EXTRACT FROM THE JOURNAL OF THE BOTANIST MENDOZA
FURIOUSLY, IN THE BEDROOM

I just broke a table in half.

Clearly I am not quite myself yet.

There are, for example, surgically tidy holes in my memory. I know certain unspeakable things happened to me, at a place called— no, can’t remember it. Can't remember anything about that. It might have happened to someone else, as far as my memory is concerned. Yet other memories have returned with disgusting clarity: I know that I’m a Crome generator, burdened with freakish precognition. Look at me, blazing like a damned dish of Cherries Jubilee. Or the Ghost of Christmas Past.

What happened?

I remember staring, fascinated, at the Indian Maize analysis. The eternal quest, for fields stretching to far horizons, kernels bright-striped in all possible colors, gritstone meal feeding multitudes that thrive...

Unbidden before my sight came an image: the figure of a man woven together out of grain-stalks, bound with bright ribbon, his featureless face an enigma.

I rubbed my eyes. The image meant nothing to me.

Abruptly, Sir Henry was standing at my side. He looked somber. "I've work for you, dearie," he said. "Come with me."

"Okay," I said, and started to obey, but the figures drew me in again as soon as I turned my face to the screen. Sir Henry had to order the credenza to save and shut itself down. I sat blinking at it until he waved his hand in front of my face--how humiliating!-- and then allowed myself to be led away through the ship.

We went to the infirmary and there was my darling's body, floating in the blue light. I went at once to the window. Who did I think I saw? Why, the one constant in my patchwork memory. We’d always been together. I could dimly remember when we walked in the garden of a Tudor manor house, though that had been a long time ago, and there was something sad about the memory. I had vague impressions, too, that we’d worn the clothing of many other eras. That was all I knew for certain. I had an uneasy feeling that bad things had happened to us, and that Alec was only one of his names....

Sir Henry had followed me. He put his mouth close to my ear, as though I were deaf. "Would you like him to come out of there, now?"

No lapse in my attention then. "Oh," I cried, "Yes, please! How do we get him out?"

"I'll drain the tank, and you get undressed," he replied. "Then you go in and help him. You'll know what to do."

I hurried out of my clothing as the bioregenerant medium gurgled away, and Alec's body sank down through the tank until it lay in a fetal curve on the tile floor. It looked blue and drowned, but the red scars from the augmentation surgery had already vanished, healed without trace. The spiraling tattoo pattern across his shoulders was pulsing like blue neon. To my joy I saw he was already trembling, one shaky hand was groping across the tiles.

"Alec!" I splashed in, fell to my knees beside him. "Up, up, come on, my love!"

Such joy. I got my arms around his chest and hauled him into a sitting position. He was turning his head blindly, as the thick blue fluid streamed down from his face, and his lank hair was dark with it. Even in such a moment, he was beautiful to me. Deftly I slipped behind him and performed a Heimlich maneuver.

His head reared up and he spat out a tremendous gob of the bioregenerant. Lurching forward onto his hands and knees he began to cough, violently expelling the stuff from his lungs; I pounded helpfully on his back, yelling "That's it, darling!"

He pushed himself upright, threw his head back, drew in a first whooping breath as I clung to him, laughing and crying. He began to laugh too, wild gurgling laughter, gasping as his lungs continued to clear. Raising his fists at the ceiling of the chamber he howled:

"LIIIIIIIFE!"

Lowering his arms he wrapped them around me and held me tight, swaying back and forth, gulping for breath a moment; then he bent to kiss me. I was so happy.

"I've missed you terribly, Alec, you have no idea, but you're all right now and we'll never lose each other again--" I babbled between kisses. He rose with me into a crouch and stood slowly, and all mortal clumsiness had gone forever from the motion of his body. I didn't know, yet, addled as I was, what was different about him.

But he must have been acutely aware of the change. He stood still a moment, his eyes wide. "Great God," he said, his voice hoarse and hushed with awe. "So this is--"

"This is how you’re supposed to be, Alec," I told him in my charmingly vacant way. "Good as new!"

He looked down at me, such speculation in his eyes.

I led him out to the shower, chattering away like a blissful idiot. He started at the first touch of spray on his changed skin; then opened his mouth and drank, seemingly fascinated by the taste of water. I cupped my hands and washed him, sluicing away the last of the bioregenerant from his body. He seemed greedy for sensation, opened each of the bottles of shampoo and soap to inhale their fragrances, gleeful.

When we stepped out, he seized the nearest towel and buried his face in it, became so involved in some mysterious worship of terrycloth that I had to take another towel and rub him dry. Oh, he liked that; liked it even better when I brought his silk robe and wrestled him into it. He noticed the infirmary cabin beyond, and barely let me tie the robe closed before he went bolting out there to run his hands over the blanket on the bed, seize up the glass vials and bottles to admire their sparkle. When I brought him his torque, he actually put out his tongue and tasted it before letting me slip it around his neck; exclaimed over the bright gleam of his wedding ring when I put it back on his finger.

He was beginning to laugh again, and I laughed with him, so giddy I had forgotten to dry myself or put on a stitch. Sir Henry, who had discreetly disappeared, was making polite throat-clearing noises to give me a clue, but I was oblivious.

“Ah,” yelled my darling, noticing the door. Only a split-second he fumbled with the lock before he ran out on deck. There he stopped, transfixed with amazement. The twilit sea still gleaming, evening star and new moon bright, a million stars, yes, I’d have stared too if I were seeing them for the first time with an immortal’s senses.

He caught his breath. He was trembling. At last he spoke.

“’…Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:
There’s not the smallest orb that thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still choiring to the young-ey’d cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But, whilst the muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.’”

By the end of the Shakespeare quote he was shouting, his glorious voice without strain echoing from the masts and spars cathedral-high above us.

I could have stood there like an idiot forever, just smiling at my monster through happy tears; but he turned to me as if for confirmation and then he noticed I was still naked. He advanced on me, caught me up in his arms with a whoop of triumph and bore me inside to the bed. “Now,” he yelled gleefully, “my love, we’ll change the world!”

And there, above me, poised, he halted: frowned. "You're hurt," he said, perhaps as it occurred to him that I was on fire with Crome’s radiation.

"No, no, Alec, I'm fine," I told him, stroking back his wet hair. As though I could have concealed the shame of my impairment! "See? And you're fine, too."

But he placed a tentative hand on my forehead. "Just-- there--"

I suppose he didn't know then the words for what was wrong, but he must have been able to see it clearly enough. He got that determined look on his face, the one that means he knows he's right regardless of reason or reality. He took my face in his hands and pushed into the wrecked place in my mind, which did hurt. I cried out once; then surrendered, as I always have, and he was inside me in an entirely new way.

Was it like roaring through darkness, across a landscape lit here and there by the fires of war? Everything burnt, blocked, misaligned? Rows of lights blinked out of sequence: he changed their pattern. Tumbled and scattered structures sprawled before those all-seeing eyes of his: he righted them, arranged them into order. Meaningless dark unkeyed strings of numbers flamed into reason and purpose for him. What had taken Sir Henry months to even begin by therapy, proceeding painfully and with infinite effort, my lover accomplished in a moment. Only that one secret file he left hidden from me, Alec and Nicholas encrypted, such loving treachery.

What was it like for me, being healed of the ruin of my wits? It was exquisite pleasure, indescribable but certainly better than sex. I had lost all fear and was yielding everything up to his probing mind, even those blocked and obliterated files, although I think he hadn't quite got to them when...

Well, there were no longer walls between us, in his new state, and he didn't know how to shield his mind from me. The darkness was lit, and in that illumination we beheld each other with utter clarity, absolute intimacy. Communion at last.

I screamed, did my best to pull away from him. He was holding me far too close for that and I went limp in his arms, staring up at him in horror. "You're not Alec!" I said.

Distantly we heard Sir Henry's bitter laughter.

"No, my dear," the man who held me admitted, and his poor face was white as though I'd just driven a knife into his heart. "My name is Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax. I believe you loved me, once."

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