The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year - Volume Eight (28 page)

The assessment report of the Europeans was
vough
; it was exact and precise, but that wasn't enough to settle the question. The choice of which clan to join with had to be right for the community; it had to be
mimi
. Only the elders could determine what was
mimi
; it was their responsibility to decide what was best for the Shangev clan. Asking Sabe to defer to the paper was asking him to act against what he considered right.

"You're right, Sabe," he said. "Forgive me. You're my elder, and it was wrong of me to suggest that paper could know more than you."

Sabe nodded and resumed walking. "You are free to do as you wish, but I believe it will do more harm than good to show that paper to others."

Jijingi considered it. The elders from the western farms would undoubtedly argue that the assessment report supported their position, prolonging a debate that had already gone on too long. But more than that, it would move the Tiv down the path of regarding paper as the source of truth; it would be another stream in which the old ways were washing away, and he could see no benefit in it.

"I agree," said Jijingi. "I won't show this to anyone else."

Sabe nodded.

Jijingi walked back to his hut, reflecting on what had happened. Even without attending a mission school, he had begun thinking like a European; his practice of writing in his notebooks had led him to disrespect his elders without him even being aware of it. Writing helped him think more clearly, he couldn't deny that; but that wasn't good enough reason to trust paper over people.

As a scribe, he had to keep the book of Sabe's decisions in tribal court. But he didn't need to keep the other notebooks, the ones in which he'd written down his thoughts. He would use them as tinder for the cooking fire.

W
e don't normally think of it as such, but writing is a technology, which means that a literate person is someone whose thought processes are technologically mediated. We became cognitive cyborgs as soon as we became fluent readers, and the consequences of that were profound.

Before a culture adopts the use of writing, when its knowledge is transmitted exclusively through oral means, it can very easily revise its history. It's not intentional, but it is inevitable; throughout the world, bards and griots have adapted their material to their audiences, and thus gradually adjusted the past to suit the needs of the present. The idea that accounts of the past shouldn't change is a product of literate cultures' reverence for the written word. Anthropologists will tell you that oral cultures understand the past differently; for them, their histories don't need to be accurate so much as they need to validate the community's understanding of itself. So it wouldn't be correct to say that their histories are unreliable; their histories do what they need to do.

Right now each of us is a private oral culture. We rewrite our pasts to suit our needs and support the story we tell about ourselves. With our memories we are all guilty of a Whig interpretation of our personal histories, seeing our former selves as steps toward our glorious present selves.

But that era is coming to an end. Remem is merely the first of a new generation of memory prostheses, and as these products gain widespread adoption, we will be replacing our malleable organic memories with perfect digital archives. We will have a record of what we actually did instead of stories that evolve over repeated tellings. Within our minds, each of us will be transformed from an oral culture into a literate one.

It would be easy for me to assert that literate cultures are better off than oral ones, but my bias should be obvious, since I'm writing these words rather than speaking them to you. Instead I will say that it's easier for me to appreciate the benefits of literacy and harder to recognize everything it has cost us. Literacy encourages a culture to place more value on documentation and less on subjective experience, and overall I think the positives outweigh the negatives. Written records are subject to every kind of error and their interpretation is subject to change, but at least the words on the page remain fixed, and there is real merit in that.

When it comes to our individual memories, I live on the opposite side of the divide. As someone whose identity was built on organic memory, I'm threatened by the prospect of removing subjectivity from our recall of events. I used to think it could be valuable for individuals to tell stories about themselves, valuable in a way that it couldn't be for cultures, but I'm a product of my time, and times change. We can't prevent the adoption of digital memory any more than oral cultures could stop the arrival of literacy, so the best I can do is look for something positive in it.

And I think I've found the real benefit of digital memory. The point is not to prove you were right; the point is to admit you were wrong.

Because all of us have been wrong on various occasions, engaged in cruelty and hypocrisy, and we've forgotten most of those occasions. And that means we don't really know ourselves. How much personal insight can I claim if I can't trust my memory? How much can you? You're probably thinking that, while your memory isn't perfect, you've never engaged in revisionism of the magnitude I'm guilty of. But I was just as certain as you, and I was wrong. You may say, "I know I'm not perfect. I've made mistakes." I am here to tell you that you have made more than you think, that some of the core assumptions on which your self-image is built are actually lies. Spend some time using Remem, and you'll find out.

But the reason I now recommend Remem is not for the shameful reminders it provides of your past; it's to avoid the need for those in the future. Organic memory was what enabled me to construct a whitewashed narrative of my parenting skills, but by using digital memory from now on, I hope to keep that from happening. The truth about my behavior won't be presented to me by someone else, making me defensive; it won't even be something I'll discover as a private shock, prompting a re-evaluation. With Remem providing only the unvarnished facts, my image of myself will never stray too far from the truth in the first place.

Digital memory will not stop us from telling stories about ourselves. As I said earlier, we are made of stories, and nothing can change that. What digital memory will do is change those stories from fabulations that emphasize our best acts and elide our worst, into ones that – I hope – acknowledge our fallibility and make us less judgmental about the fallibility of others.

Nicole has begun using Remem as well, and discovered that her recollection of events isn't perfect either. This hasn't made her forgive me for the way I treated her – nor should it, because her misdeeds were minor compared to mine – but it has softened her anger at my misremembering my actions, because she realizes it's something we all do. And I'm embarrassed to admit that this is precisely the scenario Erica Meyers predicted when she talked about Remem's effects on relationships.

This doesn't mean I've changed my mind about the downsides of digital memory; there are many, and people need to be aware of them. I just don't think I can argue the case with any sort of objectivity anymore. I abandoned the article I was planning to write about memory prostheses; I handed off the research I'd done to a colleague, and she wrote a fine piece about the pros and cons of the software, a dispassionate article free from all the soul-searching and angst that would have saturated anything I submitted. Instead, I've written this.

The account I've given of the Tiv is based in fact, but isn't precisely accurate. There was indeed a dispute among the Tiv in 1941 over whom the Shangev clan should join with, based on differing claims about the parentage of the clan's founder, and administrative records did show that the clan elders' account of their genealogy had changed over time. But many of the specific details I've described are invented. The actual events were more complicated and less dramatic, as actual events always are, so I have taken liberties to make a better narrative. I've told a story in order to make a case for the truth. I recognize the contradiction here.

As for my account of my argument with Nicole, I've tried to make it as accurate as I possibly could. I've been recording everything since I started working on this project, and I've consulted the recordings repeatedly when writing this. But in my choice of which details to include and which to omit, perhaps I have just constructed another story. In spite of my efforts to be unflinching, have I flattered myself with this portrayal? Have I distorted events so they more closely follow the arc expected of a confessional narrative? The only way you can judge is by comparing my account against the recordings themselves, so I'm doing something I never thought I'd do: with Nicole's permission, I am granting public access to my lifelog, such as it is. Take a look at the video, and decide for yourself.

And if you think I've been less than honest, tell me. I want to know.

THE INK READERS OF DOI SAKET

Thomas Olde Heuvelt

Dutch novelist and short fiction writer Thomas Olde Heuvelt (
en.oldeheuvelt.com
) is the author of five novels,
De Onvoorziene, PhantasAmnesia
,
Leerling Tovenaar Vader & Zoon, Harten Sara
, and
HEX
. His work has been awarded the Paul Harland Prize (for best Dutch work of the fantastic) on three occasions, received an honourable mention in the Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Awards and was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novelette in 2013. His short fiction has appeared in English from
Tor.com
, Oxygen Books,
Lightspeed
, and PS Publishing. His novel
HEX
will be published in English in 2015.

I
t was during a night in the twelfth lunar month of this year when two strong hands pushed young Tangmoo down into the bed of the Mae Ping River, and by doing so, ironically, fulfilled his only wish. Tangmoo flailed his arms wildly, churning up the swirling water. The whites of his eyes reflected flashes from the fireworks as his smothered cries rose in bubbles to the surface, where they burst in silence:
help, help, help, help!

These filtered cries of alarm were mistaken by a pair of dragonflies, fused in flight, their only wish to remain larvaless and so prolong their love dance endlessly, for the dripping of morning dew. So unsettled was the pair that their breaths caught, and for a second, just when the male ejaculated, they separated. Force of habit subsequently incited them to repeat this in all their future climaxes, making their fondest wish actually come true.

But this was a chance circumstance. The point here is that young Tangmoo screamed, and his lungs filled with water, and please, he did not want to die this way.

In order to fully grasp the tragedy of this drama, we'll have to flash back a few days and take a peek at the village of Doi Saket, situated on the exact same river shore. Late one afternoon, about an hour before it was time for his third bowl of rice of the day, the well-bellied weed exterminator Uan
¹
came running into the temple square. Winded as a consequence of the oversized behind that had given him his name, he stopped to catch his breath, leaning against the enormous stone phallus outside the temple (though not on the temple grounds themselves, since Buddha doesn't approve of that kind of non-Buddhist folly), before wheezing, "Come see, come see! The first wish has arrived!"

"Watch out!" cried the malodorous lampshade maker Tao
²
, whose nickname did not spring from his shell-head or his tortoise appearance, but from his extreme robustness, and he nodded toward the phallus.

In his frenzy, Uan had forgotten all about the general consensus around the ancient fertility symbol. The adulterous rice peeler Somchai
³
had once cheated on her husband with three neighbors and a shopkeeper from a nearby village after she had been spotted on the phallic altar, touching herself and wrapped in nothing but silk ribbons. As a penalty, Somchai was buried waist-deep in the rice field so that her excess fertility could seep into the crops, and it was decided that the bewitched phallus was never to be touched again, and was only to be greeted by passers-by with a brief nod of the head, something that was ardently copied by the villagers and which consequently led to an abundance of oral sex. (There were rumors that the stone was not in fact bewitched at all, but that lustful Somchai suffered from some type of obsessive exhibitionism. Nonsense, of course.)

Quick as lightning, Uan let go of the stone (but he was too late: in the following year his wife would give birth to triplets) and yelled, "Come to the river, all of you! The first wish is arriving – I've seen it with my own eyes!"

"So soon?" said the well-mannered crab gatherer Kulap, just returning from the rice field with her basket. "I don't believe it. It's way too early."

Inside his house the generally respected Puu Yaybaan, chief of the village, heard the commotion and came running out the door. "What's going on?" he shouted, scattering chickens in his wild dash. "What's all this racket?"

"Uan says the first wish is here," Kulap said, crinkling her nose in a way that was all in contrast to her gentle nature. "But I don't believe it."

"Is this true?" the Puu Yaybaan asked.

"It's as true as me standing here," Uan insisted, and indeed: there he stood.

"Well... So did you retrieve it?" Tao asked, placing his lampshade at his feet.

"Certainly not," Uan responded. "I can't swim, I'm too heavy to stay afloat. Come on, everybody! To the river!"

The hubbub caused many a window shutter to open, many a cell phone to ring, and many a banana leaf to furl bashfully back into its tree, as curiosity was the one thing that could mobilize all the villagers in unison. And sure enough, when they arrived at the riverside, they all saw it. A trace of brilliance on the tranquil stream. A floating lily made of plastic and crepe paper. A pearl inside a lotus blossom. The first wish of Loi Krathong.