The myrmicats kept pointing. Richard had no choice, and he knew it. What is it going to do to me? he asked as he took his first step forward. Eat me? Is that what this has been all about? That would make no sense at all.
He turned around. The myrmicats had not moved. Richard took a deep breath and walked the full ten meters into the lane, to a spot where he could reach out and touch one of the odd ganglia in the living mesh. As he was examining the ganglion carefully, the material around him began to move again. Richard whirled around and saw that the lane behind him was closing. Momentarily frantic, he tried to ran in that direction, back toward the passage, but it was a waste of energy. The net caught him and he resigned himself to accept whatever was going to happen next.
Richard stood perfectly still as the web enveloped him. The tiny elements, like threads, were about a millimeter wide. Slowly, steadily, they began to cover his body. Wait, Richard thought, wait. You’re going to suffocate me.
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But surprisingly, even though hundreds of filaments were already wrapping around his head and face, he was having no difficulty breathing.
Before his hands were immobilized, Richard tried to pull one of the tiny elements off his arm. It was almost impossible. As they had been wrapping around him, the threads had also been making insertions in his skin. After many tugs, he finally succeeded in freeing the white filaments from one small portion of his forearm, but he was bleeding in the areas that had been freed. Richard surveyed his body and estimated that he probably had a million or so pieces of the living mesh underneath the outer layer of his skin. He shuddered.
Richard was still amazed that he had not suffocated. As his mind began to wonder how air was getting to him through the web, he heard another voice inside his head. Stop trying to analyze everything, it said. You’ll never understand it anyway. For once in your life just experience the incredible adventure.
5
A:
gain Richard had lost track .of time. Sometime during the days (or had it been weeks?) that he had been living inside the alien net, he had changed positions. His clothes had also been removed by his hosts during one of his long naps. Richard was now lying on his back, supported by an extremely dense section of the fine mesh network enveloping his body.
His mind no longer actively wondered how he was managing to survive. Somehow, whenever he felt hunger or thirst, his needs were swiftly satisfied. His wastes always disappeared within minutes. Breathing was easy even though he was completely surrounded by the living web.
Richard passed many of his conscious hours studying the creature around him. If he looked carefully, he could see the tiny elements constantly in motion. The patterns in the net around him altered very slowly, but they definitely did change. Richard mentally plotted the trajectories of the ganglia that he could see. At one point three separate ganglia migrated into his vicinity and formed a triangle in front of his head.
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The net developed a regular cycle of interacting with Richard. It would keep its millions of filaments attached to him for fifteen to twenty hours at a time, and then release him completely for several hours. Richard slept without dreaming whenever he was not attached to the web. If he happened to awaken still in the unattached mode, he was enervated and listless. But each time the threads began to wind around him again he felt a renewed surge of energy.
His dreams were active and vivid if he slept while attached to the alien net. Richard had never dreamed much before and had often laughed at Nicole’s preoccupation with her dreams. But as his sleeping images became more complex, and in some cases quite bizarre, Richard began to appreciate why Nicole paid so much attention to them. One night he dreamed that he was again a teenager and was watching a theatrical performance of As You Like It in his hometown of Stratford-on-Avon. The lovely blond girl who was playing Rosalind came down from the stage and whispered in his ear.
“Are you Richard Wakefield?” she asked in the dream.
“Yes,” he answered.
The actress began to kiss Richard, first slowly, then more passionately with a lively, tickling tongue darting around inside his mouth. He felt a surge of overpowering desire and then woke up abruptly, strangely embarrassed by both his nakedness and his erection. Now, what was that ail about? Richard wondered, echoing the phrase he had often heard from Nicole.
At some stage in his captivity his recollections of Nicole became much sharper, more clearly delineated. Richard found to his surprise mat in the absence of other stimuli he was able, if he concentrated, to recall entire conversations with Nicole, including such details as the kind of facial expressions she used to punctuate her sentences. In the protracted solitude of his long period inside the web, Richard often ached with loneliness, the vivid memories making him miss his beloved wife even more.
His memories of the children were equally sharp. He missed them all as well, especially Katie. He remembered his last conversation with his special daughter, several
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days before the wedding, when she had come by the house to pick up some of her clothes. Katie had been depressed, and needed support, but Richard had been unable to help her. The connection just wasn’t there, Richard thought. The recent image of Katie as a sexy young woman was replaced by a picture of a reckless ten-year-old girl scampering across the plazas of New York. The juxtaposition of the two images provoked a profound feeling of loss in Richard. / was never comfortable with Katie after she awakened, he realized with a sigh. / still wanted my little girl.
The clarity of his recollections of Nicole and Katie convinced Richard that something extraordinary was happening to his memory. He discovered that he could also recall the exact scores of every World Cup quarter-final, semifinal, and final between 2174 and 2190. Richard had known all that useless information as a young man, for he had been an avid soccer fan. However, during the years before the launch of the Newton, when so many new things had crowded into his brain, he had often been unable, even during soccer discussions with his friends, to recall even the participants in a key World Cup match.
As the visual images from his memories continued to sharpen, Richard found that he was also recalling the emotions that had been associated with the pictures. It was almost as if he were completely reliving the experiences. In one long recollection he remembered not only die overpowering feelings of love and adoration that he had felt for Sarah Tydings when he had first seen her perform onstage, but also the thrill and excitement of their courtship, including the unbridled passion of their first night of love. It had left him breathless then; and now, many years later, enveloped by an alien creature resembling a neural net, Richard’s response was equally powerful.
Soon it seemed as if Richard no longer had any control over which memories were activated in his brain. In the beginning, or so he believed, he had purposely thought about Nicole or his children or even his courtship with the young Sarah Tydings, just to make himself happy. Now, he said one day in an imaginary conversation with the
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sessile net, after refreshing my memory—for God knows what purpose—it seems that you are reading it all out.
For many hours Richard enjoyed the forced memory readout, especially those portions covering his life at Cambridge and the Space Academy, when his days were enlivened by the constant joy of new knowledge. Quantum physics, the Cambrian explosion, probability and statistics, even the long-forgotten vocabulary words from his German lessons reminded him how much of his happiness in life had been due to the excitement of learning. In another particularly satisfying remembrance, his mind jumped swiftly from play to play, covering every live performance of Shakespeare that he had seen between the ages of ten and seventeen. Everyone needs a hero, Richard thought after the montage of scenes, as impetus to bring out the best in himself. My hero was definitely William Shakespeare.
Some of the memories were painful, especially those from his childhood. In one of them Richard was eight years old again, sitting on a bench at the small table in his family’s dining room. The atmosphere at the table was tense. His father, drunk and angry at the world, was glowering at all of them as they ate their dinner in silence. Richard accidentally spilled some of his soup and seconds later the back of his father’s hand hit him hard on the cheek, knocking him off his bench and into the corner of the room, where he trembled from fear and shock. He had not thought about that moment for years. Richard was unable to restrain his tears as he recalled how helpless and scared he had been around his neurotic, abusive father.
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