"The rest of the time, the sand was not nearly so detailed, because I never caused ParaHildy to pick up a handful and look at it, and think about looking at it.  Do you see the distinction?  When ParaHildy was walking down the beach, he would notice sand clinging to his feet, in an absent sort of way.  Remember, Hildy, think back, recall yourself walking down the beach, bring it back as vividly as you can."

I tried.  In some way, I already saw most of what he was driving at.  In some way, I already believed that what he was saying was true.

Memory is a funny thing.  It can't be as sharp as we'd sometimes like to believe it is.  If it was, it would be like an hallucination.  We'd be seeing two scenes at once.  The closest mental pictures of things can get to real things is in a dream state.  Other than that, our memory pictures are always hazy to one degree or another.  There are different sorts of memories, good and bad, clear and hazy, the almost-remembered, the thing you could never forget.  But memory serves to locate us in space and time.  You remember what happened to you yesterday, the previous year, when you were a child.  You remember quite clearly what you were doing one second ago:  it usually wasn't all that different from what you're doing now.  The memories stretch backward in time, defining the shape of your life:  these events happened to me, and this is what I saw and heard and felt.  We move through space continually comparing what we're seeing now to the maps and cast of characters in our heads:  I've been here before, I remember what's around that corner, I can see what it looks like.  I know this person.  That person is a stranger, his mug shot isn't in my files.

But now is always fundamentally different from the past.

I remembered walking many, many miles along that beach.  I could recall in great detail many scenes, many sounds and smells.  But I had only looked closely at a handful of sand once.  That was embedded in my past.  I could get up now, if I wished, go to the beach, and do it again, but that was now.  I had no way of disproving what the CC was telling me.  Those memory pictures from the time the CC was saying never happened were just as real to me as the hundred years that had gone before it.  More real, in some ways, because they were more recent.

"It seems like a lot of trouble," I said.

"I have a lot of capacity.  But it's not quite as much trouble as you might think.  For instance, do you recall what you did forty-six days ago?"

"It seems unlikely.  One day is pretty much like another here."  I realized I'd only bolstered his case by saying that.

"Try it.  Try to think back.  Yesterday, the day before . . . "