“I want you to go next door with me,” Sagot said. “Yes, it’s meds. You’re going to lie down a while and I want you to be good about this.”
(You smell afraid, Sagot. So do I, I think. Gods, what’s this about?)
He got up. He towered over Sagot, but Sagot reached and took his hand. (I’m hatani, Sagot, you’re not supposed to-) But he never told Sagot no. She led him by the hand to the door in the side of that room, and led him through it into a small room that left no illusions about meds in this room. It was a cramped small place, all machinery and a table. Sagot’s hand held his. She was evidently not going to argue the matter. (She’s afraid. What should I be?) But he stood there while meds came out and told him to take off his kilt and lie down.
“I’ll be all right,” he told Sagot; he did not want to undress with her there, not because he would shock her-(I have fourteen great-greatgrandchildren, boy)-but precisely because it would not, she would look on him as a child, and child-Thorn was already too naked. But Sagot stayed, and Thorn turned his back and unfastened his kilt and got up on the table when the meds told him to. His head swam; his limbs felt distant from his brain; he drifted in a vast calm which itself alarmed him.
(It was a drug Sagot gave me. Does Duun know? Does he know where I am, what they’re doing, did he order this?)
They pasted electrodes about his body. He felt this far distant from him. They spoke in whispers or his hearing had gone wrong. They adjusted a screen above his head. Something soft and rough settled over his naked body and he realized vaguely that someone had put a sheet over him; he was dimly grateful. (It’s cold in here; they never realize how cold I get sometimes, they’ve got a coat and I don’t and I’m sweating now-) Something tight went over his legs, once again over his chest. “Talk to him, for the gods’ sake, he’s not a piece of meat you’re handling.”
“Sagot-mingi, we have to ask you to be still, with respect, mingi Sagot.”
Something weighed on his shoulder. Shook at him. “Keep your eyes open. Look up.”
Thorn obeyed that voice. He heard the sound of his tapes over and over again.
“Blink. That’s right. You can blink when you have to.”
“He’s following that, isn’t he?”
The voice drifted out again. He heard another voice babbling at him; there were images, he was in the simulator; more voices, more images, there were people like him moving in the dark, there were faces that babbled at him, there were machines and more machines-
He tried to leave this.
Eyes stared at him, mirrorlike. More machines that spun in dark and arms that moved-
He fought. He evaded and escaped and fought.
“This is your heritage,” a voice told him out of the dark. “Accept it, Haras-hatani. This is your heritage. Accept what you hear and see.
Stop resisting. Accept this. This is your heritage.”
Chaos of images.
“Listen to the sounds. Learn this, Haras-hatani. Remember these things.”
“Wake up.”
He was lying on the table. The sheet was over him. He was drenched in sweat. He wanted only to lie there and his eyes stung as if sweat were in them; it might be. Someone wiped his face and the cloth was neutral-feeling, wet and rough but neither cold nor hot. Someone lifted a weight off his chest and legs. “Are you sure you ought to? He’s not awake yet.” He was, but he preferred to keep that secret to himself, and stare at the stark steel of the machinery, ignoring the faces and the touches, the sudden nakedness of his body as they peeled electrodes away in small twitches he ought to have felt keenly and did not.
“His color isn’t good.”
(I’m cold, fool.)
Something stung his arm. It was not a great pain. In a moment he began to feel his heart thumping the way it did in nightmares.
(Go away. Let me alone. Don’t touch me.)