Nearly Day 40!” exclaimed the Station Leader, heading for the cheap plastic armchairs she used for informal chats. “Well, well. It hardly seems yesterday that you first joined us.”
Stephen did his best to ignore the farting sound that the chairs made as they seated themselves. It troubled him that she didn’t care about this affront to her dignity, but she probably thought such considerations beneath her. She was an Agency officer of the old school.
“And then pastures new for you,” Leader Wilson went on. “We’ll soon all be nothing but a distant memory.”
Stephen leaned forward. His large, pink, painfully open face reddened, as it always did when he was the slightest bit angry or agitated or ashamed.
“Yes, my Day 40 is just two weeks away, but I was wondering if it would possible for me to continue working after that? To be honest I’d prefer to work right through to Day 1. It just seems silly to sit and twiddle my thumbs for forty days before my departure when I could be making myself useful.”
Leader Wilson laughed.
“God knows there’s more than enough to do, Stephen. But I can’t take up your offer. It’s a very strict Agency rule, as you know. No one is allowed to work in the forty day countdown to transmission.”
“It’s a bloody stupid rule,” Stephen snapped, his face now very red indeed, his scalp smoldering round the roots of his spiky yellow hair. “Surely it’s obvious that transmission couldn’t possibly act retrospectively to affect the quality of work done before the event.”
“Of course not.” Leader Wilson was perceptibly irritated. “But that isn’t the issue, as you must know as well as I do. It’s about your accountability for your actions. Suppose you were to make a serious error of judgment. How could you be called to account for it, if you had absolutely no memory whatsoever of your decision-making process?”
“But I’m a data analyst, for Christ’s sake!” Stephen burst out. “I process numbers! All my work is routinely checked, and none of it involves any direct contact with colonists. There really is no one I could possibly hurt or offend in those forty days, and therefore no chance whatsoever that I will compromise the Agency.”
His boss shrugged.
“I admit the rule does seem a little overzealous for non-operational staff like yourself, though you’re the first one who’s ever actually complained about having to take a five-week vacation. But a rule is a rule, Stephen, and I don’t have the right to change it, or even the inclination to try, not least because your fellow-analysts would howl with rage if I did. I’m afraid you’re just going to have to stop work on Day 40 and resign yourself to having fun for those last few weeks before you go, however onerous that may be for you.”
She stood up. Stephen reluctantly also rose to his feet. The chairs made that stupid farting sound again.
“You could get better chairs than these for ten dollars each,” he muttered.
It was an odd comment. The Station Leader frowned and peered up into his face. (He was a very big man; she was very small.)
“Are you all right, Stephen? In yourself, I mean?”
“Yeah, of course,” Stephen grunted.
Then, realizing it wasn’t in his interests to leave an impression of emotional maladjustment, he managed a sort of smile.
“I’m fine. Sorry. I know you don’t make the rules. It’s just, you know, there’s so much I could be doing.”
Mollified, the Station Leader smiled sympathetically as she showed him to the door.
“You know it’s really not a bad thing to recharge your batteries. Your work will benefit from it. Try and enjoy your last days here.”
The door closed behind him.
Outside the corridor window, a gardener was working along the perimeter fence with an herbicidal spray. Beyond was the Lutanian forest, that strange forest with no green in it, only pink and yellow and grey. The Station was full of its sweet but slightly sickly smell. It was like fermented caramel.

“Hey Steve,” said his colleague Helen Fu, as he returned to his office. “A bunch of us are going to go over to New Settlement for a few beers. Fancy joining us?”
“No. No thank you. Not tonight.”
“Oh come on Steve. You hardly ever come out these days! And you’ll soon be leaving us!”
“Really, no. But I appreciate you asking.”
He began to close down his workstation.
“Don’t be a killjoy, Steve,” persisted Helen. “Come and have some fun for once!”
Stephen didn’t like to be put under pressure.
“What do you mean fun?” he barked, as if he were an animal that had been goaded one time too often. “We all stopped having anything to say to each other ages ago. Didn’t you notice? All we do now is get drunker and drunker and louder and louder to try and cover up that fact. Excuse me if that doesn’t strike me as fun.”

Agitated, resentful, and (though he didn’t so readily admit this to himself) ashamed by his own outburst, Stephen chose to walk the three miles through the forest back to his lodgings rather than take the bus. He was one of those very bright people who are quickly irritated by the slowness of those round them, and tend not to notice the many ways in which other people are actually wiser than they are. But at some level he did notice. At some level he knew there was something out there that other people understood and he just didn’t quite get.
Fifty yards along the road, he was overtaken by the bus. A few of his colleagues looked out at him. Then the bus picked up speed, turned a corner and was gone. Inside it, they would of course still be discussing Stephen and his rudeness. But why should he care? He told himself he was much happier alone. And in some ways it was true.
He was alone, in any case, whether he liked it or not. He was profoundly alone. The Station was soon out of sight and, if it wasn’t for the metalled road itself, he could have been back in the old Lutania: not just Lutania as it had been fifteen years back before the arrival of the Agency and the Transmission Station, but Lutania as it had been three centuries ago, before the first human colonists arrived, when the forest and its denizens belonged only to themselves. For even now the human encroachment hadn’t gone very deep. These trees around him, these strange Lutanian trees that came in three different colors but never in green, stretched away for thousands of miles, interrupted only by the occasional road or tiny settlement.
It was a silent, somber, and utterly alien place. The pale tree trunks rose without branches for twenty feet before putting forth their pendulous pods and their giant leaves, pink or grey or yellow. There was no intermediate layer of vegetation to fill up the shadowy space beneath the canopy. The only breaks in the gloom were the intermittent ponds that were a feature of the entire forest: little patches of clarity and sunlight half-hidden by the trees.
And nothing moved. Most of the time nothing moved at all out there in the day except for the occasional twitching of a pod and the odd balloon-like floater drifting through the trees between the canopy and the forest floor, its feathery tendrils rustling as it knocked into trunks and bounced off again. The leaves drank in the sunlight. The ponds shone in the distance, as if they were windows into an altogether brighter place. The forest floor, covered in pinkish moss, lay like a newly vacuumed carpet in an empty room. Even the caramel air was still.
Then suddenly, so suddenly that he gasped out loud, Stephen came across three indigenes.

Goblins, the colonists called them, though the Agency tried to discourage the term. They were squatting round a large white pebble, just ahead of him and only a few yards off the road to his left. They nodded and bowed as they took it in turns to touch and prod their lump of stone.
One of them stood up. Half the height of a man and grey-skinned, it did indeed look very like a goblin in a children’s story book, with its thin pointed face, its black button eyes and its V-shaped mouth, which could be seen as smiling teasingly, or could be seen as devoid of any meaning at all. And of course it was naked. Its large member dangled down like a length of hose, ridged with thick black veins.
They were always male, like all Lutanian creatures, each one of which mated with its corresponding tree.
“Oh crap,” muttered Stephen.
His palms were sweating, his heart pounding. For the past four or five months, he hadn’t seen one of the things close-up, let alone a group of them, only the occasional glimpse of an isolated individual, deep in the forest, wandering around by itself. He’d started to get used to the idea that the indigenes, like other Lutanian creatures, preferred to keep out of the way of human beings. It was the way he preferred it, too.
“Just leave me alone, can’t you?”
They couldn’t hear him, of course. (They communicated by microwave, so the Agency biologists had discovered, their tree-females acting as relay stations.)
“Just play with your bloody stone, why can’t you, and leave me be? I’m not interfering with you.”
The goblin watched him. Its two companions watched him. Six shiny black button eyes. And all three were silent, didn’t even glance at one another, just smiled and smiled at him with those odd thin faces that could either be seen as full of cunning, or as empty of anything at all.
Stephen knew perfectly well that, this close, there was no way he was going to be able to avoid it, the thing about indigenes that people most feared. In fact he’d hardly even finished framing the thought when the voice spoke inside his head.
“Hiding away.”
It was his own voice, but not his own thought or his own inflection, as if his very thought-stream had turned out not really to be him, but only an instrument, a tool, that could as well be picked up and played with by others as by him.
“Hiding away,” it said.
It had happened before, just three times before during the whole of his three-year tour of duty, that he’d come up this close to goblins and heard that voice.
“Can’t get in,” is what he had heard the first time.
“Ha ha. No home,” the second.
He wasn’t alone that second time. He’d visibly started with the shock of it, and the three young Agency people who were with him had laughed and demanded to know what the voice had said. (He’d been mortified. It hadn’t struck him, then or since, that his companions were trying to distract themselves from inner voices of their own. He wasn’t intuitive like that.)
There had been one other time, too, when he’d seen an indigene watching him intently from far off in the forest. He wouldn’t even have noticed the creature if it hadn’t been picked out by the sunlight around a pond. And the voice had been so quiet that, if he hadn’t seen anything, he might well have been able to persuade himself that he’d just imagined it.
“Too scared to leave the path,” it had said.
And for some reason, that had been the goblin encounter that had disturbed him most, the one that came back to him in dreams.
But I’m awake now, Stephen reminded himself, and he rubbed his hands over that raw pink face of his as he looked firmly ahead and walked on past the strange trio and their precious lump of stone.

You could tell when the settlement of Lisoba was near from the green plants that had begun to creep out from it onto the forest floor, clashing with the pink indigenous moss. The clearing itself, with its densely packed vegetable plots, was startlingly, shockingly green after the shadowy forest. Emerging from the trees and seeing Lisoba spotlit by the low evening sun, Stephen felt as if he were looking at a picture in a stained glass window. The little wooden houses, the rows of beans and maize seemed too bright, too simple, too perfect to be real.
“Good evening, Mr. Kohl,” called the blacksmith Jorge Cervantes in his big bass voice, standing up from his tomato plants.
“Good evening, Mr. Cervantes. How’s your day been?”
“Hello Mr. Agency Man,” called Mad Gretel, who the villagers said was possessed by spirits.
“Hi there, Gretel.”
Stephen was easier with the tenth-generation Lutanian settlers who lived in Lisoba than he was with his own Agency people at the Station. They didn’t ask so much of him and, above all, they didn’t expect him to be anything like them. His foreign origin gave him permission to be different and separate without causing offense.
He continued into the village, greeted from time to time by other villagers.
Lisoba was only twenty houses, plus a satellite dish and a prefabricated Community Center that the Agency had put in so that it could talk to the people of Lisoba whenever it needed to, ask them things (for the Agency always longed to know), and provide them with lectures on subjects like family planning and nutrition and the world revealed by science. At the far side of the village, Stephen’s landlady, Jennifer Notuna, had the largest house. A widow for some years, she topped up her income by renting out four rooms, the largest one to Stephen, the other three to Lutanian laborers working on an Agency housing project in the nearby town of New Settlement. (Less wealthy than Stephen, they slept two or three to a room.)
Jennifer and her assistant Lucia were hanging out sheets when Stephen returned. Jennifer was in her fifties, Lucia half her age, but they were both from the same Lutanian mold: big, brown, solid women, with tough faces, and loud firm voices.
“Good evening, Mrs. Notuna. Good evening, Lucia.”
“Hey, Mr. Kohl. You hungry? Chicken and corn for dinner tonight.”
Stephen smiled. After his encounter with the indigenes, it was good to be back with people who were completely at home here in Lutania. (The Lutanian response to any reference to indigenes was invariably an irritated and dismissive snort. In some remote areas beyond the Agency’s reach, goblins were sometimes still shot as vermin.)
“Mrs. Notuna,” said Stephen suddenly, “when you’ve got a moment, I wonder if I could have a word?”
His pink, curiously naked face reddened.
“Yes, okay, Mr. Kohl. Is everything all right? A problem with the rent money maybe?”
“No, no, nothing like that. It’s . . . Well, to be honest, I could do with a little advice.”
Jennifer and Lucia studied their lodger’s glowing face. They rather liked him, even if he was from the Agency. They appreciated the fact that he had learned to speak Luto, the settlers’ language. They liked the way he showed respect to Jennifer’s age and did not call her by her first name, as most Agency people did without even asking. They even quite liked the way he looked. Pink and spiky though he was, he was also big and broad-shouldered, and he stood nearly a head taller than the average Lutanian man. “I’d give him one, no trouble at all,” had in fact once been the verdict of Lucia, during one of their periodic sexual audits of their male lodgers. (It did not seem that way to Stephen, but Lucia was actually younger than him, though already a mother with three children.)
“Is it a girl, maybe?” asked Lucia, “a girl that you’ll have to leave behind when you leave us?”
The two of them had often speculated about Stephen’s personal relationships, worrying that he nearly always seemed to come straight back from work and spend all evening at his screen.
“Or a boy, even?” asked Jennifer, attempting to accommodate to the strange cultural mores of Agency people.
Stephen laughed uncomfortably.
“Oh no, nothing like that. It’s just a few little worries—silly worries, really.”
“Well, I’ll gladly help if I can.” Jennifer was actually rather flattered that an Agency person should think her advice worth seeking. “Just let me and Lucia get dinner sorted, and then I’ll make us some coffee and we can go over to the bench where it’s quiet.”

Beyond the yard, on the far side of a low whitewashed wall, was Jennifer’s vegetable plot, part of the rich green patchwork of the Lisoba clearing. She and Lucia grew beans here, and peppers and corn and sweet potatoes. A wooden wind-wheel creaked and groaned in the middle of the plot, pulling up water from the huge natural reservoir that lay beneath the forest and dishing it out in spurts into a network of irrigation channels lined with clay that the locals scraped up out of ponds. Beyond the plot was a strip of cleared and slightly raised ground on which stood one of the village’s many wooden statues of the god Yava. (He was small and wiry, with a narrow and rather cunning face and a somewhat prominent phallus.) After that came the uncleared forest, into the edges of which the odd stray tomato or bean plant had crept. The Agency had put in a chain-link fence to mark the boundary, and prevent indigenes from wandering in and annoying the people of Lisoba.
Jennifer’s bench was up there next to the carved god. Stephen had often seen her and Lucia sitting over there in the dark when the dishes had been put away, dim shapes, with the silent forest behind them, their voices rising and falling with the characteristic Luto lilt, and the faintly glowing tips of their cigarettes periodically flaring up and illuminating their faces. (The fact that the Lutanians had rediscovered smoking during the three centuries of their isolation was a cause of great distress to the Agency, and was a subject of frequent lectures in the Community Center.)
“So what is it that’s troubling you, Mr. Kohl?” Jennifer asked as they settled on the bench. “I’d have thought you’d be looking forward to going home after three whole years away. Yava knows, I would be.”
She began to pour the coffee that Stephen had politely carried up on a tray. It was dusk. The big Lutanian sun had already sunk into the dark trees behind them, like a fat dollop of sweet red syrup.
“Well, yes, I suppose I am.” Stephen said, without enthusiasm, as he took a cup from her. “To be honest, though, my worries are more to do with the transmission itself.”
“Ha!” Jennifer exclaimed triumphantly, as if winning a long-standing argument. “Well, I can’t say I blame you for that! Not in a million years would I let anyone put me in that dreadful machine. Not in a million years. They say it takes you to pieces, beams you out like a radio signal, then puts you together again at the other end.”
Stephen smiled, amused by her vehemence.
“No way would I subject myself to that, Mr. Kohl,” Jennifer insisted. “No way at all. My ancestors came here the long way, meaning to stay here for good, Yava rest their souls, and I’m going to stick to that plan.”
Jennifer touched her forehead, supposedly Yava’s doorway into the human soul. Then she tipped three wooden spoonfuls of brown sugar into her coffee, and stirred them in with the handle.
“But you’ve done it before, Mr. Kohl, haven’t you? You came here by transmission in the first place. I’d have thought that would help.”
She took tobacco and papers out of the pocket on her apron and began to roll one of her large cigarettes.
“And I’ve heard it’s quite safe, really,” she said, without much conviction, “however dangerous it seems. As safe as crossing the strait, one of your Agency friends told me.”
She was referring to the five-mile strait between the flat forested continent in which they were sitting, and the rocky island of Balos, where the Agency had built Lutania’s new capital, with its National University, its House of Assembly, and its fine Academy of Science.
“Not that I’ve ever done that either,” observed Stephen’s landlady, who had never traveled more than twenty miles from Lisoba. “I’ve got more than enough here to keep me busy, and Balos is a nasty wicked place by all accounts.”
“It’s not the transmission itself,” Stephen said. “It is scary, of course it’s scary, knowing that for a while you’re gong to be nothing but a signal traveling through the ether, but that’s not what’s really bothering me. It’s . . . it’s to do with the memory thing.”
“Oh yes, I heard about that. People lose some of their memories when they cross over, yes? That other Agency fellow said something about it. “
Jennifer lit her cigarette and drew on it, lighting up their faces with that same orange glow that Stephen had often seen from the window of his room, looking up for a moment from the numbers on his screen.
“Yes,” she conceded, “that must feel strange. But then again, people forget things all the time, don’t they? And it’s not as if you forget your whole life or anything, or forget who you are. Not from what that other man said.”
“No, that’s true.”
Stephen wondered if he was worrying unnecessarily. It was so pleasant sitting there in the fading light with Mrs. Notuna, and the wooden statue, and the coffee, and the sounds from the village, and the tobacco smoke mingling with the caramel smell of the forest, rotten and sweet all at once.
“You’re right,” he said, “you don’t forget your past at all, only the time immediately before the transmission itself. Four weeks before it, at minimum. Five and a half weeks at most.”
He snatched up a bit of leaf from the ground and twisted it in his hands.
“To be honest, Mrs. Notuna, it’s not the loss of memory as such. It’s . . .”
He tossed aside the leaf and turned to face her.
“You see, there’s a point, forty days before transmission—Day 40 as the Agency calls it—when you know you may not remember anything from then on. And then there’s another point, Day 29, when you know for sure that you won’t remember anything after that day. Everything you do and think and say, from last thing on Day 29 at the very latest, will be completely erased from your mind.”
Jennifer grimaced and shook her head.
“That must feel strange.”
“Yes. It feels very weird afterward, I can tell you, to know that you were walking and talking and doing stuff, only a short while ago, which you’ll never recall, no matter how hard you try.”
She pulled on her cigarette.
“You could write things down, perhaps?”
“Yes, and that’s exactly what I did last time. I kept a diary. But when you look at your diary later, it doesn’t work like a diary normally does, because it doesn’t prompt your memory, not after the cut-off point. It’s like you are reading the diary of another person.”
He was no longer looking at Jennifer. He’d grabbed up that bit of leaf again and was twisting it fiercely back and forth.
“And of course . . . Well . . . You don’t know if the diary is a complete record, do you? Or whether you left something out.”
He pulled the leaf in two.
“So,” began Jennifer tentatively, “are you worried that . . . ”
Stephen interrupted her.
“What I did last time—and in fact it’s what the Agency recommends—was to say goodbye to everyone on Day 40. That way you know for sure that you’ll remember the occasion. You wouldn’t want a goodbye that everyone can remember but you. And then you go off somewhere where no one knows you until the time for the transmission comes. You take a vacation.”
Stephen sighed.
“You actually have to stop work, you see, for legal reasons,” he said with great bitterness, “whether you want to or not.”
Over at the house they saw the kitchen door open, spilling out a pool of yellow electric light into which stepped Lucia with a pail of scraps. She glanced toward them, curiously and a little enviously, then emptied the scraps into the pigpen and went back inside, closing off the light again as she shut the door behind her.
“So you did that, did you?” Jennifer prompted. “You said goodbye to everyone on Day 40 and then . . . ?”
“After that I went off to . . . Well, you wouldn’t know the place, of course, but it’s a resort by the sea, a good way away from everyone I knew. And, during the part of the time I can still remember, I stayed in a hotel and I swam in the pool, and I watched movies and played screen games, and just, you know, filled up the time.”
He looked at her. She exhaled a cloud of smoke and picked off a strand of loose tobacco from her lower lip, but she didn’t speak.
“I can remember all the way up to Day 29,” said Stephen. “Up to that point I remember everything just as well as you’d expect to remember a vacation that happened three years ago.”
Jennifer nodded, although vacations as such were outside her experience.
“And I remember,” Stephen said, “I remember the first few hours of the morning of Day 29. The first few hours but nothing after that. My diary says that I carried on doing the same kind of things for the rest of that day and for all the days afterward, right up to Day 1—swims in the pool, beers, movies, screen games—but I don’t remember. I don’t remember a thing.”
Jennifer watched him.
“Well, what else would you have done?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I really don’t.”
He rubbed his hands over his big raw face.
“I am sorry, Mrs. Notuna. Us Agency folk must seem a funny lot to you Lutanians. We fret about things that you don’t worry about at all. You’re right. People forget things all the time. There’s really nothing so unusual about it.”
“No,” said Jennifer, “we all forget. But perhaps you are . . .”
Stephen stood up.
“I appreciate the chat,” he told her. “I’ll let you get on now. There’s a report I need to get finished while there’s still time.”
“Well, if you’re sure you’ve had all the talk you needed.”
Jennifer watched him as he made his way back to the house. Then she shrugged and began to roll another cigarette.

Five days before Day 40, Stephen met another indigene on his way home from work. It was a small one, all by itself, squatting right next to the road and playing with two short pieces of stick. Its skin was piebald, pink and light grey. It didn’t even glance at him until he was only ten or fifteen yards away, then it looked up suddenly, though seemingly without the slightest surprise or alarm. The Agency biologists said that indigenes could sense the electrical activity in a person’s brain from fifty yards at least.
“Go away!” growled Stephen.
He took a run at the creature, not really meaning to chase it, but hoping to give it a fright.
It snatched up its sticks and scampered off a few yards, holding them protectively against its chest.
“Fence head,” said his own voice inside his brain. “Ha ha. Fence head.”
This angered him. He went after it, and the indigene set off ahead of him, sometimes running, sometimes skipping, sometimes leaping like a springbok with both legs together.
“Yeah, go on! Clear off into the bloody forest!” gasped Stephen as he pounded after it.
It was way too fast for him and it knew it, for it stopped near a pond and stood there watching his heavy-footed, panting pursuit.
“Ha ha. Fence head. Scared,” said the voice inside his head.
Then the indigene dived into the pond.
There was no sign of it when Stephen came gasping up to the water’s edge. The pond was clear and empty. The creature must have swum through one of the hidden channels that linked the ponds together.
(In truth the so-called continent formed by the forest was not really solid land at all, but a kind of vast mangrove that covered several million square miles of Lutania’s shallow freshwater ocean. This fact was not immediately apparent because most of the water was roofed over, so to speak, by a dense network of roots, alive and long-dead, overlaid in turn by compost which had built up over many thousands of years to create a dry floor thick enough to cultivate, and to build houses on, and to lay metalled roads.)
Stephen sank down into a clump of soft white moss. Slowly his agitation subsided and his heart rate settled. And he was surprised to find that he didn’t sink into despondency, but rather into a rather delightful sense of well-being. He was struck by what a beautiful and peaceful spot it was out here by the pond. The water was crystalline, the moss soft and bright, the air silent and still, the sun still high enough in the sky to pour down light into this opening in the forest and set it apart from the somber aisles of tree trunks all around it, so that it seemed a kind of sanctuary. Stephen felt he could happily stay here forever, if only the sun wouldn’t set and his belly wouldn’t ask to be fed. He wondered why he had never explored these ponds in all these past three years, only observed them from the road.
There was another pond not far off, and he made his way to it. Farther from the road, this new pond seemed even more beautiful than the first one, but another still lovelier-looking one beckoned from deeper in. This pond was bigger than the other two, a small lake almost. On impulse he stripped and plunged in. The cool mineral-rich water was wonderfully refreshing. He dived down and thought he made out the tunnels leading away under the trees, linking this pond up to all the rest. (So what if there were indigenes swimming around down there? What harm would they do him after all? What evidence was there to suggest they would do him harm?) He swam up and down. He did some somersaults and rolls. He lay and floated on his back, looking up at the rose pink Lutanian sky. Then he hauled himself out to lie naked on the moss.

He was wakened by a slight chill on his skin. Some time must have passed, for the sun was too low to shine down into the opening in the trees, and the pond, like the rest of the forest, was in shadow His first thought was that somehow this made it still more beautiful and he sat for a while daydreaming in the dim light with his legs in the water, until finally coldness made him dry himself down and get his clothes back on.
Then he started to wonder if he knew the direction back to the road. The other ponds were no longer visible to use as landmarks, and he realized he couldn’t remember where he’d been standing in relation to the road when he’d laid his clothes on the ground.
He had a moment of pure dread. Which way was the road? He had no idea. He’d be lost in the forest during the Lutanian night, when the indigenes and other creatures woke and began their hunt for food. He began to curse. And an old voice inside him captured his thought-stream, almost as the goblins did. You’re a fool. You can’t look after yourself. You can’t get anything right.
“Get a grip on yourself, you idiot,” he said out loud to himself. “All you’ve got to do is look for the sun.”
Ten minutes later, he was safely back on the road. He felt rather ashamed of his moment of panic, comparing himself unfavorably with more competent people who he imagined would never be so foolish: Leader Wilson, Jennifer Notuna, and even Helen Fu, who remembered details about other people that he would forget at once, and had worked so hard these last three years to help him join the life of the Station.
He strode forward briskly, anxious to get back to Lisoba as quickly as possible, and to the desk in his room.

But when he turned on his screen, he found it impossible to concentrate on his current task, which was analysis of the effectiveness of the Agency’s literacy program.
He began instead to go through the diary that he’d kept before his last transmission.

May 30th. Day 39: Got up. Had boiled egg for breakfast. Played chess for one hour then swam in pool. Watched movie King Kong (4th remake): quite enjoyed it, crap but fun. Went for walk down to beach. Had omelet and fries for lunch, and overheard couple at the next table talking about a young bar girl who was murdered here a few weeks back. Head beaten in with a spanner, apparently. There’s quite a lot of crime here, the guy was saying, but most of it is never solved. Thirty thousand tourists pass through here every week, and a lot of the people who work here are illegal migrants, so it’s hard to keep tabs on who is actually here, never mind who is doing what. And anyway the locals prefer to hush crime up, if possible, so as not to put visitors off. Apparently that dead girl never even made the local news.
Stayed in restaurant for a bit reading a boring book, then gave up, tossed the book, and came back. Quick dip, then reread briefing documents on Lutania and worked on Luto for a couple of hours. Not much point of course if I turn out to forget all this, but I probably won’t, not this early. Very tired for some reason. Chicken for dinner. Two beers. Played Solo Agent for three hours. Watched most of a porn movie on TV—girl with green hair and huge boobs who liked threesomes—don’t know why. Too tired and bored to think of something better to do, I guess.
I wish they’d have let me do some work.
Just about awake enough to write this. It’s only 10.30 but can’t keep eyes open any more.

Yes, he remembered it perfectly well. King Kong, the omelet, the couple at the next table, the breasts of the green-haired girl: he remembered it all. Same with Day 38, 37, 36, 35, 34. All the movies, all the books, all the games, even many of the individual swims and beers, though, naturally enough, memory had elided these to some extent. Same with 33, 32, 31. He remembered them well. In fact he remembered these days rather better than he’d normally have expected to remember days from a vacation three years previously. His awareness of the steadily increasing likelihood that he would not remember them had lent a frisson, a vividness, that had actually made them more memorable than they otherwise would have been.

Copyright © 2011 Chris Beckett

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