“I’m engaged,” she had said. “I mean, it couldn’t be anything—”
Disappointed, and yet ever-prepared to be gallant, he had said, “Well, then it’ll just be an evening out. Two people on the town. Friends.” He hardly knew her; they shared an English class. She was the loveliest girl in the class, tall and composed, quiet and assured yet not in the least distant. She had smiled and said, “Okay.”
And now he felt the freedom, released from the obligation of pursuit; the first time he felt on equal footing with a woman. Her fiancé, she explained, was in the Navy, stationed at the Brooklyn Naval Yard. Her family lived on Staten Island, in a house where Herman Melville had once stayed a summer.
The wind blew her hair without mussing it—miraculous, wonderful hair which (in theory) would be delightful to feel, run his hands through. They had been talking since he picked her up at her home, an apartment she shared with two women near the old white Claremont Hotel. They had driven across the Golden Gate into Marin to eat at a small seafood restaurant, the Klamshak, and talked there—about classes, about plans, about what getting married was all about (he didn’t know and didn’t even bother to fake sophistication) . They had both agreed the food was good and the decor not in the least original—cork floats and nets on the wall, filled with plastic lobsters and a weary-looking dried blowfish, an old holed dory perched out front on shell-strewn sand. Not once did he feel awkward or young or even inexperienced.
He thought, as they drove back across the bridge, In other circumstances, I’m sure we’d fall in love with each other. I’m positive we’d be married in a few years. She’s terrific—and I’m not going to do anything about it. The sensation he felt at this was sad and romantic and altogether wonderful.
He knew that if he pressed her, she would probably come up to his apartment with him, and they would make love.
Even though he hated and despised being a virgin, he would not press her. He would not even suggest it. This was too perfect.
They sat in the ‘vette outside the converted old mansion where she lodged and discussed Kennedy, laughed about their fears during the missile crisis, and then held hands and just looked at each other.
“You know,” he said quietly, “there are times when…” He stopped.
“Thank you,” she said. “I just thought you would be good on a date. Most men, you know—”
“Yeah. Well, that’s me.” He grinned. “Harmless.”
“Oh, no. Not harmless. Not in the least.”
Now was the turning point. It could go one way, or the other. He flashed on her olive-colored body and knew it was smoothly, youthfully perfect. He knew that she would go with him to his apartment.
“You’re a romantic, aren’t you?” she said.
“I suppose I am.”
“I am too. The silliest people in the world are romantics.”
He felt heat in his face and neck. “I love women,” he said. “I love the way they talk and move. They’re enchanting.” He was going to open up now, and regret it later, but what he felt was too true and undeniable, especially after this evening. “I think most men should feel a woman is, like, sacred. Not on a pedestal, that sort of thing. But just too beautiful for words. To be loved by a woman, and—That would just be incredible.”
Olivia looked through the windshield, a smile flickering on her face. Then she looked down at her purse and smoothed her calf-length blue dress with her hands. “It’ll happen,” she said.
“Yeah, sure.” He nodded. But not between us.
“Thank you,” she said again. He held her hand, and then reached up to caress her cheek. She rubbed against his hand like a kitten and tugged on the door handle. “See you in class.”
They hadn’t even kissed.
–What has happened to me since? Three wives—the third because she looked like Olivia—and this distancing, this standing apart. I have lost far too many illusions.
There are options,
–I don’t understand.
What would you wish to revise?
–If you mean go back, I don’t see how.
It is all possible here, in Thought Universe. Simulations. Reconstructions from your memory.
–I could live out another life?
When there is time.
–With the real Olivia? She… where was she, is she?
That is not known.
–Then I’ll pass. I am not interested in dreams.
There are more memories within you.
–Yes…
But where did they fit, where did they come from?
Randall Bernard, twenty-four, had wed Tiffany Marnier on the seventeenth of November, 1943, in a small Kansas City church. She wore a silver-beaded silk and white lace gown that her mother had worn for her wedding, no veil, and the flowers had been blood-red roses. They had—
They sipped a cup of wine between them and exchanged their vows and broke a piece of bread and the minister, a Theosophist who would by the end of the 1940s be a Vedantist, pronounced them equal in the eyes of the Deity, and now united by love and common regard.
The memory was tinted, like an old photograph, and not good on details. But it was there and he hadn’t even been born, and he was seeing it, and then seeing their wedding night, marveling in the quick glimpses of his own creation and how so little had changed between man and woman, marveling at his mother’s passion and pleasure, and his father’s doctorly, precise, knowing skill, even in bed a doctor—
And his father went off to war, serving as a corpsman in Europe, moving with Patton’s U.S. Third Army through the Ardennes and crossing the Rhine near Coblenz—sixty-five miles in three days—and his son watched what he could not possibly have seen. And then he watched what his father could not possibly have seen:
A soldier in plus-fours stepping into the dark, dank hallway of a brothel in Paris; not his father, not anybody he knew—
Very dim, but clear in outline, a woman rocking a child in orange sunlight coming through an isinglass window—
A man fishing with cormorants in a gray early morning river—
A child staring out of a barn loft at a circle of men in the yard below, slaughtering a huge black and white wide-eyed bullock—
Men and women doffing their long white robes and swimming in a muddy river surrounded by red stone bluffs—
A man standing on a cliff, horn bow in hand, watching a herd of antelopes cross a hazy grass plain—
A woman giving birth in a dark underground place, lit by tallow lamps, watched by smeared, anxious faces—
Two old men arguing about impressed balls of clay in a circle drawn in sand—
–I don’t remember these things. They aren’t me, I didn’t experience them—
He broke free of the flow of information. With both hands, he reached up to red-glowing circles over his head, so warm and attractive. —Where did they come from? He touched the circles and felt the answer in his hundred-cell body.
Not all memory comes from an individual’s life.
–Where, then?
Memory is stored in neurons—interactive memory, carried in charge and potential, then downloaded to chemical storage in cells, then downloaded to molecular level. Stored in introns of individual cells.
The insight was almost agonizing in its completeness and intensity.
Symbiotic bacteria and transfer virus—naturally occurring in all animals and specific for each species—are implanted with molecular memory transcribed from the intron. They exit the individual and pass on to another individual, ‘infect,’ transfer the memory to somatic cells. Some of the memories are then returned to chemical storage status, and a few return to active memory.