“Mum?”
A girl was coming toward him, stepping out of the thicker growth of the interior. She was pretty, though too thin, and appeared to be about nineteen; her hair was blond where it had been most exposed to sunlight, darker elsewhere. “You’ve scratched yourself,” Nicholas said. “You’re bleeding.”
“I thought you were my mother,” the girl said. She was a head taller than Nicholas. “Been fighting, haven’t you. Have you come to get me?”
Nicholas had been in similar conversations before and normally would have preferred to ignore the remark, but he was lonely now. He said, “Do you want to go home?”
“Well, I think I should, you know.”
“But do you want to?”
“My mum always says if you’ve got something on the stove you don’t want to burn—She’s quite a good cook. She really is. Do you like cabbage with bacon?”
“Have you got anything to eat?”
“Not now. I had a thing a while ago.”
“What kind of thing?”
“A bird.” The girl made a vague little gesture, not looking at Nicholas. “I’m a memory that has swallowed a bird.”
“Do you want to walk down by the water?” They were moving in the direction of the beach already.
“I was just going to get a drink. You’re a nice tot.”
Nicholas did not like being called a tot. He said, “I set fire to places.”
“You won’t set fire to this place; it’s been nice the last couple of days, but when everyone is sad, it rains.”
Nicholas was silent for a time. When they reached the sea, the girl dropped to her knees and bent forward to drink, her long hair falling over her face until the ends trailed in the water, her nipples, then half of each breast, in the water. “Not there,” Nicholas said. “It’s sandy, because it washes the beach so close. Come on out here.” He waded out into the sea until the lapping waves nearly reached his armpits, then bent his head and drank.
“I never thought of that,” the girl said. “Mum says I’m stupid. So does Dad. Do you think I’m stupid?”
Nicholas shook his head.
“What’s your name?”
“Nicholas Kenneth de Vore. What’s yours?”
“Diane. I’m going to call you Nicky. Do you mind?”
“I’ll hurt you while you sleep,” Nicholas said.
“You wouldn’t.”
“Yes, I would. At St. John’s where I used to be, it was zero G most of the time, and a girl there called me something I didn’t like, and I got loose one night and came into her cubical while she was asleep and nulled her restraints, and then she floated around until she banged into something, and that woke her up and she tried to grab, and then that made her bounce all around inside and she broke two fingers and her nose and got blood all over. The attendants came, and one told me—they didn’t know then I did it—when he came out his white suit was, like, polka-dot red all over because wherever the blood drops had touched him they soaked right in.”
The girl smiled at him, dimpling her thin face. “How did they find out it was you?”
“I told someone and he told them.”
“I bet you told them yourself.”
“I bet I didn’t!” Angry, he waded away, but when he had stalked a short way up the beach he sat down on the sand, his back toward her.
“I didn’t mean to make you mad, Mr. de Vore.”
“I’m not mad!”
She was not sure for a moment what he meant. She sat down beside and a trifle behind him, and began idly piling sand in her lap.
Dr. Island said, “I see you’ve met.”
Nicholas turned, looking for the voice. “I thought you saw everything.”
“Only the important things, and I have been busy on another part of myself. I am happy to see that you two know one another; do you find you interact well?”
Neither of them answered.
“You should be interacting with Ignacio; he needs you.”
“We can’t find him,” Nicholas said.
“Down the beach to your left until you see the big stone, then turn inland. Above five hundred meters.”
Nicholas stood up and, turning to his right, began to walk away. Diane followed him, trotting until she caught up.
“I don’t like,” Nicholas said, jerking a shoulder to indicate something behind him.
“Ignacio?”
“The doctor.”
“Why do you move your head like that?”
“Didn’t they tell you?”
“No one told me anything about you.”
“They opened it up”—Nicholas touched his scars—“and took this knife and cut all the way through my corpus . . . corpus . . .”
“Corpus callosum,” muttered a dry palm frond.
“—corpus callosum,” finished Nicholas. “See, your brain is like a walnut inside. There are two halves, and then right down in the middle a kind of thick connection of meat from one to the other. Well, they cut that.”
“You’re having a bit of fun with me, aren’t you?”
“No, he isn’t,” a monkey who had come to the waterline to look for shellfish told her. “His cerebrum has been surgically divided; it’s in his file.” It was a young monkey, with a trusting face full of small, ugly beauties.
Nicholas snapped, “It’s in my head.”
Diane said, “I’d think it would kill you, or make you an idiot or something.”
“They say each half of me is about as smart as both of us were together. Anyway, this half is . . . the half . . . the me that talks.”
“There are two of you now?”
“If you cut a worm in half and both parts are still alive, that’s two, isn’t it?
What else would you call us? We can’t ever come together again.”
“But I’m talking to just one of you?”
“We both can hear you.”
“Which one answers?”
Nicholas touched the right side of his chest with his right hand. “Me, I do. They told me it was the left side of my brain, that one has the speech centers, but it doesn’t feel that way; the nerves cross over coming out, and it’s just the right side of me, I talk. Both my ears hear for both of us, but out of each eye we only see half and half—I mean, I only see what’s on the right of what I’m looking at, and the other side, I guess, only sees the left, so that’s why I keep moving my head. I guess it’s like being a little bit blind; you get used to it.”
The girl was still thinking of his divided body. She said, “If you’re only half, I don’t see how you can walk.”
“I can move the left side a little bit, and we’re not mad at each other. We’re not supposed to be able to come together at all, but we do: down through the legs and at the ends of the fingers and then back up. Only I can’t talk with my other side because he can’t, but he understands.”
“Why did they do it?”
Behind them the monkey, who had been following them, said, “He had uncontrollable seizures.”
“Did you?” the girl asked. She was watching a seabird swooping low over the water and did not seem to care.
Nicholas picked up a shell and shied it at the monkey, who skipped out of the way. After half a minute’s silence he said, “I had visions.”
“Ooh, did you?”
“They didn’t like that. They said I would fall down and jerk around horrible, and sometimes I guess I would hurt myself when I fell, and sometimes I’d bite my tongue and it would bleed. But that wasn’t what it felt like to me; I wouldn’t know about any of those things until afterward. To me it was like I had gone way far ahead, and I had to come back. I didn’t want to.”
The wind swayed Diane’s hair, and she pushed it back from her face. “Did you see things that were going to happen?” she asked.
“Sometimes.”
“Really? Did you?”
“Sometimes.”
“Tell me about it. When you saw what was going to happen.”
“I saw myself dead. I was all black and shrunk up like the dead stuff they cut off in the Pontic gardens, and I was floating and turning, like in water but it wasn’t water—just floating and turning out in space, in nothing. And there were lights on both sides of me, so both sides were bright but black, and I could see my teeth because the stuff”—he pulled at his cheeks—“had fallen off there, and they were really white.”