The Dreamers
James Gunn
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
"The Volunteer,” published as IF I FORGET THEE copyright © 1980 by James Gunn, originally appeared in TRIAX published by Pinnicle Inc.
To Steve Goldman,
my best reader
PREFACE
Sometime in the late 1950s I ran across accounts of what was then called “chemical memory.” The way in which memory is transferred to the neurons in the brain for storage was mysterious at that time (and no one really knows today how the brain remembers). Robert Jordan and James McConnell, while still graduate students, began doing experiments with planarian worms at the University of Texas, studies that McConnell continued while a professor at the University of Michigan. His work and those of others was published in a publication whimsically titled The Worm-Runners Digest.
Other researchers picked up the research: Holgar Hyden, George Ungar, David Krech.... All that, if the reader is interested, is summarized (in quotes from journal and magazine articles) in the middle channel of the Mnemonist's ruminations.. The final statement in that brief history, in the Mnemonist's last section, speculates about the future potential of chemical memory. Such speculations are the spark to the rocket of the writer's imagination.
I included references to chemical memory in my novel Kampus, in which they became pills of instruction that students could pop instead of going to class—though there they became a metaphor for getting knowledge—or information—without having to work for it. But they also contained a central core of possibility: that learning itself could be encapsulated, so that one could learn to be a computer technician, say, or a surgeon by popping a pill. If that became possible, civilization would be transformed more radically than it was by the industrial revolution or by science.
The Dreamers assumes that the chemical memory revolution has already occurred. All the everyday problems of existence have been resolved. Now chemical memory is being applied to the arts, and people have the opportunity to indulge themselves in the ultimate escape fiction: the living of other people's lives through memories that have been encapsulated for them.
But there still will be a need for a few people who hold themselves apart from the common pool of pleasure, who must make decisions, create dreams, and supply the basic materials for the dreamers and their poppets.
Even in the 1950s and early 1960s, the concept of chemical memory was viewed skeptically by most biologists and physiologists, and today has been discarded. An article in the January 2001 Analog by Kyle Kirkland, a postdoctoral scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, dismisses chemical memory and describes what scientists today think about the way memories are recorded in the brain. Synaptic physiology, he wrote, is one of the most important areas of neuro-science research. Just because you can't inject other people's memories, he goes on to say, doesn't mean that you can't replicate them. But chemical memory always was more potent in what it implied about the human condition than in what it might achieve in the real world. [Science fiction, editor John W. Campbell once wrote, exists in the gap between the laboratory and the marketplace.] Memory is what makes us individuals, and the creation of memories is what, when it structures our dreams, we call art.
James Gunn
The Mnemonist I
Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know
Are a substantial world, both pure and good.
Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,
Our pastime and our happiness will grow.
—William Wordsworth
The Mnemonist stirred on his protective pallet, moving dreamlike in counterpoint to the thoughts that were more real than the room and the cocoon of flesh that enclosed them. “The question is,” the Mnemonist said, “is dreaming, like REM sleep, essential to a healthy society, or is it so ultimately satisfying that the dreams will consume the dreamers?” This question, like others that occurred to him, occupied a peaceful spot inside his head surrounded by turmoil, like a curious island in a troubled sea of data.
we are
the music makers
and we are
the dreamers
of dreams
wandering by
lone sea breakers
and sitting
by desolate
streams
robert thomson and
james mcconnell were
graduate students at the
university of texas
In 1953
they started to teach
the planarian worm
because it was
the lowest animal
with synapses
check
pellet
maker
5
generator
2
is
running
a bit
rough
The Mnemonist was like a spider at the heart of a web he had not spun. Slender tubes surrounded him, caressed him, nourished him with food and function, removed wastes, brought sleep and wakefulness. They adjusted themselves to his commands and to his unspoken needs and desires, such as they were. As the years passed, for instance, he slept less and less; now his moments of unconsciousness lasted no more than half an hour each period.
world losers and
world forsakers
on whom the
pale moon gleams
yet we are
the movers
and shakers
of the world forever
it seems
at its head end
it had
a concentration
of nerve cells
called a ganglion
that could
be thought of
as a
primitive brain
a lost
child
is
wandering
on
the third
level
of the
crèche
He was not uncomfortable. In fact, he seldom thought about that aspect of his existence. His life was information and decision and, most of all, the questions he asked to which stored data responded, but there were never any answers to the basic questions. He didn't know if he asked questions because he was a question asker—what once was called a philosopher—because questions were fed into his veins along with the information and the food, or because questions naturally emerged from the data.
courage he said
and pointed
toward the land
this mounting wave
will roll us
homeward soon
in the afternoon
they came unto a land
in which it seemed
always afternoon
mcconnell continued
training planarians
at michigan
he cut them
in half
and waited
for the pieces
to generate
into
whole worms
cultivator
421
is
destroying
plants
pull
it
in
for
overhaul
His body twitched where it rested on the fluid-filled mattress, but he was used to it. In fact he scarcely thought of it as his body anymore; it was more like part of the room in which he resided, an extension of the console's tubes, a conduit for information and food, and sometimes a nuisance. The computer took care of it while he concerned himself with important matters. “Did the discoverers of chemical memory,” he asked, “have any notion of the potentials they were releasing?"
they sat them down
u
pon the yellow sand
between the sun
and moon
upon the shore
and sweet it was
to dream
of fatherland
of child
and wife
and slave
the original heads
remembered
but the old tails
also remembered
perhaps memory
wasn't stored
in the brain
but was
a biochemical change
that took place
throughout the body
textured
Protein
716
is producing
irregular
shapes
replace
the
worn
nozzle
“What are the limits to the individual's ability to manipulate reality to his satisfaction?” the Mnemonist asked. His body was wrinkled and gray and wiry, like a spider's. His eyes were closed. He almost never opened them. There was never anything to see, and the only matters that interested him took shape inside his head or swam like small blind eels through his veins and arteries. The individual's personal power was one limit, he thought; the conflicting desires of others was another. And finally there had to be ultimate parameters within which reality permits itself to be manipulated. “Is the first limit a function of technology,” he asked, “and the second a function of population density? And if these are so, insofar as population density is dependent upon technology, do these two limits vary inversely?"
but evermore
most weary seemed
the sea weary the oar
weary the wandering
fields of barren foam
then someone said
we will return no more
and all at once
they sang
our island home
is far beyond the wave
we will no longer roam
holger
hyden
at the
university
of goteborg
suggested
that
memories
might be
molecules of
ribonucleic
acid
generator 2
may require
a complete
overhaul
check the
consequences
of pulling
it off the line
and estimate
how long
an overhaul
will require
“If one limit to the manipulation of reality is a function of technology,” the Mnemonist said, “does the self-maintaining technology of this world provide nearly total independence from environment, and thus no meaningful limit at all?” His life system was a model of the urban center in miniature, the extensions of his nerves and his realm of action like the extensions of the urban center into the fields around it and under it, with their water and minerals and growing things. Like the urban center, he was a closed system. “If resistance to desires and consequences for action are lowered to the vanishing point, is only the final limit important? Do the parameters within which reality can be manipulated remain the final limit to human happiness?"
hateful is
the dark blue sky
vaulted oer
the dark blue sea
death is the end
of life ah why
should life
all labor be
let us alone
time driveth
onward fast
and in a little while
our lips are dumb
long molecules of
dioxyribonucleic
acid
in the nucleus
of the cell
contain the complete plans
for an animal
parts are copied
of rna go into the cell
with instructions for
the manufacture of protein
lift
shaft
12
is
malfunctioning
again
check
the
controls
and
repair
as
necessary
“On the other hand, does the easy and ultimate fulfillment of dreams result in enduring happiness?” the Mnemonist asked. His voice was rusty, like a bird cawing, in that reverberating room, but if he had not asked himself questions over the years, it might long since have withered into uselessness. Once it had uttered foolishness, but that had been long ago, in another lifetime. Besides, no one heard it but him. “Is there a fundamental perversity to the human spirit that, no matter to what gods man sacrifices, refuses him his heart's desire?"
let us alone
what pleasure
can we have
to war with evil
is there any peace
in ever climbing up
the climbing wave
all things have rest
and ripen
toward the grave
in silence ripen
fall and cease
give us long rest
or death
dark death
or dreamful ease
george ungar
discovered
memory transfer
accidentally
while studying
morphine addiction
in rats
when he injected
brain extract
from a
habituated rat
into a second animal
he seemed
to transfer
the
habituation
the
pellets
are
not
at
fault
generator
2
is
overheating
pull
it
off
the
line
now
“Is the genetic code a biological mechanism for remembering?” the Mnemonist asked. His body twitched again. Such malfunctions were getting to be an annoyance; the console would have to handle matters better than that. He did not know how old he was: In the midst of all the data that flowed through his body and all the relationships his brain created between them, this personal fact had been lost with all the other facts about himself as other than a living memory machine and decision maker. His age and the condition of his body were irrelevant. At least they had been until recently. “Why shouldn't proteins carry memory? But what is the human body remembering?"