Derec wished for a drink. He wished for a light snack, cookies at least, and fresh hot coffee, even synthetic coffee. In the next room was a robot, ready to spring into action at his slightest word-almost. It was an Earthly robot, in an Earthly City. Derec could send R. David out, but there was no assurance it would return-and it would not be with food, for Derec didn’t rate meals in his own apartment. Damn Dr. Avery for not arranging for higher ratings.
But that would have been more conspicuous, he supposed.
Light from the door shone across the bed. “Time to arise, Mr. Avery,” said R. David.
“Yes, thank you, R. David.”
Derec groaned silently and sat up to sit for a moment with his elbows on his knees, chin in hands. In the short life that he could remember, it had been one crisis after another. All I want, he decided, is peace and quiet, a little establishment on some mountain brook in the boondocks of Aurora or Nexon, maybe, with just a couple of robots and a landing field only big enough for my own machine and one other. Maybe the Solarians had the right idea; they never saw anybody, and lived totally surrounded by robots.
No, he had decided. That wasn’t such a good idea, after all.
Earth turned inside out, he thought vaguely. No better than-
“Mr. Avery, are you well?”
“Yes, R. David. Merely depressed. I worry about Ariel.”
That, the robot could well understand.
“Yes, Mr. Avery. I-also worry about her. But the doctors report her condition good, do they not?”
“Yes, they did last night, R. David. What she’s like today-” He left it, somber, dressed carelessly, and tucked some equipment into the little bath satchel he had bought the day before.
Admonishing R. David rather hollowly not to worry, he set off for the Personal, returned to drop off the satchel when he had showered and washed his extra clothing, and departed for the section kitchen. This part of the trip was so routine now that he neither saw nor was seen by the policemen in the corridors and junctions; he no longer stood out like a stranger.
Breakfast was, as usual, good, but to him, tasteless. Listlessly, Derec ate it, not even interested in a fact he had finally deduced: it was neither synthetic nor natural, but both. It was made of living things and was therefore natural, but was made by an artificial process and was therefore synthetic. The basis of three-quarters of it was yeast.
He suspected that there might be a steady, if small, market for Earthly food yeasts in the Spacer worlds, if Spacers could overcome their sense of superiority long enough to try it. Granted, Spacer high cuisine had no equal on Earth that Derec had tasted, but Spacer ships were usually furnished with synthesizers. So much/or Spacer cuisine, he thought.
The hospital was a familiar place to him now. Derec did not trouble with the waiting rooms, but went to the Friends’ Lounge and queried Ariel’s condition on the monitor. There had been a problem with that when they had discovered that she wasn’t in the system. Derec had professed ignorance of the ID tag, and it was assumed-he hoped-that it had been lost when they all crowded around to help Ariel during her collapse.
Naturally he didn’t remember her number, and in their honest ignorance she and he had left other ID forms behind. Derec had promised to supply them with it next day, but so far had “forgotten” to do so the one time they remembered to ask him for it. They had had to input her with a dummy ID.
Ariel was in a room with two robots. Here, in Intensive Care, people were either unconscious or so debilitated by their illnesses that they didn’t care that it was robots who waited on them.
She was not raving today. At first Derec thought she was asleep, she lay so quietly. But then she moved, and a robot sprang forward to smooth the pillow behind her. She looked at it vacantly, closed her eyes.
A faint sound behind him was Dr. Li. The woman shook her head sadly.
“How is she, doctor?” Derec asked.
“As far as the disease goes, the worst is over. She will live. But what you’re seeing now might be worse. She is gradually losing her memories.”
Derec had had some of this explained to him. “I suppose she’s half in a hallucinatory state now.”
“Yes, or something like an intense daydream. Perhaps a brown study would be a better analogy-one of those almost hypnotic states of concentration in which you don’t see what’s in front of you.”
Derec had a vague flash memory of someone waving a hand in front of his nose, and nodded.
Ariel was reliving her life as drowning people are popularly supposed to do. It wouldn’t take me long, he mused; J suppose I might have time for it. But Ariel……
“Could I visit her?”
Dr. Li frowned, looking sadder. “You could, but after today it will get worse.” She hesitated. “There’s always a shock for the loved ones, when the patient doesn’t recognize them. That will happen, you know.”
Derec hadn’t thought of that, and the mere thought shocked him. “Then-can I visit her today?”
“I’ll ask.”
Ariel looked at him blankly, but it wasn’t a lack of recognition. It was more a lack of energy. “Oh, Derec. How are you?”
What do you say to someone who may be alive tomorrow, but won’t remember you? If Derec’s memories had been a hundred years long rather than a couple of months, he still wouldn’t have had anything to guide him.
“Well enough,” he said awkwardly. He drew near to the bed, touched it. She looked at him without much emotion.
“Are you going to help them restore my memory?”
“Of course. I’ll have to. And I hope you’ve been talking-?” He indicated the robots with a tilt of his head.
“A little,” she said reluctantly. “I’m so tired all the time. And they keep me so full of drugs I don’t have the spirit. Besides, it doesn’t matter. It won’t help. It w-won’t really be me. Derec, it’s like dying. It’s just like dying. I won’t see you again-I won’t see anyone again-it’s all fading-”
One of the robots sprang to the head of the bed and did something, and Ariel’s eyes closed. When they opened after a moment the horror had largely passed. Derec thought it was still there, though, masked by the drug.
“That isn’t so, Ariel,” he said insistently. “Your memories are still there, in your brain. They merely need to be unlocked. We’ll-”
She was shaking her head. “No, it’s all going. I’m dying, Derec. Whoever takes my place will be someone different.”
Abruptly he said, “Am I different than-the man I was?”
“Of course. And yet, you’re him.” She closed her eyes and tears trembled on her eyelids. The robot got busy at the headboard again.
“Derec, I want you to know that I’ve always loved you. Even when I was most angry, even when I was most frightened. I never blamed you. For weeks I’ve watched, hoping you would never develop the final form of the disease. I guess you did, or you wouldn’t have lost your memory. Whoever cured you…didn’t have the…technology to restore…your memory…”
She drifted off into sleep, and after a moment Derec choked down his impulse to cry out, to demand that they awaken her. Suddenly his lost memory seemed less important, what she knew seemed less important, than what she thought of him.
“Farewell, Ariel,” he managed to say huskily, and stumbled out into the Friends’ Lounge, where he sat and wept for a time, quietly. He wondered vaguely if, in all his unremembered life, he had felt this sharp, poignant pain, and doubted it. Yet, he had known her in another life, and it had not been wholly a happy relationship.
He’d had amnemonic plague; the emptiness in his head was proof enough for him. Had he gotten it from her-or given it to her?
Presently he took a deep breath, let it out in a sigh that came from the bottom of his belly, and wiped his face on a tissue from the dispenser. Robots were probably watching him; within minutes Dr. Li and a weary-looking Dr. Powell entered the room.