The Senior Common Room had been unusually quiet for almost seven minutes when Mr Blottisham slapped two sheets of paper onto the table.
“I must protest.”
Professor Quillibrace looked up from his newspaper.
“Against both stories?”
“Against the principles they appear to endorse.”
“Do they endorse any?”
“That is precisely the trouble, Professor. They leave everything open to question. Memories wander about the garden. Forests invade cities. Maps cease to be reliable authorities on where things are. And we are apparently expected to regard this as an interesting state of affairs!”
Miss Stray folded her hands. “Would you prefer it to be an uninteresting state of affairs?”
“I should prefer it not to be a state of affairs at all.”
Quillibrace resumed reading.
“An ambitious preference.”
Blottisham ignored him.
“Consider the consequences. If a memory can possess experiences its owner never had, how do we distinguish recollection from invention? How do we establish what happened? How do we know whose past we are dealing with?”
“By examining the evidence,” said Miss Stray.
“And if the evidence has a past of its own?”
She paused.
Blottisham threw up his hands. “There! You see? We have scarcely begun, and already the foundations of historical knowledge are in jeopardy.”
“Were they sound foundations?” asked Quillibrace.
“Of course they were!”
“Then they should survive a question.”
Blottisham glared at him. “A question, Professor, is not the same thing as a memory appearing in one's garden.”
“No. The latter is considerably harder to ignore.”
Miss Stray smiled. “I wonder whether the man in the first story is the only one who has lost something. He can no longer be certain which memories belong to him. But the memory seems equally unable to remain merely something remembered.”
“Precisely!” cried Blottisham. “Neither party respects the arrangement. The man should remember, and the memory should be remembered. That is the proper relationship.”
“Does the memory agree?” asked Quillibrace.
“It has no right to disagree!”
“Then I suppose the matter is settled.”
Blottisham stared at him. “You are making light of a serious problem.”
“Not at all. I am merely wondering how you intend to enforce the arrangement.”
Blottisham sat back, visibly affronted.
Miss Stray turned to the second story. “The cartographers begin with a perfectly reasonable task. They want to describe the forest accurately. Their difficulty is that their descriptions seem to become entangled with the thing they describe.”
“Then they should stop describing it,” said Blottisham.
“Would that stop the forest?”
“It would stop the maps from encouraging it.”
Quillibrace lowered his newspaper.
“Do maps ordinarily encourage forests?”
“Not ordinarily! That is what makes this particular forest so objectionable.”
“Have you established that the maps encourage it?”
“Professor, if trees begin growing in an archive precisely where they have been recorded on maps, I should consider the matter established.”
“Would you?”
“Certainly.”
“Even if the maps had recorded the trees because they were already growing there?”
Blottisham hesitated.
“That would depend on whether the trees were growing there before or after the maps were made.”
“An important chronological distinction,” said Quillibrace.
“It is the distinction on which the entire matter depends!”
“Then I am glad we have identified it.”
Miss Stray looked from one to the other. “But suppose the cartographers cannot establish the sequence. Suppose they find that some things appear on their maps before they encounter them, while other things alter after they have been recorded. What would count as evidence then?”
Blottisham turned to her with the expression of a man who had just discovered that a trusted ally had defected.
“You cannot seriously suggest that we abandon the distinction between a description and the thing described.”
“I haven't suggested abandoning it.”
“Good. Because without that distinction, a map becomes indistinguishable from a territory, a prediction from an observation, and a possibility from an actual event. We should have no means of deciding what exists and what someone has merely drawn!”
Quillibrace regarded him over the rim of his cup.
“You have found three distinctions. Have you demonstrated that the stories erase any of them?”
Blottisham opened his mouth.
“I thought not,” said Quillibrace.
Miss Stray intervened before Blottisham could recover.
“Perhaps the stories don't erase the distinctions. Perhaps they make it difficult to decide how to use them.”
“That is worse!” Blottisham exclaimed.
“Worse than erasing them?”
“Much worse. If a distinction disappears, we know where the difficulty lies. But if it remains perfectly clear in theory and becomes impossible to apply in practice, what are we supposed to do?”
Quillibrace set down his cup.
“Begin by noticing the difference.”
Blottisham looked at him suspiciously.
“You agree with me?”
“Not yet.”
Miss Stray laughed.
Blottisham turned to her. “You find this amusing, Miss Stray, but imagine the consequences for ordinary life. A man discovers that a memory he has never had contains a fact about his own childhood. A surveyor finds that a forest has appeared where his map says it must be. Does he revise the map? Does he revise his account of the forest? Or does he pretend that nothing has happened?”
“Must he choose only one?” she asked.
“Of course he must! Otherwise, how can he know what he is doing?”
“Perhaps he can know what he is doing without knowing exactly what has happened.”
Blottisham stared at her.
“That is an appalling suggestion.”
“It may be an uncomfortable one.”
“It is the same thing!”
“No,” said Quillibrace. “It is not.”
Blottisham swung round.
“Then let us have your solution, Professor. You are very good at telling us what things are not. What are they?”
Quillibrace considered him for a moment.
“I don't know.”
Blottisham sank back in his chair.
“Then what is the use of all this discussion?”
“To discover whether we know,” said Quillibrace.
“And if we don't?”
“Then we shall at least know that.”
Blottisham looked as though he might resign from the human race.
Miss Stray, meanwhile, had been thinking about the two endings. In one, a child walked towards a house whose existence could not be securely placed in the man's past or future. In the other, the cartographer could no longer tell whether the forest was approaching the kingdom or the kingdom approaching the forest.
“Perhaps the most disturbing thing,” she said, “is that neither story allows us to decide which direction the relationship runs.”
Quillibrace turned towards her.
“Do you mean that the forest makes the map, or the map makes the forest?”
“I mean that we may be too quick to assume that one must be entirely responsible for the other.”
“An understandable assumption,” he said. “Not necessarily a justified one.”
“Agreed.”
Blottisham looked from one to the other.
“You are both proposing that the relationship itself might be responsible?”
“Not quite,” said Miss Stray.
“Then what, precisely, are you proposing?”
She considered this.
“I don't yet know.”
Blottisham rose so abruptly that his chair scraped the floor.
“Two people who don't know what they are proposing, and one who refuses to say! And we are supposed to regard this as intellectual progress?”
“Not all progress is immediately recognisable,” said Quillibrace.
“Then how do we distinguish it from standing still?”
“By waiting to see whether we arrive somewhere.”
Blottisham began pacing.
“I shall tell you where we shall arrive. We shall arrive at a world in which no boundary is secure, no record conclusive, and no authority capable of enforcing the simplest distinction between what is and what might be. And when the entire system collapses, someone will ask why we did not take the warning seriously.”
“Who will ask?” said Quillibrace.
“The survivors, Professor!”
“Then we may hope that someone survives.”
Miss Stray laughed, though she was still looking towards the window.
Beyond the lawn, the trees stirred in the evening wind. She thought of the cartographer's maps, growing more accurate as the forest became harder to locate, and of the man in the garden, who could no longer be certain which of them had been carrying the memory.
She wondered whether something might remain where it was and yet become something else—not because it had changed, but because the relations through which it was known had changed around it.
“Professor,” she said, “if the world remains the same, can our account of it become something different?”
“Certainly.”
She waited.
“Whether the world has remained the same,” he added, “is another question.”
Miss Stray nodded.
Blottisham stopped pacing.
“I have had enough of questions. I shall write to the college librarian. If a tree appears in the library, I want it understood in advance that the matter is one for the groundskeeper, not the cataloguing staff.”
“An admirably clear boundary,” said Quillibrace.
“Thank you.”
“I wonder how the tree will regard it.”
Blottisham snatched up his papers.
“If that tree has any sense at all, Professor, it will remain where it belongs.”
He marched from the room.
Quillibrace watched the door close.
“Do you suppose,” he asked Miss Stray, “that he has ever considered what it means to belong somewhere?”
“I think,” she said, “that he has considered little else.”
Quillibrace picked up his newspaper.
“Then he may have more to learn than the rest of us.”
Outside, the wind moved through the trees.
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