• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2175 0

the young man had lived for thirty more years. And of course there was the story of the young physicists at Los Alamos, who had set off the first nuclear explosion wondering among themselves whether it might not burn up the entire atmosphere of the Earth, a somewhat disturbing case of self-experimentation, one had to admit. Compared to that ingesting a few amino acids seemed no very great thing, something more like Dr. Hoffman trying LSD on himself. Presumably ecphorizing would be less disorienting than an LSD experience, for if all one’s memories were being reinforced at once, consciousness would surely not be capable of being aware of it. The so-called stream of consciousness was fairly unilinear, it seemed to Sax on introspection. So that at most one might experience a quick associative train of recollections, or a random jumble— not unlike Sax’s everyday mentation, to tell the truth. He could handle that. And he was willing to risk something more traumatic, if that was what it happened to take.

He flew to Acheron.

4

Up at Acheron a new crowd was in place in the old labs, now vastly expanded, so that the entire high long fin of rock was excavated and occupied— it was a city now of some 200,000 people. At the same time it was still, of course, a spectacular fin of rock some fifteen kilometers long and six hundred meters high, while never more than a kilometer wide at any point; and it was still a lab, or a complex of labs, in a way that Echus Overlook had long since ceased to be— something more like Da Vinci, with a similar organization. After Praxis had renovated the infrastructure, Vlad and Ursula and Marina had led the formation of a new biological research station; now Vlad was dead, but Acheron had a life of its own, and did not seem to miss him. Ursula and Marina directed their own little labs, and lived still in the quarters they had shared with Vlad, just under the crest of the fin— a partially walled arboreal slot, very windy. They were as private as ever, withdrawn into their own world even more than they had been with Vlad; and they were certainly taken for granted in Acheron, treated by the younger scientists as local grandmothers or great-aunts, or simply as colleagues in the labs.

Sax, however, the younger scientists stared at, looking just as nonplussed as if they were being introduced to Archimedes. It was as disconcerting to be treated in such a way as it was to meet such an anachronism, and Sax struggled through several conversations of surpassing awkwardness as he tried to convince everyone that he did not know the magic secret of life, that he used words to stand for the same things as they did, that his mind was not yet altogether shattered by age, etc.

But this estrangement could also be an advantage. Young scientists as a class tended to be naive empiricists, also idealistic energetic enthusiasts. So coming in from outside, both new and old at once, Sax was able to impress them in the seminars Ursula convened to discuss the current state of memory work. Sax laid out his hypotheses concerning the creation of a possible anamnestic, with suggestions for various lines of experimental work on these possibilities, and he could see that his suggestions had for the young scientists a kind of prophetic power, even (or perhaps especially) when they were quite general comments. If these vague suggestions happened to chime with some avenue these people were already exploring, then the response could be enthusiastic in the extreme. In fact it was a case of the more gnomic the better; which was not very scientific, but there it was.

As he watched them Sax realized for the first time that the versatile, responsive, highly focused nature of science that he was getting used to in Da Vinci was not confined to Da Vinci alone, but was a feature of all the labs arranged as cooperative ventures; it was the nature of Martian science more generally. With the scientists in control of their own work, to a degree never seen in his youth on Earth, the work itself had an unprecedented rapidity and power. In his day