“We like you,” Damon said. “Is something wrong with that?”
He sat there, paralyzed, his heart hammering.
“Come on,” Damon said, gathering himself up. “You’ve had enough heat.”
Josh pulled himself to his feet, finding his knees weak, his sight blurring from the sweat and the temperature and the reduced G. Damon offered a hand. He flinched from it, walked after Damon down the aisle and into the showers at the end of the room.
The cooler mist cleared his head somewhat; he stayed in the stall a few moments longer than need be, inhaled the cooling air, came out again somewhat calmed, walked towel-wrapped into the locker room again. Damon was behind him. “I’m sorry,” he told Damon, for things in general.
“Reflexes,” Damon said. He frowned intensely, caught his arm before he could turn aside. Josh flinched back against the locker so hard it echoed.
A dark place. A chaos of bodies. Hands on him. He jerked his mind away from it, leaned shivering against the metal, staring into Damon’s anxious face.
“Josh?”
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I’m sorry.”
“You look like you’re going to pass out. Was it the heat?”
“Don’t know,” he murmured. “Don’t know.” He reached toward the bench, sat down to catch his breath. It was better after a moment The dark receded. “I am sorry.” He was depressed, convinced Damon would not long tolerate him. The depression spread. “Maybe I’d better check back into the facility.”
“That bad?”
He did not want to think of his own room, the barren apartment in hospice, blank-walled, cheerless. There were people he knew in the hospital, doctors who knew him, who could deal with these things, and whose motives he knew were limited to duty.
“I’ll call the office,” Damon said, “and tell them I’m going to be late. ”I’ll take you to the hospital if you feel you need it.“
He rested his head on his hands. “I don’t know why I do this,” he said. “I’m remembering something. I don’t know what. It hits me in the stomach.”
Damon sat down astride the bench, just sat, and waited on him.
“I can figure,” Damon said finally, and he looked up, recalling uneasily that Damon had had access to all his records. “What do you figure?”
“Maybe it was a little close in there. A lot of the refugees panic at crowding. It’s scarred into them.”
“But I didn’t come in with the refugees,” he said. “I remember that.”
“And what else?”
A tic jerked at his face. He rose, began to dress, and after a moment Damon did likewise. Other men came and went about them. Shouts from outside reached into the room when the door opened, the ordinary noise of the gym.
“Do you really want me to take you to the hospital?” Damon asked finally.
He shrugged into his jacket “No. I’ll be all right.” He judged that such was the case, although his skin was still drawn in chill the clothes should have warmed away. Damon frowned, gestured toward the door. They walked out into the cold outer chamber, entered the lift with half a dozen others, rode it the dizzying straight drop into outer-shell G. Josh drew a deep breath, staggered a little in walking off, stopped as the flow of traffic swirled about him.
Damon’s hand closed on his elbow, moved him gently in the direction of a seat along the corridor wall. He was glad to sit down, to rest a moment and watch the people pass them. They were not on Damon’s office level, but on a green one.
The strains of music from the concourse floated out to them from the far end. They should have ridden it on down… had stopped, Damon’s idea. Near the track around to the hospital, he reasoned. Or just a place to rest He sat, taking his breath.
“A little dizzy,” he confessed.
“Maybe it would be better if you went back at least for a checkup. I should never have encouraged you to this.”
“It’s not the exercise.” He bent, rested his head in his hands, drew several quiet breaths, straightened finally. “Damon, the names… you know the names in my records. Where was I born?”
“Cyteen.”
“My mother’s name… do you know it?” Damon frowned. “No. You didn’t say; mostly you talked about an aunt. Her name was Maevis.”
The older woman’s face came to him again, a warm rush of familiarity. “I remember.”
“Had you forgotten even that?”
The tic came back to his face. He tried not to acknowledge it, desperate for normalcy. “I have no way to know, you understand, what’s memory and what’s imagination, or dreams. Try dealing with things when you don’t know the difference and can’t tell.”
“The name was Maevis.”
“Yes. You lived on a farm.”
He nodded, treasuring a sudden glimpse of sunlit road, a weathered fence — he was often on that road in his dreams, bare feet in slick dust, a house, a prefab and peeling dome… many such, field upon field, ripe gold in the sun. “Plantation. A lot larger than a farm. I lived there… I lived there until I went into the service school. That was the last time I was ever on a world — wasn’t it?”
“You never mentioned any other.”
He sat still a moment, holding onto the image, excited by it, by something beautiful and warm and real. He tried to recover details. The size of the sun in the sky, the color of sunsets, the dusty road that led to and from the small settlement. A large, soft, comfortable woman and a thin, worried man who spent a lot of time cursing the weather. The pieces fit, settled into place. Home. That was home. He ached after it. “Damon,” he said, gathering courage — for there was more than the pleasant dream. “You don’t have any reason to lie to me, do you? But you did — when I asked you for the truth a while ago — about the nightmare. Why?”
Damon looked uncomfortable.
“I’m scared, Damon. I’m scared of lies. Do you understand that? Scared of other things.” He stammered uncontrollably, impatient with himself, with muscles that jerked and a tongue that would not frame things and a mind like a sieve. “Give me names, Damon. You’ve read the record. I know you have. Tell me how I got to Pell.”
“When Russell’s collapsed. Like everyone else.”
“No. Starting with Cyteen. Give me names.”
Damon laid an arm along the back of the bench, faced him, frowning. “The first service you mentioned was a ship named Kite. I don’t know how many years; maybe it was the only ship. You’d been taken off the farm, I take it, into the service school, whatever you call the place, and you were trained in armscomp. I take it that the ship was a very small one.”
“Scout and recon,” he murmured, and saw in his mind the exact boards, the cramped interior of Kite, where the crew had to hand-over-hand their way in zero G. A lot of time at Fargone Station; a lot of time there — and out on patrol; out on missions just looking for what they could see. Kitha… Kitha and Lee… childlike Kitha — he had had particular affection for her. And Ulf. He recovered faces, glad to remember them. They had worked close — in more than one sense, for the dartships had no cabins, no privacy. They had been together… years. Years.
Dead now. It was like losing them again.
Watch it! Kitha had yelled; he had yelled something too, realizing they were blind-spotted; Ulf’s mistake. He sat helpless at his board, no guns that would bear on the threat. He flinched from it.