s, just before the invention of the camera, only through old prints and paintings and the raft of the printed word—contemporary and more recent records. The past had become tidied, translated, reinterpreted for a different sensibility. The image of 1834 was familiar enough: the reality would have been vastly more preposterous and alarming. Of memory, the same could be said: the storage system was incomplete and self-editing.

  The shock of the old was one of the attractions of e-mnemonicvision. And yet—and yet—who would be naive enough to expect Leonardo Da Vinci’s painting of “The Last Supper” to be an accurate represention of that hasty snack which Jesus took with his disciples? Everything must undergo transformation: and to that process which a human body must submit, human memory must also conform.