Downbelow Station

“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.

“They picked me up,” he said. “Someone did.”

“A ship named Tigris hit you,” Damon said. “Ridership. But it was a freighter in the area that homed in on your capsule signal.”

“Go on.”

Damon stayed silent a moment as if he were thinking on it, as if he would not. He grew more and more anxious, his stomach taut. “You were brought onto station,” Damon said finally, “aboard a merchanter — a stretcher case, but no injuries. Shock, cold, I suppose… your life-support had started to fade, and they nearly lost you.”

He shook his head. That much was blank, remote and cold. He recalled docks, doctors; interrogation, endless questions.

Mobs. Shouting mobs. Docks and a guard falling. Someone had coldly shot the man in the face, while he lay on the ground stu

They’ve got guns! someone had shouted. And panic broke out.

“You were picked up at Mariner,” Damon said. “After it blew, when they were hunting Mariner survivors.”

“Elene — ”

“They questioned you at Russell’s,” Damon said softly, doggedly. “They were facing — I don’t know what. They were frightened, in a hurry. They used illegal techniques… like Adjustment. They wanted information out of you, timetables, ship movements, the whole thing. But you couldn’t give it to them. You were on Russell’s when the evacuation began, and you were moved to this station. That’s what happened.”

A dark umbilical from station to ship. Troops and guns.

“On a warship,” he said.

“Norway.”

His stomach knotted. Mallory. Mallory and Norway. Graff. He remembered. Pride… died there. He became a nothing. Who he was, what he was… they had not cared, among the troops, the crew. It was not even hate, but bitterness and boredom, cruelty in which he did not matter, a living thing that felt pain, felt shame… screamed when the horror became overwhelming, and realizing that there was no one at all who cared — stopped screaming, or feeling, or fighting.

Want to go back to them? He could hear even the tone of Mallory’s voice. Want to go back? He had not wanted that. Had wanted nothing, then, but to feel nothing.

This was the source of the nightmares, the dark, confused figures, the thing that wakened him in the night

He nodded slowly, accepting that.

“You entered detention here,” Damon said. “You were picked up; Russell’s; Norway; here. If you think we’ve thrown anything false into your Adjustment… no. Believe me. Josh?”

He was sweating. Felt it. “I’m all right,” he said, although it was hard, for a moment, to draw breath. His stomach kept heaving. Closeness — emotional or physical — was going to do this to him; he identified it now. Tried to control it.

“Sit there,” Damon said, rose before he could object, and went into one of the shops along the hall. He rested there obediently, head against the wall behind him, his pulse easing finally. It occurred to him that it was the first time he had been loose alone, save for the track between his job and his room in the old hospice. Being so gave him a peculiarly naked feeling. He wondered if those who passed knew who he was. The idea frightened him.