William of Orange, the Dutch prince who had become monarch of England, did not like Mrs. Behn. Yet, somehow, though she was regarded as a wicked and scandalous woman, she was buried in Westminster Abbey.
“How did that happen? I was interred among the greatest of the great? I?”
“No one in my time knew why,” Frigate said.
“Nor in mine,” Burton said. “We will have to resurrect one of your contemporaries to determine that.”
“Byron was refused a grave in Westminster Abbey,” Frigate said. “He was thought to be too blasphemous and wicked to be given that honor. Yet you made it.”
“And I,” Burton said, “I was also refused. I had deserved it more than many who rested there, but Nigger Dick would not be allowed within the hallowed walls.”
Aphra had many miserable and frightening times on the Ri-verworld, but life was almost always worthwhile. No fun being dead. So, here she was in ‘the tower and she had just parted with another lover. She might live with de Marbot again, though it did not seem likely just now. Never mind. She did not intend to be alone for long.
17
While waiting for his little world to be built, Peter Jairus Frigate was not idle. He decided that he did not wish to cut off the “memory movie” entirely. He was too curious about his past; he had many questions about it that he had thought would never be answered. Though he’d be pained seeing it, he was going to force himself to endure the pain. Now and then. So he removed a square of the paint from a wall of a room in his suite, and he spent an hour each day in that room. The moment he appeared in it, the past sprung to life as seen through his eyes and heard through his ears.
Experimenting, he found that the Computer did not insist on showing him everything according to the program. If he requested a certain time area, then he got it.
Also, the Computer had a clock synchronized with the time of its subject’s memory. If Frigate had known in the past what date it was because he’d looked at a calendar that day or someone had mentioned the date, the Computer could flash to that event. Otherwise, it had to estimate the approximate time and would scan its track for the area of time first, then the particular date.
There were, as he soon found out, many gaps in the “movie.” He asked for a date at random, October 27, 1923. At that time, he was playing around and trying to do some spot-checking. That day was a blank; he had nothing in his memory about it.
The Computer told him why.
There was not enough space in his memory cells to store his entire life. A mechanism in the mnemonics complex erased what was to him insignificant; thus making more room for the meaningful. Often, though, what his conscious considered unimportant, his unconscious considered worth storing.
The wathan was supposed to have stored the entire life experiences of the individual. Nothing was left unrecorded. This theory could not be validated, since, so far, no wathan could be tapped. Its bright many-colored exterior remained invulnerable to probing. Like the Sphinx, it was beautiful and awe-inspiring but silent.
The Computer figured out for him that he had lived 55,188,000 minutes so far. Of this, 22,075,200 minutes were available at that moment. That was the total, but that did not mean that every one of those minutes could be run off in its entirety. There were many fragments of minutes in the storage. If Frigate cared to know just how many fragments and how long each was, he could get the numbers from the Computer. But he did not care to know.
“Sixty percent of the movie of my life went onto the cutting-room floor,” he muttered. “Jesus! If I sit down and watch the whole movie from beginning to end, it’ll take me 15,330 days of twenty-four-hour periods to see it. Forty-two years of just sitting watching.”
How could the human brain, that small gray mass, contain so many memories, so much data, so many millions, maybe billions, of miles of film?