But, slowly, Alia began to feel uncomfortable. She wound down.

Twenty pairs of eyes watched her.

Bale said, “Alia, are you well? Do you need a rest — a drink, perhaps, or—”

“What is meant by ‘Unmediated Communication’?”

For an answer, Bale reached out and took her hand. It was the first time any of them had touched her physically; she felt an odd jolt, like a mild electric shock. She pulled back, startled.

Bale said, “Most human communication is symbolic.”

She struggled to regain her composure. “You mean language?”

“Language, art, music. Language is a legacy of our deepest past. With it we envisage past and future, build cities and starships — with language we won a Galaxy. But it is all symbolism. I encode my thoughts in symbols, I transmit them to you, you receive them, and decode them. You can see the limitations.”

She frowned. “Bandwidth problems. Difficulties of translation.”

“Yes. What I say to you can only be a fraction of what I think or feel. But there are modes of communication deeper and more ancient than language.”

Suddenly he snapped his fingers in her face, and she flinched.

“I apologize,” Bale said. “But you see the point. That message was crude, just a gesture of threat. But you reacted immediately, in the deeper roots of your being. And when I took your hand you felt something beneath words, didn’t you? We humans communicate on a tactile level. Even a cellular, even a chemical level…”

“It sounds scary,” Alia admitted.

“You don’t know the half of it,” said Denh.

“What do you mean?”

“Before you can communicate with others, you have to be able to communicate with yourself.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will.”

“When will my treatment begin?”

“It already has,” called Bale’s great-aunt from the back of the room.

She looked around, feeling claustrophobic, helpless, exposed before these drab strangers.

I lay down in the dark and took a pill.

After I lost Morag I was prescribed medication. There were medicines, I was told, that could target the sites in your head where traumatic memories are formed. Something to do with inhibiting the formation of certain proteins. If I only took the pill, I was told, I would still remember Morag and all that had happened, as if I stored a narrative in my head, but I wouldn’t feel it — not the same way, not so much that it would harm my functioning.

John had always pressed me hard to take the medication. For sure it’s what he would have done. But I had refused. Memories are what make up me — even bad memories, dreadful memories. What’s the point of “functioning” if I lose that? When I refused to allow Tom the same treatment I faced a battery of counselors who gravely advised me on the harm I was causing to my helpless son, the hurt I could help him avoid. I stuck to my guns. But sometimes, I admit, when I look back on Tom’s life since, I wonder if I made the right choice for him.

So I refused the “forget” pills. But I did learn that there are also such things as “remember” pills.

By getting glutamate or some such molecule to work more efficiently, there’s a medication that can sharpen memories, rather than dull them. It takes some analysis by various therapeutic machines to figure out what you need, and you have to put up with counseling about the damage that might be done to your personality by too much memory. But it’s over-the-counter stuff. When I found out all this I bought some pills, and put them aside, kept them in my bathroom bag. I’d carried them everywhere since, knowing they were there but not thinking about why I wanted them with me.

Now was the time. I popped my pills, and I lay in that bed, in that small hotel, in the middle of England, and I tried to remember.

Here I had been with Morag, that first night. We had gone to bed early, still full of the bonhomie and speeches, the food and champagne of the wedding. We made love.

But I remembered waking later, maybe three in the morning, the time your body is at its lowest, all your defenses down. She was awake, too, lying beside me, here in this hotel. The booze had worn off by then; I felt mildly hung over. But she was here. As we’d lived together for a year before anyhow I think we’d both imagined the marriage wouldn’t matter. But we’d made a commitment to each other. It did make a difference.

So we came together again, in this hotel, in the dark, right here. I remembered the scent of shampoo and spray on her hair, the softness of her skin, a slight saltiness when I kissed her cheeks — she’d done plenty of crying that day, as brides do. And around us the hotel breathed, centuries old, and beyond its walls the still more ancient pile of the old city thrust its stone roots deep into the ground. Immersed in my pharmaceutically sharpened memories, I remembered it all, as if it were real again. Maybe I cried. Probably. Maybe I slept.

I thought I heard somebody calling.

It was a woman, outside the hotel, calling from the street below, the line of the Roman road. The room felt cold, terribly cold. Listening to that voice, I hugged myself to stop my shivering.

I found myself outside the hotel.

It was nearly dawn, and a blue light leaked grudgingly into the sky, totally lacking warmth. That light was mirrored in a flood that blocked the street, between me and the city center. I was surrounded by the silhouettes of darkened houses. No traffic moved on the road, nobody was out there, nobody awake but me. The flood water rippled languidly, strewn with rubbish. The world seemed a drab, defeated place.

How had I got here? I couldn’t remember dressing, or coming down from my room. I was disoriented, overtired.

Looking along the road toward the city, I saw a shifting shadow — a curve of back, a leg, the faint sound of footsteps.

I turned north, up the road toward the city center. I walked along the middle of the road, trying to catch up with her. But those cobbles were big and smoothed with use and shiny with dew, and I had to watch every step I took in the uncertain light. I tired quickly, mentally as well as physically.

Then I came to that flood. As I approached it I could see water bubbling up out of the drains and around the rims of manhole covers. I vaguely remembered that somewhere near here the two rivers that ran through the city, the Ouse and the Fosse, came to a confluence, and the place was notorious for flooding. The water looked old and dirty, covered with a layer of dusty scum, and with bits of garbage floating in it. I couldn’t see how deep it got toward the center. You get used to these things; once towns like this had probably flooded once a decade, but now it was a rare year when it didn’t flood, and people got worn out with trying to fix things, and just accepted the change.

But the pond was in my way. I walked to the left and right, helpless. There was no obvious way around it. The side streets would lead me away from the direction to the city center, from the way I wanted to go, toward Morag. Everything was mixed up, made chaotic by the water intruding into the land; I was stranded in a strange landscape, a place where nothing worked anymore.

I couldn’t see Morag. Perhaps I had already lost her. I grew panicky.

Lawned gardens lined one side of the street. I decided to go that way. I made for an old, crumbling wall on the right-hand side of the road. It was too high to be easy to climb. I jumped up, and had to use my arms to haul my bulk up so my belly was resting on the wall. Then, with a lot of swinging, I got my right leg onto the lip of the wall, and then the left. I more or less fell down on the other side.

I landed heavily on my side on soft, moist grass, hard enough to knock the wind out of me. I lay there for a few seconds. I could feel dew, or flood water, soaking my face, my jacket, my trousers. There were high-water marks on the wall, and somebody had chiseled dates into the brick beside the higher of them: 2000. 2026. 2032. And I saw a worm, a long earthworm, crawling around on the grass. Maybe the rising water had forced it out of the ground. It looked as bewildered as I did.