Rob Chilson - Refuge

“I told you so,” he said to the absent Donovan.

Being watched by the TBI did not bother him; he was used to being watched by mother-hen robots.

He did think much, though, on what the Terry had told him: he had never had the plague, though he had antitoxins to its neurotoxin in his blood. He’d had the memory loss without the plague. He’d received a dose of the neurotoxin without having had the disease.

Well, his arrival on that ice asteroid, without his memory, while the robots were searching for the Key to Perihelion, never had seemed to him like an accident or a coincidence. He felt, and always had, as if he were a piece in a game, being herded across the board for someone else’s reasons. A mad someone else.

The only one he knew of with both the madness and the genius was Dr. Avery.

They had to get back to Robot City.

One morning during this period he looked up from table J-9 and saw Korolenko next to him. She was wearing her hospital whites, or he might not have recognized her.

“Eat your bacon,” she said crisply as recognition dawned on his face.

The thought made him ill. Yeast-based or no, it was fat and greasy and sickening. His opinion of the bacon showed on his face.

“Then eat the eggs. And the toast.” Korolenko’s voice was grim. “Look, Mr. Avery, you won’t help your wife by collapsing of starvation.”

Derec wanted to say it was stress, not starvation, but realized that there was something in what she said. He’d been living on fruit juices and caffeine. He managed to choke down the toast and some of the scrambled eggs, with lots of hot, sweet tea.

“That’s better. We’ll see you at the hospital tomorrow.”

That night Derec had one of his worst dreams about Robot City, and the next day he sat looking at nothing and thinking about it…

Nothing silly about Dr. Avery shrinking, or the Human Medical Team. He knew perfectly well that Robot City was on its own planet-even during the dream. What he was dreaming was that a miniature version had been injected into his blood, where it had started growing and reproducing. Here the dream became silly-the miniature city was getting iron from his red blood cells. But there was nothing silly about the feeling it left him with.

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.

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-”