“Thank you.” Eprhraim stared at the old dark wood of the railing in front of him. “I wonder how he felt about that show? I can’t remember that, either.”
“Ephraim.” It was the first time in her questioning that Erin had used his given name. She leaned against the railing, looking down at him, and her voice was coaxing. “Tell us about your work in progress. You call it Children’s Crusade, don’t you?”
“Yes.” The word came out a whisper.
“Will the plaintiff please speak so that we can hear him?” the judge demanded.
“Yes,” Ephraim said more loudly.
“What would happen to it when it was finished?”
“The Unwin Gallery in the New York Dome had contracted to show it.” He relaxed a little. “They showed my last three works.”
“Were they successful?”
“Yes.” He wasn’t sure where this was going. It wasn’t a matter of money, he wanted to tell her, and sensed that their juror was getting restless. “I get a royalty every time someone participates in the piece. And they sell virtual copies. Although you don’t get the same effect.”
“So Children’s Crusade would have made you a lot of money?”
“Probably.” He shrugged.
“You speak as if you can’t finish this piece.”
“I can’t.” He forced himself to speak up.
He thought she would ask him why—and he couldn’t tell her. But she didn’t ask; instead, she nodded, then looked up at the judge. “Your Honor, I would like to have the juror experience Fields—a piece that Mr. Polk finished prior to the malfunction of his implant. And then have him see the unfinished piece, Children’s Crusade—if we may?”
“Yes,” the judge said, “you may proceed.”
“Run Fields,” Erin instructed the system.
The holographic projection was focused on the jury box, but from his adjacent witness chair the images looked only a little distorted, the sounds and scents barely out of sync. Calendri sat very still, his eyes flicking from here to there to follow the kaleidoscopic images. The piece ended. Almost imperceptibly, Calendri seemed to shrug.
“Now this is the piece that Mr. Polk is unable to finish,” Erin went on doggedly. She had noticed that shrug, too, Eprhaim thought bleakly. “You can compare them directly. System, run Crusade.”
There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Ephraim watched, unable to stop himself. The images pierced him—children playing tag amidst the thornbrush huts of dying Africa, a girl with tawny skin and a round Asian face beneath a white headscarf carefully cutting the throat of a red and black rooster while its scarlet blood ran down her arm, a boy cradling a newborn kitten, two children peering through the glassless window of a ruined urban building, a young child fleeing through an open-air market with his arms full of stolen clothes.… The glimpses showered down around him like stinging rain, jagged and without power or cohesion. Flute and percussion notes whispered in his ears and a breath of icy air raised goosebumps on his skin. It didn’t work with the rooster’s bright feathers, and the thick, crimson blood.
“Thus we create ourselves eternally, in an innocence that evolves into good or evil, but is never lost,” Ephraim whispered. Those were the notes in his working file. He reached for that description, felt for the soul of this piece. It was gone. Forever. In his brain, the stored images pressed against the walls of his skull, and the access code was there, so easy to invoke. Grief pierced him. Release them, he thought. Let the darkness eat it all, eat all that was left of him—water of Lethe. At least he would no longer care. He began to shape the code images.
“System, endit.” Erin’s words were close and loud in his ears. “Ephraim, don’t.”
The anguish in her voice reached him. Ephraim let the code fade, and buried his face in his hands. The pressure of those images threatened to burst the walls of his skull, scatter shards of bone like shrapnel, and maybe it would be the best thing. “It isn’t finished.” He pressed darkness into his eyes with the heels of his hands, wanting to blank those incomplete images forever. “I knew how it was supposed to work. I knew what I wanted. I knew how to finish it." He drew a sobbing breath. “And now… it’s gone. I don’t know… what I meant to do here anymore.” He raised his head slowly and met Calendri’s impassive stare. “I just don’t know.”
“What don’t you know, Ephraim?” Erin’s quiet words prodded him mercilessly.
“Playing on the street, going to school.” The words tore their way free. “It’s gone. Wiped out. My father, and how he talked to me, how he felt when I passed an exam, or when I got hurt. Don’t you understand?” He clutched the railing, his nails biting the wood. “Did I tell you about a puppy I had? I think I did, but I don’t remember what I told you. You can remind me, but can you make it part of me again?” He closed his eyes briefly, his hands shaking. “How can I finish a piece about the child that we were and are? I never was a child." He bowed over the smooth wood. “I am not even sure that I am human anymore,” he whispered.
Silence filled the courtroom. And for nearly a minute, no one said anything.
“That’s all I have, Mr. Polk,” Erin said, and there was a roughness in her voice that he hadn’t heard before. She turned to the judge. “Is it about time for lunch, Your Honor?”
“Yes,” the judge said. “At 1:00 P.M. we will reconvene for Mr. Polk’s cross-examination.”
Slowly, Ephraim straightened, and his eyes met those of the juror. A brief emotion moved across the man’s face, but it vanished too quickly for Ephraim to identify it. Pity, he thought bleakly. Pity for a loser. Then Erin’s hand was on his arm and she was guiding him back to his seat.
“Just a few more questions, Mr. Polk.” Clark studied his paper notes at the podium. Erin thought he would not keep Ephraim on the stand much longer. This was a case where every “I don’t remember” answer only served to illustrate the loss.
“You wouldn’t have been able to make your art without the implant. Isn’t that true?”
“What?” Ephraim looked so exhausted and vulnerable. Erin had to restrain herself from leaping to her feet, rushing forward to interpose herself between Ephraim and his attacker. But any objection to questions that were entirely proper on cross-examination would only earn her a sanction from the judge.
Clark repeated his question, and Ephraim replied, “No. I still could have done it. When I still had my memories.”
“But you couldn’t have done it as efficiently? It would have taken a lot longer, right?”
“That’s true.”
“And your work might not have been as good?”
“Yes.”
“Now, you did receive a copy of NeuroTek’s disclosure statement and product warnings before you had the device implanted, didn’t you?”
Ephraim’s face showed that lost, perplexed expression that had become to him almost as habitual as his guarded one. Once again, Erin found herself poised on the edge of her seat.
“Let me help,” Clark went on quickly, displaying a document on the exhibit monitor. It was two pages long and had a lot of words. “I won’t waste the court’s time by reading this now. Mr. Calendri, I’m sure, is quite capable of reading it for himself. And the judge will instruct the juror that these warnings are legally sufficient under federal regulations. But to sum it up, this does reveal the risk of memory damage to certain users, doesn’t it?”