My whole head hurt, except for my nose, and even my nose was itching now.
It was absurd to think that I could be aware of a mere itch against the background of so much pain and stink, but I was. Did that, I wondered, make this bizarre experience more likely to be true or less likely? Either way, the other me seemed to be on the brink of losing my will to live.
This time, I tried to formulate an intention to talk. It seemed to work, although I couldnt be sure that it wasnt mere coincidence but it didnt matter anyway, because the first consonant got stuck in a grinding stammer: C?
I was trying to say Christine, but I couldnt be certain that the other me wasnt trying to form a different set of syllables beginning with the same consonant.
Take your time, Madoc. Damon said, a trifle inconsistently.
C
I heard someone else speak, their lips too far away from the microphone that Damon was using for their words to be audible. I tried hard to concentrate on the business of thinking, not so much because it might make it easier to talk as in the faint hope that it might help me stop my other self wanting to die.
I dont understand, Madoc, Damon said, with the ostentatious patience that the sane always take care to display while they talk to the slightly mad.
I knew then that I had no chance at all of forcing my other self to pronounce anything as complicated as Christine Caines name. I wondered whether I might just manage Tyre, or Vesta, or even Proteus, but I knew there was no point in trying. Christine Caine was one of
the only two names I had on the tip of my tongue that would make any sense at all to Damon Hart.
Except, of course, that it wouldnt. Nothing that the me that wasnt not me could say to Damon, if I could say anything at all, would make the slightest sense, because nothing did make the slightest sense. He and I, though not he and not me , were in a world beyond logic, babes in a trackless wilderness.
This, I realized, was what I had forgotten. This was how Id come to be frozen down. This was how Id booked my ticket for the Omega Expedition. It wasnt real, but it was true. Somehow, even though I hadnt been able to recover the memory itself, Id contrived to obtain a photocopy, a VE reproduction.
This, at last, was the truth. I might have reached it by unorthodox means, but I had reached it in the end.
Damon Hart had put me away to save me from a fate worse than death. Maybe he had forgotten me in the course of the next two centuries and maybe he hadnt, but in the beginning, hed been trying to save me. Even if he had forgotten me, in the end, hed forgotten me because there was nothing he could do for me, because he had no way to save me from the rogue IT that was still lurking in my brain and my bones.
If I had been betrayed and I had I had been betrayed by circumstance, not by Damon Hart. Not, at any rate, until he forgot me. Maybe even that had been a kindness: the cost of making sure that his new and extremely undependable friends didnt find out where I was.
Sometimes, it can be a mercy to be forgotten.
I tried to tell my other self that the pain in my head was easing slightly, and that the odor in which I was dissolving wasnt the perfume of my own gangrenous and necrotized flesh but the other me wasnt listening, because the other me was busy with an intention of its own.
This time I stuttered as well as stammering, but I finally got the word out. Dd-d-date?
Its Wednesday, Madoc, the voice that sounded like Damons told me, presumably trying to be helpful, while actually concealing everything that either I really needed to know. Wednesday the nineteenth. Youve been under for four and a half days. I dont know what sort of dreams youve been having, but youre back now, if only for a little while. This is real. It wont last long, and I havent a clue how long it will be before we can bring you back again for good, but you have to hang in there. Ill find out what this is even if I have to take it to Conrad and eat humble pie. Ill pull you through. All you have to do is keep the faith.
He sounded convincing. He sounded like the Damon Id known for so many years: the good Damon, who knew the meaning of friendship. He sounded like the Damon Id believed in, the Damon I still wanted to believe in and that was the trouble.
That was where paranoia kicked in again.
If I wasnt feeding this to myself by way of compensation for the obvious fact that I was actually in Hell, I thought, then somebody else probably was. Somebody who knew me a lot better than Davida Berenike Columella. Or some thing which knew me a lot better than any meatborn citizen of the thirty-third century.
I knew that I had to test that hypothesis, if I could. If I could only speak
Its surprising how difficult short words can be when your voice is stretched to the limit and opening your mouth fills the available space with poison gas. I knew that I couldnt contrive an M, but I thought a D might be easier.
Unfortunately, it was open to anyone who wanted to mock me to misconstrue Eido as I do and equally open to the me that wasnt not me to misconstrue what really was I do as something that I wanted to say but couldnt, because I was a thousand years away.