I thought about that, and I thought I detected a flaw.
"Oh, no!" I said. "Wait a minute here, Wyn. If she can't remember the past even a minute ahead, you couldn't even talk with her. She'd remember what you were going to say, instead of what you had said. Not only that, she'd talk backward! You'd never be able to understand her."
"People are adaptable," he replied. "She evidently learned to talk backward—to her; correctly, to us. People learn to talk so others can understand them. And as for conversation, do you remember Summer ever answering a question directly?"
I started to say I did, for it seemed that I did. But a moment's reflection changed my mind. Not a direct question; and her participation in a conversation always had been a jumpy and disturbing thing.
"But we can talk with Summer," I protested. "For years we've been able to understand each other."
"Like writing letters that cross in the mails," he said. "And I think people do have some knowledge of the immediate future, even you and I. Summer would develop that faculty more than the average person."
Certainly. No wonder she had been so affectionate to me that it had been impossible for me to resist her. To her, at that time, we had already been lovers. By the same token, my own knowledge when the affair was concluded that we had been lovers must have created in me an attitude that was a strong incentive for her to yield to me at the end of our relationship—the beginning, to her.
What a way to live! Always trying to guess, from the conversation of those around her, what (to her) was going to happen, so she could react intelligently.
"But," I protested, still unwilling to accept it, "if the past is the future to her, her actions could affect the past."
"Exactly," he said. "I told you, this means you have to accept the principle that the past is just as mallable as the future, and the future is no more mallable than the past."