“It almost all fits,” said Thorne.

Mark opened his hands and held them apart palm to palm, as if invisible threads ran back and forth between them. “Yeah. Almost.” He closed his hands together. “So here we are. And there we’re going. Our first trick will be to re-enter Jacksonian space past Fell’s jump point station. Captain Quinn has brought along quite a kit for doctoring our identities. Coordinate your ideas with her on that one. We have ten days to play with it.”

The group broke up, to study the new problems each in his, her, or its own way. Bothari-Jesek and Quinn lingered as Mark rose, and stretched his aching back. His aching brain.

“That was quite a pretty piece of analysis, Mark,” said Quinn grudgingly. “If it’s not all hot air.”

She ought to know. “Thank you, Quinn,” he said sincerely. He too prayed it wouldn’t all turn out to be hallucinatory, an elaborate mistake.

“Yes … he’s changed a bit, I think,” Bothari-Jesek observed judiciously. “Grown.”

“Yeah?” Quinn’s gaze swept him, up and down. “True …”

Mark’s heart warmed in hungry anticipation of a crumb of approval.

“—he’s fatter.”

“Let’s get to work,” Mark growled.

Chapter Twenty-Two

He could remember studying tongue-twisters, once. He could even picture a whole screen-list of them, black words on pale blue. Had it been for some sort of rhetoric course? Unfortunately, though he could picture the screen, he could only remember one of the actual lines. He struggled to sit upright in bed, and try it. “Sheshells … shsh … she shells she shit!” He took a breath, and started over. Again. Again. His tongue seemed thick as an old sock. It felt staggeringly important to recover control of his speech. As long as he kept talking like an idiot, they were going to keep treating him like one.

It could be worse. He was eating real food now, not sugar-water or soft sludge. He’d been showering and dressing on his own for two whole days. No more patient gowns. They’d given him a shirt and pants, instead. Like ship knits. Their grey color at first pleased him, :hen worried him because he could not think why it pleased him. ’She. Sells. Sea. Shells. By. The. Sea. Shore. Ha!” He lay back, wheezing in triumph. He glanced up to see Dr. Rowan leaning in the doorway, watching him with a slight smile.

Still catching his breath, he waved his fingers at her in greeting. She pushed off and came to sit at his side on his bed. She wore her usual concealing green smock, and carried a sack.

“Raven said you were babbling half the night,” she remarked, “but you weren’t, were you. You were practicing.”

“Yuh,” he nodded. “Gotta talk. C’mand—” he touched his lips, and waved vaguely around the room, “obey.”

“You think so, do you?” Her brows arched in amusement but her eyes, beneath them, regarded him sharply. She shifted, and swung his tray table across between them. “Sit up, my authoritarian little friend. I brought you some toys.”

“Sec’on chil’hd,” he muttered glumly, and shoved himself upright again. His chest only ached. At least he seemed done with the more repulsive aspects of his second infancy. A second adolescence still to come? God forbid. Maybe he could skip over that part. Why do I dread an adolescence I cannot remember?

He laughed briefly as she upended the bag and spread about two dozen parts from some disassembled hand weapons across the table. “Test, huh?” He began to pick them up and fit them together. Stunner, nerve disrupter, plasma arc, and a projectile gun … slide, twist, click, knock home … one, two, three, four, he laid them in a row. “Pow’r cells dea’. Not armin’ me, eh? These—extras.” He swept half a dozen spare or odd parts aside into a pile. “Ha. Trick.” He grinned smugly at her.

“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 wf 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. “Bur-nin’ 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. Granda.

“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?”

“Wo. Inna shar,” he insisted.

“It’s very strange. This, I expected,” she nodded to the re-assembled 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 amnesiacs 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 than usually possible, it could be more than usually difficult to detangle again. I have to be very, very careful not to suggest anything to you that I am not absolutely certain about. And it’s hard, because I’m theorizing in my head probably just as urgently as you are. I have to be sure that anything you give me really comes from you, and is not a reflection of some suggestion on my part.”