Blue Mars(256)

“Uh-huh. . . .”

“The musicologist Tovey had a similar power,” Ursula added. “It isn’t uncommon in musicians. It’s as if music is a language where incredible memory feats are sometimes possible.”

“Hmm.”

Marina went on. “A Professor Athens, of Cambridge University, early twenty-first century, had a vast knowledge of specifics of all sorts— again music, but also verse, facts, math, his own past on a daily basis. ‘Interest is the thing,’ he was reported to have said. ‘Interest focuses the attention.’ ”

“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. Talmudic 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 fighting, and my impression was that the Ahad started it. But someone was setting them on each other, I thought. Cutting slogans in the windows.”