I turned as I heard a skitter of wheels on pavement behind me-the Christmas tree was skating away, its work here evidently finished-and when I turned back the Horch was looking me over. He sniffed at me with the little nostril slits in his pointy snake nose, then drew his head back to stare into my eyes. “You will be all right, I think,” he said. “This medical sapient will take you to a safe place and care for you.”
He signaled to the Doc, who picked me up, more gently than the machine, and held me as the Horch came over for a last word. I could feel the breath from its mouth as his head stretched toward me. “Perhaps you will want a name for me. You can call me Beert-“ trilling the r, clipping the final t. “It is the short form of my name, as yours is Dan. Another one called me that before he died.”
I was practicing saying the name for myself when he got to the last part. Then I opened my mouth to ask about this “other one,” but Beert wasn’t listening. “Yes, you say my name quite well. No questions now, please. I have duties to attend to, but I will come to you when I can. In any case, everything will be explained to you, if you survive.”
If you survive. These creatures from other planets were great at dropping conversation-stoppers on me.
Helping me to survive appeared to be the Doc’s job. He didn’t speak, but he laid me down on a bench in the vehicle and began to palp my throat, belly, groin, skull. I didn’t see him do anything to make the vehicle start, but while he was poking at me the door closed, the car lurched and, evidently on autopilot, we began to glide away on its air cushion.
The Doc rolled me over and began doing something radical to the small of my back. It didn’t hurt, but it felt unwelcome. Then it began to feel a little better.
If I had been a little less bone-weary-frazzled, I might have tried to see where we were going. I didn’t. There were no windows operating in the car, and besides, the Doc’s ministrations were making me feel a little bit relaxed, for the first time in quite a while.
So I suppose I fell asleep. At least I was surprised when the door opened and I realized the car had stopped.
Another Doc peered in. The two of them, my medic and the new one, mewed at each other in a high-pitched language I had never heard before. Then they helped me out of the car.
I was standing in bright sunshine, with half a dozen of the Docs gathered around to stare at me. The new one spoke. “You are Dannerman,” he informed me-well, more accurately, she informed me; it wasn’t until a little later that I got the genders straight. “My name is ...”
Was something I had a lot of trouble pronouncing, much less writing down; it started with a kind of baritone purring sound, then something like clearing the throat, and at the end finishing with a deep-toned hiss; the closest I can come is “Pirraghiz.” “You are safe here,” she went on. “Do you know what this place is?”
I frowned at her. She was rapidly making my pleasant languor evaporate, and that struck me as a stupid question. How would I know what it was?
Then I looked around more carefully, and I did.
There were a couple of strange-looking buildings that I knew I had never seen before. Shiny. Yellow, like the chinaware walls of the interrogation room. Five or six meters high and sort of elliptical in plan, with sides that tapered up from the ground. What they reminded me of mostly was pictures I had seen of the ancient Civil War ironclad, the Merrimac, and they were not in the least familiar.
However, that wasn’t all that was in sight. There was a little stream not far away, crossed by stepping-stones. There were trees in the distance. There was something that looked like a primitive stone fireplace. And there was a tepeelike thing that wasn’t exactly a tepee. The last time I’d seen any of those, Jimmy Lin had given them a name. He called them “yurts.”
“Oh, my God,” I said, because, yes, it was a very familiar place. “I lived in those yurts when I was a captive of the Beloved Leaders.”
“That is correct,” Pirraghiz told me gently. “You lived here before. Now you will stay here again while we feed you and try to make you well.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I spent most of the next few days sleeping. As far as I could tell, Pirraghiz never slept at all. Every time I woke up she was there, carrying me to a toilet, spoon-feeding me more of the foods I had been eating for so long, rubbing the small of my back with that special little touch of hers that seemed to be meant to put me back to sleep, and always did.
So for the next forty-eight hours at least, it could have been more, I was pretty much out of it. I was hazily aware that sometimes she was doing other things to me-massaging, poking, cupping my head in her two largest hands-but I didn’t know why, except that it felt good. Now and then I know others came into the room to look at me, mostly other Docs, but once or twice, I think, the Horch. Those fuzzy periods of nearly waking didn’t last. When Pirraghiz saw that I was wakeful she touched me with one gentle talon and I was gone again.
When the time came that I was very nearly wide-awake, for very nearly an hour or so at a time, I took a closer look at my surroundings.
The bed I was in was comfortable enough, except for being maybe a little firmer than I would have preferred. However, it was built to Doc dimensions, nearly four meters long and more than half that in width. The room was in the same statuesque scale. On the walls there were a couple of mural-like paintings-or still photographs, I couldn’t decide which. One was a group of Doc infants at play, the other a misty, idealized scene of a seashore with gentle waves breaking on a pink-sand beach. Elsewhere along the walls were shelves that contained clothes and things-Pirraghiz’s, I supposed-and others with spools of a glassy sort of ribbon (the Horch equivalent of books, I found out later). A squat cylindrical thing by the window blew air at me, I supposed for comfort. In recesses in the walls there was a thing like a chromium soup bowl a meter across that was standing on one edge-for what purpose, I did not know-and a couple of smaller bowls of a different kind that were filled with a kind of peat moss. Unfamiliar blue-green buds poked out of the moss. The whole place had a lived-in look. Naturally enough. It was Pirraghiz’s own room. She had given it up for me.
When she came to check up on me she was astonished to find me standing up. Before she said anything she carefully felt me all over. Then, more or less satisfied, she allowed me to walk to the toilet on my own.
I haven’t said what the toilet was like. There were three of them lined up, huge, Doc-sized things that looked like Chic Sale outhouses on pilings. They were built right over the flowing stream and you got to them by a small bridge. I must have said something that Pirraghiz hadn’t expected, because she looked at me curiously. “Are you dissatisfied with the sanitary arrangements?”
“No, of course not. Well, a little surprised, anyway. It’s just that the sanitary arrangements don’t seem very sanitary. On Earth a lot of people get very upset if they find anyone using the streams for toilets, because of the risk of spreading infection.”
That stopped her cold. The snowy, mossy eyebrows went up in astonishment. “Are you telling me,” she asked, sounding scandalized, “that your excrement may contain live pathogens?”
“Doesn’t everybody’s?”
The great bland face was wearing an expression of revulsion. “That is a disgusting concept, Dannerman. No. We will have to provide you with other facilities, for the protection of other species who are downstream from us ... and you must not excrete into the river anymore.”