"Connie Willis - Fire Watch" - читать интересную книгу автора (Willis Connie)

The biggest problem with using memory-assistance drugs to put information into your long-
memory is that it never sits, even for a micro-second, in your short-term memory, and that m
retrieval complicated, not to mention unnerving. It gives you the most unsettling sense of deja v
suddenly know something you're positive you've never seen or heard before.
The main problem, though, is not eerie sensations but re-trieval. Nobody knows exactly how
brain gets what it wants out of storage, but short-term is definitely involved. That brief, somet
microscopic, time information spends in short-term is apparently used for something be
tip-of--the-tongue availability. The whole complex sort-and-file pro-cess of retrieval is appar
centered in short-term; and without it, and without the help of the drugs that put it there or arti
substitutes, information can be impossible to re-trieve. I'd used endorphins for examinations
never had any difficulty with retrieval, and it looked like it was the only way to store al
information I needed in anything ap-proaching the time I had left, but it also meant that I would n
have known any of the things I needed to know, even for long enough to have forgotten them. If
when I could retrieve the information, I would know it. Till then I was as ignorant of it as if it
not stored in some cobwebbed corner of my mind at all.
"You can retrieve without artificials, can't you?" Kivrin said, looking skeptical.
"I guess I'll have to."
"Under stress? Without sleep? Low body endorphin levels?" What exactly had her pract
been? She had never said a word about it, and undergraduates are not supposed to ask. S
factors in the Middle Ages? I thought everybody slept through them.
"I hope so," I said. "Anyway, I'm willing to try this idea if you think it will help."
She looked at me with that martyred expression and said, "Nothing will help." Thank you
Kivrin of Balliol.
But I tried it anyway. It was better than sitting in Dunworthy's rooms having him blink a
through his histori-cally accurate eyeglasses and tell me I was going to love St. Paul's. When
Bodleian requests didn't come, I overloaded my credit and bought out Blackwell's. Tapes on W
War II, Celtic literature, history of mass transit, tourist guidebooks, everything I could think of.
I rented a high-speed recorder and shot up. When I came out of it, I was so panicked by the fe
of not knowing any more than I had when I started that I took the tube to London and race
Ludgate Hill to see if the firewatch stone would trigger any memories. It didn't.
"Your endorphin levels aren't back to normal yet," I told myself and tried to relax, but that
impossible with the prospect of the practicum looming up before me. And those are real bullets,
Just because you're a history major doing his practicum doesn't mean you can't get killed. I
history books all the way home on the tube and right up until Dunworthy's flunkies came to tak
to St. John's Wood this morning.
Then I jammed the microfiche OED in my back pocket and went off feeling as if I would hav
survive by my native wit and hoping I could get hold of artificials in 1940. Surely I could get thr
the first day without mishap, I thought; and now here I was, stopped cold by almost the first w
that was spoken to me.
Well, not quite. In spite of Kivrin's advice that I not put anything in short-term, I'd memorize
British money, a map of the tube system, a map of my own Oxford. It had gotten me this far. S
I would be able to deal with the Dean.
Just as I had almost gotten up the courage to knock, he opened the door, and as with the pinp
it really was over quickly and without pain. I handed him my letter, and he shook my hand and
something understandable like, "Glad to have another man, Bartholomew." He looked strained
tired and as if he might collapse if I told him the Blitz had just started. I know, I know: Keep
mouth shut. The st ared silence, etc.
He said, "We'll get Langby to show you round, shall we?" I assumed that was my Verger o
Pillow, and I was right. He met us at the foot of the stairs, puffing a little but jubilant.
"The cots came," he said to Dean Matthews. "You'd have thought they were doing us a favor