Owls

1
Although the trip to the Tharsis Polytechnic Institute
campus could be made in just fifteen minutes by taking local
air transport, Denor Serven, an associate neurologist at Tharsis
Central Hospital, insisted on taking his glider to bring his
granddaughter. He headed for the main road that skirted the
rice paddies to reach Kepler Road just where it left the cliffs of
Mellas Chataan behind.

But Serven was thinking of the splendid scenery, which

at that time of the afternoon would be formed by the sun, over
the fields dotted with microwave concentrators. So, when he
reached the crossroads, he turned right, taking the perimeter
road that ran through them, climbed the winding terraces that
had just bloomed and headed for the Polithar after emerging
onto the Aryabata plain, which was traditionally considered the
beginning of the desert.

—I knew it, –she said, annoyed and amused at the detour.

Serven was aware of the girl's hurry to get to campus, to

register and then to stay in the dorms of the orbital architecture
faculty. But it mattered little. He knew that the procedure could
be done at any time and that, as had always been the case, there
would be plenty of rooms available, even those with a view of
Lake Marineris.

Serven glanced sideways at his granddaughter. There was

hardly any trace of his anger left and he could guess that she,
just at that moment, was just waiting to get to the 200 kilometer
gas station, to order a sweet and sour mango and pineapple
jelly.

Phobos and Deimos, just above the eastern horizon, were

approaching their alignment phase. Their intense brightness
stood out against the dull orange of the sky. Denor Serven felt a
condescending affection for them, like that of any Martian who
had ever traveled to Earth. Contemplating the pair of tiny twin
satellites didn't even come close to the spectacle of the
immense Moon on a night by the sea.

In his sixties, Serven remained at the peak of his

professional powers. But that evening, at the thought of the girl
entering college, he felt already old. As soon as he entered the
rice paddies, he stopped the glider at the side of the road and
prayed a mantra to the sky as he watched the sun go down. A
vague sadness overcame him. He felt the weight of time and
found it ironic to have to accept that he, who had devoted
himself for years to the treatment of amnesia, was in turn also
doomed to oblivion.

Serven felt an icy breeze that seemed to have snuck under

the deflector field formed by the microwave concentrators, and
thought to report that possible fault on his return to Tharsis. He
returned to the slider and brushed his shoulder with three
fingers to activate the automatic mode of his clothing. The suit
began to spread its rough, soft fabric around his neck, forming
a pleasing velvety fleece that adjusted its density, as the
afternoon temperature dropped.

—An owl, so early in the morning! -said the girl,

excitedly.

She turned to watch the bird as it skimmed past the ears

of corn until it landed on the antenna of a concentrator. The owl
blinked a couple of times and turned its head upside down as it
fluffed its feathers.

Serven stood for a few moments leaning against a side

panel of the vehicle, lost in vague associations of memories, of
the invasion of cloned mice that forced food imports from Terra
Xanthe for three harvests, and only checked himself when
someone suggested bringing in the owls. He remembered his
late friend Thyaga Baya and his ill-fated wife Saru, and thought
of the long years of work he himself, after those deaths, had put
into creating the bismuth sheath.

The distant boom of the activation of a cargo crawler

woke him. He boarded the slider, switched on the flotation
system and ordered the vehicle to continue on its way to the
Polithar. Spotting a vague glow in the distance, he slowed to a
stop at the grocery store at the crossroads.

—A polysaccharide rum wouldn't hurt, –he said, winking

at his granddaughter.

On the way back he handed her the pot of jelly, took a

tiny glass of the drink and started walking. Night had already
fallen. The control lights of the last microwave concentrators
were barely glowing on the horizon. Serven adjusted the
slider's thermal regulator, and as he set off he said:

—Now owls are the mascot of Tharsis. You may not

know it, but I had, many years ago, quite a bit to do with it.
 2
I was Thyaga Baya's assistant for several years. We
worked with strange cases of amnesia. These were usually
patients brought in from the asteroid mines. They always came
in asleep, in their life-support capsules. You couldn't
understand why, from one moment to the next, they would
forget certain routine procedures. And why, on rare occasions,
did they suddenly remember something they must have already
forgotten? Why did the medical records sometimes report that
they claimed to have been transported, for a brief moment, to
what turned out to be a remote moment in the past?

Thyaga Baya had long treated cases of memory

disturbances due to contamination by mercury, lead and other
heavy metals. But in this case it was just the opposite. The U-
waves generally showed normal behavior, but suddenly jumped
into a cyclic phase, as if the chaotic pattern of a healthy mind
was turned for a few seconds into a repetitive cycle, with a
fixed rhythm and at incredible frequencies of up to 3000
megahertz. Was it this unusual concentration of the same wave
that determined the momentary and paralyzing irruption of a
lost memory? And furthermore, could the momentary
forgetfulness of those procedures have the same root?

Thyaga Baya analyzed the patients' U-waves and noticed

that their values were multiples of a number related to the rate
of disintegration of cesium. There was no noticeable degree of
radioactivity above normal ranges for a human being, but
perhaps the patients were suffering from some kind of special
sensitivity. On the mere possibility that the radiation might
affect the staff, Baya forbade direct contact with the patients.
She was adamant about that. And she really did protect us, even
though it had tragic consequences.

To treat patients, Baya invented a chamber where the

behavior of U-waves could be recorded and altered. When this
Differential Field Diffuser detected cyclic behavior, it diverted
the waves through a magnetic conduit into a diffuser that
released them into the air. We researchers on our team often
wondered if this could be used to build a memory transmitter,
but we were not operating in a technological facility, we were
operating in a medical research facility, so these ideas were
never more than fanciful.

We used many approaches to treating the sick, but we

soon realized that we needed a larger population with which to
evaluate different field strengths and different frequencies and
wave amplitudes. Baya commissioned Polithar to build a
collection of small Diffuser replicas, inside which we enclosed
a large number of cloned laboratory mice. We constructed a
maze that held various containers that contained - or did not
contain - food. By altering the U-wave cycles, Baya got the
mice to forget the location of the containers and, moreover, got
them to remember that location, even after months of
forgetting. But the Diffuser produced damage that was not
noticed until much later. I named it Berry Phase Offset, in
memory of the master, and it is essential to understanding
amnesia.

He did not usually say anything about his symptoms, but

I knew he had been to the eye doctor several times. He would
squint his eyelids as if straining his eyesight and it would slip
out from time to time that he was seeing double. Then came the
attacks of vertigo, the forgetfulness of recent tasks already
performed, the alteration of the most elementary routines.

In the department of mnemonics we have studied his case

in depth. Twenty years have passed since then, and now we
understand the power that a Differential Field Diffuser can
have, to the point that we have been able to cure cases of total
amnesia, even those due to trauma. But the DFD has to be
coated with a bismuth sheath. Otherwise, the same wave
pattern that helps patients to recover their memory, when it
touches a healthy brain, increases it to the extent that the person
does not know if he/she is in the present or in the past. It is this
jump in time that produces vertigo and double vision.

It was so painful.

Sura, his wife, complained about every daily stumble.

The most insignificant tasks used to end in disaster. She would
tell him that she lived on Phobos. But he was not distracted. He
would only travel back in time, at first for moments and then
for hours.

She would tell us of her concern. But what could we do,

Baya was the chief neurologist at Tharsis Central Hospital. It
leaves me with such a bad taste to have met Thyaga Baya at the
peak of his career and that it was just then that he collapsed.

One day I arrived at the lab. Baya had released all the
mice. Hundreds of them. I asked her what was going on.

—It's a disaster, a disaster! -she said.

I didn't understand anything.

—I didn't. He told me so many times, but I didn't do it.

 —What Thyaga thing, I asked.

—The brakes on the slider.

—Where is she?

—No! –It's too late. I was gone, I don't know for how
long. When I woke up I saw the message asking for help. I ran
to look for her at kilometer 25, but she was already dead. She's
in the side room.

I went to see the body. When I returned to the lab I found

Thyaga Baya locked inside the Differential Field Diffuser. He
activated the maximum polarity. He turned on the system and
fell to the floor. I reported the accident. We took him to the
Central Hospital. His mental activity was healthy, but if you
talked to him, he was completely abstracted. He had gone into
the past, never to return.

The mice escaped to the wheat fields. The government

tried to exterminate them to no avail, until someone suggested
bringing in the owls.

3
Denor Serven arrived home late at night. A vague regret
oppressed him. He had the contradictory feeling that something
or nothing remained to be done. He closed his eyes to suspend
for a moment the uncomfortable double vision that was
growing month by month. He slept a dense dream full of
voices. A woman was speaking to him from a faraway place,
and he felt a desperate longing to find her, to give her a
necklace of gray feathers.

In the morning he awoke to a high, pale sun. From his

window he gazed at the far rim of the crater. He tried to
imagine the silhouette of Lake Marineris, just a thin line
skirting the horizon and behind it the outline of the ravines over
which the delicate domes of the Polithar loomed.

She prayed a brief mantra. She breathed for a few

minutes with her eyes closed. As he did every morning, he
looked at himself in the mirror. He found himself old and alone
in an empty house. He turned on his communicator.

No message.

Then he understood what was missing, what had been

pending for so many years, but only in this moment of brief
lucidity did he manage to recognize. He dressed in a light
summer suit, made of faint cellulose nets. He went out into the
street. He cut his way through the third basement until he
reached the building that housed the mnemonic department of
the Tharsis Central Hospital.

He went up to the laboratory and greeted with affection

those strangers who received him with deference. He entered
the chamber of the old Differential Field Diffuser. He
deactivated the bismuth shield and turned the diffuser on at full
power.

A vertigo swept over him until he floated. It was that old

feeling he hadn't experienced since that trip to Earth, when he
did his postdoctoral studies at the University of Ulm. "The
moon," he thought.

A well-known voice spoke to him. Somehow he already

knew it, but he still let it speak:

—Dad, I have something to tell you. I'm pregnant.