Dark Of The Woods

who or what had him and where they or them were keeping him, but he was equally ignorant of his own identity. Meekly, he asked, "Who am I?"
    I will restore the majority of your memory banks shortly. The nerves to them had been momentarily disconnected. Patience. Wait.
    "But—"
    The tests come first. After the tests, you will know.
    He obliged its requests to move feet, hands, arms. It released his hands and legs of the straps, but only one at a time, so there was no possibility of him jumping and running. Which was unlikely, he thought, considering he was blind and nearly mindless in a world he didn't know. His olfactory nerves were tested with a long series of odors he often did not recognize—not because he couldn't smell them, but because they were not the spices commonly used by citizens of—Of what? He forgot.
    Now, a short sleep—
the voice-tape began.
    "My memory!" he shouted.
    But then there was sleep…
    Yellow…
    What is the color?
he was asked.
    "Yellow."
    This one?
    There was nothing before his eyes, in any direction, but shimmering blue the color of an Earth sky. He named the hue for the machine.
    This?
    "Purple."
    Is this second blue closer to the shade you have called purple than the first blue—this blue—you saw a moment ago?
    He went through the routine for five minutes, growing impatient. But he was afraid to speak for fear he would be punished by further sleep before he learned the answers to the questions that plagued him. When he was finished, the couch settled into a horizontal position, and dozens of instruments of a surgical nature began working about his head. He could feel the brush of them against his skin now and again, though he could not guess what they were doing and could feel no pain. Then, abruptly, he knew who he was and that he had, in the last moments before he had awakened here, been lying in the snow at the base of Tooth Mountain, dying. He had died. He distinctly remembered the passing from the sleep-darkness to that other shade of black, the energiless and eternal night that had been beyond the power of words to describe. He tried to sit up, was held down by the straps.
    Wait.
    He waited. He had a fairly good idea where he was now. There had been a fortress after all. And Leah had gotten him into it. And if he had not died until she had him within the receival tray of a fullsize robo-doc there was a chance the machine had been able to hypo adrenalin into him to get his heart functioning, while it had fed him bottles of blood plasma from a needle.
    Yet that did not explain some of the strange sensations that he had been through. He still felt as if he were Stauffer Davis—and someone else, as if he were not wholly himself.
    There was sleep yet again.
    And when he woke, he was sitting up, still strapped in the form-changing couch, looking straight into the eyes of a Demosian man, when there never should have been such a creature there. The Demosian men were nonexistent now, destroyed by the war and the sterilizing mustard gas. There were only women remaining, as Matron Salsbury had so pointedly assured him when he had tried to find out where Leah's husband was.
    He opened his mouth to ask how the Demosian came to be there—and the mouth of the alien opened at the same moment. For the first time, Davis realized he was looking into a mirror placed directly opposite him and that the slight, handsome Demosian with the wings folded down the middle of his back was
him!
    The mirror rose into the ceiling, and Leah was standing behind it, on the platform of the surgical robot, looking worriedly down at him. As the straps let him go, she asked, "It was all right, what I did?"
    He was dazed, unable to understand what had happened to him.
    "You were dead. You were dead shortly after I found the entrance and dragged you back and inside. Half an hour after you were dead, I got you into the machine. I didn't think anything could be done then. But what brain cells had deteriorated, the machine rebuilt."
    "I'm not a man any more," he said.
    "You're a Demosian, yes. The genetic chambers were prepared to deliver a perfectly structure male Demosian for the implantation of your own brain tissue. That was the problem with the Artificial Wombs: they could turn out grown Demosians, male or female, but not with brains that could learn more than enough to understand the basics of even self-care. Morons. If the project couldn't solve the problem, they were prepared to transplant the brains of