Cathedral by Michael Mangels (ebook reader color screen txt) 📕

After several minutes of running, the corridor widened into another room. It was a comfortably appointed lounge, where a man and a woman sat side by side on a low sofa, each of them reading silently. And studiously ignoring one another.

They were much younger than the way he remembered them, so much so that he almost failed to recognize them as Richard and Amsha Bashir, his parents. So intent were they on their respective reading material—Father pored over what appeared to be a blueprint of some sort, while Mother studied an old-fashioned hard-cover thriller—that they both failed to notice his entrance. Not at all unusual, really. A bitter smile came to his lips. Some things never change.

“Hello, Mother,” Julian said. “Father.”

Father looked up from his blueprint and offered Julian an uneasy smile. “Ah, there you are, Jules.”

Mother matched Father’s wan smile. “We were beginning to think you were lost.”

Julian said nothing. I am lost, he thought, until he began recognizing some of the details of the room’s appointments. The corner chair, upholstered in a scaly gray leather made from the hide of some genetically altered beast. A bas-relief on the wall depicting one of the local eight-legged riding animals. Those details had been among the earliest trophies he’d placed in the Hagia Sophia.

I’m in the waiting room. On Adigeon Prime.

“Why have you brought me here again?” Julian said, glaring at his father.

A scowl creased Father’s swarthy features. “Because it’s necessary, Jules.”

“Because I turned out so dumb, you mean.”

Mother adopted a sad, long-suffering expression. “Because we want you to have a chance to lead a happy, fulfilled life, Jules. And once the procedures are done, that’s exactly what you’ll have.”

Julian struggled against his growing confusion. “We already did this once, Father. When I was six.”

Father rose to his feet, his scowl deepening. “I’d never know it from looking at you now, Jules.”

“Stop calling me that,” Julian said, an arc of rage sparking across some gap in his soul. “I’m Julian now. I’ve been Julian ever since I came to understand what you’d done to me here.”

Mother rose and approached Julian, taking both of his hands, holding their palms upward. “Are you?”

“Am I what?”

“Are you really the same Julian we brought home from Adigeon Prime?”

Julian looked down at his hands, encircled by hers, and studied them. They were the hands of a grown man, rather than those of a six-year-old child. In a rush, he realized that he could no longer remember having come to Adigeon Prime as a child.

Because he had never been here.

Because he had never undergone the “procedures.”

Because he was now the grown man who young, ungenengineered Jules Bashir would have become, had he been left alone, unaltered.

Father eyed the chronometer on his wrist with evident impatience. “Get ready, Jules. The doctors will be coming to examine you any minute now.”

Julian thought about that for a long, silent interval. Perhaps he was being offered a way to recover everything he had lost. Everything that the alien cathedral had taken from him. Or perhaps not.

Procedures. They think I’m nothing without their precious procedures. And maybe they’re right.

Mother held his hands more tightly. Julian saw great tears of disappointment pooling in her eyes. “We only want what’s best for you, Jules. We love you so much—”

He shook her hands away. “You obviously don’t love me the way I am now,” he said, taking a backward step and nearly tripping over his own feet in the process. He felt slow and awkward as well as stupid.

A door across the room opened, and Richard Bashir turned toward the sound, blocking Julian’s view momentarily. Then he turned back, smiling. “The doctors are ready to see you now, Jules.”

Julian’s breath caught in his throat when he saw that the two burly orderlies he had just eluded were standing in the open doorway, menacing glares fixed on their faces, fists as big as cured hams planted on their hips.

Limbs flailing, Julian ran from the room the same way he’d entered.

The air shaft was cold and filthy, but at least he was out of sight. Safe, if only for the moment. His hands shaking, Julian peered through the ventilation grill at the white corridor several meters below. Nobody seemed to be searching for him. He had no idea how long he’d lain in the cramped conduit, and wondered how much longer he could continue to hide. Or if he even should.

Maybe those men only wanted to make me smart, the way Mother and Father said. He wondered how he could ever hope to recover what he’d lost if he remained too frightened to take a chance and let them try.

He recalled how doctors had always frightened him during his childhood, until he’d understood that they were only trying to help him. The death of that poor little girl back on Invernia II, which he had witnessed at the tender age of ten, had occurred because an ion storm had prevented anybody from reaching a doctor in time—and because nobody had known that a local herb could have saved her from the fever that took her life. That sad incident had made him want to become a doctor, a notion that had already been in the back of his mind ever since five-year-old Jules had begun stitching up Kukalaka’s wounds.

That memory hadn’t been taken from him, he realized. He tried to recall exactly what it was that had been hunting down and killing his memories, but couldn’t. All he could come up with was the vague impression that his memories had been somehow related to a church of some sort.

Footfalls echoed loudly in the corridor below, startling Julian into clunking his head into the side of the air shaft. Ignoring the sharp pain, he looked through the grillwork again to see who was coming. The footfalls crescendoed, and a moment later the two large orderlies walked by directly beneath Julian’s vantage point. They were escorting a small figure who appeared to be a patient. He was a frail