“True,” Sax said.
“He mostly used his memory for what he found interesting. An interest in meaning, he called it. But in 2060 he remembered all of a list of twenty-three words he had learned for a casual test in 2032. And so on.”
“I’d like to learn more about him.”
“Yes,” Ursula said. “He was less of a freak than some of the others. The so-called calendar calculators, or the ones who can recall visual images presented to them in great detail — they’re often impaired in other parts of their lives.”
Marina nodded. “Like the Latvians Shereskevskii and the man known as V.P., who remembered truly huge quantities of random fact, in tests and in general. But both of them experienced synesthesia.”
“Hmm. Hippocampal hyperactivity, perhaps.”
“Perhaps.”
They mentioned several more. A man named Finkelstein, who could calculate the election returns for the entire United States faster than any calculators of the 1930s. Tal-mudic scholars who had not only memorized the Talmud, but also the location of every word on every page. Oral storytellers who knew Homeric amounts of verse by heart. Even people who were said to have used the Renaissance palace-of-memory method to great effect; Sax had tried that himself after his stroke, with fair results. And so on.
“These extraordinary abilities don’t seem to be the same as ordinary memory,” Sax observed.
“Eidetic memory,” Marina said. “Based on images that return in great detail. It’s said to be the way that most children remember. Then at puberty, the way we remember changes, at least for most of us. It’s as if these people don’t ever metamorphose away from the children’s way.”
“Hmm,” Sax said. “Still, I wonder if they are the upper extremes of continuous distributions of ability, or whether they are examples of a rare bimodal distribution.”
Marina shrugged. “We don’t know. But we have one here to study.”
“You do!”
“Yes. It’s Zeyk. He and Nazik have moved here so that we can study him. He’s being very cooperative; she’s encouraging him. There might as well be some good that comes of it, she says. He doesn’t like his ability, you see. In him it doesn’t have much to do with computational tricks, although he’s better at that than most of us. But he can remember his past in extraordinary detail.”
“I think I remember hearing about this,” Sax said. The two women laughed, and startled, he joined in. “I’d like to see what you’re doing with him.”
“Sure. He’s down in Smadar’s lab. It’s interesting. They view vids from events that he witnessed, and ask him questions about the events, and he talks about what he remembers while they’ve got all the latest scans running on his brain.”
“Sounds very interesting.”
Ursula led him down to a long dimmed lab, in which some operating beds were occupied by subjects undergoing scans of one sort or another, colored images flickering on screens or holographically in the air; while other beds were empty, and somehow ominous.
After all the young native subjects, when they came to Zeyk he looked to Sax like a specimen of Homo habilis, whisked out of prehistory to be tested for mental capacity. He was wearing a helmet studded with contact points on its inner surface, and his white beard was damp, his eyes sunken and weary in bruise-colored, withered skin. Nazik sat on the other side of his bed, holding his hand in hers. Hovering in the air over a holograph next to her was a detailed three-dimensional transparent image of some part of Zeyk’s brain; through it colored light was flickering continuously, like heat lightning, creating patterns of green and red and blue and pale gold. On the screen by the bed jiggled images of a small tent settlement, after dark. A young woman, presumably the researcher Smadar, was asking questions.
“So the Ahad attacked the Fetah?”
“Yes. Or they were righting, and my impression was that the Ahad started it. But someone was setting them on each other, I thought. Cutting slogans in the windows.”
“Did the Muslim Brotherhood often have internal conflicts this severe?”
“At that time they did. But why on that night, I don’t know. Someone set them on each other. It was as if everyone had suddenly gone crazy.”
Sax felt his stomach tighten. Then he felt chilled, as if the ventilation system had let in the air of the cold morning outside. The little tent town in the vids was Nicosia. They were talking about the night John Boone had been killed. Smadar was watching the vids, asking questions. Zeyk was being recorded. Now he looked at Sax, nodded a greeting. “Russell was there also.”
“Were you,” Smadar said, looking at Sax speculatively.
“Yes.”
It was something Sax had not thought about in years; decades; a century, perhaps. He realized that he had never been back to Nicosia again, not even once since that night. As if he had been avoiding it. Repression, no doubt. He had been very fond of John, who had worked for him for several years before the assassination. They had been friends. “I saw him attacked,” he said, surprising them all.
“Did you!” Smadar exclaimed. Now Zeyk and Nazik and Ursula were staring at him as well, and Marina had joined them.
“What did you see?” Smadar asked him, glancing briefly up at Zeyk’s brain image, flickering away in its silent storm. This was the past, just such a silent flickering electric storm. This was the work they were embarked on.
“There was fighting,” Sax said slowly, uneasily, looking into the hologram image as if into a crystal ball. “In a little plaza, where a side street met the central boulevard. Near the medina.”
“Were they Arab?” the young woman asked.
“Possibly,” Sax said. He closed his eyes, and though he could not see it he could somehow imagine it, a kind of blind sight. “Yes, I think so.”
He opened his eyes again, saw Zeyk staring at him. “Did you know them?” Zeyk croaked. “Can you tell me what they looked like?”
Sax shook his head, but this seemed to shake loose an image, black and yet there. The vid showed the dark streets of Nicosia, flickering with light like the thought in Zeyk’s brain. “A tall man with a thin face, a black mustache. They all had black mustaches, but his was longer, and he was shouting at the other men attacking Boone, rather than at Boone himself.”
Zeyk and Nazik were looking at each other. “Yussuf,” Zeyk said. “Yussuf and Nejm. They led the Fetah then, and they were worse about Boone than any of the Ahad. And when Selim appeared at our place later that night, dying, he said Boone killed me, Boone and Chalmers. He didn’t say I killed Boone; he said Boone killed me.” He stared again at Sax: “But what happened then? What did you do?”
Sax shuddered. This was why he had never returned to Nicosia, never thought about it: on that night, at the critical moment, he had hesitated. He had been afraid. “I saw them from across the plaza. I was a distance away, and I didn’t know what to do. They struck John down. They pulled him away. I — I watched. Then — then I was in a group running after them, I don’t know who the rest were. They carried me along. But the attackers were dragging him down those side streets, and in the dark, our group… our group lost them.”
“There were probably friends of the assailants in your group,” Zeyk said. “There by plan, to lead you the wrong way in the pursuit.”
“Ah,” Sax said. There had been mustached men among the group. “Possibly.”
He felt sick. He had frozen, he had done nothing. The images on the screen flickered, flashes in darkness, and Zeyk’s cortex was alive with microscopic colored lightning.
“So it was not Selim,” Zeyk said to Nazik. “Not Selim, and so not Frank Chalmers.”
“We should tell Maya,” Nazik said. “We must tell her.”
Zeyk shrugged. “She won’t care. If Frank did set Selim on John, and yet someone else actually did the deed, does that matter?”
“But you think it was someone else?” Smadar said.