Life to Life: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (5 page)

Damn! She didn't even realize that...

I told her, "It's okay, Clara."

"This was a very nice neighborhood at one
time," she said wistfully.

I could believe that. But
all things change. I asked her, very gently, "Is there someone you
could stay with for a few days?"

"No one," she replied without even wondering
about it.

A car had pulled up across the street. A guy
was fussing with camera equipment. The insatiable press had smelt
the blood.

I thought about it for all of two seconds
then asked Clara, "Would you like to spend a few days at the
beach?"

"Oh I couldn't afford that," she said with a
small laugh.

"My guest," I told her. "I have a place at
Malibu."

"Really! At the colony?"

The small laugh was mine this time. She was
talking megabucks there. I replied, "No, but on a really clear day
I can see their roofs. What do you say? There's a spare bedroom and
I promise to behave myself."

Those old eyes had begun
to sparkle. "I spent a weekend at the colony once."

My turn. "Really!"

"Yes. But that was a very long time ago. I
haven't been to the ocean since..."

I said, "Then you're overdue." The guy with
the cameras was out of his vehicle now, gazing our way. "Why don't
you run in and put a few things together?"

"You know, I think I will!"

"Good girl. Scoot. I'll
wait for you here."

She was moving like a twenty-year-old as she
crossed to the house, and the look she tossed me over the shoulder
as she went inside was, I swear, almost vampish. The reporter
hurried over and was making his way along the walk when I stepped
out of the car. He ignored me, went on to the door, and was about
to push the bell when I warned him, "Ring that bell, pal, and I'll
ring yours."

He swiveled about to give me a respectful
look, finger still poised at the doorbell, and said the magic word.
"Press."

I said mine. "Uh-uh."

He was flustered and appropriately outraged
but also a man of reason. "I'd like to at least get some pictures
of the scene," he muttered.

I said, 'Take all you'd like after we're
gone. That will be just a minute or so. Meanwhile, vacate the
property. Please."

The reporter took the "please" in the spirit
it was given, immediately retreating to his vehicle.

I leaned against the Maserati and lit a
cigarette, scowling his way occasionally until Clara reappeared in
the doorway with a small overnight bag in her hand. I went over and
took it from her, put them both in the car, and we took off for
Malibu.

"This is terrible," she told me with a
giggle. "I don't even remember your name."

I arched my eyebrows at
her and told her back, sounding almost like Francois, "Never
fear,
ma cherie,
it shall be on your lips the whole night through."

She loved it.

Hell, so did I.

A minute or so later Clara gave me a very
direct but almost embarrassed look then smiled soberly and asked
me, "Don't you have the feeling that we've done this before?"

Yes. I did. I had that
feeling very strongly.

Chapter Six: In
an Envelope of Time

Ever consider how important memory is to the
living organism? Any living organism. Birds have it. Bees have it.
Bugs in the tree have it. The tree itself has it. Otherwise there
would be no two living things that were really similar. Life is a
dynamic force. It gathers up diffusing matter and molds it into an
image of itself. Without the mold there would be only the gathering
and it could be as diffuse as hydrogen gas or as dense as a black
hole in space. Which is to say, without life.

The black hole and the hydrogen are formed
by other processes, but even these require a more elemental kind
of memory and they definitely are the result of molds in space.

In elemental life forms,
this
memory
for
expression is carried within microscopic bits of fluff which man
in his genius has labeled genes. To
call
a bowl of peanuts a bowl of
beans does not change the taste of the peanuts. Man's penchant for
naming things (since Adam) gets us all into a lot of trouble
because we do not all of us call the same things by the same
names.

We do love to package things too, and of
course the practice has proven highly convenient—so when I ask for
a hot dog most people know that what I want is a wiener on a bun
with maybe a slap of mustard. Ask an aborigine for a hot dog,
though, and he's liable to set fire to your French poodle.

So the word
gene
is just a handy way
of packaging a very esoteric idea long before we got around to
understanding the idea itself. Early biologists recognized the fact
that all living things carry a set of instructions locked up inside
them and that these instructions are sort of like blueprints by
which that living thing was constructed—and it was noted that these
instructions are the means by which hereditary characteristics are
transmitted from parent to offspring. So what the hell, let's call
these instructions
genes,
from the Greek
genea
which means breed or kind. We
could just as easily have called them
mems
and been much closer to the
truth.

If life is a dynamic force
that collects inert matter and molds it into an image of itself,
and if a certain
kind
of life always works from the same mold generation after
generation to construct an edifice of expression which only it may
inhabit, then those
molds
can only be the
memories
of past successful
expressions or incarnations because no other definition makes any
sense at all.

Take a note. Write this down. Better sketch
that. Make a map. Record it.

Jottings. Genes are
jottings, cryptic notes, recipes for successful forays into the
space-time dimension. It is a kind of memory. And a book of
memories, pal, is more or less what you and I really are. Of course
we have the advantage over slugs and snails because we are a much
more complex organism and so our book is much thicker and probably
carries a lot more footnotes. We are so complex indeed that our
memory-pak includes a kit for great masses of nerve tissue put
together in a very special way that allows the development of a
whole new kind of memory—and this nerve-tissue memory in turn
produces something called
personality
or, as my dictionary
defines the term, "that which constitutes a person; personal
existence."

So you and I have genetic memory and
personal memory. The genetic memory has much to say about how tall
you are, the color of your hair and eyes, susceptibility to certain
diseases, special affinities and talents, and it even has
something to say about the way you handle personal memory.

Personal memory becomes a
way that we regard ourselves, our relation to nature and to one
another. We are really talking about experience now but the
experience
has to be
remembered if it is to have an effect upon our personalities.
Indeed it is the memory of the experience more so than the
experience itself that builds personality so we are still talking
about memory. If you show the kid every morning how to tie his
shoes but you are still tying them for him when he's in high
school, then the experience has helped him not a bit. Only when he
remembers does the experience take on meaning.

The important thing to
remember there is that you never had to show the kid how to
circulate blood through his body. His little heart began beating
quite ahead of any direct influence from you because he remembered
genetically how to start it up and keep it regulated, the same as
he remembered how to build it and the blood too along with
everything else he brought here with him.

The genetic memory establishes species and
space-time orientation. In other words, a man and a woman cannot
pool their mems to provide a space-time envelope for a pig memory.
Only pigs can do that. But the pig memory cannot work with the
highly complex construction kit for humans—only human memory can do
that—so pigs will never tie shoes, no matter how many times you
show them how.

Nerve memory produces
unique personalities within a species. The more complex the kit,
the more complex and unique the personality. Pigs have nerve memory
but their construction kits are simpler than ours; they have not
remembered as much nor do they even have the capacity required
for a critical-mass rollover into a higher state of genetic
complexity. Keep pigs in the classroom from now till doomsday and
they will still oink and roll in slime because
pig memory
is fixed in space and
time and they are what genetic memory has molded for
them.

You and I, though, have
something very special going for us. The genetic memory that
produces the human species came into the game at critical mass. It
was a change of state that produced the first human. Genetic memory
had reached an evolutionary barrier
beyond
which it could not travel, so
it established a new baseline beyond the barrier, deposited its
endowment over there with
something
new
in terrestrial existence, an entirely
new mold: the planetary experience of the ages became distilled in
a new genetic system—a new packaging, like "hot dogs"—with a vast
reservoir for nerve memory and
self-conscious expression
. Memory
thus becomes more than a record of mere experience; it is now
enriched by reflection upon and interpretation of experience. Thus,
understanding enters memory and influences the interpretation of
future experience.

For the first time on this planet, then,
with the advent of man, nerve memory became more; important than
genetic memory. That is because genetic memory produces species
which interact only with their environment. Nerve memory produces a
unique individual who interacts with existence itself, questions
it, examines it, interprets it. Put another way, you could say that
nerve memory at a certain state is the awakening of cosmos; it is
the universe becoming aware of itself.

I appreciate your patience
if you are still with me, not left back there somewhere among the
hot dogs and flaming poodles. I have brought you through all this
because we are shortly going to get into some really wild stuff in
this case so I think It best that you have some preparation for
that which is to follow.

What I am asking you to consider, if you are
to enjoy this case as much as I did, is that there is more to man
than meets the eye, that we occupy a really special parcel of
existence, that there is virtually no inherent limit to the degree
with which we may interact with cosmos. It is important that you
have this understanding because I will be introducing you to men
and women whom you may otherwise find difficult to understand.

Clara Boone could be one of these.

She has gone through quite
a transformation from the befuddled old lady I met at the police
station. I am beginning to revise my presumption as to how old
seventy-five really is. She has let her hair down, literally, and
it falls in beautifully shimmering silver waves almost to the
waist. We stroll with bare feet through the cold Pacific surf; her
eyes glisten with excitement and she leaps with a squeal to avoid
the rollers. We tarry beside the tidal pools and she gives me a
wondering look of sheer delight when an anemone sucks her
fingertip.

Later she is quietly reflective but no less
transformed as we toast marshmallows on the open deck and watch a
spectacular Pacific sunset. When the sun goes down in California,
so does the temperature, abruptly; Clara shivers slightly and leans
against me for warmth and it is good.

We go inside and build a
fire. It is our only light and as we toast the night with red wine
I no longer am aware of the wrinkled and sagging skin. I am
experiencing the person, not her spatial envelope; there is a sense
of timelessness and timeless memories hovering at the lip of
awareness but we do not speak of these. I am man and she is woman
but we cannot split the years between us, not in this envelope of
time, and indeed neither of us wish to do so. It is enough that we
are there at the same moment, to watch the flames consume the
darkness and to shiver together with the knowledge that unrevealed
memories tremble together between us.

If this sounds perverse to some then so be
it, but we made a sort of love there without a touch and without a
look, without a word between us. She arose as the final embers were
flaring, touched my face lightly with the fingertips of both hands,
and told me goodnight.

"Tomorrow I will tell you
what you need to know," she said to me from the doorway to her
bedroom.

"Clara," I replied, "God himself could not
tell me what I need to know."

"God
her
self," she corrected me, and
closed the door.

"Whatever," I said to the fireplace.

But I had just had one hell of a religious
experience. And I knew that the best was yet to come.

Chapter Seven: A Long and Distant
Journey