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 toin 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 inwhat? 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 otherwisebits 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 notbut 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 againat 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 habitus, 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 waran old-fashioned serialized text provocatively promoting a single viewpoint, without any pretense at objectivitywhile 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 amand that I am desperately sickat 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 momentglass 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 stethoscopethe 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."