Household Gods

both partners. He ripped you off. I’ve been saying so, too, to everybody who’ll listen.”

But he hadn’t resigned his own partnership, to open it to Nicole. She’d have been unbearably revolted about that, once. Now she understood. She wouldn’t have given it up, either. She didn’t know that she’d have had the guts to rock the boat that much, either, not that early in a partnership. “I appreciate that,” she said. “Believe me.”

“It was the least I could do,” Ogarkov said. By Jupiter, Nicole thought: Gary had a conscience. Who’d have thought it?

When he’d hung up, she paused again, but only briefly. Then she called her mother in Indiana. She got the machine, as she’d expected. She left a message: “Mom, it’s Nicole. I’m awake, I’m all right. Doctors don’t know what happened. I’ll be home in a couple of days.” And, after a second’s pause: “Love you.”

By now it sounded pat, the words well worn with use, as if she’d been a well-coached witness in court. And yet, even as the words unrolled themselves, she wondered. What if it was all nonsense? What if she’d imagined the whole thing, Liber and Libera, Carnuntum, the people, the privations, the whole smelly, verminous world? It was crazy to think she’d traveled back in time down the helix of her own DNA, and climbed back up along it, to wake in this hospital bed.

And yet, she thought. There was a way to tell. If they ever got around to letting her go…

She roused herself with a start. A young man in a white coat — a lab tech, she guessed — stood smiling down at her. He had a syringe in his hand, with a needle that looked, from her perspective, as long as her arm. “Hello,” he said cheerily. “My name is Roberto. I’m your vampire for this morning.”

While she gaped at him, he got a grip on her arm, found the vein with practiced ease, slipped the needle in and took what he needed. He was good: she barely felt it. He slapped on a patch of gauze, secured it with adhesive tape — marvels of modern technology, both of them — and went on his way.

Dr. Feldman must have passed him in the hall: she came in as soon as he’d gone out. A nurse followed her, pushing a wheelchair. “Here you go,” the doctor said. “We’re going to take you downstairs and see if we can figure out what’s going on with you.”

Nicole gritted her teeth on any number of fierce rejoinders. The nurse unhooked her from her banks of monitors, and — thank God — removed the catheter, and eased her into the wheelchair. She didn’t need that, but she put up with it. If they wanted to think her weak, let them. Hospital personnel had a way of reducing patients to dependent children in any case.

Dependent children didn’t have to sign endless consent forms. Nicole did, dutifully; taking time to skim the wording, as a good lawyer should, before she signed her name to it. She wasn’t averse to tests, not in the slightest. She was as eager as the doctor to know if somehow her brains had fried.

They ran an ultrasound. They took a series of ordinary X-rays. Dr. Feldman did a spinal tap — that hurt. It hurt rather badly, but never as badly as having her tooth pulled without anesthetic. She had to hold still, that was the hardest part. But she did it.

They ran a CAT scan, which was claustrophobic, and an MRI, which was both claustrophobic and noisy. It was much like going through a car wash, except for the water, and the hot wax afterwards.

Being silly helped. So did just being — being here, in this world and time, where pain was seldom worse than a brief discomfort, and where everything was so very clean.

It was the middle of the afternoon before she got back to her room. She was exhausted, and she was starving. It was well past the lunch hour, but Dr. Feldman was ready for that: she called Dietary, and the kitchen sent up a tuna-salad sandwich, a plate of orange heavy-duty Jell-O, and an oversized chocolate-chip cookie. The bread was soft and wonderfully free from grit, though it didn’t have a tenth the flavor of her own baking in Carnuntum — but Umma’s shoulder and elbow had ached endlessly from working the quern.

But even better than the bread was the cookie. Until she bit into what was, really, an indifferently good cookie grudgingly flecked with poor-quality chocolate, she’d forgotten just how much she missed that dark sweetness. No chocolate in Carnuntum. No food of the gods. Even knowing how much better it could be, she savored each bite. God, it was good.

When she’d eaten her lunch in blissful solitude, she hunted around for the remote and turned on the TV news. There was plenty of local crime, but there were also New York and Moscow and Angola and the Persian Gulf, right in the room with her. She could find out what was going on in any of those places more readily than she could have learned what was happening in Vindobona, twenty miles up the Danube from Carnuntum. What a wonder of a world this was!

She reined herself in before she got too giddy. She should calm down or she’d get into trouble, but it was rather wonderful to be so very much aware of all the things she’d taken for granted. It made her feel more alive; more in the world.

She was still thinking about half in Latin, till she ran into concepts that needed English. Or she thought it was Latin. If she’d hallucinated a year and a half in Carnuntum, she could just as easily have hallucinated a language to go with it. She’d been at a party once, one of Frank’s academic mill-and-swills, in which she’d overheard one of the guests telling another about a colleague who’d apparently gone around the bend: “He claims he’s been channeling one of Alexander the Great’s historians — in Greek, no less.”

“And is it real Greek?” the other had asked.

“Well,” said the first with a touch of scorn, “it is Greek — but it’s much too archaic for the place and the time.”

At the time she’d laughed, thinking how very academic that conversation was. They weren’t disturbed by the channeling, but channeling in too archaic a dialect — that was very bad form.

Now she wondered. What if..?

No. It was preposterous. And yet…

Somewhere between the international scene and the financial report, a nurse brought in a plastic bag filled with clothes. Frank hadn’t wasted any time sending them. Neither had he taken the time to come up and visit. He wasn’t that considerate.

Then again, maybe he was. They couldn’t stay in the same room without squabbling. It was a great deal easier on her nerves if he stayed in his place and she stayed in hers.

The day could have dragged, but she had the TV and the remote, and she entertained herself with relentless channel-surfing. Soap operas, game shows, movies old and almost new, kids’ programming, women’s programming, talk shows, reality shows, the entertainment report, the news, sports, Discover, PBS, the Learning Channel… She was as drunk on images as she’d once been on wine.

Dinner came on time: frozen fried chicken, frozen peas, mashed potatoes with the same gluey gravy she remembered from her high-school cafeteria, and in place of tough Jell-O in colors never seen in nature, a scoop of gelatinous tapioca pudding. The novelty was wearing off: she was starting to think that hospital cuisine left a bit to be desired. But the styrofoam cup held real coffee. How on earth had they let that through Dietary?

She didn’t care how, just that it was there. She sighed with pleasure over every lukewarm sip.

Just about two sips from the bottom of the cup, Dr. Feldman strode into the room, not quite so springily as she had in the morning. Her face wore a distinctly sour expression.

She didn’t linger long in small talk of the good-evening-how-are-you? variety. “I’ve been going over your new tests,” she said.

Nicole’s heart thudded. She was glad the monitor was disconnected: it would have brought a nurse at the run. “Yes?” she prompted when the doctor didn’t go on.

“And,” Dr. Feldman said, looking more sour still, “as far as they go, you seem to be a normal, healthy specimen. Except that normal, healthy specimens aren’t in the habit of lapsing into six-day comas. Something went wrong in there. We just can’t determine what it was.”

“But I’m all right now?” Nicole asked.

“So far as we can determine, yes. “ Dr. Feldman didn’t sound happy at all.

Nicole pounced on the important thing. “Then will you let me go home tomorrow?”

The doctor frowned. “If your insurance will cover it, I’d really like to keep you here for another day of observation. You wouldn’t want to lose consciousness again as you were driving home, would you?”

“No,” Nicole said. She wasn’t enthusiastic about going to sleep, either. She’d gone up to her bedchamber in Carnuntum every night hoping, praying, she would wake up in L.A. If she fell asleep here, would she wake up in Carnuntum again? Had that journey been real, and was this the hallucination?