Come to think of it, Robot City could be thought of as a kind of infection of the planet on which it had been established. It, too, had grown from a single point of infection, a living organism that had grown and reproduced.
Robot City inside him. He could feel it there. The feeling was so strong that he forgot all about eating, or going to the hospital. Even Ariel was faint in the back of his mind.
Chapter 12. Amnesiac
Ariel awoke slowly, stretched tired limbs, and looked about. The hospital. It seemed to stretch into the remote past. She could scarcely remember a time when it wasn’t all around her. The world beyond it was vague in her mind. A city, she recalled. No, a City, a City of Earth, a humming hive of people, people, people. Beyond, though, was space, and stars, and the Spacer worlds.
Robot City was there, and Derec, and the Human Medical Team. Wolruf and Mandelbrot, who had been called Alpha, long ago. Aranimas, too, was out there somewhere. Beyond that-Aurora. She couldn’t remember. Aurora-everybody knew about Aurora. Planet of the Dawn, first settled from Earth, land of peace and contentment and civilization, richest and most powerful of the Spacer worlds.
The world she had called home, and which had exiled her, leaving her to die alone.
But no memories came.
She couldn’t remember her homeworld. She couldn’t remember her parents, her school, her first robot.
Of course not. She had had amnemonic plague-Burundi’s fever, they called it in the Spacer worlds. She had lost her memory.
But she was alive. Ariel began to weep.
A robot was at her bedside, a silly Earth robot with a cheerful face. “Mrs. Avery, are you well? We have been ordered to minimize drug dosages to let you recuperate, but if your distress is too intense we can give you tranquilizers.”
With an effort, she calmed herself enough to say, “Thank you, but I am quite well. I merely weep in relief that I am alive. I did not expect to survive.”
The spell broken, she found the weeping fit over. She was hungry. She told them so, and was promptly fed. Afterward, feeling tired, very tired, vastly tired, from long lying in even the cleverest hospital bed with all its muscle tone-retaining tricks, she drifted off to sleep.
When Ariel awoke, she was aware again of who she was and that she had had amnemonic plague. She had survived! They told her that her memories would return gradually, based on the foundation they had implanted in her brain. She didn’t believe them, but she didn’t care. She was alive!
When she had eaten again, they told her, “Your husband is here.”
Husband! For an awful moment she was totally blank. “My what?”
They led in a thin, hollow-eyed boy.
“Your husband-Derec Avery,” said the robot.
After a moment, she recognized
“His name isn’t Derec!” she said, and at his anguished expression she halted. No-David was dead, he had died of carbon monoxide poisoning on Robot City. No-he had disappeared-she didn’t know what had happened-her memories were scrambled, or gone.
Derec!
After a moment she asked, hesitantly, half knowing it was wrong, half fearing it was wrong, “Husband?”
“Why, of course,” said he, smiling. He looked so thin, the smile was a grimace on his wasted cheeks. Her heart bumped painfully, and she felt a pricking in her eyes. One of his eyes closed and opened as he continued confidently, “Some things come back faster than others, they tell me-not much of a compliment to me that our wedding wasn’t the first thing you remembered!”
Ariel smiled and thought: Avery! She couldn’t remember how that name of all names was stuck on them-she knew he hadn’t been going under it. But no doubt there was a logical explanation that she would remember in due time. She remembered now their escape from Robot City, their use of the Key, leaving Wolruf and Mandelbrot, and their arrival on Earth in a sparse apartment.
Still smiling faintly, she leaned back and said, “I do remember now, but it’s all a little faint-like, like a remembered dream. I hope you won’t quiz me on it till I’ve had time to remember more.”
“Of course not,” he said, and the instant he had completed the phrase, a robot broke in.
“The doctors’ directions are that you not attempt to force the memories. It would be better, Mr. Avery, if you never questioned her about your past or hers.”
“Yes, I’ve been told. Thank you,” he said, with true Spacer politeness toward robots. Here in the hospital, the medtechs and nurses called them all boy!
“So when can I get out of this place and-and out?” she asked, feeling the suffocating terror of claustrophobia closing in. Gamely, she fought against it. It had been her constant companion since arriving in the hospital, and all during her illness she had battled it. If not for tranquilizers, she’d have lost her mind while losing her memory.
“Well, you’re still pretty weak physically, and the doctors are not sure yet about your memory. They want to keep you here for a couple more days just on mind games. After that -I dunno. R. Jennie, do you know?”
“Mrs. Avery must have several days of physical therapy before she can safely leave the hospital, Mr. Avery,” said the robot. “ As for her memory, and her mind generally, I have not been informed.”
“If I don’t get out of here soon, I’ll go mad!” she said with a sudden vehemence that startled her. There was an impulse to resist what her conditioning told her was a lapse into madness, but she had had all she could take of concrete caverns and crowds of-of troglodytes. “I want to see the sun again, and breathe air, and-and feel the grass, and-”
Abruptly she was weeping, for in the midst of this catalog of sights that she had not seen since her memory began, there came a sudden demanding vision: an image of a garden, somewhere; of bright light and flowers and warmth, drowzy warmth, with bees humming sweetly on key, and the scent of orange blossoms. Someone she loved lay just out of sight.
Ariel turned over and wept passionately for some minutes, her face in her pillow. She felt a hand on her shoulder, not a robotic hand, and felt faintly grateful, but was too wretched to turn.
A detached, floating calm gradually washed away her tears, leaving her tired but spent. Tranquilizer; the robots never gave her more than a few minutes to weep. They usually allowed her that-or she’d have gone mad from the inability to express her emotions at all.
When she turned, Korolenko was there, frowning in conversation with-Derec, she must remember always to call him. That was right, that was what the Earthers called him. But there was another reason, which she couldn’t quite recall, why she must not use his true name. Or did she know his true name, after all? She had forgotten so much, could she trust that memory too?
Avery!she thought, remotely astonished. The drug made all emotions remote.
She wondered vaguely where Dr. Avery was now. Still on Robot City, she supposed. For a moment she felt an ironic amusement at the thought that they had been using his apartment, his robot, and his funds on Earth. Then she knew that this was an old amusement, she’d had this thought before; and with that thought, she remembered having had the amusement before.
“Memory is like drink,” she said to the uncomprehending robot. She felt a little light-headed.
The nurse and a robot stepped aside as they spoke together and Ariel looked, shocked, at…Derec.
“Why is…he so-thin?” she demanded abruptly.
“Mr. Avery? He had been under a strain, Mrs. Avery. He has been worried about you and has not been eating sufficiently.”
“Does he have-” Her heart stopped, started painfully. “-Burundi’s fever?” Again her heart shook her.
“No, Mrs. Avery. He is merely under a strain.”