Capitol - By Orson Scott Card Page 0,79

isn't a pleasant memory. My sanity is not a pleasant thing to hold onto."

Dr. Hort nodded.

There was a knock at the door. Link straightened up. "Who is it?" Hort asked.

"Me. Mrs. Danol."

Linkeree stood up abruptly, walked around the office to a point at the far wall from the door.

"I'm consulting, Mrs. Danol."

Her voice was strident, even through the muffling door. "They told me Linkeree had come back. I heard you talking to him in there."

"Go away, Mrs. Danol," Dr. Hort said. "You will see your son in due time."

"I will see him now. I have a writ that says I can see him. I got it from the court at noon. I want to see him."

Hort turned to Link. "She thinks ahead, doesn't she?"

Link was shaking. "If she comes in, I'll kill her."

"All right, Mrs. Danol. Just a moment."

"No!" Link shouted, making spastic motions as if he wanted to claw his way through the wall backward.

Hort whispered, "Relax, Link. I won't let her near you." Hort opened a closet-- Link started to walk in it. "No, Link." And Hort took his spare suit off the hanger, and a clean shirt. The suit, in the standard one piece, was a little long for Linkeree, but the waist and shoulders were not far wrong, and Link didn't look out of place in it when he had finished dressing.

"I don't know what you hope to gain by stalling, Dr. Hort, but I will see my son," Mrs. Danot shouted. "In three minutes I'll call the police!"

Hort shouted back, "Patience, Mrs. Danol. It takes a moment to prepare your son to see you."

"Nonsense! My son wants to see me!"

Linkeree was trembling, hard. Hort put his arms around the young man, gripped him tight. "Keep control," he whispered.

"I'm trying," Link chattered back, his lower jaw out of control.

Hort reached into his hipbag, pulled out his id and his cred, and handed them to Link. "I won't report them missing until you are on a ship out of here."

"Ship?"

"Go to Capitol. You'll have little trouble there, finding a place. Even without money. There's always room for someone like you."

Link snorted "That's a damn lie and you know it."

"Right. But even if they send you back here, your mother will be dby then."

Linkeree nodded.

"Now here's the door control. When I say, open the door."

"No."

"Open the door and let her in. I'll keep her under control until you get out the door and close it from the outside. There's no way out of here, then, except Gram's masterkey, and this note should take care of that." Hort scribbled a quick note. "He'll cooperate because he hates your mother almost as much as I do. Which is a terrible thing for an impartial psychologist to say, but at this point, who the hell cares?"

Linkeree took the note and the door control and stood beside the door with his back to the wall. "Doctor," he asked, "what'll they do to you for this?"

"Raise holy hell, of course," he said. "But I can only be removed by a council of medical practitioners-- and that's the same group that can have Mrs. Danol committed."

"Committed?"

"She needs help, Link."

Linkeree smiled-- and was surprised to realize it was his first smile in months. Since. Since Zad died.

He touched the open button.

The door slid open and Mrs. Danol swept in. "I knew you'd see reason," she pronounced, then whirled to look as Link stepped out the door, closing it so quickly that he almost got caught in it. His mother was already screaming and pounding as Link handed the note to Gram, who read it, looked closely at the man, and then nodded. "But hurry your ass, boy," Gram said. "What we're doing here is called kidnapping in some courts."

Linkeree set the door control on the desk and left, running.
* * *

He lay in the ship's passenger hold, recovering from the dizziness that they told him was normal with a person's first mindtaping. The brain patterns that held all his memories and all his personality were now in a cassette securely stored in the ship's cabin, and now he lay on a table waiting for them to drug him with somec. When he woke up and had his memory played back into his mind in Capitol, he would only remember up to the moment of taping. These moments now, between the tape and the tap, would be lost forever.

And that was why he thought back to the infant whose warm body he had held, and why