Free Forest of Memory by Mary Robinette Kowal Page A

you’re the winemaker?”
    He glanced at the sign and shook his head, wincing a little. “It’s the easiest explanation, but no—not anymore. My niece handles that now.”
    “And you just do the tasting room?”
    He tapped the side of his nose. “Concussion. Severed my olfactory nerves.”
    “Oh. Oh, I—I am so sorry.”
    “Years ago.” He turned and walked toward the glass double doors that led to the back of the winery. “Got enough back so food doesn’t taste like cardboard anymore, but not enough to make wine.”
    “But enough to do the tasting room.”
    “That?” He paused to hold the door open for me, and a wave of dark fruit aromas billowed into the winery. “They all taste the same now. I just rely on memory to describe them to customers.”
    Memory.
    It seems like such an unreliable thing. I am so used accustomed to using my i-Sys, Lizzie, to recall recorded memories for me, yet she can only do that for audio and visual memories. What I smelled, or tasted, or felt, is another story. And what I thought?
    I can use the saved record to remind myself of these sensory details, but my thoughts change based on the new viewing. I re-examine and revise my perspectives.
    And without a recording . . .
    We live so little of our days without a LiveConnect to record it. And the three days you are asking about are among those. I wonder if, in part, what youa re intetersted in is the very fact that I have memories unemcumbered by a verified record.
    The part I’m telling you now, of course, occurred while I was still on the Grid. I don’t have to remember the winemaker’s words; I can just ask just asked Lizzie to do playback for me.
    As I type this, I can see the winemaker’s faded red hair catch the light in the late afternoon sun as we leave the wine room.
    I can hear the sound of our footsteps tapping in and out of sync as we cross the vast space of the winery proper. The way the industrial white walls frame the rounded wood barrels and the purple stains on the cement floor are all part of the record my LiveConnect record.
    We walked to a lacquered-wood door set into one wall of the winery. It was made of reclaimed barrel staves, straightened in a steamer and polished so the stain of pinot noir gleamed under the cool LED lights.
    The interior of the member barrel room was dimmer than the working winery. Each barrel lay in its own cradle with a the member’s name branded into the head of the barrel. A long table and library chairs turned it inot part laboratory, part reading room.
    As we entered, Lizzie spoke in my ear. “The south wall has the display.”
    I turned south, and the wall matched the image she’d spotted on a member’s public LiveConnect. An alcove had been set into the wall—probably to hold an old-style television at some point in the past—and it was filled now with someon’es imagining of what an office might have looked like.
    It was the sort of mishmash of eras that treated the entire twentieth century as if it was all one thing.
    The typewriter (this Corona #3 from 1918) sat next to a cordless phone (Bell from the mid-eighties), and an office plaque that, by its font, probably came from the 1950s. A stack of floppy discs sat atop a Samsung printer from the late nineties. And . . . wonder of wonders—a battered paperback
Webster’s Dictionary
.
    I do remember that my hands itched to pick it up the moment I saw it. The angle of the image Lizzie had snagged didn’t show the paperback; it was beautifully worn, as if someone had really used it.
    Wesselman cocked his head and wandered over to the alcove. “Huh. That looks nice. Not that I’m surprised. Amy has good taste. Literally.”
    I can hear my own laugh on the recording, and I probably smiled. “And in more than one area, apparently. May I?”
    He shrugged. “Sure.”
    I picked up the dictionary first. The pages were yellowed with age, but not brittle. I opened the cover, taking care not to add any of my own imprints to it,