Prize but the guy who wants to marry me doesn't think I can order my own breakfast.'
They were standing in front of a large tank with crystal-clear water. About half a dozen small whales were swimming in circles around the tank, occasionally going to the surface for air. 'You came and asked my opinion in the beginning, my young friend,' he said quietly. 'And I told you that I thought your souls were not compatible. Do you remember what you said to me?'
'Yes,' she answered with a rueful smile. 'I asked you what the chief scientist of MOI could possibly know about souls. I'm sorry, Oscar. I was sorry at the time. I was so headstrong. Dale looked great on paper and I wanted your approval — '
'Forget it,' he interrupted her. 'You know how I feel about you. But never underestimate a scientist. Some of them,' he said abstractedly, 'want to know facts and concepts so that ultimately they can understand the overall nature of everything. Including the putative soul.
'Now take these whales,' Oscar continued, increasing the tempo and adroitly changing the subject. 'We have been mapping their brains for almost a decade now, isolating various kinds of functions in specific locations, and trying to correlate their brain structure with that of a human being. We have been reasonably successful. The language function that governs their singing has been separated and the location of the physical controls for all parts of the body have been identified. In fact, we have found an area in the whale brain that corresponds to the equivalent function for every major capability in the human brain. But there's still a problem, a mystery if you will.'
One of the whales stopped in its normal circuit about the tank. It seemed to be watching them. 'There's a large section of their brain that we have been unable to allocate to any specific function. A brilliant scientist years ago, after listening to the whales' songs while they were migrating and correlating those songs with the rest of their behavior, postulated that this large, unmapped portion of their brain was a multidimensional memory array. His hypothesis was that the whales store entire incidents in that array, including sights, sounds, and even feelings, and that they relive these incidents during migration to alleviate the boredom. Our tests are starting to confirm his theory.'
Carol was intrigued. 'You mean, they might put in that array the entire set of sensory impressions from something important, like calving, and then have, in a sense, a full instant replay during a particularly boring part of the migration route? Wow. That's fascinating. My memory irritates me all the time. It would be great if somehow I could go in there, in a directed sense, and pull out anything I want. Complete with feelings.' She laughed. 'There have been times in the summers when I couldn't remember exactly how great it felt to ski and I have almost panicked, worrying about whether or not that feeling might be gone the next winter.'
Oscar waved at the whale and it swam away. 'Be careful,' he said. 'Other people have also thought that it would be fantastic if our memories were more complete, like a computer's. But suppose we did have a perfect, multidimensional memory like that hypothesized for the whale. And suppose we had the same lack of entry control that is characteristic of human memory as it now exists. You know, where what we remember and when we remember it are not under our individual control. Then there would be problems. We might even be nonfunctional as a species. A song, a picture, a smell, even the taste of a cake might suddenly force us to confront anew the full emotions associated with the death of a loved one. We might have to see again a painful fight between our parents. Or even the trauma of our own birth.'
Oscar was quiet for a moment. 'No,' he said finally, 'evolution has served us in good stead. It couldn't develop an entry control mechanism for our memories. So to protect us, to keep us from being demolished by mistakes or past events, evolution built a natural fade process into our memories — '
'Carol Dawson. Carol Dawson. Report immediately to the audiovisual conference room adjacent to the director's office.'
The loudspeaker interrupted the quiet in the MOI aquarium. Carol gave Oscar a hug. 'It's been great, Ozzie, as always,' she said, watching him wince as she used her pet name for