She laughed again, harder. It made him grin to hear it. Though he was frightened too. Three Anns? Even one had been more than he could understand.

“But I’m losing some of those labs,” he said. “Whole units of my past. Some people model memory as a node-and-network system, so it’s possible the palace-of-memory method intuitively echoes the physical system involved. But if you somehow lose the node, the whole network around it goes too. So, I’ll run across a reference in the literature to something I did, for instance, and try to recall doing it, what methodological problems we had or whatever, and the whole, the whole era will just refuse to come to me. As if it never happened.”

“A problem with the palace.”

“Yes. I didn’t anticipate it. Even after my— my incident— I was sure nothing would ever happen to my ability to— to think.”

“You still seem to think okay.”

Sax shook his head, recalling the blank-outs, the gaps in memory, the presque vus as Michel had called them, the confusions. Thinking was not just analytical or cognitive ability, but something more general. . . . He tried to describe what had been happening to him recently, and Ann seemed to be listening closely. “So you see, I’ve been looking at the recent work being done on memory. It’s gotten interesting— pressing, really. And Ursula and Marina and the Acheron labs have been helping me. And I think they’ve worked out something that might help us.”

“A memory drug, you mean?”

“Yes.” He explained the action of the new anamnestic complex. “So. My notion is to try it. But I’ve become convinced that it will work best if a number of the First Hundred gathered at Underhill, and take it together. Context is very important to recollection, and the sight of each other might help. Not everyone is interested, but a surprising number of the remaining First Hundred are, actually.”

“Not so surprising. Who?”

He named everyone he had contacted. It was, sad to admit, most of them left; a dozen or so. “And all of us would like it if you were there too. I know I would like it more than anything.”

“It sounds interesting,” Ann said. “But first we have to cross this caldera.”

• • •

Walking over the rock, Sax was amazed anew by the stony reality of their world. The fundamentals: rock, sand, dust, fines. Dark chocolate sky, on this day, and no stars. The long distances with no blurring to define them. The stretch of ten minutes. The length of an hour when one was only walking. The feeling in one’s legs.