"Mm? Didn' notice." She was right, he realized. He fingered the plasma arc doubtfully.
"Did anything come up for you while you were doing that?" she asked.
He shook his head in renewed frustration, then brightened. " 'Membered som'thin s'mornin, tho'. Inna shar." At speed, his speech slurred into unintelligibility again, a logjam of the lips.
"In the shower," she translated encouragingly. "Tell me. Slow down as much as you need."
"Slow. Is. Death," he enunciated clearly.
She blinked. "Still. Tell me."
"Ah. Well. Think I wuzza boy. Ridin' onna horse. Old man on 'nother horse. Uppa hill. 'S chilly. Horses . . . puffin' lak I 'm." His deep breaths were not deep enough to satisfy. "Trees. Mountain, two, three mountain, covered w' trees, all strung tog'ther wi' new plastic tubes. Runnin' down to a shack a' t' bottom. Gran'da happy . . . 'cause tubes are efficient." He struggled to get that last word out intact, and succeeded. "Men'r 'appy too."
"What are they doing, in this scene?" she asked, sounding baffled. "These men."
He could see it again in his head, the memory of a memory. "Burnin' wood. Makin' sugar."
"That makes no sense. Sugar comes from biological production vats, not from burning trees," said Rowan.
"Trees," he asserted. "Brown sug'r trees." Another memory wavered up: the old man breaking off a chunk of something that looked like tan sandstone and giving him a taste by popping it in his mouth. The feel of the gnarled old stained fingers cool against his cheek, sweetness tinged with leather and horses. He shivered at the overwhelming sensory blast. This was real. But he still could name no names. Gran'da.
"Mountains mine," he added. The thought made him sad, and he didn't know why.
"What?"
"Own 'em." He frowned glumly.
"Anything else?"
"No. 'S all there is." His fists clenched. He straightened them, spreading his fingers carefully on the tray table.
"Are you sure this wasn't a dream from last night?"
"No. Inna shar," he insisted.
"It's very strange. This, I expected." She nodded to the reassembled weapons, and began putting them back in the cloth bag. "That," a toss of her head indicated his little story, "doesn't fit. Trees made out of sugar sound pretty dream-like to me."
Doesn't fit what? A desperate excitement surged through him. He grabbed her around one slim wrist, trapping her hand with a stunner still in it. "Doesn' fi' wha'? Wha' d' you know?"
"Nothing."
"Na' nothin'!"
"That hurts," she said levelly.
He let go of her instantly. "Na' nothin'," he insisted again. "Som'thin. Wha'?"
She sighed, finished bagging the weapons, and sat back and studied him. "It was a true statement that we did not know who you were. It is now a truer statement that we are not sure which one you are."
"I gotta choice? Tell me!"
"You are at a . . . tricky stage of your recovery. Cryo-revival amnesics seldom recover all of their memories at once. It comes in little cascades. A typical bell-curve. A few at first, then a growing mass. Then it trails off. A few last holes may linger for years. Since you had no other gross cranial injuries, my prognosis is that you will eventually recover your whole personality. But."
A most sinister but. He stared at her beseechingly.
"At this stage, on the verge of cascading, a cryo-amnesic can be so hungry for identity, he'll pick up a mistaken one, and start assembling evidence to support it. It can take weeks or months to get it straightened out again. In your case, for special reasons, I think this is not only more than usually possible, it could be more than usually difficult to detangle again. I have to be very, very careful not to suggest anything to you that I am not absolutely certain about. And it's hard, because I'm theorizing in my head probably just as urgently as you are. I have to be sure that anything you give me really comes from you, and is not a reflection of some suggestion on my part."
"Oh." He sagged back in bed, horribly disappointed.
"There is a possible short-cut," she added.
He surged back up again. "Wha'? Gimme!"
"There is a drug called fast-penta. One of its derivatives is a psychiatric sedative, but its usual use is as an interrogation drug. It's actually a misnomer to call it a truth serum, though laymen insist on doing so."
"I . . . know fas'pent'." His brows drew down. He knew something important about fast-penta. What was it?
"It has some extremely relaxing effects, and sometimes, in cryo-revival patients, it can trigger memory cascades."
"Ah!"
"However, it can also be embarrassing. Under its influence people will happily talk about whatever crosses their minds, even their most intimate and private thoughts. Good medical ethics requires me to warn you about that. Also, some people are allergic to the drug."
"Where'd . . . you learn . . . goo' med'cal ethics?" he asked curiously.
Strangely, she flinched. "Escobar," she said, and eyed him.
"Where we now?"
"I'd rather not say, just yet."
"How could that contam'nate m' mem'ry?" he demanded indignantly.
"I can tell you soon, I think," she soothed. "Soon."
"Mm," he growled.
She pulled a little white packet from her coat pocket, opened it, and peeled off a plastic-backed dot. "Hold out your arm." He obeyed, and she pressed the dot against the underside of his forearm. "Patch test," she explained. "Because of what I theorize about your line of work, I think you have a higher than normal chance of allergy. Artificially-induced allergy."
She peeled the dot away again—it prickled—and gazed closely at his arm. A pink spot appeared. She frowned at it. "Does that itch?" she asked suspiciously.
"No," he lied, and clenched his right hand to keep from scratching at the spot. A drug to give him his mind back—he had to have it. Turn white again, blast you, he thought to the pink splotch.
"You seem to be a little sensitive," she mused. "Marginally."
"Pleassse . . ."
Her lips twisted in doubt. "Well . . . what do we have to lose? I'll be right back."
She exited, returning shortly with two hyposprays, which she laid on the tray table. "This is the fast-penta," she pointed, "and this is the fast-penta antagonist. You let me know right away if you start to feel strange, itch, tingle, have trouble breathing or swallowing, or if your tongue starts to feel thick."
"Feels th'ck now," he objected, as she pushed up both his sleeves on his thin white arms and pressed the first spray to the inside of his elbow. "How d'I tell?"
"You'll be able to tell. Now just lie back and relax. You should start to feel dreamy, like you're floating, by the time you count backward from ten. Try it."
"Te'. Nan. Ei'. Seben. Si', fav, fo', tree-two-wun." He did not feel dreamy. He felt tense and nervous and miserable. "You sure yo' go' rat one?" His fingers began to drum on the tray table. The sound was unnaturally loud in his ears. Objects in the room were taking on hard, bright outlines with colored fringes. Rowan's face seemed suddenly drained of personality, an ivory mask.
The mask loomed threateningly toward him. "What's your name?" it hissed.
"I . . . I . . . yiyi . . ." His mouth clogged with stutters. He was the invisible eye, nameless. . . .
"Strange," the mask murmured. "Your blood pressure should be going down, not up."
Abruptly, he remembered what was so important about fast-penta. "Fas'pent'—maksmeyper." She shook her head in non-comprehension. "Yiper," he reiterated, out of a mouth that seemed to be seizing up in spasms. He wanted to talk. A thousand words rushed to his tongue, a chain-collision along his nerves. "Ya. Ya. Ya."
"This isn't usual." She frowned at the hypospray, still in her hand.
"No sh't." His arms and legs drew up like coiled springs. Rowan's face grew charming, like a doll's. His heart raced. The room wavered, as if he were swimming underwater. With an effort, he uncoiled. He had to relax. He had to relax right now.
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"Do you remember anything?" she asked. Her dark eyes were like pools, liquid and beautiful. He wanted to swim in those eyes, to shine in them. He wanted to please her. He wanted to coax her out of that green cloth armor, to dance naked with him in the starlight, to . . . His mumbles to this effect suddenly found voice in poetry, of a sort. Actually, it was a very dirty limerick playing on some obvious symbolism involving wormholes and jumpships. Fortunately, it came out rather garbled.
To his relief, she smiled. But there was some un-funny association. . . . "Las' time I recited that, som'bod' beat shit outta me. Wuz on fas'pent' then, too."
Alertness coursed through her lovely long body. "You've been given fast-penta before? What else do you remember about it?"
" 'Is name wuz Galen. Angry wi' me. Doan' know why." He remembered a reddening face wavering over him, radiating an implacable, murderous hatred. Blows raining on him. He searched himself for remembered fear, and found it oddly mixed with pity. "I doan' unnerstan'."
"What else did he ask you about?"
"Doan' know. Told 'im 'nother poem."
"You recited poetry at him, under fast-penta interrogation?"
"Fer hours. Made 'im mad as hell."
Her brows rose; one finger touched her soft lips, which parted in delight. "You beat a fast-penta interrogation? Remarkable! Let's not talk about poetry, then. But you remember Ser Galen. Huh!"
"Galen fit?" He cocked his head anxiously. Ser Galen, yes! The name was important; she recognized it. "Tell me."
"I'm . . . not sure. Every time I think I'm taking a step forward with you, we seem to go two sideways and one back."
"Lak to step out wi' you," he confided, and listened to himself in horror as he went on to describe, briefly and crudely, what else he would like to do with her. "Ah. Ah. Sorry, m'lady." He stuffed his fingers into his mouth, and bit them.
"It's all right," she soothed. "It's the fast-penta."
"No—izza testost'rone."
She laughed outright. It was most encouraging, but his momentary elation was drowned again in a new wash of tension. His hands plucked and twisted at his clothing, and his feet twitched.
She frowned at a medical monitor on the wall. "Your blood pressure is still going up. Charming as you are under fast-penta, this is not a normal reaction." She picked up the second hypospray. "I think we'd better stop now."
"M' not a normal man," he said sadly. "Mutant." A wave of anxiety rushed over him. "You gonna tak' my brain out?" he asked in sudden suspicion, eyeing the hypospray. And then, in a mind-blinding blast of realization, "Hey! I know where I am! I'm on Jackson's Whole!" He stared at her in terror, jumped to his feet, and bolted for the door, dodging her lunge.
"No, wait, wait!" she called, running after him with the glittering hypospray still in her hand. "You're having a drug reaction, stop! Let me get rid of it! Poppy, grab him!"
He dodged the horse-tail-haired Dr. Durona in the lab corridor, and flung himself into the lift tube, boosting himself up with yanks on the safety ladder that sent bolts of searing pain through his half-healed chest muscles. A whirling chaos of corridors and floors, shouts and running footsteps, resolved at last into the lobby he had found before.
He shot past some workmen maneuvering a float-pallet stacked with cases through the transparent doors. No force screen shocked him backward this time. A green-parka'd guard turned in slow motion, drawing a stunner, mouth open on a shout that emerged as thickly as cold oil.
He blinked in blinding gray daylight at a ramp, a paved lot for vehicles, and dirty snow. Ice and gravel bit his bare feet as he ran, gasping, across the lot. A wall enclosed the compound. There was a gate in the wall, open, and more guards in green parkas. "Don't stun him!" a woman yelled from behind him.
He ran into a grimy street, and barely dodged a groundcar. The piercing gray-whiteness alternated with bursts of color in his eyes. A broad open space across the street was dotted with bare black trees with branches like clutching claws, straining at the sky. He glimpsed other buildings, behind walls, farther down the street, looming and strange. Nothing was familiar in this landscape. He made for the open space and the trees. Black and magenta dizziness clouded his eyes. The cold air seared his lungs. He staggered and fell, rolling onto his back, unable to breathe.
Half a dozen Dr. Duronas pounced on him like wolves upon their kill. They took his arms and legs, and pulled him up off the snow. Rowan dashed up, her face strained. A hypospray hissed. They hustled him back across the roadway like a trussed sheep, and hurried him inside the big white building. His head began to clear, but his chest was racked with pain, as if it were clamped in a squeezing vise. By the time they put him back in his bed in the underground clinic, the drug-induced false paranoia had washed out of his system. To be replaced by real paranoia. . . .
"Do you think anyone saw him?" an alto voice asked anxiously.
"Gate guards," another voice bit out. "Delivery crew."
"Anybody else?"
"I don't know," Rowan panted, her hair escaping in snow-dampened wisps. "Half a dozen groundcars went by while we were chasing him. I didn't see anyone in the park."
"I saw a couple of people walking," volunteered another Dr. Durona. "At a distance, across the pond. They were looking at us, but I doubt they could see much."
"We were a hell of a show, for a few minutes."
"What happened this time, Rowan?" the white-haired alto Dr. Durona demanded wearily. She shuffled closer and stared at him, leaning on a carved walking stick. She did not seem to carry it as an affectation, but as a real prop. All deferred to her. Was this the mysterious Lilly?
"I gave him a dose of fast-penta," Rowan reported stiffly, "to try and jog his memory. It works sometimes, for cryo-revivals. But he had a reaction. His blood pressure shot up, he went paranoid, and he took off like a whippet. We didn't run him down till he collapsed in the park." She was still catching her own breath, he saw as his agony started to recede.
The old Dr. Durona sniffed. "Did it work?"
Rowan hesitated. "Some odd things came up. I need to talk with Lilly."
"Immediately," said the old Dr. Durona—not-Lilly, apparently. "I—" but she was cut off when his shivering, stuttering attempt to talk blended into a convulsion.
The world turned to confetti for a moment. He came back to focus with two of the women holding him down, Rowan hovering over him snapping orders, and the rest of the Duronas scattering. "I'll come up as soon as I can," said Rowan desperately over her shoulder. "I can't leave him now."
The old Dr. Durona nodded understanding, and withdrew. Rowan waved away a proffered hypospray of some anti-convulsant. "I'm writing a standing order. This man gets nothing without a sensitivity scan first." She ran off most of her helpers, and made the room dim and quiet and warm again. Slowly, he recovered the rhythm of his breath, though he was still very sick to his stomach.
"I'm sorry," she told him. "I didn't realize fast-penta could do that to you."
He tried to say, It's not your fault, but his powers of speech seemed to have relapsed. "D-d-d-i, diddi, do. Bad. Thing?"
She took far too long to reply. "Maybe it will be all right."
Two hours later, they came with a float-pallet and moved him.
"We're getting some other patients," Dr. Chrys of the wing-hair told him blandly. "We need your room." Lies? Half-truths?
Where they moved him to puzzled him most of all. He had visions of a locked cell, but instead they took him upstairs via a freight lift tube and deposited him on a camp-bed set up in Rowan's personal suite. It was one of a row of similar chambers, presumably the Duronas' residence-floor. Her suite consisted of a sitting room/study and a bedroom, plus a private bath. It was reasonably spacious, though cluttered. He felt less like a prisoner than like a pet, being smuggled against the rules into some women's dormitory. Though he had seen another male-morph Dr. Durona besides Raven, a man of about thirty Dr. Chrys had addressed as "Hawk." Birds and flowers, they were all birds and flowers i
n this concrete cage.
Later still, a young Durona brought dinner on a tray, and he ate together with Rowan at a little table in her sitting room as the gray day outside faded to dusk. He supposed there was no real change in his prisoner/patient status, but it felt good to be out of the hospital-style room, free of the monitors and sinister medical equipment. To be doing something so prosaic as having dinner with a friend.
He walked around the sitting room, after they ate. "Mind 'f I look at your things?"
"Go ahead. Let me know if anything comes up for you."
She still would not tell him anything directly about himself, but she now seemed willing at least to talk about herself. His internal picture of the world shifted as they spoke. Why do I have wormhole maps in my head? Maybe he was going to have to recover himself the hard way. Learn everything that existed in the universe, and whatever was left, that dwarfish-man-shaped hole in the center, would be him by process of elimination. A daunting task.
He stared out the polarized window at the faint glitter hanging in the air, as if fairy dust were falling all around. He recognized the force screen for what it was, now, an improvement in cognition over his initial head-first encounter with it. The shield was military-grade, he realized, impermeable down to viruses and gas molecules, and up to . . . what? Projectiles and plasma, certainly. Must be a powerful generator around here somewhere. The protection was a late add-on to the building's architecture, not incorporated into its design. Some history inherent there. . . . "We are on Jackson's Whole, aren' we?" he asked.
"Yes. What does that mean to you?"
"Danger. Bad things happenin'. What is this pla'?" He waved around.
"The Durona Clinic."
"Ya, so? What you do? Why'm I here?"
"We are the personal clinic of House Fell. We do all sorts of medical tasks for them, as needed."
"House Fell. Weapons." The associations fell into place quite automatically. "Biological weapons." He eyed her accusingly.
"Sometimes," she admitted. "And biological defenses, too."
Was he a House Fell trooper? A captured enemy trooper? Hell, what army would employ a half-crippled dwarf as any kind of trooper? "House Fell give me to you to do?"
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