Eating Memories by Patricia Anthony Page B

this soul comes from an alternate universe. After all, if no life was left on Earth, where would those souls go who needed further incarnations? That problem would have to be addressed, and nothing in Kardeckian Theory allows for it.”
    Moss was regarding Stengler thoughtfully. “I’m not a Kardeckian. I’m just a physicist who got in this through the quantum theory back door. Things don’t fit as neatly for me as they do for Burton. I’m not sure what reality is.” His voice lowered and he looked at me. “And, considering the dichotomy inherent in clairvoyance, I’m not sure how time works, either.”
    “So.” I paused, bathed in the fearful uncertainty of Moss’s gaze. “He might really be remembering a future life. A life where, in fifty-three years, the sky darkens and it snows in the jungle.”
    “Right,” Moss told me.
    “It’s highly doubtful,” Stengler said. He relaxed his grip on the voice stress analyzer. The pieces fell away in his hands and he looked down at them in surprise.
    * * *
    Mrs. Harding had had her irises dyed an iridescent shade of blue. A flat, cobalt facial gem was nestled professionally into the skin at the edge of her cheek. The effect was less sensual than disturbing.
    “I’m sorry you feel this way,” I said lamely, turning from that electric blue stare to the unaltered hazel one of Mr. Harding.
    Harding crushed the tabloid in his oversized hand. It splintered, oozing liquid crystal fluid on the table. “A freak. They call him a freak.”
    “Not a freak,” I told him. I had read the article myself. “Simply a boy who can see the future.”
    Mr. Harding got up from the white wrought-iron ice cream table and paced the sunlit patio. The furniture, baroque in its pleasant fussiness, was a jarring note to the conversation. I felt I was having an argument in a nursery. “A freak,” he said.
    “That is your word, Mr. Harding,” I said.
    He turned on me, an athletic Doberman guarding his own sense of propriety. “Who leaked this!” he shouted.
    “I don’t know.” Turning from the angry father, I tried to enlist the mother’s help. Her eerie eyes were disturbing. “We need to take Bobby away,” she said.
    I flung my pleading hands across the glass-topped table. “You can’t do that. Bobby’s at a very dangerous stage in his treatment. He needs to be watched every hour of every day. He eats too much, and he eats too fast. Someone has to be with him.”
    “You made him this way,” Mr. Harding said. “You filled his mind up with all this dying shit.”
    “He remembers a life as Gilberto Soares. I can’t help that he does.” My voice shook. I couldn’t help that either.
    “Reincarnation’s a crock,” he told me.
    “How do you refute the Holbeck case? All the controls that were met? How do you refute that?”
    He lifted one comer of his mouth in a sneer. With his bland, jogger’s face it looked inappropriate. “I don’t have to refute it. I just don’t believe it.”
    There is, I’ve discovered, no argument against ignorance. “Please, Mrs. Harding,” I said as I turned back to her. “Please keep him here. Taking him will be so dangerous.”
    Those neon-blue eyes dropped. “We have a household servo. It will take care of him.”
    “A robot?” I asked in shock. “You can’t leave him with a robot. He needs the hospital. He needs me.”
    “No, he doesn’t,” Mr. Harding snarled. “You’re sick, Patel. A robot isn’t perfect, but at least it won’t be in love with death.”
    It was no use. I felt I was caught in a surge of destiny. Deep inside the coils of my DNA, perhaps there is something left that is Hindu.
    “Yes,” I said. “You’re right. A robot is in love with nothing.”
    * * *
    Six months later Moss called to tell me Tonya Soares had had her baby. It was a boy, and they named him Gilberto. I put in a call to the Hardings again, They were back from Australia, apparently. Mr. Harding answered the video phone.
    “This is Dr.