I

"Does the word Sparta mean anything to you?"

A young woman sat on a spoke-backed chair of varnished pine. Her face was turned to the tall window; her unmarked features were pale in the diffuse light that flooded the white room, reflected from the wintry landscape outside.

Her interrogator fussed with his trim salt-and-pepper beard and peered at her over the top of his spectacles as he waited for an answer. He sat behind a battered oak desk a hundred and fifty years old, a kindly fellow with all the time in the world.

"Of course." In her oval face her brows were wide ink strokes above eyes of liquid brown; beneath her upturned nose her mouth was full, her lips innocent in their delicate, natural pinkness. The unwashed brown hair that lay in lank strands against her cheeks, her shapeless dressing gown, these could not disguise her beauty.

"What does it mean to you?"

"What?"

"The word Sparta, what does that mean to you?"

"Sparta is my name." Still she did not look at him.

"What about the name Linda? Does that mean anything to you?"

She shook her head.

"Or how about Ellen?"

She did not respond.

"Do you know who I am?" he asked.

"I don't believe we've met, Doctor." She continued to stare out the window, studying something a great distance away.

"But you do know that I'm a doctor."

She shifted in her chair, glanced around the room, taking in the diplomas, the books, returning her gaze to him with a thin smile. The doctor smiled back. Though in fact they had met every week for the past year, her point was taken-again. Yes, any sane person would know she was in a doctor's office. Her smile faded and she turned back to the window.

"Do you know where you are?"

"No. They brought me here during the night. Usually I'm in... the program."

"Where is that?"

"In... Maryland."

"What is the name of the program?"

"I..." She hesitated. A frown creased her brow.

"...I can't tell you that."

"Can you remember it?"

Her eyes flashed angrily. "It's not on the white side."

"You mean it's classified?"

"Yes. I can't tell anyone without a Q clearance."

"I have a Q clearance, Linda."

"That is not my name. How do I know you have a clearance? If my father tells me I can talk to you about the program, I will."

He had often told her that her parents were dead. Invariably she greeted the news with disbelief. If he did not repeat it within five or ten minutes, she promptly forgot; if, however, he persisted, trying to persuade her, she became wild with confusion and grief-only to recover her sad calm a few minutes after he relented. He had long since ceased to torture her with temporary horrors.

Of all his patients, she was the one who most excited his frustration and regret. He longed to restore her lost core and he believed he could do it, if her keepers would permit him to.

Frustrated, bored perhaps, he abandoned the script of the interview. "What do you see out there?" he asked.

"Trees. Mountains." Her voice was a longing whisper. "Snow on the ground."

If he were to continue the routine they had established, a routine he remembered but she did not, he would ask her to recount what had happened to her yesterday, and she would recite in great detail events that had occurred over three years ago. He rose abruptly-surprising himself, for he rarely varied his work schedule. "Would you like to go outside?"

She seemed as surprised as he.

The nurses grumbled and fussed over her, bundling her into wool trousers, flannel shirt, scarf, fur-lined leather boots, a thick overcoat of some shiny gray quilted material-a fabulously expensive wardrobe, which she took for granted. She was fully capable of dressing herself, but she often forgot to change her clothes. They found it easier to leave her in her robe and slippers then, pretending to themselves that she was helpless. They helped her now, and she allowed it.

The doctor waited for her outside on the icy steps of the stone veranda, studying the French doors with their peeling frames, the yellow paint pigment turning to powder in the dry, thin air. He was a tall and very round man, made rounder by the bulk of his black Chesterfield coat with its elegant velvet collar. The coat was worth the price of an average dwelling. It was a sign of the compromises he had made.

The girl emerged, urged forward by the nurses, gasping at the sharpness of the air. High on her cheeks two rosy patches bloomed beneath the transparent surface of her blue-white skin. She was neither tall nor unusually slender, but there was a quick unthinking certainty in her movements that reminded him she was a dancer. Among other things.

He and the girl walked on the grounds behind the main building. From this altitude they could see a hundred miles across the patchwork brown and white plains to the east, a desert of overgrazed, farmed-out grit. Not all the white was snow; some was salt. Afternoon sun glinted from the windows of a moving magneplane heading south, too far away to see; ice-welded blades of brown grass crunched under their feet where the sunlight had sublimed the snow cover.

The edge of the lawn was marked by bare cottonwoods planted close together, paralleling an ancient wall of brownstone. The ten-foot electrified fence beyond the wall was almost invisible against the mountainside, which rose abruptly into shadow; higher up, blue drifts of snow persisted beneath squat junipers.

They sat on a bench in sunlight. He brought a chess pad from the pocket of his coat and laid it flat between them. "Would you like to play?"

"Are you any good?" she asked simply.

"Fair. Not as good as you."

"How do you know?"

He hesitated-they had played often-but he was weary of challenging her with the truth. "It was in your file."

"I would like to see that file someday."

"I'm afraid I no longer have access to it," he lied. The file she had in mind was a different file.

The chess pad assigned her the white pieces and she opened swiftly with the Giuco Piano, throwing the doctor off balance with pawn to bishop-three on the fourth move. To give himself time to think he asked, "Is there anything else you would like?"

"Anything else?"

"Is there anything we can do for you?"

"I would like to see my mother and father."

He didn't answer, pondering the board instead. Like most amateurs, he struggled to think two or three moves deep but was unable to hold all the permutations in his mind. Like most masters, she thought in patterns; although at this moment she could no longer recall her opening moves, it didn't matter. Years ago, before her short-term memory had been destroyed, she had stored uncounted patterns.

He pushed the piece-keys and she replied instantly. On her next move one of his bishops was pinned. He smiled ruefully. Another rout in the making. Nevertheless he did his best to stay with her, to give her an interesting game. Until her keepers untied his hands he had little else to give her.

An hour passed-time was nothing to her-before she said "check" for the last time. His queen was long gone, his situation hopeless. "Your game," he said. She smiled, thanked him. He slipped the chess pad into his pocket.

With the pad out of sight, her longing stare returned.

They made a final tour of the wall. The shadows were long and their breath congealed before their faces; overhead the hazy blue sky was crisscrossed with a thousand icy contrails. A nurse met them at the door, but the doctor stayed outside. When he said good-bye the girl looked at him curiously, having forgotten who he was.

Some rekindled spark of rebellion inspired the doctor to key the phonelink. "I want to talk to Laird."

The face on the videoplate was bland and polite.

"Terribly sorry. I'm afraid the director cannot accept unscheduled calls."

"It's personal and urgent. Please tell him that. I'll wait."

"Doctor, believe me, there's simply no way... "

He was on the link a long time with one aide after another, finally wringing a promise from the last of them that the director would call him in the morning. These obstinate encounters fanned the rebellious spark, and the doctor was deeply angry when the last connection was cut.

His patient had asked to see her file-the file of which she had been the subject until a year before her arrival at the hospital. He had meant to wait for clearance, but why bother? Laird and the rest of them would be incredulous, but there was no way she could use, or abuse, what she would see: she would forget it almost instantly.

That, after all, was the point of this whole shameful exercise.

He knocked on the door of her upstairs room. She opened it, still wearing the boots and shirt and trousers she had put on for her walk. "Yes?"

"You asked to see your file."

She studied him. "Did my father send you?"

"No. One of the M.I. staff."

"I'm not allowed to see my file. None of us are."

"An... exception has been made in your case. But it's at your discretion. Only if you're interested."

Wordlessly, she followed him down the echoing corridor, down flights of creaking stairs.

The basement room was bright and warm, thickly carpeted, quite unlike the drafty halls and wards of the old sanatorium above. The doctor showed her to a carrel. "I've entered the appropriate code already. I'll be right here if you have any questions." He sat across the narrow aisle, two carrels down, with his back turned to her. He wanted her to feel that she had some privacy, but not to forget that he was present.

She studied the flatscreen on the desk. Then her fingers expertly stroked the hemispheres of the manual input. Alphanumerics appeared on the screen: "WARNING: unauthorized access to this file is punishable by fine and/or imprisonment under the National Security Act." After a few seconds a stylized logo appeared, the image of a fox. That image disappeared, to be replaced by more words and numbers. "Case L. N. 30851005, Specified Aptitude Resource Training and Assessment project. Access by other than authorized Multiple Intelligence personnel is strictly forbidden."

She stroked the input again.

Across the aisle the doctor nervously smoked a cigarette-ancient and hideous vice-while he waited, seeing what she saw on the screen in front of him. The procedures and evaluations would be familiar to her, embedded in long-term memory, engrained there, because so much of what she had learned was not mere information, but was process, performance....

She was reminded of what had become part of her. She had been taught languages-many of them, including her own-by conversing and reading aloud at far beyond the level of vocabulary considered appropriate to her age. She had been taught to perform on the violin and the piano since infancy, since long before the fingers of her hands could stretch to form chords, and in the same way she had been taught dance and gymnastics and horseback riding, by being made to practice incessantly, by having the most expected of her. She had manipulated space-filling images on a computer, and learned drawing and sculpture from masters; she had been immersed in a swirling social matrix in the schoolroom since before she could speak; she had been tutored in set theory, geometry, and algebra from the time she had been able to distinguish among her toes and demonstrate Piagetian conservation. "L. N." had a long number attached to her file name, but she was the first subject of SPARTA, which had been created by her father and mother.

Her parents had tried not to unduly influence the rating of their daughter's achievements. But even where double-blind scoring was impossible, her mastery was evident. Revealed here on the flatscreen, as she had never seen it confirmed before, her excellence was enough to make her weep.

The doctor was immediately at her side. "Is something wrong?" She wiped at her tears and shook her head, but he gently insisted. "It's my job to be of help."

"It's only-I wish they could tell me," she said. "Tell me themselves. That I'm doing all right."

He pulled a chair around and sat beside her. "They would if they could, you know. They really can't. Under the circumstances."

She nodded but did not answer. She advanced the file.

How would she respond to what came next? he wondered, and watched with what he hoped was strictly professional curiosity. Her memories terminated abruptly in her seventeenth year. The file did not. She was almost twenty-one now....

She frowned at the screen. "What is that evaluation? 'Cellular programming.'s I never studied that. I don't even know what it is."

"Oh?" The doctor leaned forward. "What's the date?"

"You're right." She laughed. "It must be what they're planning for next spring."

"But look, they've already assigned you scores. A whole group."

She laughed again, delighted. "They probably think that's what I ought to score."

For him, no surprises after all-and in her mind, no surprises would be permitted. Her immersion in the reality her brain had recreated for her could not be drained by a few numbers on a flatscreen. "They think they know you pretty well," the doctor said dryly.

"Perhaps I'll fool them." She was happy at the prospect.

The file ended abruptly at the conclusion of her standard training, three years ago. On the screen, only the logo of the Multiple Intelligence agency: the fox. The quick brown fox. The fox who knows many things...

The doctor observed that her cheerfulness persisted longer than usual, while she stared at that logo. Perhaps it maintained her in a present of some continuity with her past.

"Perhaps you will," he murmured.

Leaving her at the door of her room-she already forgetting him, having already forgotten what they both had seen-he moved his bulk ponderously down the old stairs to his office. The high-ceilinged, drafty brick building, built on the flanks of the Rocky Mountains in the late 19th century as a tuberculosis sanatorium, now two hundred years later well served its role as a private asylum for disturbed members of the families of the modestly well-to-do. The doctor did his best for those who were innocently committed here, but case L. N. 30851005 was quite different, and increasingly absorbed his attention.

On his own flatscreen he called up the clinical file the institution had kept since her arrival. An odd emotion took hold of him then-when decision overtakes a mind, even a normal one, it often happens so quickly it erases the track of its own processes-and the doctor was shaken by a shuddering warmth, the certainty of revealed truth.

He pressed his finger against his ear and keyed his commlink with the sanatorium staff. "I'm concerned that Linda has not been sleeping well this week."

"Really, Doctor?" The nurse was surprised. "Sorry. We haven't noticed anything unusual."

"Well, let's try sodium pentobarbital tonight, shall we? Two hundred milligrams."

The nurse hesitated, then acquiesced. "Certainly, Doctor."

•  •  •

He waited until everyone was asleep except the two night nurses. The man would be prowling the corridors, supposedly alert for trouble, actually nursing his own insomnia. The woman would be dozing in front of the videoplate monitors at her station on the main floor.

He nodded to her as he passed by, on his way up the stairs. "I'll just have a look around before I go home." She looked up, belatedly alert.

Everything he needed fitted easily inside his luxurious Chesterfield without appreciably adding to his bulk. He climbed the stairs and moved down the second floor corridor, conscientiously poking his head into every ward and private room.

He came to L. N. 30851005's room and entered. The photogram camera was watching from its invisible position high in the corner; he could keep his back to it, but someone passing in the hall would have a different angle of view, so he casually swung the door half closed behind him.

He bent over her unconscious form, then swiftly turned her head upright. Her respiration was steady and deep. First out of his pocket was a flat CT scope the size of a checkbook. He laid it across her closed eyes; its screen displayed a map of her skull and brain as if they had been sliced through. Digital coordinates appeared in one corner of the screen. He adjusted the CT scope's depth finder until the gray matter of the hippocampus was centered.

He was still bent over her. He drew a long hypodermic from his sleeve, a seemingly primitive instrument frightening in its undisguised purpose. But within the shank of the steel needle nested other needles, needles within needles, graduated in fineness until the slimmest of them was finer than a human hair, invisible. They were needles that possessed a mind of their own. He dipped the tip of the barrel in disinfectant in a small, clear vial. He felt the bridge of her nose, pressed his fingers down to widen her nostrils, then carefully, inexorably-watching its progress on the miniature screen-he shoved the long, telescoping shaft into her brain.

Copyright © 1999 by Byron Preiss Visual Publications, Inc.