Miles Errant - Lois McMaster Bujold [331]
"You never pointed those at me or yourself while you were handling them," she observed curiously.
"Mm? Didn' notice." She was right, he realized. He fingered the plasma arc doubtfully.
"Did anything come up for you while you were doing that?" she asked.
He shook his head in renewed frustration, then brightened. " 'Membered som'thin s'mornin, tho'. Inna shar." At speed, his speech slurred into unintelligibility again, a logjam of the lips.
"In the shower," she translated encouragingly. "Tell me. Slow down as much as you need."
"Slow. Is. Death," he enunciated clearly.
She blinked. "Still. Tell me."
"Ah. Well. Think I wuzza boy. Ridin' onna horse. Old man on 'nother horse. Uppa hill. 'S chilly. Horses . . . puffin' lak I 'm." His deep breaths were not deep enough to satisfy. "Trees. Mountain, two, three mountain, covered w' trees, all strung tog'ther wi' new plastic tubes. Runnin' down to a shack a' t' bottom. Gran'da happy . . . 'cause tubes are efficient." He struggled to get that last word out intact, and succeeded. "Men'r 'appy too."
"What are they doing, in this scene?" she asked, sounding baffled. "These men."
He could see it again in his head, the memory of a memory. "Burnin' wood. Makin' sugar."
"That makes no sense. Sugar comes from biological production vats, not from burning trees," said Rowan.
"Trees," he asserted. "Brown sug'r trees." Another memory wavered up: the old man breaking off a chunk of something that looked like tan sandstone and giving him a taste by popping it in his mouth. The feel of the gnarled old stained fingers cool against his cheek, sweetness tinged with leather and horses. He shivered at the overwhelming sensory blast. This was real. But he still could name no names. Gran'da.
"Mountains mine," he added. The thought made him sad, and he didn't know why.
"What?"
"Own 'em." He frowned glumly.
"Anything else?"
"No. 'S all there is." His fists clenched. He straightened them, spreading his fingers carefully on the tray table.
"Are you sure this wasn't a dream from last night?"
"No. Inna shar," he insisted.
"It's very strange. This, I expected." She nodded to the reassembled weapons, and began putting them back in the cloth bag. "That," a toss of her head indicated his little story, "doesn't fit. Trees made out of sugar sound pretty dream-like to me."
Doesn't fit what? A desperate excitement surged through him. He grabbed her around one slim wrist, trapping her hand with a stunner still in it. "Doesn' fi' wha'? Wha' d' you know?"
"Nothing."
"Na' nothin'!"
"That hurts," she said levelly.
He let go of her instantly. "Na' nothin'," he insisted again. "Som'thin. Wha'?"
She sighed, finished bagging the weapons, and sat back and studied him. "It was a true statement that we did not know who you were. It is now a truer statement that we are not sure which one you are."
"I gotta choice? Tell me!"
"You are at a . . . tricky stage of your recovery. Cryo-revival amnesics seldom recover all of their memories at once. It comes in little cascades. A typical bell-curve. A few at first, then a growing mass. Then it trails off. A few last holes may linger for years. Since you had no other gross cranial injuries, my prognosis is that you will eventually recover your whole personality. But."
A most sinister but. He stared at her beseechingly.
"At this stage, on the verge of cascading, a cryo-amnesic can be so hungry for identity, he'll pick up a mistaken one, and start assembling evidence to support it. It can take weeks or months to get it straightened out again. In your case, for special reasons, I think this is not only more