membered Kalal turning over and over in his nervous

  hands as he spoke to her future self. Here at last was the link that would bind her through the pages of destiny,

  and for a moment she hitched her hand back and pre-

  pared to throw it so far out into ocean that it would never be reclaimed. Then her arm relaxed. Out there, all the way across the darkness of the bay, the tideflowers of Habara were glowing.

  She decided to keep it.

  3 8 7

  Angles

  Orson Scott Card

  3000

  Hakira enjoyed coasting the streets of Manhattan. The

  old rusted-out building frames seemed like the skeleton of some ancient leviathan that beached and died, but he

  could hear the voices and horns and growling machinery

  of crowded streets and smell the exhaust and cooking oil, even if all that he saw beneath him were the tops of the

  trees that had grown up in the long-vanished streets. With a world as uncrowded as this one, there was no reason to

  dismantle the ruins, or clear the trees. It could remain as a monument, for the amusement of the occasional visitor.

  There were plenty of places in the world that were still

  crowded. As always, most people enjoyed or at least

  needed human company, and even recluses usually

  wanted people close enough to reach from time to time.

  Satellites and landlines still linked the world together, and ports were busy with travel and commerce of the

  lighter sort, like bringing out-of-season fruits and veg-

  etables to consumers who preferred not to travel to where the food was fresh. But as the year 3000 was about to

  pass away, there were places like this that made the

  3 8 8

  A N G L E S

  planet Earth seem almost empty, as if humanity had

  moved on.

  In fact, there were probably far more human beings

  alive than anyone had ever imagined might be possible.

  No human had ever left the solar system, and only a

  handful lived anywhere but Earth. One of the Earths, any-

  way—one of the angles of Earth. In the past five hundred

  years, millions had passed through benders to colonize

  versions of Earth where humanity had never evolved, and

  now a world seemed full with only a billion people or so.

  Of the trillions of people that were known to exist, the

  one that Hakira was going to see lived in a two-hundred-

  year-old house perched on the southern coast of this is-

  land, where in ancient times artillery had been placed to command the harbor. Back when the Atlantic reached

  this far inland. Back when invaders had to come by ship.

  Hakira set his flivver down in the meadow where the

  homing signal indicated, switched off the engine, and

  slipped out into the bracing air of a summer morning

  only a few miles from the face of the nearest glacier. He was expected—there was no challenge from the security

  system, and lights showed him the path to follow through

  the shadowy woods.

  Because his host was something of a show-off, a pair

  of sabertooth tigers were soon padding along beside him.

  They might have been computer simulations, but know-

  ing Moshe’s reputation, they were probably genetic back-

  forms, very expensive and undoubtedly chipped up to

  keep them from behaving aggressively except, perhaps,

  on command. And Moshe had no reason to wish Hakira

  ill. They were, after all, kindred spirits.

  The path suddenly opened up onto a meadow, and af-

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  O R S O N S C O T T C A R D

  ter only a few steps he realized that the meadow was the

  roof of a house, for here and there steep-pitched skylights rose above the grass and flowers. And now, with a turn,

  the path took him down a curving ramp along the face of

  the butte overlooking the Hudson plain. And now he

  stood before a door.

  It opened.

  A beaming Moshe stood before him, dressed in, of all

  things, a kimono. “Come in, Hakira! You certainly took

  your time!”

  “We set our appointment by the calendar, not the

  clock.”

  “Whenever you arrive is a good time. I merely noted

  that my security system showed you taking the grand

  tour on the way.”

  “Manhattan. A sad place, like a sweet dream you can

  never return to.”

  “A poet’s soul, that’s what you have.”

  “I’ve never been accused of that, before.”

  “Only because you’re Japanese,” said Moshe.

  They sat down before an open fire that seemed real,

  but gave off no smoke. Heat it had, however, so that

  Hakira felt a little scorched when he leaned forward.

  “There are Japanese poets.”

  “I know. But is that what anyone thinks of, when they

  think of the wandering Japanese?”

  Hakira smiled. “But you do have money.”

  “Not from money-changing,” said Moshe. “And what I

  don’t have, which you also don’t have, is a home.”

  Hakira looked around at the luxurious parlor. “I sup-

  pose that technically this is a cave.”

  “A homeland,” said Moshe. “For nine and a half cen-

  turies, my friend, your people have been able to go al-

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  A N G L E S

  most anywhere in the world but one, an archipelago of

  islands once called Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu—”

  Hakira, suddenly overcome by emotion, raised his

  hand to stop the cruel list. “I know that your people, too, have been driven from their homeland—”

  “Repeatedly,” said Moshe.

  “I hope you will forgive me, sir, but it is impossible to imagine yearning for a desert beside a dead sea the way

  one yearns for the lush islands strangled for nearly a

  thousand years by the Chinese dragon.”

  “Dry or wet, flat or mountainous, the home to which

  you are forbidden to return is beautiful in dreams.”

  “Who has the soul of a poet now?”

  “Your organization will fail, you know.”

  “I know nothing of the kind, sir.”

  “It will fail. China will never relent, because to do so

  would be to admit wrongdoing, and that they cannot do.

  To them you are the interlopers. The toothless Peace

  Council can issue as many edicts as it likes, but the Chinese will continue to bar those of known Japanese ances-

  try from even visiting the islands. And they will use as

  their excuse the perfectly valid argument that if you want so much to see Japan, you have only to bend yourself to

  a different slant. There is bound to be some angle where

  your tourist dollars will be welcome.”

  “No,” said Hakira. “Those other angles are not this

  world.”

  “And yet they are.”

  “And yet they are not.”

  “Well, now, there is our dilemma. Either we will do

  business or we will not, and it all hinges on that question.

  What is it about that archipelago that you want. Is it the land itself? You can already visit that very land—and we

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  O R S O N S C O T T C A R D

  are told that because of inanimate incoherency it is the same land, no matter what angle you dwell in. Or is your desire really not simply to go there, but to go there in defiance of the Chinese? Is it hate, then, that drives you?”

  “No, I reject both interpretations,” said Hakira. “I care nothing for the Chinese. And now that you put the question in these terms, I realize that I myself have not

  thought clearly enough, for while I speak of the beautiful land of the rising sun, in fact what I yearn for is the

  Japanese nation, on those islands, unmolested by any

  other, governing ourselves as we have from the begin-

  ning of our existence as a people.”

  “Ah,” said Moshe. “Now I see that we perhaps can do business. For it may be possible to grant you your heart’s desire.”

  “Me and all the people of the Kotoshi.”

  “Ah, the eternally optimistic Kotoshi. It means ‘this

  year,’ doesn’t it? As in, ‘this year we return’?”

  “As your people say, ‘Next year in Jerusalem.’ ”

  “A Japan where only the Japanese have ruled for all

  these past thousand years. In a world where the Japanese

  are not rootless wanderers, legendary toymakers-for-hire, but rather are a nation among the nations of the world,

  and one of the greatest of them. Is that not the home you wish to return to?”

  “Yes,” said Hakira.

  “But that Japan does not exist in this world, not even

  now, when the Chinese no longer need even half the land

  of the original Han China. So you do not want the Japan

  of this world at all, do you? The Japan you want is a fantasy, a dream.”

  “A hope.”

  “A wish.”

  3 9 2

  A N G L E S

  “A plan.”

  “And it hasn’t occurred to you that in all the angles of

  the world, there might not be such a Japan?”

  “It isn’t like the huge library in that story, where it is believed that among all the books containing all the

  combinations of all the letters that could fit in all those pages, there is bound to be a book that tells the true history of all the world. There are many angles, yes, but our ability to differentiate them is not infinite, and in many of them life never evolved and so the air is not breathable. It is an experiment not lightly undertaken.”

  “Oh, of course. To find a world so nearly like our own

  that a nation called Japan—or, I suppose, Nippon—exists

  at all, where a language like Japanese is even spoken—

  you do speak Japanese yourself, don’t you?”

  “My parents spoke nothing else at home until I was

  five and had to enter school.”

  “Yes, well, to find such a world would be a miracle.”

  “And to search for it would be a fool’s errand.”

  “And yet it has been searched for.”

  Hakira waited. Moshe did not go on.

  “Has it been found?”

  “What would it be worth to you, if it had?”

  2024—ANGLE 1

  “You’re a scientist,” said Leonard. “This is beneath you.”

  “I have continuous video,” said Bêto. “With a mechan-

  ical clock in it, so you can see the flow of time. The chair moves.”

  “There is nothing you can do that hasn’t been faked by

  somebody, sometime.”

  3 9 3

  O R S O N S C O T T C A R D

  “But why would I fake it? To publish this is the end of

  my career.”

  “Exactly my point, Bêto. You are a geologist, of all

  things. Geologists don’t have poltergeists.”

  “Stay with me, Leonard. Watch this.”

  “How long?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes it’s immediate. Sometimes it

  takes days.”

  “I don’t have days.”

  “Play cards with me. As we used to in Faculdade. Look

  at the chair first, though. Nothing attached to it. A normal chair in every way.”

  “You sound like a magician on the stage.”

  “But it is normal.”

  “So it seems.”

  “Seem? All right, don’t trust me. You move it. Put it where you want.”

  “All right. Upside down?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “On top of the door?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “And we play cards?”

  “You deal.”

  2090

  It is the problem of memory. We have mapped the en-

  tire brain. We can track the activity of every neuron, of every synapse. We have analyzed the chemical contents

  of the cells. We can find, in the living brain, without surgery, exactly where each muscle is controlled, where per-

  ceptions are rooted. We can even stimulate the brain to

  3 9 4

  A N G L E S

  track and recall memory. But that is all. We cannot ac-

  count for how memory is stored, and we cannot find

  where.

  I know that in your textbooks in secondary school and

  perhaps in your early undergraduate classes you have

  read that memory was the first problem solved, but that

  was a misunderstanding. We discovered that after map-

  ping a particular memory, if that exact portion of the

  brain was destroyed—and this was in the early days, with

  clumsy equipment that killed thousands of cells at a time, an incredibly wasteful procedure and potentially devastating to the subject—if that exact spot was destroyed, the memory was not lost. It could resurface somewhere else.

  So for many years we believed that memory was

  stored holographically, small portions in many places, so that losing a bit of a memory here or there did not cause the entire sequence to be lost. This, however, was

  chimerical, for as our research became more and more

  precise, we discovered that the brain is not infinite, and such a wasteful system of memory storage would use up

  the entire brain before a child reached the age of three.

  Because, you see no memory is lost. Some memories are hard to recover, and people often lose track of their memories, but it is not a problem of storage, it is a problem of retrieval.

  Portions of the network break down, so tracks cannot

  be followed. Or the routing is such that you cannot link

  from memory A to memory X without passing through

  memories of such power that you are distracted from the

  attempt to retrieve. But, given time—or hyperstimulation

  of related memory tracks—all memories can be retrieved.

  All. Every moment of your life.

  We cannot recover more than your perceptions and

  3 9 5

  O R S O N S C O T T C A R D

  the sense you made of them at the time, but that does not change the fact that we can recover every moment of your childhood, every moment of this class. And we can

  recover every conscious thought, though not the uncon-

  scious streaming thought behind it. It is all stored . . .

  somewhere. The brain is merely the retrieval mechanism.

  This has led some observers to conclude that there is,

  in fact, a mind, or even a soul—a nonphysical portion of

  the human being, existing outside of measurable space.

  But if that is so, it is beyond the reach of science. I, however, am a scientist, and with my colleagues—some of

  whom once sat in the very chairs where you are sitting—I

  have labored long and hard to find an explanation that

  is, in fact, physical. Some have criticized this effort because it shows that my faith in the nonexistence of the

  immaterial is so blind that I refuse to believe even the

  material evidence of immateriality. Don’t laugh, it is a

  valid question. But my answer is that we cannot validly

  prove the immateriality of the mind by the sheer fact of

  our inability to detect the material of which it is made.

  I am happy to tell you that we have received word that

  the journal Mind—and we would not have settled for anything less than the premiere journal in the field—has ac-

  cepted our article dealing with our findings. By no means does this constitute an answer. But it moves the field of inquiry and reopens the possibility, at least, of a material answer to the question of memory. For we have found

  that when neurons are accessed for memory, there are

  many kinds of activity in the cell. The biochemical, of

  course, has been very hard to decode, but other re-

  searchers have accounted for all the chemical reactions

  within the cell, and we have found nothing new in that

  area. Nor is memory electrochemical, for that is merely

  3 9 6

  A N G L E S

  how raw commands of the coarsest sort are passed from

  neuron to neuron—rather like the difference between us-

  ing a spray can as opposed to painting with a monofila-

  ment brush.

  Our research, of course, began in the submolecular

  realm, trying to find out if in some way the brain cells

  were able to make changes in the atom, in the arrange-

  ment of protons and neutrons, or some information

  somehow encoded in the behavior of electrons. This

  proved, alas, to be a dead end as well.

  But the invention of the muonoscope has changed

  everything for us. Because at last we had a nondestruc-

  tive means of scanning the exact state of muons through

  infinitesimal passages of time, we were able to find some astonishing correlations between memory and the barely

  detectable muon states of slant and yaw. Yaw, as you

  know, is the constant—the yaw of a muon cannot change

  during the existence of the muon. Slant also seemed to be a constant, and in the materials which had previously

  been examined by physicists, that was indeed the case.

  However, in our studies of brain activity during forced

  memory retrieval, we have found a consistent pattern of

  slant alteration within the nuclei of atoms in individual brain cells. Because the head must be held utterly still for the muonoscope to function, we could only work with

  terminally ill patients who volunteered for the study and were willing to die in the laboratory instead of with their families, spending the last moments of their lives with