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