I hear dryness, and there's a taste of blue in my mouth, and I have an erection. I lick my lips and find my mouth is dry and tastes like something died in it. And I don't have an erection because I don't have a penis to have one with. What I've got is a bad case of, of—memory fugue , I realize, and my eyes click open.
I'm lying between harshly starched white sheets, facing a white wall with strange sockets in it. Pale green hangings form a curtain on either side of my bed. Someone's put me in an odd gown with a slit running right up the back. The gown is also green. This must be the hospital, I think, closing my eyes and trying not to panic. How did I get here? Trying not to panic is a nonstarter. I gasp and try to sit up.
A few seconds later the dizziness subsides and I try again. My heart's pounding, I'm queasy, and the front of my head aches; I feel as weak as a jellyfish. Meanwhile the panic is scraping at my attention again. Who brought me here? If Yourdon finds me, he'll kill me! There's some kind of box with buttons on it hanging from a hook on the bed frame. I pick it up and stab a button at semirandom, and my feet come up. Other way! Ten seconds later I'm sitting up uncomfortably, the bed raised behind my back. It puts an unpleasant pressure on my stomach, but with verticality comes a minute degree of comfort—I've got some control over my environment—before the greater unease sneaks up on me again.
Okay, so the gardener —I trail off, my internal narrative stuck in a haze of incomprehension. It brought me here? Where is here, anyway? This bed—it's one of a row, spaced alongside one wall in a huge, high-ceilinged white room. There's an array of windows set high up in the opposite wall, and I can glimpse blue and white sky through it. Incomprehensible bits of equipment are dotted around. There are lockers next to some of the beds—and I see that one of the beds at the other end of the room looks to be occupied.
I close my eyes, feeling a deadweight of dread. I'm still in the glasshouse , I realize sickly.
But I'm too weak to do anything, and, besides, I'm not alone. I hear the clack of approaching heels and the sound of voices coming my way. "Hours end at four o'clock," says a female voice with the flattening of affect I've come to expect of zombies. "The consultant will visit in the evening. The patient is weak and is not to be disturbed excessively." The curtain twitches back, and I see a female zombie wearing a white dress and an odd hair adornment. The zombie looks at me. "You have a visitor," she intones. "Do not overexert yourself."
"Uh," I manage to say, and try to turn my head so I can see who it is, but they're still half-concealed behind the curtain. It's like a nightmare, when you know some kind of monster is creeping up on you—
"Well, if it isn't our little librarian!"
And I think, Fuck, I know that voice! And simultaneously, almost petulantly, But you can't be here , just as Fiore steps around the curtain and leans over the rail alongside my bed, an expression of bemused condescension on his face. "Would you like to tell me where you think you were going?"
"No." I manage to avoid gritting my teeth. "Not particularly." The nightmare has caught up, and the well of despair is threatening to swallow me down. They've caught me and brought me back to play with me. I feel sick and hot.
"Come now, Reeve." Unctuous, that's the word. Fiore plants one plump hand on my forehead, and I realize he feels clammy and cold. "Oh dear. You are in a state." He removes the hand before I can shake it off, and I shiver. "I can see why they brought you straight here."
I clamp my teeth shut, waiting for the coup de grâce, but Fiore seems to have something else in mind. "I have to look after the pastoral well-being of all my flock, little lady, so I can't stay too long with you. You're obviously ill "—he puts some kind of odd emphasis on the word—"and I'm sure that's the explanation for your recent erratic behavior. But next time you decide to go climbing in the walls, you should come and talk to me first"—for a moment his expression hardens—"you wouldn't want to do anything you might regret later."
Between shivers, I manage to roll my eyes. "I have no regrets." Why is he playing with me?
"Come now!" Fiore clucks disapprovingly for a moment. "Of course you have regrets! To be human is to be regretful. But we must learn to make the most of what we have to work with, mustn't we? You've been slow to settle in and find your place in our little parish, Reeve, and that's been causing some concern to those of us who keep an eye on such things. I have—may I be frank?—been worried that you might be an incorrigibly disruptive influence. On the other hand, you obviously mean well, and care for your neighbors—" An unreadable expression flits across his jowls. "So I'm trying to give you the benefit of the doubt. Rest now, and we'll continue our little chat later, when you're feeling better."
He straightens up in his portly manner and begins to turn away. I shiver again, a chill running up my spine. It's like he doesn't know I killed him! I realize. I can see Fiore running multiple instances of himself, but surely they'd be aware of each other, by way of their netlink? Why, doesn't he—
"You," I manage to say.
"Yes?"
"You." It's hard to form words. I'm really feeling feverish. "What's the, the . . ."
"I don't have all day!" His voice rises when he's irritated, in an annoying whine. He straightens his robe. "Nurse? I say, nurse!" In a quieter voice, to me: "I'll have them send for your husband. I'm sure you'll have a lot to talk about." Then he turns on his heel and bumbles away down the ward toward the other occupied beds.
I realize my teeth are chattering: I'm not sure whether from fever or black helpless rage. I killed you! And you didn't even notice! Then the nurse comes stomping along in her sensible shoes, clutching some kind of primitive diagnostic instrument, and I realize that I'm feeling extremely unwell.
NURSE Zombie gives me a test that involves sliding a cold glass rod into my ear and staring into my eyes from close range, then she pulls out a jar and gives me what I assume at first is a piece of candy, except that it tastes vile. The hospital is set up to resemble a real dark ages installation, but luckily they seem to draw the line at leeches or heart transplants and similar barbarism. I guess this is some sort of drug, synthesized at great expense and administered to have some random weird systemic effect on my metabolism. "Try to sleep," Nurse explains to me. "You are ill."
"C-cold," I whisper.
"Try to sleep, you are ill." But Nurse bends down and pulls out a loose-weave blanket. "Drink lots of fluids." The glass on the table next to me is empty, and in any case, I feel too shivery to pull an arm out from under the blanket. "You are ill."
No shit. It's not just my arms and legs—all my joints are screaming at me in chorus with a whole load of muscles I wish I didn't have right now—but my head's throbbing and I feel like I'm freezing to death and my stomach's not so good either. And the blackouts and memory fugues are still with me. "What's wrong with, me?" I ask, and it takes a big effort to get the words out.
"You are ill," the zombie repeats. It's useless arguing with her—nobody home, no theory of mind, just a bunch of reflexes and canned dialogues.
"Who can I ask?"
She's turning away, but I seem to have tripped a new response. "The consultant will visit at eight o'clock tonight, all questions must be addressed to the consultant. The patient is weak and must not be disturbed excessively. Drink lots of fluids." She picks up an empty jug that was out of view a moment ago and whisks it away toward one end of the ward. A moment later she's back with it. "Drink lots of fluids."
"Yeah . . ." I shudder and try to work myself into a smaller volume under the blanket. I dimly realize I ought to be asking lots of questions—actually I ought to be forcing myself out of bed and running like my hair's on fire—but right now, just pouring myself a glass of water seems like an heroic task.
I lie back and stare at the ceiling, incoherent with anger and embarrassment. Did I imagine myself killing Fiore in the library? I don't think so; the memories are vivid. But so are all my other memories, the massacres and the endless years of war. And not all my memories are real, are they? The bootstrap memory, talking to another voice in my own larynx—if it's not just a false memory of a false memory, then it certainly wasn't me: It was a customized worm running on my implant. I can't—this is getting difficult—trust myself, especially while I keep going into fugue.
"Can I?" I ask, and I open my eyes again, and Sam startles.
He's leaning over me where Fiore was, and I realize immediately that I've been in fugue for some time. I'm cold, but I'm no longer feverish; the sheets are damp with sweat, and the light visible through the windows is dimming toward evening. "Reeve?" he asks anxiously.
"Sam." I lift my hand and reach for him. He wraps my fingers in his. "I'm ill."
"I came as soon as I heard. Fiore telephoned the office." He sounds slightly shocky, his eyes haunted. "What happened?"
I shiver again. The damp sheets are getting to me. "Later." Meaning: Not where the walls have ears. "Need water." My mouth's really dry. "I keep having fugues."
"The nurse said something about a consultant," says Sam. "Dr. Hanta. She said he'd be coming to look at you later. Are you going to be all right? Why are you ill?"
I clutch Sam's hand as hard as I can. "I don't know." He offers me the water glass, and I swallow. "Suspect . . . not. Not sure. How long was I . . . asleep . . . for?"
"You didn't recognize me when I came in," Sam says. He's holding on to my hand as if he's afraid one of us is drowning. "You didn't recognize me."
"Memory fugue's getting much worse," I say. I lick my lips. "Three"—no, four —"today. I'm not sure why. I keep remembering stuff, but I'm not sure how much of it is real. Thought I'd"—I stop before I say killed Fiore , just in case I really did and there's some other reason the priest doesn't know about it—"escaped. But I woke up here." I close my eyes. "Fiore says I'm ill."
"What am I meant to do?" Sam asks plaintively. "How do I fix you? There's no A-gate here . . ."
"Dark ages tech." My hand aches from gripping him. I force it to relax. "They didn't disassemble people and rebuild them, they used medicine, drugs, and surgery. Tried to repair damaged tissue in situ."
"That's insane!"
I chuckle weakly. "You're telling me? That's what the consultant is, he's a doctor." One of those weird, obsolescent words that doesn't mean what it used to—in the real world outside this prison, a doctor is a scholar, someone who investigates stuff, not a wetware mechanic. I suppose it may have meant the same back in the real dark ages, when nobody really knew how self-replicating organisms functioned and there was an element of research involved. "I think he's meant to figure out what's wrong with me and repair it. Assuming they don't just have a medical assembler down in the basement here—" I clutch his hand, because a horrible thought's just struck me. If they've got a medical A-gate, won't it be infected with Curious Yellow? "Don't let them put me in it!"
"Put you in—what? What is it, Reeve? Reeve, are you having another fugue?"
Things are going gray around me. He leans close, and I whisper, "* * *," in his ear. Then—
DESPERATION is the engine of necessity.
It's two hundred megs since that committee meeting with Al and Sanni and a lot of things have changed. Me, for example: I'm not in military phenotype anymore. Neither is Sanni. We're civilians now, corpuscles of military experience discharged into the circulating confusion of reconstruction that has become the future of Is.
I'm not used to being human again, ortho or otherwise—bits of me are missing. When the war exploded, trapping me on the MASucker for almost a generation, I was reduced to what I was carrying on my person and in my head. Then when I militarized myself, I had to let component aspects of my identity go. I'm not sure why, in all cases. Some things make sense (when at war, one's scruples about inflicting pain and injury on the enemy faction must be suppressed), but there are gaps that follow no obvious rhyme or reason. According to my written notes from the period on the Grateful for Duration , I used to have an abiding and deep interest in baroque music of the preindustrialized age, but now I can't recall even a scrap of melody. Again, I used to be married, with children, but I am mystified by my lack of memories from the period, or feelings. Maybe that was a reaction to grief, and maybe not—but now I've been demobilized, I find myself out of reaction mass and adrift along an escape vector diverging from all attachments. Only my new job retains any hold over me.
The Linebarger Cats emerged from the coalition with significant assets. To my surprise I received a credit balance that with careful management might mean I never need to work again—at least for a few gigasecs. It seems that warfare pays, if you're on the winning side and manage not to misplace your mind in the process.
When I left MilSpace (a convoluted process involving numerous anonymous remixer networks and one-way censorship gates to strip me of my military modules before my reintegration into civil society), I had myself reassembled as a louche young man in the Cognitive Republic of Lichtenstein. There's a lot to be said for being louche, especially after you've spent several hundred megaseconds with no genitals.
Lichtenstein is a vivid and cynical colony of artistic satirists, so sophisticated they've almost circled back into primitivism. By convention we use visual field filters that limn everything in dark strokes, filling our bodies with color. Life aspires toward a state of machinima. It's a strange way to be, but familiar and comfortable after the unsleeping hyperspectral awareness of a tankie. So I hang around in the galleries and salons of Lichtenstein, exchanging witty repartee and tall stories with the other habitués, and in my copious free time I pay frequent trips to the bathhouses and floataria. I make a point of never sleeping with the same person twice in the same body, although I discover that even such anonymous abandon doesn't protect me from my lovers' tears: It seems half the population have lost someone and are wandering, searching the world over.
My life is outwardly directionless for the first four or five megs. In private I work on something that might eventually turn out to be a memoir of the war—an old-fashioned serialized text provocatively promoting a single viewpoint, without any pretense at objectivity—while in public I live on my savings. DeMob gave me a reasonably secure cover identity as a playboy remittance man from a primogeniture polity, sent to while away his youth in less hidebound (and politically loaded) biomes, and it's not hard to keep up appearances. But deep down, the insignificance and lack of meaning of such a life chafes; I want to be doing something, and while the project I've been working on under Sanni's auspices for the past couple of years fits the bill, it is, perforce, anonymous. If I make a mark, it will be by my deeds, not my name. And so, as my debauch intensifies, I slip into a kind of melancholic haze.
Then one morning I am awakened by a brassy flare of trumpets from the bedside orrery, which announces that I have a visitor.
I realize who and where I am—and that I am desperately sick—at the exact moment that Dr. Hanta presses a small, freezing cold brass disk against the bare skin between my breasts. "Ow!"
"Breathe slowly," she orders, not unkindly, then blinks like a sleepy owl from behind her thick-lensed glasses: "Ah, back in the realm of the conscious, are we?"
By way of an answer I go into a hoarse coughing fit, my muscles locking in spasms that leave my ribs aching. Hanta recoils slightly, removing the stethoscope. "I see," she says. "I'll just wait a moment—glass of water?"
I realize she's jacked the back of my bed up as the coughing subsides. "Yes. Please." I'm shivery and weak but not freezing anymore. She holds out a glass, and I manage to accept it without spilling anything, although my hand shakes alarmingly. "What's wrong with me?"
"That's what I'm here to find out." Hanta is a petite female, shorter than I am, her skin a shade darker, although not the aubergine-tinted brown of Fiore. Her short hair is dusted with the silver spoor of impending senescence, and there are laugh-lines around her face. She wears an odd white overcoat buttoned up the front and carries the arcane totems of her profession, the caduceus and stethoscope—the bell of the latter she rubs upon my chest. She looks friendly and open and trustworthy, the antithesis of her two clerical colleagues: but beauty is not truth, and some gut instinct tells me never to let my guard down in her presence. "How long have you been febrile?"
"Febrile?"
"Hot and cold. Chills, shivers, alternating with too hot. Night sweats, anything like that."
"Oh, about—" I feel my forehead wrinkling. "What day is it? How long have I been in here?"
"You've been here six hours," Dr. Hanta says patiently. "You were brought in around midafternoon."
I shiver convulsively. My skin is icy. "Since an hour or two before then."
"The Reverend Doctor Fiore tells me you were climbing." Her tone is neutral, professional, with no note of censure.
I swallow. "Since then."
"You're a lucky lady." Hanta smiles enigmatically and moves her stethoscope to the ball of my left shoulder, pulling open my hospital gown to get at it. "I'm sorry, I'll be quick. Hmm." She stares into the stethoscope's eye crystal and frowns. "It's a long time since I've seen that . . . sorry." She straightens up. "It's not safe to climb around in the walls here; some of the neighboring biomes aren't biomorphically integrated. There are replicators in the mass fraction reserve cells that will eat anything based on a nucleotide chassis that doesn't broadcast a contact inhibition signal, and you're not equipped for that."
I swallow again—my mouth is unnaturally dry. "What?"
"Somehow or other you've managed to get yourself infected with a strain of pestis mechaniculorum . You're feverish because your immune system is still just about containing it. It's a good thing for you that we found you before mechanotic cytolysis set in . . . Anyway, I'll fix you up just as soon as I finish sequencing it."
"Um." I shudder again. "Oh, okay."
" ‘Okay' indeed. Do I have to tell you not to go climbing around inside the walls again?" I shake my head, almost embarrassed by my own fear of discovery. "Good." She pats me on the shoulder. "At least if you're going to do it again, come to me first, please? No more unfortunate accidents." She carefully disconnects the stethoscope and wraps it around her caduceus. It makes soft clicking noises as it fuses with the staff. "Now I'll just run you off a little antirobotic, and you'll be up and about in no time."
Dr. Hanta hitches up her coat, then perches on a stool next to my bed. "Isn't this a bit out of character?" I ask her, throwing caution to the winds. I suspect if I asked Fiore or Yourdon that question, they'd bite my head off, but Hanta seems more approachable, if not more trustworthy.
"We all make mistakes." It's that smile again: It's slightly fey and very sincere, as if she's laughing at a joke that I'd laugh along with, if I only knew what it was. "You leave worrying about the integrity of the experiment to me, dear." She waves a dismissive hand. "Of course you worry about it when the priests' backs are turned. Of course people try to game the system—it's only to be expected. Probably some people don't even want to be here. Maybe they changed their minds after signing the waiver. All I can say is, we'll do our best to make sure they're not unhappy with the outcome." She raises an eyebrow at me speculatively. "It's not easy to run an experiment on this scale, and we make mistakes, what else can I say? Some of us make more mistakes than others." And now she pulls an expression of mild distaste, which seems to say it all. She's inviting my agreement, and I find myself nodding along despite my better judgment.
"But those mistakes . . ." I stop, unsure if I should continue.
"Yes?" She leans forward.
"How's Cass?" I force myself to ask.
Dr. Hanta's face, which up until now has been open and friendly, closes like a trapdoor. "Why do you ask?"
I lick my lips again. "I need something to drink." She slides off her stool and paces round my bed, pours what's left of the water jug into my cup, and hands it to me without a word. I swallow. "One of Fiore's little mistakes, I suppose." I aim to say it lightly, but it comes out dripping with sarcasm.
"Oh yes." Dr. Hanta looks round, toward the far end of the ward—at something hidden from me by the curtain. I shudder, and this time it's not from the fever chills. "I wouldn't say one of his little mistakes." Her tone of voice is dry, but there's something behind it that makes me glad I can't see her face. But when she turns back to me, her expression is perfectly normal. "Cass will be all right, dear."
"And Mick?" I prompt.
"That is under discussion."
"Under discussion. Was what happened to Esther and Phil discussed ahead of time?"
"Reeve"—she actually has the gall to look upset—"no, it wasn't. Someone miscalculated badly. They've gone back to the primary sources and discovered that what, what Esther and Phil were doing wasn't so very unusual. And you're right, the weighting attached to, uh, what they did—Major Fiore misjudged the mood of the crowd. It won't happen again, we've learned from that experience, and from—" She swallows, then nods minutely at the curtain. "If a couple doesn't get on, there's going to be a procedure to go through to obtain formal social approval of the separation. We're not evil. We're in this for the long haul, and if you're unhappy, if everyone's unhappy here, the polity won't gel, and the experiment can't work."
The experiment can't work. I look at her and find myself wondering, Does she mean it? Fiore and Yourdon are so cynical I find myself startled to be in the presence of a member of their team who seems to believe in what she's doing. I'm suddenly appalled, as badly taken aback by her honesty as the police zombies are by a stripper. "Uh. I think I see." I shake my head, then wince. My neck aches. "But as long as Mick stays here, some of us won't be happy at all."
"Oh, Mick will be dealt with one way or another, dear." Her caduceus trills for attention, and she fidgets with it as she talks. "I don't think the psychological damage is irremediable—we probably won't have to restore from backup, which is a good thing right now. But I'm going to have to redesign his motivational parameters from the ground up." She frowns at the serpent heads but doesn't explain herself further. "Cass will be . . . well, I'm attending to the physical damage right now, and when she's better, I'll ask her who she wants to be." She falls silent for a few seconds. "Most medical fraternities, confronted by a patient with this level of damage, would prescribe gross memory surgery—or simply terminate the instance and restore from backup. I don't believe in authorizing such a serious step without taking her wishes into account."
She falls silent again. After a moment I realize she's staring at me. "What is it?"
"We need to talk about your blackouts."
"My what?" I bite my tongue, but it's a bit late to play dumb.
Dr. Hanta raises one eyebrow and crosses her arms. "I'm not stupid, you know." She looks away, as if she's speaking to someone else. "Everyone in here has been through redactive reweighting and experiential reduction before we recruit them. One of the reasons this polity needs a medical supervisor is to be ready for identity crises. Most people have some inkling of who they used to be and why they wanted memory surgery. Occasionally, we get someone who doesn't remember—there's something they wanted to bury so deep that they wouldn't even know what it was about. Something painful. But I don't normally see . . . well! You've gone into fugue twice since you were admitted to this ward, did you know that? I checked with your husband during your last one, and he said you've been having them more frequently."
She leans toward me, keeping her hands sandwiched in her armpits as if she's hugging herself. "I don't like to intrude where I'm not wanted, but by the sound of it, you need help very badly indeed. You seem to have had a bad reaction to the suppressants the clinic used on you, and while I can't be sure without making a detailed examination, there is a risk that you could be heading for some kind of crisis. I don't want to overstate things, but in the worst-case scenario you could lose . . . well, everything that makes you you . For example, if it's an autoimmune reaction—according to your file you've got a heuristic upgrade to your complement system, and sometimes the Bayesian recognizers start firing off at the wrong targets—you could end up with anterograde amnesia, a complete inability to lay down any new mnemostructures. Or it might just be a sloppy earlier edit bleeding through and triggering random integration fugues, in which case things will ease off after a while, although you won't enjoy the ride. But I can't tell you what to expect, much less treat you, if you won't even admit you've got a problem."
"Oh." It takes me a while to absorb this, but Hanta is remarkably patient with me and waits while I think about things. If I didn't know better, I'd swear she actually liked me. "A problem," I echo, uncertain how much I can let slip, before a cold chill runs its icy fingers up my spine, and I shudder uncontrollably.
"Speaking of problems . . ." Hanta raises her caduceus: "This will hurt, but only momentarily and a lot less than being eaten alive by a mechaplague." She smiles faintly as she points it at my shoulder, and I wince as the asps strike at me. There's a toothy little prickling as they begin pumping adjuvant patches into my circulation, upgrading my prosthetic immune system so that it can deal with the pestis . I try not to wince.
"The infection will take some time to die off, and there's a risk that it's adaptable enough to out-evolve the robophages, so I'm going to keep you here overnight—just for observation. Hopefully you'll be well enough to go home tomorrow, and I'm going to write you up for a week off work while you recover. In the meantime, have a think about whatI said concerning your memory problem, and we can talk about it in the morning when I check on your progress."
The snake-heads let go of me and wrap themselves back around the staff as Hanta stands up. "Sleep well!"
NATURALLY, I don't sleep well at all.
At first, I spend an indeterminate time shuddering with cold chills and occasionally forgetting to inhale until some primitive reflex kicks me into sucking in great rasping gasps of air. Sleep is out of the question when you're afraid you'll stop breathing, so I amuse myself to the point of abject terror by rolling the events of the day over in my mind. Great arterial gouts of blood project like ghosts upon the wall, shadows of my guilt over killing Fiore . . . Fiore? But he doesn't know I killed him! Did I hallucinate the whole thing? Obviously not the mad scramble up the shaft, arms burning with overstressed muscles. The priest and the doctor both knew about it. Assuming I didn't imagine their visits, I remind myself. I'm fighting off a mecha infection and an obscure neurological crisis at the same time. Wouldn't it be reasonable to suspect I might just be out of my skull?
The lights on the ward have dimmed, and the glimpse of sky I can see through the windows is deepening toward purple, fly-specked with burning pinpricks of luminescence that glitter oddly, as if refracted through a deep pool of water. Maybe they don't know I know about Curious Yellow and the assembler in the library basement, I tell myself. They just think I'm having a mental breakdown, and I went for a little climb. Dissociative fugue, isn't that what the ancients called it? I got myself infected with compost nano and Fiore called Hanta in to patch me up, and he won't mention it in Church because it would undermine the integrity of the experiment. Maybe they're right, and I just imagined killing Fiore. I'm not simply remembering fragments of badly suppressed memories, I'm confabulating out of fragments, synthesizing false memories from the wreckage of a failed erasure job. The memories of my time in the Cats, could they simply be recollections from a game I used to play? Multiplayer immersive worlds with a plot and an identity model—I don't remember being a gamer, but if I wanted to get rid of an addiction, mightn't I have tried to flush it out with a lightweight round of memory surgery?
I can't ask anyone, I realize. If I ask Sam, and he hasn't heard of the Linebarger Cats, it doesn't mean they weren't real—everyone here's been through memory excision! I'd giggle if my throat wasn't so dry. I am Reeve! Watch me fake up a bunch of memories to haunt myself with! Was the guy who stalked me through the hallways of the Invisible Republic real? What about the mad bitch with the sword who called me out? I've been running from enemies I never actually saw—only glimpsed out of the sides of my eyes. It's like I'm suffering from blindsight, the strange neurological trauma that leaves its victims unable to see but able to sense events in their visual field by guessing. Maybe I'm an intelligence agent trying to track down a dangerous nest of enemies . . . and maybe I'm just a sad, sick woman who used to substitute game play for living a real life and who's now paying the price.
I lie awake in the twilight and eventually I realize that the shivering has gone. I ache, and I'm feeble, but that's to be expected after the long climb. And as I lie there I become aware of the subtle noises on the ward, the soft white noise of the air-conditioning, the tick of a clock, the quiet sobbing of—
Sobbing?
I sit bolt upright, the sheet and blanket falling away from me. My thoughts churn in parallel with a sense of dread and a numinous awareness of relief. Rescuing Cass and If Cass is here, then that memory was real with Still doesn't mean everything else was real and finally If it was real, Cass must be . . .
"Shit," I hear myself mutter. I pull the bedding up and clutch it like a frightened child. "I can't deal with this." I feel like sucking my thumb. "I am not ready for this." I'm subvocalizing, so low I make no sound. I have to talk softly when I'm telling myself the truth, because the truth is embarrassing and hurtful. I flash back to what Hanta said: When she's better, I'll ask her who she wants to be, and that's a comfort because I certainly don't have anything better to offer her. Is Hanta up to doing memory surgery properly? I ponder. It would surprise me if they didn't have a full surgeon-confessor along for the ride—it's the ultimate prophylactic for those little ethical embarrassments that an experimental polity might suffer. (Or for those little infiltration-level embarrassments that a secret military installation might encounter, a lying, cynical part of me that I'm no longer entirely sure I believe in adds.)
I lie down again. The sobbing continues for a while, then I hear the clacking heels of a nursing zombie converge on the bed. Quiet voices and a sigh, followed by snores. The white ghost of a nurse pauses at the foot of my bed, its face a dim oval. "Do you need anything?" It asks me.
I shake my head. It's a lie, but what I need they can't provide.
Eventually I doze off.