"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 gray 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.
Dr. Chrys had made notes and gone off again, leaving him to Rowan's tenderer mercies. He lay now steaming gently in Rowan's bed, dressed in a towel, while she reviewed skeleto-muscular structure all up and down his back. Dr. Chrys's fingers, doing massage, had been like probes. Rowan's hands caressed. Not anatomically equipped to purr, he did manage a small, encouraging moan of appreciation now and then. She worked down to his feet and toes, and started back up.
Face down, mashed comfortably into her pillows, he became gradually aware that a very important bodily system was reporting for duty, for the first time since his revival. Res-erection indeed. His face flushed in a mixture of embarrassment and delight, and he flung an arm up as-if-casually to conceal his expression.
She's your doctor. She'll want to know.
It wasn't as if she weren't intimately familiar with every part of his body, inside and out, already. She'd been up to her bloody elbows in him, literally. He stayed hidden in his arm-cave anyway.
"Roll over," Rowan said, "and I'll do your other side."
"Er . . . d'rather not," he mumbled into the pillow.
"Why not?"
"Um . . . 'member how you keep askin' if somethin' has come up for me?"
"Yes . . ."
"Well . . . somethin' has."
There was a brief silence, then, "Oh! In that case, definitely roll over. I need to examine you."
He took a breath. "Things we do fer science."
He rolled over, and she took away his towel. "Has this happened before?" she inquired.
"No. Firs' time in my life. This life."
Her long cool fingers probed quickly, medically. "That looks good," she said with enthusiasm.
"
Thank
you," he caroled cheerfully.
She laughed. He didn't need a memory to tell him it was a very good sign when a woman laughed at his jokes at this point. Experimentally, gently, he pulled her down to face him.
Hooray for science. Let's see what happens.
He kissed her. She kissed him back. He melted.
Speech and science were both put aside for a time, after that. Not to mention the green coat and all the layers underneath. Her body was as lovely as he'd imagined, a pure aesthetic of line and curve, softness and floral, hidden places. His own body contrasted vividly, a little rack of bones scored with shocking red scars.
An intense consciousness of his recent death welled up in him, and he found himself kissing her frantically, passionately, as if she were life itself and he could so consume and possess her. He didn't know if she was enemy or friend, if this was a right or wrong thing. But it was warm and liquid and moving, not icy and still, surely the most opposite thing imaginable to cryo-stasis.
Seize the day.
Because the night waited, coldly implacable. This lesson burned from his center outward, like radiation. Her eyes widened. Only his shortness of breath forced him to slow down to a more decorous, reasonable pace.
His ugliness ought to have bothered him, but it didn't, and he wondered why.
We make love with our eyes closed.
Who had told him that? The same woman who'd told him,
It's not the meat, it's the motion
? Opening Rowan's body was like facing that pile of field-stripped weaponry. He knew what to do, what parts counted and which were camouflage, but could not remember how he'd learned it all. The training was there, yet the trainer was erased. It was a more deeply disturbing coupling of the familiar with the strange than any he'd yet experienced here.
She shivered, sighed, and relaxed, and he kissed his way back up her body to murmur in her ear, "Um . . . doan' think I can do push-ups, jus' yet."
"Oh." Her glazed eyes opened, and focused. "My. Yes." A few moments of experiment found a medically-approved position, flat on his back in great comfort with no pressure or strain on his chest, arms, or abdomen, and then it was his turn. That felt right, ladies first and then he wouldn't have pillows thrown at him for falling asleep immediately afterwards. A terribly familiar pattern, with all the details wrong. Rowan had done this before too, he judged, though perhaps not often. But great expertise on her part was scarcely required. His body worked just fine. . . .
"Dr. D," he sighed up at her, "yr a gen'ius. Aes . . . Asku . . . Aesch . . . that Greek guy coul' tak' lessons in resurr'ction from you."
She laughed, and oozed down beside him, body to body.
My height doesn't matter when we're lying down.
He'd known that, too. They exchanged less-hurried, exploratory kisses, savored slowly like after-dinner mints.
"You're
very
good at that," she murmured wheezily, nibbling on his ear.
"Yea . . ." His grin faded, and he stared at the ceiling, brows drawing down in a combination of gentle, post-coital melancholy, and renewed, if purely mental, frustration. " . . . wonder if I was married?" Her head drew back, and he could have bitten his tongue at her stricken look. "Doan' think so," he added quickly.
"No . . . no." She settled back again. "You're not married."
"Which ever one I am?"
"That's right."
"Huh." He hesitated, winding her long hair in his fingers, spreading it idly out in a fan across the burst of red lines on his torso. "So who d'you think you were makin' love to, jus' now?"
She touched a long index finger gently to his forehead. "You. Just you."
This was most pleasing, but . . . "Wuzzat love, or therapy?"
She smiled quizzically, tracing his face. "A little of both, I think. And curiosity. And opportunity. I've been pretty immersed in you, for the past three months."
It felt like an honest answer. "Seems t'me you made t' opportunity."
A small smirk escaped her lips. "Well . . . maybe."
Three months
. Interesting. So he'd been dead a bit over two months. He must have absorbed a lot of the Durona Group's resources, in that time. To begin with, three months of this woman's labor were not cheap.
"Why you doin' this?" he asked, frowning at the ceiling as she snuggled carefully around his shoulder. "I mean t'whole thing. What d'you expect me to do for you?" Half-crippled, tongue-tied, blank and stupid, not a dollar to his non-existent name. "You're all hangin' on m'recovery like I'm your hope 'f heaven." Even the brutally efficient physical therapist Chrys he'd come to see as pushing him for his good. He almost liked her best, for her merciless drive. He resonated to it. "Who else wants me, tha' you should hide me? Enemies?"
Or friends?
"Enemies for certain," Rowan sighed.
"Mm." He lay back in lassitude; she dozed, he didn't. He touched her net of hair and wondered. What did she see in him? I thought of it as the enchanted knight's crystal coffin . . . I picked out enough grenade fragments to be certain you weren't a bystander. . . .
So, there was work to be done. Nor did the Durona Group want an ordinary mercenary. If this was Jackson's Whole, they could hire ordinary thugs by the boatload.
But then, he'd never thought he was an ordinary man. Not even for a minute.
Oh, milady. Who do you need me to be?