“Do you remember the lock code?” Smadar asked.
Zeyk frowned, his lips moved, his eyes clamped shut. “They were part of the Fibonacci sequence, I remember noticing that. Five-eight-one-three-two-one.”
Sax gaped. Smadar nodded. “Go on.”
“Then a woman I didn’t know ran by and told us Boone had been found in the farm. We followed her to the medical clinic in the medina. It was new, everything was clean and shiny, no pictures on the walls yet. Sax, you were there, and the rest of the First Hundred in the town: Chalmers and Toitovna, and Samantha Hoyle.”
Sax found he had no memory of the clinic at all. Wait . . . an image of Frank, his face flushed, and Maya, wearing a white domino, her mouth a bloodless line. But that had been outside, on the glass-scattered boulevard. He had told them of the attack on Boone, and Maya had cried instantly Didn’t you stop them? Didn’t you stop them? and he had realized all of a sudden that he hadn’t stopped them— that he had failed to help his friend— that he had stood there frozen in shock, and watched while his friend had been assaulted and dragged off. We tried, he had said to Maya. I tried. Though he hadn’t.
But at the clinic, later; nothing. Nothing came to him of the whole rest of that night, in fact. He closed his eyes like Zeyk, clamped the lids shut as if that might squeeze out another image. But nothing came. The memory was odd that way; he remembered the critical moments of trauma, when these realizations had stabbed into him; the rest had disappeared. Surely the limbic system and the emotional charge of every incident must be crucially involved in the entrainment or encoding or embedding of a memory.
And yet there was Zeyk, slowly naming every person he had known in the clinic waiting room, which must have been crowded; then describing the face of the doctor who had come out to give them the news of Boone’s death. “She said, ‘He’s dead. Too long out there.’ And Maya put a hand on Frank’s shoulder, and he jumped.”
“We have to tell Maya,” Nazik whispered.
“He said to her, ‘I’m sorry,’ which I thought was odd. She said something to him about how he had never liked John anyway, which was true. And Frank even agreed, but then he left. He was angry at Maya as well. He said, he said ‘What do you know about what I like or don’t like.’ So bitter. He didn’t like her presumption. The idea that she knew him.” Zeyk shook his head.
“Was I there during this?” Sax said.
“. . . Yes. You were sitting right on the other side of Maya. But you were distracted. You were crying.”
Nothing came back to Sax of that, nothing. It occurred to him with a lurch that just as there were many things that he had done that no one else would ever know about, there were also things he had done that others remembered, that he himself could not recall. So little they knew! So little!
And still Zeyk went on: the rest of that night, the next morning. The appearance of Selim, his death; then the day after that, when Zeyk and Nazik had left Nicosia. And the day after that as well. Later Ursula said that he could go on in that amount of detail for every week of his life.
But now Nazik stopped the session. “This one is too hard,” she said to Smadar. “Let’s start again tomorrow.”
Smadar agreed, and began tapping at the console of the machine beside her. Zeyk stared at the dark ceiling like a haunted man; and Sax saw that among the many dysfunctions of the memory, one would have to include memories that worked too well. But how? What was the mechanism? That image of Zeyk’s brain, replicating in another medium the patterns of quantum activity— lightning flickering around in his cortex . . . a mind that held the past far better than the rest of the ancient ones, impervious to the affliction of breaking memory, which Sax had believed to be an inexorable clocklike breakdown . . . well, they were giving that brain every test they could think of. But it was quite possible the secret would remain unsolved; there was simply too much happening of which they were completely unaware. As on that night in Nicosia.
• • •
Shaken, Sax changed into a warm jumper and went outdoors. The land around Acheron had already been providing welcome breaks from his lab time, and now he was very happy to have a place to get away.
He headed north, toward the sea. Some of his best thinking about memory had come when he was walking down to this seashore, over routes so circuitous that he could never find the same way twice, partly because the old lava plateau was so fractured by grabens and scarps, partly because he was never paying attention to the larger topography— he was either lost in his thoughts or lost in the immediate landscape, only intermittently looking around to see where he was. In fact it was a region in which one could not get lost; ascend any small ridge, and there the Acheron fin stood, like the spine of an immense dragon; and in the other direction, visible from more places as one approached it, the wide blue expanse of Acheron Bay. In between lay a million micro-environments, the rocky plateau pocked with hidden oases, and every crack filled with plants. It was very unlike the melting landscape on the polar shore across the sea; this rocky plateau and its little hidden habitats seemed immemorial, despite the gardening that was certainly being done by the Acheron ecopoets. Many of these oases were experiments, and Sax treated them as such, staying out of them, peering down into one steep-walled alas after another, wondering what the ecopoet responsible was trying to discover with his or her work. Here soil could be spread with no fear of it being washed into the sea, although the startling green of the estuaries extending back into the valleys showed that some fertile soil was making its way down the streams. These estuarine marshes would fill with eroded soils, while at the same time they were getting saltier, along with the North Sea itself. . . .