Derec stared. “A ship’s already been here? Then why am I still here?” he demanded.
“This station’s medical facilities are superior to those on boardFariis. It was not possible to release you to them in your condition.”
Derec closed his eyes and sighed. “All right. Probe away.” His eyes opened and he struggled to a seated position. “But I want to know what you’re doing before you do it, do you hear?”
“Thank you, Derec,” Dr. Galen said politely. “What do you know of amnesia?”
“Just what I see on the hypervision.”
“That is unfortunate,” Dr. Galen said.
“It’s just a saying. Actually, I don’t even remember that.”
“That is just as well,” Dr. Galen replied. “Amnesia has been used as a convenient device in fiction for centuries, usually in defiance of known facts. A common plot is for a victim to suffer a blow to the head, forget everything and everyone and begin leading a new life, then be restored in the closing scene by another blow.”
“That does sound sort of familiar. Maybe I have seen one or two like that,” Derec admitted.
“Please do your best to forget them,” Dr. Galen said disapprovingly. “They will only hinder understanding.”
Over the next three days, Derec learned a great deal about amnesia. He had had no idea how many kinds of amnesia there were and how many different causes had been identified. Under other circumstances, it would have been more than he wanted to know. But since he was personally affected, he avidly absorbed everything Dr. Galen told him.
Amnesia could affect the past (retrograde) or the present (anterograde). It could have physical causes (organic) or emotional ones (psychogenic). Some amnesiacs were unable to remember anything for more than a few seconds, while others would forget everything for only a few seconds at a time. Some victims knew that they were having difficulty, while others passionately denied it.
Nine out of every ten cases of amnesia, Derec learned, had some specific physical cause. Those causes were as different as inflammation of the whorled and folded outer layer of the brain, hardening of the cerebral arteries, electric shock, and deficiency of B vitamins. (Also on the list, but nowhere near the top, was a blow to the head.)
“In more primitive times, many cases of true organic amnesia were wrongly diagnosed as psychogenic,” Dr. Galen said as though outraged by the fact. “Patients who needed drugs or surgery were offered hypnosis and psychotherapy.”
“Maybe all amnesias have some physical cause,” Derec suggested. “Maybe the ten percent we still think are psychogenic are the ones we just haven’t found the organic cause for.”
But Dr. Galen dissented. “The distinction between mind and brain has not been completely erased by medical science. The mind is more than the sum of the brain’s parts. There are things that happen at that level of synergy which cannot be traced to specific physical events.”
Even so, the testing focused first on the possible physical causes. Dr. Galen subjected him to cortical analysis, an endorphin response test, three different nondestructive scans of his brain, and even a biopsy and culture for encephalitis.
“Your own awareness of your loss of memory is a clue, as your apparently unimpaired intelligence,” Dr. Galen told Derec. “You retain your sense of time and of the connectedness of events. All of these things are meaningful.”
But the unhappy truth was that all the clues added up to naught, and all the tests revealed nothing. Derec learned several new words to describe his condition-”fractionated retrograde hypnosis-resistant psychogenic amnesia”-but he learned nothing about himself.
“I can find no physical cause,” Dr. Galen concluded reluctantly at the end of a week. “Your cortex, thalamus, mammillary bodies, and fornix bundle are all normal. And yet you have not responded to any psychogenic therapy I am aware of. I am sorry, Derec, I have failed you.”
“Don’t take it so hard,” Derec said, sighing. “I’m beginning to get used to life in the dark.”
In the course of the testing, Dr. Galen had gradually allowed Derec more and more freedom of movement until he had the run of the small hospital complex. Physically, he was nearly completely restored. His new skin was no longer painful to the touch and was gradually becoming less sensitive to variations in temperature. His ribs had knitted while he was kept unconscious, and the only sign they had even been broken was an occasional stitch of dull pain when he drew a deep breath or stretched the wrong way.
Despite that progress, Dr. Galen resisted releasing Derec from his care. The furthest he would go was to allow Derec to move from the ICU to a private room with more traditional accommodations. But the robot’s recalcitrance was not entirely a surprise. With their special First Law responsibility as healers, robot doctors were notorious for their caution.
But Derec suspected that it was not the injuries to his body that concerned Dr. Galen, but the injury to Derec’s mind. The real reason for keeping Derec nearby was to keep him under observation while he treated Katherine. Since Dr. Galen could not be in two places at once, he was keeping his two patients in one place.
Derec could not order Dr. Galen to stop worrying about him, so he resigned himself to living within the robot’s restrictions. In some ways, Derec welcomed the vacation from responsibility. His body had had time to heal, but his mind still vividly remembered the erupting surface of the asteroid, the electric blue pain from Aranimas’s stylus, the sudden flash of the booby trap exploding in his face. He had a right to a few days of peace.
Or so Derec thought. But one day of idleness was enough to satisfy that need. The next morning he did not wait for Dr. Galen’s ritual visit and examination, but went looking for the robot himself. He found him standing at the biomedical monitor at the foot of Katherine’s bed in the ICU.
“Good morning, Derec,” the robot said. “I am sorry that I was delayed. How are you feeling today?”
“Restless,” Derec said. “I’m ready to get back to a normal life.”
“But you are in the fugue state of an amnesiac episode,” Dr. Galen said. “A normal life is not possible for you now.”
“I’ll settle for the substitute at hand,” Derec said. “I can’t just sit around here hoping my memory will come back.”
“What is it you wish to do?”
“I guess I won’t know until I find out what’s already been done for me,” Derec said. “Outside of the robots on the station, who knows that I’m here? Is anybody trying to find out who I am?”
“I cannot say,” Dr. Galen said. “I am certain that the station manager reported your arrival to the district supervisor at Nexon, as I did to the medical supervisor. That information may have been passed to any number of interested parties in the interval since. Why, is there someone you would like to contact?”
Derec pointed across the room at the sleeping Katherine. “Her. How much longer till you bring her out?”
“I concluded some days ago that she might hold the key to unlocking your loss of memory, and decided to allow her to wake at the earliest opportunity when her own health and comfort would not be at risk,” said Dr. Galen. “She was taken off the sleep-inducing drug at midnight. According to her brain waves, she is dreaming now. I expect her to wake sometime this morning.”
Derec glanced around the ward. There was nowhere to sit except the floor.
“There is no need for you to conduct a vigil,” Dr. Galen said as though reading his thoughts.
“I want to be here when she wakes up.”
Dr. Galen nodded understandingly. “I promise, I will call you.”
Derec whiled away one hour, then another, with a bookfilm titled “The Architects of the Machine.” He hoped to find among its profiles of notable designers and engineers a clue as to who the “minimalist” behind the asteroid colony might have been. With all the more tangible evidence lost or destroyed, it was one of the few unexplored leads left to him. Genius of that sort had to have left a trail.
But only three of the biographies were of contemporary designers, and the choices were entirely predictable. The roboticist Fastolfe. March, the Havalean wizard of micromagnetics. The human ecologist Rutan, whose services were so much in demand by the wealthy on a dozen Spacer worlds.