“Nicholas Kenneth de Vore. What’s yours?”
“Diane. I’m going to call you Nicky. Do you mind?”
“I’ll hurt you while you sleep,” Nicholas said.
“You wouldn’t.”
“Yes, I would. At St. John’s where I used to be, it was zero G most of the time, and a girl there called me something I didn’t like, and I got loose one night and came into her cubical while she was asleep and nulled her restraints, and then she floated around until she banged into something, and that woke her up and she tried to grab, and then that made her bounce all around inside and she broke two fingers and her nose and got blood all over. The attendants came, and one told me—they didn’t know then I did it—when he came out his white suit was, like, polka-dot red all over because wherever the blood drops had touched him they soaked right in.”
The girl smiled at him, dimpling her thin face. “How did they find out it was you?”
“I told someone and he told them.”
“I bet you told them yourself.”
“I bet I didn’t!” Angry, he waded away, but when he had stalked a short way up the beach he sat down on the sand, his back toward her.
“I didn’t mean to make you mad, Mr. de Vore.”
“I’m not mad!”
She was not sure for a moment what he meant. She sat down beside and a trifle behind him, and began idly piling sand in her lap.
Dr. Island said, “I see you’ve met.”
Nicholas turned, looking for the voice. “I thought you saw everything.”
“Only the important things, and I have been busy on another part of myself. I am happy to see that you two know one another; do you find you interact well?”
Neither of them answered.
“You should be interacting with Ignacio; he needs you.”
“We can’t find him,” Nicholas said.
“Down the beach to your left until you see the big stone, then turn inland. Above five hundred meters.”
Nicholas stood up and, turning to his right, began to walk away. Diane followed him, trotting until she caught up.
“I don’t like,” Nicholas said, jerking a shoulder to indicate something behind him.
“Ignacio?”
“The doctor.”
“Why do you move your head like that?”
“Didn’t they tell you?”
“No one told me anything about you.”
“They opened it up”—Nicholas touched his scars—“and took this knife and cut all the way through my corpus . . . corpus . . .”
“Corpus callosum,” muttered a dry palm frond.
“—corpus callosum,” finished Nicholas. “See, your brain is like a walnut inside. There are two halves, and then right down in the middle a kind of thick connection of meat from one to the other. Well, they cut that.”
“You’re having a bit of fun with me, aren’t you?”
“No, he isn’t,” a monkey who had come to the waterline to look for shellfish told her. “His cerebrum has been surgically divided; it’s in his file.” It was a young monkey, with a trusting face full of small, ugly beauties.
Nicholas snapped, “It’s in my head.”
Diane said, “I’d think it would kill you, or make you an idiot or something.”
“They say each half of me is about as smart as both of us were together. Anyway, this half is . . . the half . . . the
“There are two of you now?”
“If you cut a worm in half and both parts are still alive, that’s two, isn’t it?
What else would you call us? We can’t ever come together again.”
“But I’m talking to just one of you?”
“We both can hear you.”
“Which one answers?”
Nicholas touched the right side of his chest with his right hand. “Me, I do. They told me it was the left side of my brain, that one has the speech centers, but it doesn’t feel that way; the nerves cross over coming out, and it’s just the right side of me, I talk. Both my ears hear for both of us, but out of each eye we only see half and half—I mean, I only see what’s on the right of what I’m looking at, and the other side, I guess, only sees the left, so that’s why I keep moving my head. I guess it’s like being a little bit blind; you get used to it.”
