Father rose to his feet, his scowl deepening. “I’d never know it from looking at you now, Jules.”
“Stop calling me that,” Julian said, an arc of rage sparking across some gap in his soul. “I’m Juliannow. I’ve beenJulian ever since I came to understand what you’d done to me here.”
Mother rose and approached Julian, taking both of his hands, holding their palms upward. “Areyou?”
“Am I what?”
“Are you really the same Julian we brought home from Adigeon Prime?”
Julian looked down at his hands, encircled by hers, and studied them. They were the hands of a grown man, rather than those of a six-year-old child. In a rush, he realized that he could no longer remember having come to Adigeon Prime as a child.
Because he had never been here.
Because he had never undergone the “procedures.”
Because he was now the grown man who young, ungenengineered Jules Bashir would have become, had he been left alone, unaltered.
Father eyed the chronometer on his wrist with evident impatience. “Get ready, Jules. The doctors will be coming to examine you any minute now.”
Julian thought about that for a long, silent interval. Perhaps he was being offered a way to recover everything he had lost. Everything that the alien cathedral had taken from him. Or perhaps not.
Procedures. They think I’m nothing without their precious procedures. And maybe they’re right.
Mother held his hands more tightly. Julian saw great tears of disappointment pooling in her eyes. “We only want what’s best for you, Jules. We love you so much—”
He shook her hands away. “You obviously don’t love me the way I am now,”he said, taking a backward step and nearly tripping over his own feet in the process. He felt slow and awkward as well as stupid.
A door across the room opened, and Richard Bashir turned toward the sound, blocking Julian’s view momentarily. Then he turned back, smiling. “The doctors are ready to see you now, Jules.”
Julian’s breath caught in his throat when he saw that the two burly orderlies he had just eluded were standing in the open doorway, menacing glares fixed on their faces, fists as big as cured hams planted on their hips.
Limbs flailing, Julian ran from the room the same way he’d entered.
The air shaft was cold and filthy, but at least he was out of sight. Safe, if only for the moment. His hands shaking, Julian peered through the ventilation grill at the white corridor several meters below. Nobody seemed to be searching for him. He had no idea how long he’d lain in the cramped conduit, and wondered how much longer he could continue to hide. Or if he even should.
Maybe those men only wanted to make me smart, the way Mother and Father said.He wondered how he could ever hope to recover what he’d lost if he remained too frightened to take a chance and let them try.
He recalled how doctors had always frightened him during his childhood, until he’d understood that they were only trying to help him. The death of that poor little girl back on Invernia II, which he had witnessed at the tender age of ten, had occurred because an ion storm had prevented anybody from reaching a doctor in time—and because nobody had known that a local herb could have saved her from the fever that took her life. That sad incident had made him want to become a doctor, a notion that had already been in the back of his mind ever since five-year-old Jules had begun stitching up Kukalaka’s wounds.
Thatmemory hadn’t been taken from him, he realized. He tried to recall exactly what it was that had been hunting down and killing his memories, but couldn’t. All he could come up with was the vague impression that his memories had been somehow related to a church of some sort.
Footfalls echoed loudly in the corridor below, startling Julian into clunking his head into the side of the air shaft. Ignoring the sharp pain, he looked through the grillwork again to see who was coming. The footfalls crescendoed, and a moment later the two large orderlies walked by directly beneath Julian’s vantage point. They were escorting a small figure who appeared to be a patient. He was a frail boy who couldn’t have been older than six. Julian could hear him crying; one of the orderlies appeared to be muttering bland reassurances to the child.
Julian’s heart leaped into his throat when the boy looked up at one of the men, turning his tear-streaked face ceilingward, his eyes bright and alert. The child bore little resemblance to the dull, vacant creature Julian had expected to see. But there was no mistaking his identity.
The weeping, terrified patient was young Jules Bashir. And he was about to undergo, Julian was certain, the “procedures” his parents had arranged.
A short while later, Julian clambered down from the stifling air duct into another corridor, which turned out, thankfully, to be empty. Hearing approaching footfalls, he flattened himself against the wall. Julian knew he had an important task to perform here, but couldn’t quite recall what it was. Trying to think in terms of plans and objectives was proving utterly frustrating.
But there wasn’t time to think as the footfalls grew near. The orderlies, their young charge between them, passed Julian along a perpendicular corridor. He heaved a sigh of relief as they went by without noticing him, then quietly shadowed them through several turns. Luckily, they never turned to look behind them, and the sounds of their passage covered whatever noise Julian’s pursuit was making.
Peering from around a corner, Julian watched as the two large men shepherded young Jules through a door to what appeared to be some sort of lab or infirmary. Moments later, the two men emerged again into the corridor—this time without the child—and walked away, taking no notice of Julian as they disappeared around another bend in the hallway.
Responding intuitively to some vague ghost of a memory, Julian saw that this had to be the place. The place where the doctors changed me.
He moved quietly to the unlocked door, pushed it open, and stepped into the room.
The boy sat in a too-large, swept-back chair. His slight body all but lost in his bulky hospital gown, the child’s slippered feet dangled several centimeters off the sterile floor. His small hands were in his lap, clutching at one another as though each were competing for the protection of the other. Little Jules was facing in Julian’s direction, while a trio of graceful, birdlike Adigeons—evidently doctors or surgeons—handled hypos and tricorders, their white-smocked backs to the door, apparently oblivious to Julian’s presence. The boy, though he clearly had noticed Julian’s entrance immediately, said nothing. He made no sign that might serve to alert the Adigeons.
Clever child.
Julian stood in silence, studying the boy’s dusky eyes—the same eyes that once studied him from the other side of his father’s old-fashioned looking glass—for what seemed like minutes, seeking some justification there for his parents’ fervid desire to remold and remake him. The child’s eyes, though betraying a hard edge of fear, nevertheless smoldered with something irrepressible. This boy seemed to be anything but the afflicted alter ego his parents had assured him that he was so much better off without. Young Jules bore scant resemblance to the cautionary specter that had followed him ever since the day when fifteen-year-old Julian Subatoi Bashir had learned the far-reaching extent of the genetic enhancements his parents had secured for him on Adigeon Prime. The child looked more like the bright if slightly learning-disabled doppelganger who sometimes stalked Julian’s dreams like the ghost of a murdered twin.
Despite the accelerating deterioration of his own intellect and perceptions, Julian knew that he could believe in one simple, objective truth about young Jules simply by meeting his gaze—somebody was in there, a tenacious soul stoking an inner fire.