So he was not going to have to do all the work of developing a memory reinforcer himself, not by any means; the Acheron labs were highly interested, and Marina remained active in the city’s lab of labs, and the city still had a close relationship with Praxis, with all its resources. And many labs there were already investigating memory. It was a big part of the longevity project now, for obvious reasons. Marina said that some twenty percent of all human effort was now being devoted, in one form or another, to the longevity project. And longevity itself was pointless without memory lasting as long as the rest of the system. So it made sense for a complex like Acheron to focus on it.

• • •

Soon after his arrival Sax joined Marina and Ursula alone, for breakfast in the dining area of their quarters. Just the three of them, surrounded by portable walls covered by batiks from Dorsa Brevia, and trees in pots. No remembrance of Vlad. Nor did they mention him. Sax, conscious of how unusual it was to be invited into their home, had trouble focusing on the matter at hand. He had known both these women from the beginning, and greatly respected both of them, Ursula especially for her great empathic qualities; but he didn’t feel he knew them at all well. So he sat there in the wind, eating and looking at them, and out the open window walls. There to the north lay a narrow strip of blue, Acheron Bay, a deep indentation in the North Sea— to the south, far beyond the first nearby horizon, the enormous bulk of Olympus Mons. In between, a devil’s golf course of a land— hard gnarled eroded old lava flows, riven and pocked— and in each hollow a little green oasis, dotting the blackish waste of the plateau.

Marina said, “We’ve been thinking about why experimental psychologists in every generation have reported a few isolated cases of truly exceptional memories, but there is never any attempt to explain them by the memory models of the period.”

“In fact they forget them as soon as they can,” Ursula said.

“Yes. And then when the reports are exhumed, no one quite believes them to be true. It’s put down to the credulity of earlier times. Typically no one alive can be found who can reproduce the feats described, and so the tendency is to conclude that the earlier investigators were mistaken or fooled. But a lot of the reports were perfectly well substantiated.”

“Such as?” Sax said. It had not occurred to him to look at organism-level real-world functional accounts, anecdotal as they invariably were. But of course it made sense to do so.

Marina said, “The conductor Toscanini knew by heart every note of every instrument for about two hundred and fifty symphonic works, and the words and music of about a hundred operas, plus a lot more shorter works.”

“They tested this?”