house for now, until someone arrives.’
‘Why. What’s wrong with me?’
‘Well, you’re completely naked, for a start.’
I nodded. ‘And you’re not just a robot, are you? Well, I’m sorry. I don’t usually do this.’
‘There’s no need at all to apologise, Tanner. No need at all. It’s quite right and proper that you should be a little disorientated. You’ve been asleep for a great length of time, after all. Physically, you may have suffered no obvious ill effects… none at all that I can see, in fact…’ She paused, then seemed to snap out of whatever reverie she was in. ‘But mentally, well… it’s only to be expected, really. This kind of transient memory loss is really much commoner than they would have us believe.’
‘I’m glad you used the word “transient” there.’
‘Well, usually.’
I smiled, wondered if that was an attempt at humour or just a crass statement of the statistics.
‘Who would “they” be, while we’re at it?’
‘Well, obviously, the people who brought you here. The Ultras.’
I knelt down and fingered the grass, crushing a blade until it left green pulp on my thumb. I sniffed the residue. If this was a simulation, it was an extraordinarily detailed one. Even battle-planners would have been impressed.
‘Ultras?’
‘You came here on their ship, Tanner. You were frozen for the journey. Now you have thaw amnesia.’
The phrase caused a fragment of my past to fall lopsidedly into place. Someone had spoken to me of thaw amnesia — either very recently or very long ago. It looked like both possibilities might be correct. The person had been the cyborg crewperson of a starship.
I tried to remember what they had told me, but it was like groping through the same grey fog as before, except this time I did have the sense that there were things within the fog; jagged shards of memory: brittle, petrified trees, reaching out stiff branches to reconnect with the present. Sooner or later I was going to stumble into a major thicket.
But for now all I remembered were reassurances; that I should have no qualms about whatever it was they were about to do to me; that thaw amnesia was a modern myth; very much rarer than I had been led to believe. Which must have been a slight distortion of the facts, at the very least. But then the truth — that shades of amnesia were almost normal — wouldn’t have been conducive to good business.
‘I don’t think I was expecting this,’ I said.
‘Funnily enough, almost no one ever does. The hard cases are the ones who don’t even remember ever dealing with Ultras. You’re not that badly off, are you?’
‘No,’ I admitted. ‘And that makes me feel a lot happier, you know.’
‘What does?’
‘Knowing that there’s always some poor bastard worse off than me.’
‘Hmm,’ she said, with a note of disapproval. ‘I’m not sure that’s quite the attitude one should be having, Tanner. On the other hand, I don’t think it’s going to be very long before you’re as right as rain. Not very long at all. Now, why don’t you return to the house? You’ll find some clothes there that will fit you. And it’s not that we’re prudish or anything here at the hospice, but you’ll catch your death like that.’
‘It wasn’t intentional, believe me.’
I wondered what she’d make of my chances for a swift recovery if I told her that I’d had to run out of the house because I was terrified by an architectural feature.
‘No, of course it wasn’t,’ she said. ‘But do try the clothes on — and if they aren’t to your liking, we can always alter them. I’ll be along shortly to see how you’re doing.’
‘Thank you. Who are you, by the way?’
‘Me? Oh, no one in particular, I’m afraid. A very small cog in a blessedly large machine, one might say. Sister Amelia.’
Then I hadn’t misheard her when she called the place a hospice.
‘And where exactly are we, Sister Amelia?’
‘Oh, that’s easy. You’re in Hospice Idlewild, under the care of the Holy Order of Ice Mendicants. What some people like to call Hotel Amnesia.’
It still didn’t mean anything to me. I’d never heard of either Hotel Amnesia or the place’s more formal name — let alone the Holy Order of Ice Mendicants.
I walked back into the chalet, the robot following me at a polite distance. I slowed as I approached the door back into the house. It was stupid, but though I’d been able to dismiss my fears almost as soon as I was outside, they now came back with almost the same force. I looked at the alcove. It seemed to me to be imbued with deep evil; as if there were something waiting coiled in there, observing me with malignant intent.
‘Just get dressed and get out of here,’ I said to myself, aloud and in Castellano. ‘When Amelia comes, tell her you need some kind of neurological once-over. She’ll understand. This sort of thing must happen all the time.’
I inspected the clothes that were waiting for me in a cupboard. Nothing too fancy, and nothing at all that I recognised. They were simple and had a handmade feel to them: a black V-neck jersey and baggy, pocketless trousers, a pair of soft shoes; adequate for padding round the clearing, but not much else. The clothes fitted me perfectly, but even that made them feel wrong, as if it was not something I was used to.
I rummaged deeper in the cupboard, hoping to find something more personal, but it was empty apart from the clothes. At a loss, I sat on the bed and stared sullenly at the textured stucco of the wall, until my gaze passed over the little alcove. After years of being frozen, my brain chemistry must have been struggling back towards some kind of equilibrium, and in the meantime I was getting a taste of what psychotic fear must feel like. I felt a strong temptation to just curl up and block the world from my senses. What kept me from losing it completely was the quiet knowledge that I had been in worse situations — confronted hazards that were just as terrifying as anything my psychotic mind could imprint on an empty alcove — and that I had survived. It hardly mattered that at the moment I couldn’t bring any specific incidents to mind. It was enough to know that they had happened, and that if I failed now, I would be betraying a buried part of me which remained fully sane, and perhaps remembered everything.
I didn’t have long to wait before Amelia arrived.
She was out of breath and flushed when she entered the house, as if she’d climbed quickly up from the bottom of the valley or cleft I’d seen after I’d awakened. But she was smiling, as if she had enjoyed the exertion for its own sake. She wore a black wimpled vestment, a chained snowflake hanging from her neck. Dusty boots poked out from beneath the hem of her vestment.
‘How are the clothes?’ she said, placing her hand atop the robot’s ovoid head. It might have been to steady herself, but it also looked like a show of affection towards the machine.
‘They fit me very well, thanks.’
‘You’re quite sure of that? It’s no trouble at all to change them, Tanner. You’d just have to whip them off, and well… we could have them altered in no time.’ She smiled.
‘They’re fine,’ I said, studying her face properly. She was very pale; much more so than anyone I had ever seen before. Her eyes almost lacked pigment; her eyebrows were so fine that they looked like they’d been brushed in by an expert calligrapher.
‘Oh, good,’ she said, as if not completely convinced. ‘Do you remember anything more?’
‘I seem to remember where I’ve come from. Which is a start, I suppose.’
‘Just try not to force things. Duscha — Duscha’s our neural specialist — she said you’d soon begin to remember, but you shouldn’t worry if it takes a little while.’
Amelia sat down on the end of the bed where I’d been asleep only a few minutes ago. I had turned the blanket over to hide the speckles of blood from my palm. For some reason I felt ashamed of what had happened and wanted to do my best to make sure Amelia didn’t see the wound in my palm.
‘I think it might take more than a little while, to be honest.’
‘But you do remember that Ultras brought you here. That’s more than a lot of them do, as I said. And you remember where you came from?’
