GODS OF RIVERWORLD

17

While waiting for his little world to be built, Peter Jairus Frigate was not idle. He decided that he did not wish to cut off the "memory movie" entirely. He was too curious about his past; he had many questions about it that he had thought would never be answered. Though he'd be pained seeing it, he was going to force himself to endure the pain. Now and then. So he removed a square of the paint from a wall of a room in his suite, and he spent an hour each day in that room. The moment he appeared in it, the past sprung to life as seen through his eyes and heard through his ears.

Experimenting, he found that the Computer did not insist on showing him everything according to the program. If he requested a certain time area, then he got it.

Also, the Computer had a clock synchronized with the time of its subject's memory. If Frigate had known in the past what date it was because he'd looked at a calendar that day or someone had mentioned the date, the Computer could flash to that event. Otherwise, it had to estimate the approximate time and would scan its track for the area of time first, then the particular date.

There were, as he soon found out, many gaps in the "movie." He asked for a date at random, October 27, 1923. At that time, he was playing around and trying to do some spot-checking. That day was a blank; he had nothing in his memory about it.

The Computer told him why.

There was not enough space in his memory cells to store his entire life. A mechanism in the mnemonics complex erased what was to him insignificant; thus making more room for the meaningful. Often, though, what his conscious considered unimportant, his unconscious considered worth storing.

The wathan was supposed to have stored the entire life experiences of the individual. Nothing was left unrecorded. This theory could not be validated, since, so far, no wathan could be tapped. Its bright many-colored exterior remained invulnerable to probing. Like the Sphinx, it was beautiful and awe-inspiring but silent.

The Computer figured out for him that he had lived 55,188,000 minutes so far. Of this, 22,075,200 minutes were available at that moment. That was the total, but that did not mean that every one of those minutes could be run off in its entirety. There were many fragments of minutes in the storage. If Frigate cared to know just how many fragments and how long each was, he could get the numbers from the Computer. But he did not care to know.

"Sixty percent of the movie of my life went onto the cutting-room floor," he muttered. "Jesus! If I sit down and watch the whole movie from begi

How could the human brain, that small gray mass, contain so many memories, so much data, so many millions, maybe billions, of miles of film?

Frigate asked if the Computer could show him the container unit that contained the "movie." Obligingly, the Computer did so, and Frigate saw on the screen a yellow sphere the size of a cranberry. And that was only half-full.

What he most wanted to see—and also did not want to see— was a very early period. He would have been about a year old, living in a house in North Terre Haute, Indiana. His mother's mother was visiting them then, having come from Kansas City, Missouri, to help his mother with her infant. Frigate had the idea that his grandmother had mistreated him when she babysat him. He believed that it was not because she was cruel or sadistic but because she easily lost her temper. He based this speculation on the visions of her he had had during some sessions with a psychoanalyst in Beverly Hills. There, while trying to probe his infantile memories, he had become convinced that his grandmother had treated him in such a fashion that he had become subdued, submissive and fearful while a baby. Or that she had laid the foundation for these attitudes, which flowered when he became an adolescent.

The psychoanalyst obviously had not put much credence in this, but he had allowed Frigate to make the effort. Probably, the analyst was pondering the significance of his attempt to fix the blame on his grandmother.

Hesitantly, Frigate ran the movie at high speed until he located the exact area of time in which his grandmother had taken care of him.

It took a week to convince him that he had been wrong. Certainly, there was nothing in his grandmother's behavior to justify even faintly his fantasy. Because it was a fantasy. His grandmother had not shaken or yelled at or spanked him to keep him from crying or mistreated him in any way. She had complained a lot to herself because of his crying, but Frigate did not understand more than a quarter of what she said, because she usually talked to herself in German. He could have asked the Computer to translate for him but did not bother. At that age, he would not have been affected by what was said but by the way it was said. The tone of complaint would not have meant much to him since she did not make it plain to the baby that she was displeased with him. And she did sing German lullabies to him, though she certainly had not held him much.

"Well, hell!" Frigate said to himself. "There goes another theory. Probably I'll find out that my character deficiencies were due to genetic disposition far more than to the environment."

He told Nur about his search. The little Moor laughed and said, "It's not the past that counts. It's the present. You ca

"Yes, but the memory-movie is a great psychoanalytic tool," Frigate said. "Too bad they didn't have it on Earth. The patient and the doctor could have gone over any areas in doubt and cleared everything up. The patient could have seen what really happened, and he could have separated the truth from fantasy, the unimportant from the really significant."

"Perhaps. But it's not necessary. You know what you are now. At least, you should, unless you're still fooling yourself about yourself, and that's highly possible. One good thing about the movie is that it would destroy your self-image, would demonstrate that you may have been wrong many times when you thought you were right. Or convince you that others were not entirely monsters or egoistic when they dealt with you. Or show you the times when they truly were so.

"However, aside from satisfying your curiosity, and that may be very painful and humiliating, or satisfying your desire to see the faces of those you once loved or hated, the movies are time wasted. It is now that matters, now is the cliff edge on which you stand and must leap from into the future. What you have been and are is not what you must be. You are avoiding taking action on the now by immersing yourself in the past. The past should be only a light to the future. Or a measuring stick of your progress. That and that only."

"You don't watch your movie?" Frigate said.

"No. I'm not interested in it."

"You don't care to see your parents when they were young, your playmates?"

Nur tapped his head. "They're all in there. I can summon them up when I wish."

"If the movie is a waste of time, then why did the unknown fix it so that it would be with us every second of waking time?"

"The unknown did not arrange just that. The unknown fixed it so that we could see the movie if we wished to. She wasn't unaware of the possibility that we'd paint the walls and so block out the movie. Perhaps, by painting, we failed a test."

"And what would the penalty for flunking it be?"

Nur shrugged.

"I'd guess that the penalty would be self-inflicted. It'd be a failure to progress."