Miles Errant - Lois McMaster Bujold [335]
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.