Somewhere East of Life

by Brian W Aldiss

  So any memory-set, gathered from various stores in the brain, presented startling inexactitudes: lay revelations, mystic hiatuses. Burnell knew he was driving a vehicle across a tropical land and entering a dismal hut. He did not know who he was. Only that he was not Burnell.

  He was speaking a tongue unfamiliar to his everyday palate. He approached a woman who crouched by a bed, uttering words of consolation. She did not look up on his arrival. He moved nearer to her, hesitantly, to set a gnarled hand on her shoulder. Vision smudged hand and shoulder within the distortions of a tear.

  As she did, he too looked down at an emaciated child lying on a blanket. The blanket was red, black, mustard-yellow, and soiled. The child, a boy, was dead. He knew it had died of a variety of ills, mainly pneumonia, brought about by near-starvation. He had come from a township as fast as he could.

  The boy’s lips were drawn back, revealing pallid gums in a horrifying grimace. The teeth looked too large for the shrunken face. Ex-Burnell reached out and closed with his dark hand pale mouth and eyes. At this, the woman rose to her feet. She began to shriek, beating her head with clenched fists to allay mental pain with physical. She was wrapped in a material of bold design: strong blue flowers bursting from among green leaves. The flowers covered her from neck to ankle. Her broad handsome face was distorted with grief.

  Feeling his own weakness, Burnell stooped, tenderly lifting the dead child from the bed. He looked about him, uncertain whether or not a third party was with them in the hut. Flies kept up a menacing note. The boy’s body was appallingly light. Probably Burnell was the father of the weeping woman; probably she was the mother of the boy. Thought entered the captive memory or faded, like an uncertain radio signal. He had other people in mind, dark, concerned, slow-moving, some driving cattle before them.

  Slow-moving himself, he carried the boy from the hut into the eye of the sun. The veldt, the rough track, a dozen more huts, his vehicle—nothing else. The woman remained behind in the hut, standing against a wall, letting her grief pour from her. The blue flowers on her dress were drooping, drooping.

  The sun at zenith laid its weight on his shoulders. The world appeared dung-colored. Other people were arriving, all of them thin, the women thin as rakes, some carrying children, walking as if against a fog. Although they spoke the incomprehensible language, yet Burnell understood it, and replied. Each laid hands on his shoulders, where the deep hollows were, and on his face. Grief was shared by all means of communication in their power. All suffered alike. Sense of community was strong.

  He settled himself down under a dying tree—little more than its whiskered trunk remained, and one lopsided branch—easing himself down, still clutching the dead boy. Cross-legged in the stick of shade, he wrapped the body in the rug, hugged it, rocked it, cried for it and the promise of life which had fled. Other old men squatted by him, prodding gray fingers abstractedly in the dust.

  Burnell said to them, “We have not long before we follow the dear lad…”

  Heat dried the tears as fast as they formed.

  A last leaf fell from the one branch remaining above him. It floated down, to settle on the forehead of the dead boy. All the world was lost in contemplation of the leaf, as if it was a miraculous sign.

  It settled green on the wrinkled gray forehead. It turned yellow as he stared, altering its living form as it did so. Within minutes, it had withered and turned brown. It became nothing, and blew away on the lightest breeze. The cheek too was beginning to wither…

  “It’s not my child, not mine…” He was still speaking in the strange tongue even as the machine switched off.

  Sitting up in the plastic chair, Burnell focused on the scene round him. He was imprisoned in his glass booth; in the neighboring booth he saw Murray-Roberts, eyes closed as he lay back in his EMV chair. The store was still there, its shelves packed with imprisoned memories. He pushed up the headset and went to walk about, the sense of bereavement still heavy on him. He leaned against a fixture and took a snort of slap up both nostrils.

  Khan grinned at him, waving a lighted cigarette in friendly greeting. Burnell managed a feeble response.

  He paced up and down, arms folded across his chest. Almost as if the bullet continued to unravel in his head, he imagined the old black man, whom he had briefly been, going to the nearest city, Harare or wherever it might be, to sell his memories to raise cash. The EMV agent would have paid him almost nothing. Perhaps a dollar or two would be forthcoming for him to give to the mother of the dead boy.

  And the old man, being made free of all memory, would no longer carry a burden of grief. Wasn’t that the most immoral aspect of e-mnemonicvision?

  If I had my memory of Stephanie back, thought Burnell, would I not be retrieving an old grief of which at present I know nothing?

  Yet he forced himself back into the booth, to go on seeking through the illegal bullets, “Fabriqué en San Marino.” He tried the next one. It contained four sequences of memory from different sources, some longer than others, all less harrowing than the previous scene of death.

  He lived through a six-day voyage over a great reef, where he scuba-dived. The voyage ended with a huge party on a small island. Here he took part in a moonlit orgy.

  Then he was a witless brute of a man, living in an apartment in a bleak township where snow lay thick. Among horrendous drunken bouts and fights came an exhilarating drive over tundra to shoot reindeer. In the dim mind was no compassion for the slaughtered beauties sprawling dead in the snow.

  He was a woman, successful and high-spirited. She ran a popular clothing store in a Patagonian town, with occasional buying and partying sprees in Buenos Aires. Her cherished memory was of winning a prize in a downtown dance hall, which brought her an interview on an evening television program.

  He spent a tense but uneventful week in a small picturesque village in the Alps, where a married couple lived in fear of their mentally deficient son. The couple once discussed selling their memories to EMV in order to raise money to send the son to a good safe institution.

  While they lasted, these memory episodes were as real to Burnell as memories of his own life. They filled his brain. He came out of them exhausted. In some of the episodes, he had gained a clear picture of what he looked like; the cheerful Patagonian lady spent many minutes every day scrutinizing herself in the mirror; in other episodes, he knew little of resemblances—the drunken reindeer-hunter saw no one clearly. Lying in the plastic chair, he wondered about the rigors of human existence, and about the people he had been. The wish was strong to learn what had happened to them after their memory had been stolen, for he briefly knew them better than he knew his friends.

  Yet their joys, their sorrows, their unresolved problems, grew faint fairly quickly; no transference was made in Khan’s EMV projector from short-term to long-term memory. Already the poor old man with his dead grandson was beginning to sink from mind. Only a falling leaf of sadness remained.

  Burnell turned to the next bullet, labeled “Shirts in a Cupboard of Linen.” At the touch of the Go button he was transformed.

  He was aware of his new mnemonic person as little more than a pair of boots, a hard body, a pair of arms with sleeves rolled up. In one of his hands he was clutching a sickle. Heat made his arms glisten with sweat. He felt himself to be young and lusty as he inhaled the warmth of an early summer afternoon. It was England, and the cuckoo called distantly across the fields. Peace was like the flavor of fresh-picked mint in his mind. His sickle moved in practiced sweeps. He was cutting down cow parsley and goose-grass.

  Whoever he was, he worked his way along steadily, avoiding some camellias which had finished flowering. His curved blade whispered its way through the severing stalks. Every now and again, straightening his back, he caught glimpses of the garden and a smoothly mowed lawn. Of the house, only a peak of roof was visible.

  He saw a woman walking beside an ornamental pool, tall and fair. Tantalizingly, her back was to him. When he wiped the sweat from
his brow, she was gone. He bent his back and continued with the work, enjoying the rhythms of it, the swing of his strong right arm.

  The strip of bank was finished. He raked into a heap what had fallen and wiped the sickle blade on his jeans before laying it on an oak bench. By now, the mild sun was lower, slanting toward an avenue of lime trees, and the day at its most perfect. He walked slowly across a courtyard cut diagonally by shadow and into the house by a rear door.

  Sunlight soaking his retina painted the interior in reds and greens until his vision cleared, as he climbed a narrow back stair. It was dark on the stairway and on the upper landing which led to a bathroom. The framed and glazed pictures on the passage wall yielded only reflections, not the prints themselves but ghosts of light, back-gleams of distant doors and windows.

  The small bathroom was wood-panelled, its panels painted white, with tiles above the basin. Yellow soap lay by the chrome taps. Tree tops were visible through the small high window. He pulled off his damp shirt and washed his face and torso, drying them on a thick blue towel.

  In so doing, he caught a glimpse of his face in the mirror to one side of the basin. Sharp-featured, red-faced, fair—was it fair?—hair.

  Leaving the shirt on the floor, he trod over it and went across to an airing-cupboard to find a clean one. Opening the door, he was met by a crisp fresh smell as of newly-baked biscuits.

  Inside the cupboard, neatly laundered and set on shelves, clothes lay in immaculate array. Ironed sheets were stored on a low shelf, with duvet covers on a shelf above. Shirts hung on a rack in orderly fashion. There were piles of clean handkerchiefs and stocks of women’s garments. Dresses hung crisp and creaseless.

  Burnell reached forward towards the shirts and—

  —without pause was running down the right wing of a football pitch with the ball at his feet. Green field, blur of crowd in a stadium. Cheering. The Italian Luigi Raniero, charging toward him. The roar of spectators went unheeded in his heightened state. In his determination, he knew nothing would stop him. He swerved in the split second Raniero was at him, tapping the ball neatly round to the left of his opponent’s boots, instantly recapturing it. Ahead lay the goalmouth and—

  He squeezed the Off button on the zapper he held in his fist. The memory died. He was back in his chair, gasping with shock. Bootleg memory bullets often switched in this fashion from one fragment to another fragment, completely unrelated. The bullets contained no credits or fade-ins, no editorial matter. Most—like this one—were not edited at all. In a composite bullet, snatches of various memories were thrown together, often lopped from longer memory sequences.

  Leaning back, shutting his eyes, Burnell let his pulse rate sink to a more normal level. Damn the footballer! He concentrated his thought on the earlier episode. Had he stumbled on a fragment of his own memory or not? Had he once been the young man with the sickle in the pleasant garden? Had that been his more youthful face glimpsed in the mirror?

  How to be certain? Although he believed for an instant he had caught a moment of his own past life, he recognized how greatly that belief was prompted by hope. The mystery of the EMV medium was how often vital things—like personal identity—failed to come through; personal identity was so integral it took second place to such matters as the sweep of the sickle, the details of the bathroom. Memory—it was an old saying—”played strange tricks.”

  And. A trivial hour in a summer’s afternoon… the passage of possibly nine or ten years… youth’s happy habit of inattention…

  Who was the woman? Whose the house?

  His shrink in the Frankfurt institution had told him that one fragment of retrieved memory, implanted in the brain, could reanimate others. Awakened dialogue between hippocampus and cortex was such that messages would leap synapses and propagate adjacent neurons, until what was lost would be recovered, to a limited extent.

  What the shrink had not touched on was the question now facing Burnell. Where did memory shade into imagination? The Budapest theft had left him as disadvantaged as an old man, unsure whether what came to mind was what he thought he remembered or what he remembered he thought.

  In the early days of his association with Stephanie, he had—hadn’t he?—bought a derelict country house, with the aid of a loan from his father. She and he—hadn’t they?—had worked on restoring the place. As rooms and lawns were re-created, and the light let in, they had been wildly happy—hadn’t they? But—had those rooms, those lawns, been the ones he experienced in “Shirts in a Cupboard of Linen?”

  He had felt no undeniable stab of recognition. The fragment, visually lucid, proved unclear. Perhaps the past was always unclear, crumbling even as it traveled through the processing plant of the present.

  He had managed no close look at the woman walking by the ornamental fish pool. But the courtyard, the side of the building, the house itself, the stairs, the upper landing, the bathroom… They had not seemed distinctive, were indeed common to thousands of English homes. The identical brand of yellow soap reposed in identical basins in thousands of houses. And of course the original owner of the memory had taken no specific notice of that with which he was already familiar.

  But the airing-cupboard. The owner of the memory had looked into the cupboard merely to find a clean shirt. Its orderliness he had taken for granted.

  What lingered with Burnell was that orderliness.

  Supposing he had come on a fragment of his own memory, had just seen himself, had almost been himself, as he was possibly five or six years earlier. Then the woman by the pool could have been—most likely was—Stephanie, that dear young tender Stephanie when they were first in love, when magic still enfolded their relationship, when one emblem of their love had been the resurrection of a mansion and the flinging open of its windows. The time of enchantment.

  If all that were so, then the orderliness of the airing-cupboard might provide a clue as to why they had parted. Perhaps Stephanie had found him too untidy in his habits. Perhaps he had found her too pernickety… How trivial such shortcomings seemed in retrospect, viewed from a shabby plastic chair in Central Asia. This was where his questing nature, and a blindness to domestic virtues, had brought him.

  That small room, just large enough to walk into, was almost a secret compartment. It was part of Stephanie’s domain in the old house, remaining in darkness for most of the time. Stephanie stocked it with the clothes she had washed and ironed, no one but Stephanie. Not so much as a sock there but knew her caring touch. And had he for some reason thrown it all away?

  His shoulder was being shaken. Murray-Roberts was saying, “Wake up, old stick.”

  18

  The Friendship Bridge

  On the following morning, a member of the Hotel Ashkhabad’s staff pushed a letter under the door of Burnell’s room. It arrived in a blue envelope with a Spanish stamp on it.

  Burnell stared at it from his bed, eyes half open. It was without meaning. His dreams as usual had been bad. He rose shakily and went into the shower.

  As the chlorinated water trickled over him, he thought of the EMV bullet he had bought expensively from Mr. Khan. He still could not decide whether or not he had actually stumbled across a fragment of his own memory. Back in Frankfurt, he could have an expert reinsert it into his brain and lock it into the declarative memory. In that way, he would reclaim at least something of what had passed.

  Uncertainty held him back. An ascetic side to his nature disdained the idea of having false memories inserted, as many people did, to supplement their impoverished lives with transplants of other days they had never experienced.

  He lived out of his suitcase. Samsonite was his home. His clothes, both laundered and soiled, lay about in the room. Forgetting to lock his case when leaving the hotel on the previous day, he had left papers and books strewn everywhere. A half-eaten melon attracted small dung-colored flies on the window sill. His alarm clock lay face down on the bed. As he sought about for a clean shirt, he perceived the general disorder. So this was
the kind of man he was…

  His mind returned obsessively to his ex-wife. Perhaps the clue to the break between them lay within that glimpsed airing-cupboard, among those sweet-smelling ledges. In that hot little closet of hers, where all was stowed neatly away, awaiting inspection, the tidiness of her mind was revealed. Everything ready to wear, pristine, tended… Had he tended their relationship? Surely he had been tender. Perhaps his mind had been too much on his career. He could not believe he had been unfaithful to her.

  “Stephanie.” He spoke her name aloud, trying it out on his lips. The airing-cupboard served as a revelation. Yet he could in no way be certain it had ever been theirs. All that had been theirs had been stolen.

  Again he found himself up against the brick wall of a question: how does a man manage to get through his life? What is there that helps him to swim through a sea of circumstance? He had been the first-born of his parents; traditional wisdom had it that first-borns always make the most difficult passage through life.

  Half clothed, he went over to the door and picked up the Spanish letter. Without thought, he ripped open the blue envelope.

  Roy,

  Will this reach you? Have I ever entrusted a letter to the mails of Tartary before? And other enthralling questions.

  Most enthralling of all, how is my unremembering lover faring? I imagine you searching for samovars in Samarkand and suchlike.

  I’m just back in Madrid from the mountains, having persuaded our WACH Director—not the most lovable of women—to part-finance the dig progressing in the Sierra de la Demanda. This project is so important, worth sacrificing just one mouldering baroque church for. They’re building a new road up to San Pineda as more experts are called to the site. And—this is the hot news—a pictograph has been found on one of the rocks. Well, we now know it to be a painting though it much resembles a big squashed insect. Imagine! The earliest ever representation of a human. We’re getting in experts in AMS radiocarbon dating who will give an exact date. That will take a while.