“I take everything back,” Davud murmured. “Everything.”
Ryly glanced from his phenotype-brother to Joanne. “I guess we have his blessing; then. If—if you’re willing to become an outcast from the Clingerts, that is.”
Now it was Joanne’s turn to look startled. “Outcast? For fulfilling the aim of the first Clingert?”
“What’s that?”
“You mean you don’t know?”
Ryly shook his head. “I don’t have the faintest idea of what you’re talking about.”
“When it all started,” she said patiently. “When the spaceship exploded and the Clingerts and Bailles were thrown free and landed on The World, hundreds of years ago, Jarl Clingert wanted to interbreed, but Thomas Baille wouldn’t have any of it. He wanted to keep his line pure. So there hasn’t been very much contact between Clingert and Baille since then, ever since the time the first Baille threatened without provocation to kill Jarl Clingert if he came within ten miles of—”
“Hold it,” Ryly said. “It was Clingert who tried to kill Thomas Baille and marry Doris, but Thomas drove him off and—”
“No,” said Joanne. “You’ve got it all backward. It was Baille’s fault that—”
“Let’s discuss ancient history some other time,” Davud interjected suddenly. There was a curiously pained expression on his face. “Ryly, do you mind if I talk to you alone a moment?”
“Why—all right,” Ryly said, surprised.
They drew a few feet farther away, and Ryly said, “Well? What do you think of her?”
“That’s what I want to talk to you about,” Davud whispered harshly. “I think she’s far and away above the Baille women. She’s so—different. Gentle but not weak, small but not flimsy—”
“I knew you’d like her, Davud.”
“Not like,” Davud groaned. “Love. I love her too, Ryly.”
It came like a blow across the face. Ryly’s eyes widened and stared into the equally blue ones of his phenotype-brother. The Baille genes had been duplicated perfectly among them, it seemed. In every respect.
“You can’t mean that,” Ryly said.
“I do. Dammit, I do. How can I help it?”
“We can’t both have her, Davud. And I think I have priority. I—”
Davud gasped and seized him suddenly, spinning him around. Ryly looked, shut his eyes, touched his fingers lightly to his eyelids, and looked again. The mirage was still there. It was no illusion.
He saw two Joannes.
“Ryly? Davud? Meet Melena. Melena Clingert.”
“Is she—your sister?” Ryly asked hoarsely. The two Clingerts were, at this distance, identical.
“My cousin,” Joanne said. “I don’t have any sisters.” She grinned. “Melena was hiding near the far side of the waterfall. I brought her along to have a peek at Ryly.”
Ryly and his phenotype-brother exchanged astonished glances.
“Of course,” Ryly said softly. “We Bailles all look alike; why shouldn’t the Clingerts? Three hundred years of inbreeding. Lord, they must all be identical!”
“More or less,” Joanne said. “There are some minor variations but not many. Most of the unfixed genes in the clan were lost generations ago. As probably happened in your clan too. This was the thing that Jarl Clingert wanted to avoid, but when Thomas Baille refused to—”
“It was Clingert’s treacherous ways that caused the whole thing,” Ryly snapped. “Let’s get that straight right now. Why, it’s common knowledge!”
“Among whom? Among the Bailles, that’s who—whom!” Joanne’s eyes were blazing again, with the fury Ryly loved so much to see. “But why don’t you listen to the Clingert side of the story for a change? You Bailles were always like that, shutting your ears to anything important. You—” She stopped in mid-breath. Very quietly she said, “I’m sorry, Ryly.”
“It was my fault. I started the whole thing.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “I did, when I brought up the topic of—”
He smiled and touched a finger lightly to her lips. “Look,” he said.
She looked. Davud and Melena had drawn to one side, standing on a moist, moss-covered patch of ground within the field of spray and foam of the waterfall. They were talking softly. It wasn’t difficult to see by their faces what the topic of discussion was.
“We’ll have to forget about ancient history now,” Joanne said. “Forget all about what happened between Jarl Clingert and Thomas Baille four centuries ago.”
Ryly took her hand. “We’ll go somewhere else on The World,” he said. “Start all over, build a new settlement. Just the four of us. And maybe we can recruit some others, if I can lure a few Bailles out here to meet Clingerts.”
“And vice versa. The Clingert men hate the Bailles now too, you know. But that can stop. We’ll breed the feuding out.”
Ryly looked over at Davud and Melena, then back at Joanne. Everything looked incredibly lovely at that moment—the angular red leaves of the overhanging trees, the white spray of the falls, prismatically colored blue and gold by the sunlight, the quiet green clouds drifting above. He wanted to fix that moment in his mind forever.
He smiled. His mind was still full of insidious Clanfather-instilled legends of the early days on The World as seen through Baille eyes. But he could start forgetting them now.
Soon there would be a third clan on The World—a hybrid clan, both fair and dark, both short and tall.
And someday his descendants would be spinning legends about him, and how he had helped to found the clan, back in the misty time-shrouded days of the remote past.
The Man Who Never Forgot
One of the most useful tools a writer can have is a retentive memory. Names, places, dates, bits of esoteric information, the look and feel of an object, the color of the sky over Paris one summer afternoon in 1957—the more detail you can summon up at the twitch of a synapse, the richer and more meaningful your fiction becomes. My memory isn’t what it once was, but it’s still pretty sharp, and once upon a time it was truly extraordinary, the kind of trick memory that can tell you not only where to find a certain fact but on which side of the page it’s located. That kind of memory has disadvantages as well as advantages, though—nobody likes a smartass, and the kid who’s always right is the one who always gets chased around the block by the ones who are always wrong. So there’s more than a tincture of autobiographical feeling in this otherwise purely fictional piece.
I wrote it in June of the preternaturally fertile year of 1957 and sent it to Anthony Boucher, who bought it with gratifying rapidity and used it in the February, 1958 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Glancing through it now, I’m startled to see how strongly it foreshadows a much better known work of mine that deals with the hidden drawbacks of superior mental powers—the novel Dying Inside, which I would write fifteen years later.
~
He saw the girl waiting in line outside a big Los Angeles movie house, on a mildly foggy Tuesday morning. She was slim and pale, barely five-three, with stringy flaxen hair, and she was alone. He remembered her, of course.
He knew it would be a mistake, but he crossed the street anyway and walked up along the theater line to where she stood.
“Hello,” he said.
She turned, stared at him blankly, flicked the tip of her tongue out for an instant over her lips. “I don’t believe I—”
“Tom Niles,” he said. “Pasadena, New Year’s Day, 1955. You sat next to me. Ohio State 20, Southern Cal 7. You don’t remember?”
“A football game? But I hardly ever—I mean—I’m sorry, mister. I—”
Someone else in the line moved forward towards him with a tight hard scowl on his face. Niles knew when he was beaten. He smiled apologetically and said, “I’m sorry, miss. I guess I made a mistake. I took you for someone I knew—a Miss Bette Torrance. Excuse me.”
And he strode rapidly away. He had not gone more than ten feet when he heard the little surprised gasp
and the “But I am Bette Torrance!”—but he kept going.
I should know better after twenty-eight years, he thought bitterly. But I forget the most basic fact—that even though I remember people, they don’t necessarily remember me—
He walked wearily to the corner, turned right, and started down a new street, one whose shops were totally unfamiliar to him and which, therefore, he had never seen before. His mind, stimulated to its normal pitch of activity by the incident outside the theater, spewed up a host of tangential memories like the good machine it was: 1 Jan. 1955. Rose Bowl Pasadena California Seat G126; warm day, high humidity, arrived in stadium 12.03 P.M., PST. Came alone. Girl in next seat wearing blue cotton dress, white oxfords, carrying Southern Cal pennant. Talked to her. Name Bette Torrance, senior at Southern Cal, government major. Had a date for the game but he came down with flu symptoms night before, insisted she see game anyway. Seat on other side of her empty. Bought her a hot dog, $.20 (no mustard)—
There was more, much more. Niles forced it back down. There was the virtually stenographic report of their conversation all that day:
(“…I hope we win. I saw the last Bowl game we won, two years ago…”
“…Yes, that was 1953. Southern Cal 7, Wisconsin 0…and two straight wins in 1944-45 over Washington and Tennessee…”
“…Gosh, you know a lot about football! What did you do, memorize the record book?”)
And the old memories. The jeering yell of freckled Joe Merritt that warm April day in 1937—who are you, Einstein? And Buddy Call saying acidly on 8 November 1939, Here comes Tommy Niles, the human adding machine. Get him! And then the bright stinging pain of a snowball landing just below his left clavicle, the pain that he could summon up as easily as any of the other pain-memories he carried with him. He winced and closed his eyes suddenly, as if struck by the icy pellet here on a Los Angeles street on a foggy Tuesday morning.
They didn’t call him the human adding machine any more. Now it was the human tape recorder; the derisive terms had to keep pace with the passing decades. Only Niles himself remained unchanging, The Boy With The Brain Like A Sponge grown up into The Man With The Brain Like A Sponge, still cursed with the same terrible gift.
His data-cluttered mind ached. He saw a diminutive yellow sports car parked on the far side of the street, recognized it by its make and model and color and licence number as the car belonging to Leslie F. Marshall, twenty-six, blond hair, blue eyes, television actor with the following credits—
Wincing, Niles applied the cutoff circuit and blotted out the upwelling data. He had met Marshall once, six months ago, at a party given by a mutual friend—an erstwhile mutual friend; Niles found it difficult to keep friends for long. He had spoken with the actor for perhaps ten minutes and had added that much more baggage to his mind.
It was time to move on, Niles decided. He had been in Los Angeles ten months. The burden of accumulated memories was getting too heavy; he was greeting too many people who had long since forgotten him (curse my John Q. Average build, 5 feet 9, 163 pounds, brownish hair. brownish eyes, no unduly prominent physical features, no distinguishing scars except those inside, he thought). He contemplated returning to San Francisco, and decided against it. He had been there only a year ago; Pasadena, two years ago; the time had come, he realized, for another eastward jaunt.
Back and forth across the face of America goes Thomas Richard Niles, Der fliegende Holländer, the Wandering Jew, the Ghost of Christmas Past, the Human Tape Recorder. He smiled at a newsboy who had sold him a copy of the Examiner on 13 May past, got the usual blank stare in return, and headed for the nearest bus terminal.
For Niles the long journey had begun on 11 October 1929, in the small Ohio town of Lowry Bridge. He was third of three children, born of seemingly normal parents, Henry Niles (b. 1896), Mary Niles (b. 1899). His older brother and sister had shown no extraordinary manifestations. Tom had.
It began as soon as he was old enough to form words; a neighbor woman on the front porch peered into the house where he was playing, and remarked to his mother, “Look how big he’s getting, Mary!”
He was less than a year old. He had replied, in virtually the same tone of voice, “Look how big he’s getting, Mary!” It caused a sensation, even though it was only mimicry, not even speech.
He spent his first twelve years in Lowry Bridge, Ohio. In later years, he often wondered how he had been able to last there so long.
He began school at the age of four, because there was no keeping him back; his classmates were five and six, vastly superior to him in physical coordination, vastly inferior in everything else. He could read. He could even write, after a fashion, though his babyish muscles tired easily from holding a pen. And he could remember.
He remembered everything. He remembered his parents’ quarrels and repeated the exact words of them to anyone who cared to listen, until his father whipped him and threatened to kill him if he ever did that again. He remembered that too. He remembered the lies his brother and sister told, and took great pains to set the record straight. He learned eventually not to do that, either. He remembered things people had said, and corrected them when they later deviated from their earlier statements.
He remembered everything.
He read a textbook once and it stayed with him. When the teacher asked a question based on the day’s assignment, Tommy Niles’ skinny arm was in the air long before the others had even really assimilated the question. After a while, his teacher made it clear to him that he could not answer every question, whether he had the answer first or not; there were twenty other pupils in the class. The other pupils in the class made that abundantly clear to him, after school.
He won the verse-learning contest in Sunday school. Barry Harman had studied for weeks in hopes of winning the catcher’s mitt his father had promised him if he finished first—but when it was Tommy Niles’ turn to recite, he began with In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, continued through Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them, headed on into Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made, and presumably would have continued clear through Genesis, Exodus, and on to Joshua if the dazed proctor hadn’t shut him up and declared him the winner. Barry Harman didn’t get his glove; Tommy Niles got a black eye instead.
He began to realize he was different. It took time to make the discovery that other people were always forgetting things, and that instead of admiring him for what he could do they hated him for it. It was difficult for a boy of eight, even Tommy Niles, to understand why they hated him, but eventually he did find out, and then he started learning how to hide his gift.
Through his ninth and tenth years he practiced being normal, and almost succeeded; the after-school beatings stopped, and he managed to get a few Bs on his report cards at last, instead of straight rows of A. He was growing up; he was learning to pretend. Neighbors heaved sighs of relief, now that that terrible Niles boy was no longer doing all those crazy things.
But inwardly he was the same as ever. And he realized he’d have to leave Lowry Bridge soon.
He knew everyone too well. He would catch them in lies ten times a week, even Mr. Lawrence, the minister, who once turned down an invitation to pay a social call to the Nileses one night, saying, “I really have to get down to work and write my sermon for Sunday,” when only three days before Tommy had heard him say to Miss Emery, the church secretary, that he had had a sudden burst of inspiration and had written three sermons all at one sitting, and now he’d have some free time for the rest of the month.
Even Mr. Lawrence lied, then. And he was the best of them. As for the others—
Tommy waited until he was twelve; he was big for his age by then and figured he could take care of himself. He borrowed twenty dollars from the supposedly secret cashbox in the back of the kitchen cupboard (his mother had mentioned its existence five years before, in Tommy’s hearing) and tiptoed out of the house at three
in the morning. He caught the night freight for Chillicothe, and was on his way.
There were thirty people on the bus out of Los Angeles. Niles sat alone in the back, by the seat just over the rear wheel. He knew four of the people in the bus by name—but he was confident they had forgotten who he was by now, and so he kept to himself.
It was an awkward business. If you said hello to someone who had forgotten you, they thought you were a troublemaker or a panhandler. And if you passed someone by, thinking he had forgotten you, and he hadn’t—well, then you were a snob. Niles swung between both those poles five times a day. He’d see someone, such as that girl Bette Torrance, and get a cold, unrecognizing stare; or he’d go by someone else, believing the other person did not remember him but walking rapidly just in case he did, and there would be the angry, “Well! Who the blazes do you think you are!” floating after him as he retreated.
Now he sat alone, bouncing up and down with each revolution of the wheel, with the one suitcase containing his property thumping constantly against the baggage rack over his head. That was one advantage of his talent: he could travel light. He didn’t need to keep books, once he had read them, and there wasn’t much point in amassing belongings of any other sort either; they became overfamiliar and dull too soon.
He eyed the road signs. They were well into Nevada by now. The old, wearisome retreat was on.
He could never stay in the same city too long. He had to move on to new territory, to some new place where he had no old memories, where no one knew him, where he knew no one. In the sixteen years since he had left home, he’d covered a lot of ground.
He remembered the jobs he had held.
He had been a proofreader for a Chicago publishing firm, once. He did the jobs of two men. The way proofreading usually worked, one man read the copy from the manuscript, the other checked it against the galleys. Niles had a simpler method: he would scan the manuscript once, thereby memorizing it, and then merely check the galley for discrepancies. It brought him fifty dollars a week for a while, before the time came to move along.