“I thought you said the advantage of this way was that I couldn’t talk?”
“Talk later, I said. This is partly later.”
“Hair splitter.”
“I’ll split more than that. This could be well more than halfway to later, for all you know.”
“Mmmm. Not your style.”
“Don’t be so sure. ‘I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear my trousers rolled.’ Eliot.”
“I know it’s Eliot.”
“How wonderful, to have such a lofty conversation while—”
“Shut up!”
He did, for once.
“That was wonderful,” Nigel said. He felt warm, relaxed. Exactly as if he had just made love to her. Nikka’s aroma even lingered in his nostrils. Remarkably effective, better than a real, Natural memory could have been.
“You are welcome.”
The bird slid its eyes around its face in what it must have meant as an expression. Nigel looked away. Somehow, no matter the immensity of intelligence behind the thing, it never got this bit right.
“Everything was just the way I recall it.”
“That was all?”
“No,” he said grudgingly. “Better, of course.”
“We could augment your memory with further detail.”
“Completely convincing, no doubt.”
“In context and fulfilling.”
“But of course fabricated.”
The bird smiled. This did not work at all on a beak. “Detail is seldom well carried forward by cycled memories such as yours.”
“But they at least are ours.”
“There is no clear distinction.”
“You add and heighten. The sheets just then were a light blue silk. Cool but not slick. I doubt that I could recall that.”
“True. Which way would you rather have it?”
“Or her scent. It persisted until I fully breathed in again.”
“I will have to tune that down then.”
“You’re dodging my point—”
“I think the reverse is true.”
Irritatingly quick, this fowl. “I can’t tell which is mine.”
“The interpolation procedures I use are akin to yours. When you remember naturally, you also stitch in minutiae to fill out your own internal picture-dramas.”
Nigel nodded sourly. “From now on, thanks, I shall much prefer to hobble forward with my own thin remembrance.”
“The past is what survives.”
“In the long run—”
“Nothing survives.” The bird gave a credible imitation of being amused, eyes dancing, but its voice remained flat.
“Even you?”
“Let me be more exact in this serial acoustic representation. No thing survives.”
“You’re not a thing?”
With a pang Nigel felt himself getting drawn away, when a deep part of him wanted only to luxuriate in the immediacy of Nikka’s memory. His damnable curiosity always got the better of him.
“The ‘I’ who presumes to speak for you is not a thing either.”
