Mirror dance (49 page)

"You seem to be a little sensitive," she mused. "Marginally."

"
Pleassse . . .
"

Her lips twisted in doubt. "Well . . . what do we have to lose? I'll be right back."

She exited, and returned shortly with two hyposprays, which she laid on the tray table. "This is the fast-penta," she pointed, "and this is the fast-penta antagonist. You let me know right away if you start to feel strange, itch, tingle, have trouble breathing or swallowing, or if your tongue starts to feel thick."

"Feels th'ck now," he objected, as she pushed up both his sleeves on his thin white arms and pressed the first spray to the inside of his elbow. "How d'I tell?"

"You'll be able to tell. Now just lie back and relax. You should start to feel dreamy, like you're floating, by the time you count backward from ten. Try it."

"Te'. Nan. Ei'. Seben. Si', fav, fo', tree-two-wun." He did not feel dreamy. He felt tense and nervous and miserable. "You sure yo' go' rat one?" His fingers began to drum on the tray table. The sound was unnaturally loud in his ears. Objects in the room were taking on hard, bright outlines with colored fringes. Rowan's face seemed suddenly drained of personality, an ivory mask.

The mask loomed threateningly toward him. "What's your name?" it hissed.

"I . . . I . . . yiyi . . ." His mouth clogged with stutters. He was the invisible eye, nameless. . . .

"Strange," the mask murmured. "Your blood pressure should be going down, not up."

Abruptly, he remembered what was so important about fast-penta. "Fas'pent'—maksmeyper." She shook her head in non-comprehension. "
Yiper
," he reiterated, out of a mouth that seemed to be seizing up in spasms. He wanted to talk. A thousand words rushed to his tongue, a chain-collision along his nerves. "Ya. Ya.
Ya
."

"This isn't usual." She frowned at the hypospray, still in her hand.

"No sh't." His arms and legs drew up like coiled springs. Rowan's face grew charming, like a doll's. His heart raced. The room wavered, as if he were swimming underwater. With an effort, he uncoiled. He had to relax. He had to relax
right now
.

"Do you remember anything?" she asked. Her dark eyes were like pools, liquid and beautiful. He wanted to swim in those eyes, to shine in them. He wanted to please her. He wanted to coax her out of that green cloth armor, to dance naked with him in the starlight, to . . . His mumbles to this effect suddenly found voice in poetry, of a sort. Actually, it was a very dirty limerick playing on some obvious symbolism involving wormholes and jumpships. Fortunately, it came out rather garbled.

To his relief, she smiled. But there was some un-funny association. . . . "Las' time I recited that, som'bod' beat shit outta me. Wuz on fas'pent' then, too."

Alertness coursed through her lovely long body. "You've been given fast-penta before? What else do you remember about it?"

" 'Is name wuz Galen. Angry wi' me. Doan' know why." He remembered a reddening face wavering over him, radiating an implacable, murderous hatred. Blows raining on him. He searched himself for remembered fear, and found it oddly mixed with pity. "I doan' unnerstan'."

"What else did he ask you about?"

"Doan' know. Told 'im 'nother poem."

"You recited poetry at him, under fast-penta interrogation?"

"Fer
hours
. Made 'im mad as hell."

Her brows rose; one finger touched her soft lips, which parted in delight. "You
beat
a fast-penta interrogation? Remarkable! Let's not talk about poetry, then. But you remember Ser Galen. Huh!"

"Galen fit?" He cocked his head anxiously.
Ser
Galen, yes! The name was important; she recognized it. "
Tell me
."

"I'm . . . not sure. Every time I think I'm taking a step forward with you, we seem to go two sideways and one back."

"Lak to step out wi'
you
," he confided, and listened to himself in horror as he went on to describe, briefly and crudely, what else he would like to do with her. "Ah. Ah. Sorry, m'lady." He stuffed his fingers into his mouth, and bit them.

"It's all right," she soothed. "It's the fast-penta."

"No—izza
testost'rone
."

She laughed outright. It was most encouraging, but his momentary elation was drowned again in a new wash of tension. His hands plucked and twisted at his clothing, and his feet twitched.

She frowned at a medical monitor on the wall. "Your blood pressure is still going up. Charming as you are under fast-penta, this is not a normal reaction." She picked up the second hypospray. "I think we'd better stop now."

"M' not a normal man," he said sadly. "Mutant." A wave of anxiety rushed over him. "You gonna tak' my brain out?" he asked in sudden suspicion, eyeing the hypospray. And then, in a mind-blinding blast of realization, "
Hey!
I know where I am! I'm on
Jackson's Whole
!" He stared at her in terror, jumped to his feet, and bolted for the door, dodging her lunge.

"No, wait, wait!" she called, running after him with the glittering hypospray still in her hand. "You're having a drug reaction, stop! Let me get rid of it! Poppy, grab him!"

He dodged the horse-tail-haired Dr. Durona in the lab corridor, and flung himself into the lift tube, boosting himself up with yanks on the safety ladder that sent bolts of searing pain through his half-healed chest muscles. A whirling chaos of corridors and floors, shouts and running footsteps, resolved at last into the lobby he had found before.

He shot past some workmen maneuvering a float-pallet stacked with cases through the transparent doors. No force screen shocked him backward this time. A green-parka'd guard turned in slow motion, drawing a stunner, mouth open on a shout that emerged as thickly as cold oil.

He blinked in blinding grey daylight at a ramp, a paved lot for vehicles, and dirty snow. Ice and gravel bit his bare feet as he ran, gasping, across the lot. A wall enclosed the compound. There was a gate in the wall, open, and more guards in green parkas. "Don't stun him!" a woman yelled from behind him.

He ran into a grimy street, and barely dodged a ground-car. The piercing grey-whiteness alternated with bursts of color in his eyes. A broad open space across the street was dotted with bare black trees with branches like clutching claws, straining at the sky. He glimpsed other buildings, behind walls, farther down the street, looming and strange. Nothing was familiar in this landscape. He made for the open space and the trees. Black and magenta dizziness clouded his eyes. The cold air seared his lungs. He staggered and fell, rolling onto his back, unable to breathe.

Half a dozen Dr. Duronas pounced on him like wolves upon their kill. They took his arms and legs, and pulled him up off the snow. Rowan dashed up, her face strained. A hypospray hissed. They hustled him back across the roadway like a trussed sheep, and hurried him inside the big white building. His head began to clear, but his chest was racked with pain, as if it were clamped in a squeezing vise. By the time they put him back in his bed in the underground clinic, the drug-induced false paranoia had washed out of his system. To be replaced by real paranoia. . . .

"Do you think anyone saw him?" an alto voice asked anxiously.

"Gate guards," another voice bit out. "Delivery crew."

"Anybody else?"

"I don't know," Rowan panted, her hair escaping in snow-dampened wisps. "Half a dozen ground-cars went by while we were chasing him. I didn't see anyone in the park."

"I saw a couple of people walking," volunteered another Dr. Durona. "At a distance, across the pond. They were looking at us, but I doubt they could see much."

"We were a hell of a show, for a few minutes."

"What happened this time, Rowan?" the white-haired alto Dr. Durona demanded wearily. She shuffled closer and stared at him, leaning on a carved walking stick. She did not seem to carry it as an affectation, but as a real prop. All deferred to her. Was this the mysterious Lilly?

"I gave him a dose of fast-penta," Rowan reported stiffly, "to try and jog his memory. It works sometimes, for cryo-revivals. But he had a reaction. His blood pressure shot up, he went paranoid, and he took off like a whippet. We didn't run him down till he collapsed in the park." She was still catching her own breath, he saw as his agony started to recede.

The old Dr. Durona sniffed. "Did it work?"

Rowan hesitated. "Some odd things came up. I need to talk with Lilly."

"Immediately," said the old Dr. Durona—not-Lilly, apparently. "I—" but she was cut off when his shivering, stuttering attempt to talk blended into a convulsion.

The world turned to confetti for a moment. He came back to focus with two of the women holding him down, Rowan hovering over him snapping orders, and the rest of the Duronas scattering. "I'll come up as soon as I can," said Rowan desperately over her shoulder. "I can't leave him now."

The old Dr. Durona nodded understanding, and withdrew. Rowan waved away a proffered hypospray of some anti-convulsant. "I'm writing a standing order. This man gets nothing without a sensitivity scan first." She ran off most of her helpers, and made the room dim and quiet and warm again. Slowly, he recovered the rhythm of his breath, though he was still very sick to his stomach.

"I'm sorry," she told him. "I didn't realize fast-penta could do that to you."

He tried to say,
It's not your fault
, but his powers of speech seemed to have relapsed. "D-d-d-i, diddi, do. Bad. Thing?"

She took far too long to reply. "Maybe it will be all right."

Two hours later, they came with a float-pallet and moved him.

"We're getting some other patients," Dr. Chrys of the wing-hair told him blandly. "We need your room." Lies? Half-truths?

Where
they moved him to puzzled him most of all. He had visions of a locked cell, but instead they took him upstairs via a freight lift tube and deposited him on a camp-bed set up in Rowan's personal suite. It was one of a row of similar chambers, presumably the Duronas' residence-floor. Her suite consisted of a sitting room/study and a bedroom, plus a private bath. It was reasonably spacious, though cluttered. He felt less like a prisoner than like a pet, being smuggled against the rules into some women's dormitory. Though he had seen another male-morph Dr. Durona besides Raven, a man of about thirty Dr. Chrys had addressed as "Hawk." Birds and flowers, they were all birds and flowers in this concrete cage.

Later still, a young Durona brought dinner on a tray, and he ate together with Rowan at a little table in her sitting room as the grey day outside faded to dusk. He supposed there was no real change in his prisoner/patient status, but it felt good to be out of the hospital-style room, free of the monitors and sinister medical equipment. To be doing something so prosaic as having dinner with a friend.

He walked around the sitting room, after they ate. "Mind 'f I look at your things?"

"Go ahead. Let me know if anything comes up for you."

She still would not tell him anything directly about himself, but she now seemed willing at least to talk about herself. His internal picture of the world
shifted
as they spoke.
Why do I have wormhole maps in my head?
Maybe he was going to have to recover himself the hard way. Learn everything that existed in the universe, and whatever was left, that dwarfish-man-shaped hole in the center, would be him by process of elimination. A daunting task.

He stared out the polarized window at the faint glitter hanging in the air, as if fairy dust were falling all around. He recognized the force screen for what it was, now, an improvement in cognition over his initial head-first encounter with it. The shield was military-grade, he realized, impermeable down to viruses and gas molecules, and up to . . . what? Projectiles and plasma, certainly. Must be a powerful generator around here somewhere. The protection was a late add-on to the building's architecture, not incorporated into its design. Some history inherent there. . . . "We
are
on Jackson's Whole, aren' we?" he asked.

"Yes. What does that mean to you?"

"Danger. Bad things happenin'. What
is
this pla'?" He waved around.

"The Durona Clinic."

"Ya, so? What you do? Why'm I here?"

"We are the personal clinic of House Fell. We do all sorts of medical tasks for them, as needed."

"House Fell. Weapons." The associations fell into place quite automatically. "Biological weapons." He eyed her accusingly.

"Sometimes," she admitted. "And biological defenses, too."

Was he a House Fell trooper? A captured enemy trooper? Hell, what army would employ a half-crippled dwarf as any kind of trooper? "House Fell give me to you to do?"

"No."

"No? S—why'm I here?"

"That's been a great puzzle for us, too. You arrived frozen in a cryo-chamber, with every sign of having been prepped in great haste. In a crate addressed to me, via common carrier, with no return address. We hoped if we revived you, you could tell us."

" 'S more goin' on than that."

"Yes," she said frankly.

"Bu' you won' tell me."

"Not yet."

"Wha' happens if I walk outta here?"

She looked alarmed. "Please don't. That could get you killed."

"Again."

"Again," she nodded.

"By who?"

"That . . . depends on who you are."

He veered off the subject, then ran the conversation around to it three more times, but could not lull or trick her into telling him any more about himself. Exhausted, he gave up for the night, only to lie awake on his cot worrying the problem as a predator might worry a carcass. But all his bone-tossing did no good but to freeze his mind with frustration.
Sleep on it,
he told himself. Tomorrow must bring him something new. Whatever else this situation was, it wasn't stable. He felt that, felt balanced as though on a knife-edge; below him lay darkness, concealing feathers or sharpened stakes or maybe nothing at all, an endless fall.

He wasn't quite sure of the rationale behind the hot bath and the therapeutic massage. Exercise, now, he could see that; Dr. Chrys had lugged in an exercise bicycle to Rowan's study, and let him sweat himself near to passing out. Anything that painful must be good for him. No push-ups yet, though. He'd tried one, and collapsed with a wide-eyed, muffled squeak of agony, and been yelled at quite firmly by an irate Dr. Chrys for attempting unauthorized bodily motions.