"Justina Robson - Silver Screen" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robson Justina)

from the day they arrived to long after they had left. Most were entirely driven by the
anxious frustration of bubbling away in the top half of one or other of these scales,
rising and falling like gases boiling out of a liquid.
But on one of those scales my name was permanently at the top, as
untouchable as the divine тАУ because some errant gift of the Almighty had cursed me
with a perfect memory.
Memory comes in different ways, labelled according to its primary trigger:
kinaesthetic, the memory of the body and its movements; eidetic, the perfect recall
of spoken words, of actions; photographic, the retention of what is seen as it was
seen; olfactory, the instant recognition of a particular smell which brings with it
emotion, the flavour of a moment, a symbolic picture, a complex meaning often
elusive to an ordi-nary mnemonic. Not to me; I have all those memories. I remember
everything without effort and recall it at will. YouтАЩd never see me gnawing a pencil or
twirling my hair as I pored over some exam question, trying to suck that final dreg of
understanding from it that would clue me in to the answer. And there lies my
weakness, ever indulged to ruinous proportions: I can remember it all, but I donтАЩt
need to understand it. The ability to paraphrase has many times proved invaluable.
IтАЩd simply recall a text or two, or a teacherтАЩs recitation, and arrange it in some
different words and be pronounced clever. The technique was so immediately
successful and produced such a worthwhile envy in others that it was impossible to
explain, even to the most sympathetic supervisor, that such an ability filled me with
terror.
As I told Roy Croft late one night, itтАЩs like being a kind of conduit. The
messages pass through me, the information perfect, yet all undifferentiated so that
everything seems of equal import-ance, nothing stands out. Questions and answers
come and go, accurately responded to, as if someone else inhabited my head,
someone much smarter, who knew the answers and told them to me. I never knew
how things worked. I could do high-level maths with ease, simply by following the
rules, but I couldnтАЩt attach any meaning to the equations or feel their relationship to
the real world. I was a human file server. As I said this aloud one day, fat and
wretched on the edge of his bunk, Roy frowned and became uncharacteristically still
with the effort of imagining the situation.
тАШI see everything,тАЩ he said. тАШI see it and I feel it. I know it as a surface or an
object or a movement. I can do it as numbers or just shapes. ItтАЩs like reading music.
I hear the tune of the equation as soon as I look at it. I always know how the pieces
fit together, and how they donтАЩt.тАЩ
тАШI only know that they donтАЩt, but I couldnтАЩt prove it or say why, only that
IтАЩve heard the teacher say why. I couldnтАЩt think of a thing on my own.тАЩ I twisted the
corner of the bedsheet, feeling unwelcome but too miserable to leave. тАШCanтАЩt you
show me how? How does it mean anything?тАЩ
But he couldnтАЩt, and I couldnтАЩt say what I meant by mean anyway. I thought
that understanding was like a lightbulb in peopleтАЩs heads, which came on with every
new idea and re-mained for ever sure, a beacon in the darkness. My head was lit by
candles which the faintest breeze of doubt extinguished.
Jane was of even less help. Thin and pale and exuding hostility, like a triffidтАЩs
etiolated shoot, she swung her foot back and forth and stared at her workstation.
тАШWhy does it matter?тАЩ she said directly when I had tried to explain. She didnтАЩt look
at me, just talked to the screen. тАШIf you can do the work without mistakes and you
have the answers, surely you must be able to put the question and the answer
together. So why do you want anything else? What the hell else is there?тАЩ