Chapter 2: Ursus Survives

Magician's Merger

by Xenophon Hendrix

Chapter 2

I now remembered the last few moments of my previous life. My name was Ursus Enlil. I had been lounging atop my tower while admiring the lovely bay that spread to the west. The tower was attached to a comfortable house. The house was located on a large beachfront property. The bay was a natural deep-water harbor that handled a great deal of shipping, and the clipper ships with all their sails were beautiful as they glided along. So were the young women on the beach.

I had discovered the node of the multiverse I was living upon. It hadn't been prime real estate when I found it, but I had been the first leader of the terraforming project that was still in the process of turning much of the world into a garden. Before we had started, the highest form of life on the node had been blue-green algae. Now, fish filled the oceans. Birds and squirrels and trees and flowers surrounded me. We had done good work, and our successors on the project were still doing it.

I actually said to myself, aloud, "Life is good," just before I felt an immense magical attack strike me. Apparently, so many years without enemies had made me soft, for the attack had caught me by surprise. I hadn't had time to identify my attackers. I hadn't even realized that someone had wanted me dead.

The next thing I remembered was being a disincarnate spirit floating in the Metaphorical Aether--the physically unreal space that surrounds the nodes of the multiverse. I came to the conclusion that my body most likely had been destroyed. However, over my centuries of wizardry, I had enveloped myself in many layers of protections. Some of them, apparently, had managed to preserve my consciousness, at least for a time. That consciousness, though, was bound to be slowly decaying without a body to maintain it. Therefore, I needed to install it into a new body.

I considered the problem of finding a new body. I wasn't a murderer, so I wasn't about to steal a body that someone else was using, even if I could figure out how to do such a thing. A freshly dead body, on the other hand, was liable to have problems, so that was a last resort. I could take over a recently conceived embryo, but that still struck me as wrong. It felt like stealing someone's child. What to do?

I pondered for a while before I came up with a solution that I found ethically acceptable. It was dangerous and desperate, but I didn't have a choice. I reached out with my senses for magic, which can't be described to those who don't have them. The Metaphorical Aether was filled with loose magical energy--call it manna (it has many names: manna, mana, potentia, amorphia, etc.)--and I gathered some of it to me. Even bodiless, I still had much of my wizardly skill, and magic was particularly easy to do in the Aether.

I created an algorithm to search the nearby nodes--nearby metaphorically, not physically. I wanted a married couple who desired children but who were mutually infertile. Ideally, the couple would have at least a comfortable level of wealth, as would the place where they lived, and it would be politically stable. If possible, my would-be parents should look enough like me that no one would question that I was their son.

The node needed enough responsiveness to magic that I could accomplish what I intended to do, but it couldn't be protected against the meddling of ethereal beings such as my current self. It also needed enough loose manna available that I could someday leave that universe.

I turned several copies of the algorithm loose and fed them manna steadily. It was an immense amount of energy, but I was an experienced wizard used to dealing with such power. I refined the algorithm as it worked.

I didn't have an objective way to measure time, but subjectively the search was a long process. Whenever the spell found a candidate place and couple, I spent some time observing it and them and created a ranked list of choices. I continued the search as long as I could but eventually noticed that my sense of self was beginning to decay. It was time to move on to the next step of the plan.

I selected the top couple on my list. As a spirit floating in the Aether outside the node, I couldn't do anything large within the node, but what I intended was subtle rather than grand. In this node of the multiverse, the instructions for creating a person were chemically stored, and the instructions in the germ cells of my candidate father had become slightly scrambled, rendering him sterile. Fortunately, I could ignore his somatic cells; I merely had to fix the scrambled code in the cells that created sperm.

Even more fortunately, I didn't have to know in detail what was wrong with his genetics. I was a wizard working with magic, and magic is controlled by visualization and metaphor. I only needed enough understanding to create a good metaphor for his problem and then manipulate the metaphor to solve it.

In the Aether, magic was easy enough that I could create and implement the spell entirely mentally. Very roughly, I created a detailed vision of a knotted string squeezing his testicles. I then untied the knot. That is the gist of a great deal of ritual and mental preparation.

Fixing his sterility was payment for what I was about to do to him and his wife. I created a much more elaborate ritual. Its result was to send into his wife's womb the instructions for creating my new body. That was a tricky bit of work that involved a duplication of my substance in protoplasm--a zygote to be precise.

I also made a metaphorical pocket to store my personality and memories and attached that pocket to the growing embryo. The memories would begin to be recalled by my new brain shortly after it reached puberty. Any sooner, and I risked damaging myself with memories an immature brain was unequipped to understand. My final memory before my transition to a new life was of launching the spell that poured my essence of self into the pocket.

Either I was going insane, or my plan had worked, and I would assume that I was sane until proven otherwise. To sum it up, then, I had a new life and a new body that had lived independently of the rest of my memories for more than eleven years. If I had done everything right, my new body would grow up to be a near copy of my old body, and it would have all of my old memories.

Upon consideration, I decided that it perhaps had been unfair to stick my essence into the child who had so far grown up without me. I plead desperation. When I had made the plan, my focus was on saving my life, and I hadn't taken the rights of my clone into consideration. It was utterly thoughtless, and I felt the beginning of an immense guilt building. Nevertheless, to my great good fortune, the eleven-year-old part of me hadn't been overwhelmed and subsumed by the ancient part of me. To my great humbling, he didn't even seem angry.

Hey, old man, thought Arthur. After I got over being scared, it started to get interesting. Am I going to be able to cast spells and stuff?

That's the plan.

Cool. I could forgive a lot for that. Anyway, you're already starting to feel like a part of me, and it's pretty hard to be mad at your own--Arthur grasped for the right word--appendage.

Hmph.

Moral pondering done for a while, I reached out with my senses for magic and "felt" for loose manna. I had a vague feeling that it was nearby, but I couldn't reach it. It looked like it was going to take me some time and effort to figure out how magic worked on this node.

Man, when you were in the Aether, you just pulled it in like picking grapes, thought Arthur.

Different places have different rules. Part of the danger of going to a new node is that one doesn't have a feel for the rules.

Is being a wizard dangerous, then?

It can be, especially if one is stupid. A magically inclined idiot can get himself into all kinds of trouble, Ursus thought.

You're not an idiot, are you? Arthur asked.

I sometimes have my doubts, but your brain is a genetic copy of my original. You tell me.

I mostly spent the rest of the day actively remembering. Other than that, I got examined and prodded some by the medical staff, and I walked up and down the halls a bit. At about four in the afternoon my parents came to get me. They had some clothing for me and the rest of the clan in tow. After they received final instructions and signed some forms, I was free to go.

There was a chill in the air when we left the hospital. It was the sixteenth of November, and there was no doubt that winter was on its way. We all piled into Mom's van, which had three rows of seats. Mary made sure Susan was buckled in beside me and then took the other end of the bench seat beside her. Mary was almost exactly one year younger than I was. I had been born on February fifteenth, and she had been born on February sixteenth one year later.

Susan was four years old, and she was definitely going to be the last of the kids. Susan had been an extremely difficult pregnancy, and Mom was no longer able to bear children, which I suppose was just as well.

Mom and Dad had got married about a month after Dad graduated from the University of Michigana with a degree in mechanical engineering. They had badly wanted children, but none had been forthcoming. Ursus's memories now informed me why they had gone from being thirty-year-olds without kids to forty-somethings with a large brood relative to their time and place.

Rich and Charlie were relegated to the middle bench, where everyone in the van could keep an eye on them. They were ages eight and six, respectively. They weren't horrible as brothers went, but they always seemed to be under foot.

Although I was the oldest, Mary was the true chief kid. When the younger ones had problems and the parents weren't available, Mary was the one they went to. She liked taking responsibility for her siblings, was even tempered for her age, and had a heart that was bigger than her chest. I, on the other hand, had always been introverted, moody, and felt somewhat distant from the others. Physically, all five of us kids had the same dark brown hair, blue eyes, and generally resembled each other, so nobody would doubt that we were all siblings, despite my not actually being one. That last thought bothered the Arthur part of me. I wasn't related to my family.

Dad drove. Rich and Charlie stated making funny noises as they played with a couple toy cars. Susan asked me, "Are you going to stay home now?"

"I think so. Did you miss me?"

"Yep." She must have been contented with the extent of the conversation, because she started humming to herself. Mary reached out and brushed her little sister's face with the back of her fingers.

This is insane, Ursus thought.

What?

You've belted yourselves into this steel box, and now you have it hurtling along at speeds far in excess of what are safe for an unaugmented human body. Worse, you are surrounded by other morons in similar contraptions all doing the same thing. Does this infernal vehicle have any safety devices besides these straps?

Well, it has brakes. My hand was cramping up from the force of its grip upon the armrest. Loosen up. You're hurting us.

Does it have an automatic pilot? Anything to keep it and these other automobiles from colliding?

Even as he asked the questions, Ursus gained access to my relevant memories, but I answered him anyway. No, it's all up to the driver.

Fortunately for Ursus's nerves, the drive home didn't take that long. Home was a three-bedroom, brick, ranch-style house in a dozen-year-old or so tract neighborhood. Dad and Mom had bought the house when they had found out that they were finally going to be parents. For its time and place, it was nice enough. It had a kitchen/dining area, living room, family room, a full bathroom with a tub, and another bathroom with just a shower stall. Part of the basement had been turned into a recreation room with a pool table and bar.

With seven people living there, it was crowded, and the parents were talking about getting a bigger place that was still near Dad's business. Being a founding partner limited his options for just locating a new job and moving.

When we piled through the door, I could smell something good cooking. A quick glance verified that the large slow cooker was full of chicken stew. After a bathroom break, I headed into the room I shared with my two younger brothers. I saw with dismay the pile of schoolwork that had been stacked upon the desk for me.

"You sure have a lot of schoolwork to make up," Rich said. "I have some, too, but nothing like you."

Rub it in, you little brat. "You only have to practice your arithmetic tables and spelling," I said.

"Yeah, I'd sure hate to be you."

In lieu of Rich's face, I began punching out my pillow. It was all such bullshit! I didn't mind learning new things, but half of what we did in school was busywork.

I then had one of the weird splits in consciousness that I'd been experiencing ever since I woke up. At the very least, from my ordeal, I had gained the ability to have a genuine conversation with myself. Hey, it won't be so bad, Ursus thought. You have me to help, now.

Sure. You can provide the running commentary while I beat my head against the desk.

Rich hastily got out of my way as I wheeled around and went out the door. I stomped to the kitchen to fill a plastic bottle with water. Mom said, "Supper will be in about an hour. Mary brought your schoolwork home for you today."

"I saw. I must thank her for that," I said totally deadpan.

"She's a good sister. You should be nicer to her."

"I'll try. For now, I better start looking my homework over. My immense pile of semi-worthless, unjust, boring, soul-destroying nonsense."

I went back to my room and attempted to settle in at the desk, but Rich and Charlie decided to have a dogfight with a couple of toy planes. "Why don't you guys do that somewhere else?" I said.

"It's our room, too!" Rich replied. This was a conversation that we'd had many times since I'd started having to do regular homework in grade five.

"I don't dispute that, but you're just playing while I'm trying to do schoolwork."

"So you think you can just kick us out of our room."

"The desk is in here, but you can play lots of different places. Why don't you two go downstairs?"

"Why don't you?"

"I told you, the desk is here."

"There's an old table downstairs."

So there was. "Fine," I said. "I'll do that." I gathered up a great stack of papers, folders, and books and tromped out. As I passed the kitchen, I said to Mom, "Rich and Charlie are making a lot of noise. I'll study downstairs."

Dad, with the help of Mom and the alleged help of Mary and me, had finished the basement several years before. Once I got over my fear of being alone down there, it had become my favorite spot in the house. Unless someone wanted to play pool or watch the old television, there was usually a lot less traffic than upstairs.

The stairway ran approximately east-west with the top being at the east. East of the staircase, across the full eastern wall, Dad had made a workroom full of both electric and hand tools. It was separated from the rest of the basement by a wall that came perpendicularly off the end of the stairway.

Just west of the workroom, and sharing a wall with it, was another full room with a door on its northern wall. I believed that it was intended to be a home office, but it had never been furnished and tended to collect junk. Just west of it was a narrow storage room full of steel shelves. Everything but the workroom and storage room was paneled and had a suspended ceiling.

The big L-shaped room that made up the rest of the basement was a recreation room. Across from the end of the stairs, along part of the west wall, was a wet bar with it's own refrigerator. Dad's pool table, running east-west, was a little east of the bar, far enough away that the cue sticks didn't hit it. West of the non-office and beside the storage room was a sitting area with an old couch and chair on top of a rug covering the tiled floor. The couch, an old television opposite it, was in line with the bar along the west wall. North of the non-office was an old kitchen table surrounded by beat up chairs. That was my objective.

I less than gently brushed some toys out of the way, put down my school stuff, took a seat, and started going through my work. In Arthur's time and place, elementary school ran from kindergarten through grade six. Junior high school ran from grades seven through nine. High school was grades ten through twelve, with an optional grade thirteen for the university bound. A free year of trade school was available for the non-college bound.

In grades five and six, the teachers were supposed to assign one hour of homework per school day, but it had been taking me longer than that to do the work assigned by Mr. Dean, my teacher. I wasn't alone in taking longer, but whenever one of the students complained, Mr. Dean assured us that we should be able to get it done in an hour. On top of the homework, I had all the in-class assignments to do. "O God, just take me now."

I felt Ursus rustling around in my memories. Calm down, kid. It's not going to be so bad.

I replied with a vision of long hours working on crap that bored me stupid.

Part of your problem, Ursus thought, is that you are temperamental and stubborn. You double your workload because you are constantly fighting yourself.

What do you know?

Well, for one, I have access to your memories. For two, you are a clone of me, and I remember what I was like when I was your age.

Ursus began guiding us through his memories. I saw that arithmetic was now going to be a snap. Ursus knew mathematics well beyond arithmetic. The symbols were different from what Ursus was used to, but Arthur knew what they meant, and translation was almost instantaneous.

Language arts should be almost as easy. As Arthur, I already tested at high-school level on various measures of reading and writing. Ursus had beyond-doctorate proficiency in composition in several languages. All he had to do was study English punctuation and usage a bit and everything should be simple after that except, perhaps, spelling. English spelling was only semi-rational.

There was a health book and a science book. Mr. Dean didn't use them much. He mostly used lectures, mimeographed sheets, films, and filmstrips to present those subjects. Examining Arthur's memories, Ursus decided that the curriculum was designed to expose the students to a broad array of ideas. He would find it interesting to start learning how the rules of nature operated on this node of the multiverse.

The social studies book was another hodge-podge. In social studies, Mr. Dean wanted to concentrate the classroom time on projects. To ensure that the kids read the book, and to make them practice taking notes, he required that every chapter be outlined, approximately one per week. Of all of his regular assignments, Arthur hated it second worst of all. Outlining an entire book is bullshit. It's just a horrible, hideous, disgusting time sink. I could be doing something I want to do. Hell, I could be learning something useful.

Ursus thought about Arthur's memories. I bet you really remember the material.

Well, yeah, but it takes forever. If I had to do it for every subject, I wouldn't have time to sleep.

Perhaps. In any event, I've had a lot of experience taking notes. It should go faster for you, now.

Arthur's most hated subject of all was the vocabulary words, twenty per week. Arthur didn't mind learning new words, but each word had to be looked up in the dictionary, and the entire definition, word-for-word, needed to be copied down and the appropriate citation given. When Arthur had told his parents that he needed a dictionary for school, they had bought him a collegiate dictionary with excruciatingly detailed definitions. Copying them took a long time.

After being guided through Arthur's memories, Ursus thought for a moment and then gave Arthur an internal slap across the back of the head. Why didn't you ask your parents for an easier dictionary?

Mr. Dean said he didn't want us using a little-kid dictionary.

There is a lot of room between a kid's dictionary and a collegiate. What are you, a masochist? Arthur started to think about the dictionary meaning of masochist, but Ursus's memories instantly gave him a detailed visual definition. I found myself blushing while simultaneously being amused at my reaction.

Mom and Dad already got me the collegiate dictionary, said Arthur, and I didn't want to beg for another. You know I don't get an allowance and have almost no money to buy one myself.

Suck in your pride; explain the problem; and ask them for another dictionary. They're your parents.

I don't like asking them for too much. They both work so hard.

Ursus actually had sympathy for that line of reasoning, but he also had a deeper understanding of the issue: One of the reasons your parents work so hard is because they love you and your brothers and sisters, and the cost of a dictionary isn't that much. The amount of time you spend writing out definitions is ridiculous; it's just time down a rat hole. But if it will make you feel better, we'll find a way to make the cost of a dictionary up to them.

Arthur had no answer to that.

In addition to copying word definitions, I had to use them in a sentence, find them in and cut them from a newspaper or a magazine, and memorize how they were spelled. I hated the word search, but the rest wasn't so bad, and Ursus knew some tricks to help with the memorization.

Looking for words to cut out is another huge waste of time, I said.

I can feel your sense of tedium, but it does force you to read.

I read on my own initiative, constantly.

Well, we'll think on the problem.

Soon after I had given the pile of work a once over, Rich and Charlie came downstairs and began rolling billiard balls around. "You guys have to go back upstairs," I said.

"You don't own the basement."

"You made me come down here, remember?"

My new adult consciousness said, Careful, their big brother just got out of the hospital. Maybe they just want to be near you.

Maybe. Or maybe they just want to torment me for their own amusement.

Stern measures were called for. I walked to the bottom of the stairs and called up. "Mom, Rich and Charlie are now down here bugging me, even after they drove me out of our room." The door to the basement was only a half-door, so I didn't have to raise my voice much for her to hear me.

"You two, get your asses up here. Now!" Charlie stuck his tongue out at me as they passed.

I worked until called for supper. After we had all sat down, I said, "Mom, you know that dictionary you bought me?"

"What about it?"

"It's a good dictionary, but I have to copy twenty definitions a week, and the ones in that dictionary are awfully detailed. Do you think you could buy me a new one? Not a children's dictionary--that's not allowed--but a lot less elaborate adult dictionary? A cheap paperback will do."

"Why didn't you tell me that's what you wanted before I bought the other one?"

"At the time, I didn't know there was going to be a problem."

Mom shook her head. "All right, I'll see what I can find."

See, Ursus told Arthur internally, things are already looking up.

Chapter 1: Arthur Wakes Up

Magician's Merger

by Xenophon Hendrix

Chapter 1

In grade six, I got the chicken pox--a bad case of the chicken pox. I remember feeling lousy, and the horrible itching. Then the hallucinations started. The giant bipedal rat was the worst. After that, my memories have a gap.

I awoke with that strange-bed start. I was on my back. My mouth and throat were dry, and my lips were stuck together. I had trouble working up enough spit to moisten them. My eyes felt like they were full of gravel. I reached up to clean them out, but my arm was brought up short with a jerk.

I looked down. My arms were tied to the rails of the bed, and my left hand had a tube sticking out of it. That gave me a jolt of fear until I identified what the tube thing was--an IV. I must be in the hospital.

Wow! Aren't those arms and hands small? So is the rest of my body! What is going on? At that point, a torrent of confused memories came flooding in. I became overwhelmed with panic and started struggling with my bonds and attempting to scream, which came out as rough croaks.

At about that time, a nurse came in and pressed down on my shoulders to dampen my thrashing. "Artie, calm down. Everything is OK. You are in the hospital, and we are taking good care of you."

I kept struggling a bit, but it was beginning to seem kind of pointless. Still, I was badly frightened. "Help," I attempted to croak.

"If you calm down. I'll get you some ice chips." Ice chips. Ice chips would feel good. I forced myself to be still. After I had quit moving for several seconds, the nurse said, "Are you going to be all right now?"

I nodded. She let go of me and hurried out. I noticed that I was in a semi-private room, but there was no one in the bed next to mine. I worked at trying to keep myself calm. It wasn't easy, but I at least didn't move, except for a tremble in my hands and legs. Things were not right, definitely not right. Memories were still flooding me at a rate too fast to comprehend.

A few minutes later, the nurse came back with a cup of ice and a doctor. At that moment, I was far more interested in the ice. "This is Dr. Clawson."

"Hi," I tried to say.

The doctor returned my greeting and got down to doctor business with her stethoscope and penlight. She was young for a physician, had dark blonde hair tied back in a loose bun, eyeglasses, and was rather stacked. I distractedly noted that it felt good when she pressed against me as she conducted her examination.

The nurse spooned a heap of ice into my mouth, and it was heaven. She then began to cut me loose with blunt scissors. "Don't pull out your IV," she warned, "or we'll have to tie you back up." She left after that.

"Can you talk now?" Dr. Clawson asked after I had sucked on the ice for a bit.

"I think so." My voice was hoarse, but it was working again.

"Some of my questions might seem a bit silly, but you were unconscious for quite a while, and I'm just checking to make sure your head is working OK."

I nodded, "All right." Dr. Clawson was hot! When had I started noticing things like that? Why, I had been noticing things like that for years. No I hadn't, it had only been a bit over a year, at most. What! That can't be right. I felt the panic building again, but I struggled to keep it down.

"Do you know where you are?"

"A hospital."

"Umm hmm, and what is your full name?"

"Urs--," no, that wasn't right. "Arthur Teagan Powyr."

"How old are you?"

I had to think about that a bit. "Eleven. I'll be twelve in a few months."

"Where do you live?"

I had to think about that, too. "31266 Dewey Drive."

"What country?"

"The United Provinces of Novi Orbis."

"Province?"

"Michigana."

"And city."

"Packard."

"What year is it?"

Again, I had to think. "1973."

"What are your parents' names?"

"Warren and Agnes Powyr."

"Do you have any brothers and sisters?"

"Uh-huh, four."

"What are their names?"

"Mary, Rich, Charlie, and Susan."

The questions continued in that vein for a while, then the nurse returned with a woman who looked familiar. She was well built and had brown hair, blue eyes, was somewhat shorter than average and good looking. She was my mother, wasn't she? But I remembered a different woman being my mother. No, no--this woman in front of me was definitely my mother.

"Hi, Mom," I said softly.

We weren't a touchy-feely family, but she did come over and brush the hair off my forehead. "You had us worried as hell, you little shit." She smiled when she said it.

"How did I get in here?"

"What do you remember?"

"I remember waking up with chicken pox on Friday morning and being taken to the doctor to make sure that is what it really was. Then I remember a couple of days feeling miserable and a lot of dreams and nightmares and some hallucinations, I think. After that, I don't remember anything, until now."

"Last Monday, I went into your room to check on you a few times," Mom said. "When you hadn't woken up by noon, I gave you a shake and couldn't get you up. Dad came home from work, and we took you to the doctor. Even jabbing you with a needle didn't get you to wake up, so you were admitted to the hospital.

"This is next Monday. You've been out for over a week. You've been having nightmares and yelled in your sleep a lot and thrashed around, but nothing has been able to wake you up."

Dr. Clawson interjected, "It's one of the weirdest things I've ever seen. It wasn't a coma. You went through all the normal stages of sleep and mumbled a lot, but you just wouldn't wake up." She addressed my mother. "He takes a bit longer than normal to respond to the standard memory questions, but his answers are correct. Physically, he looks fine, other than some apparent anxiety, but I think we should keep him at least another day for observation."

The adults in the room continued to talk over me for a while. I felt a bit peeved at being excluded. Wasn't I the one who was sick?

Calm down, a voice said in my head. That frightened me enough that I forgot about being ticked off. I had the urge to hide. But how could I hide from a voice in my head?

"Are you all right, Art?" Mom asked. "You look like you just pissed yourself."

"I felt really scared for a second."

That caused Dr. Clawson to prod me some more. "Do you feel OK now, or are you still feeling scared?"

"I'm OK."

"You look anxious."

"I feel nervous, but it's not too bad."

"Let someone know if it gets bad. We can give you something for anxiety, but I'd rather not if we don't have to."

I acknowledged her instructions. When the doctor left, I asked my mother, "Is Dad at work?" He was a partner in an engineering consulting firm that did a lot of automotive jobs.

"He was, but I phoned him. He's on his way."

Mom began to fill me in on recent family doings. "By last Monday, the rest of you little monsters were down with chicken pox, too, and I'm not going to forget that you were the one who dragged it home," she said with a smile. I was the oldest of the five kids.

"It sounds like you had an interesting week," I said.

"You can take your 'interesting week' and shove it up your ass, thank you. The next time you feel like livening up my routine, you can get me a box of assorted chocolates."

"Is everyone still off school?"

"This is their first day back."

"Who's taking care of Susan?" She was too young to go to school.

"Mrs. Pullik has her." Mrs. Pullik lived across the street. I did not like her in the least, but Mom was strangely friendly with her.

Dad showed up and asked me the standard questions and then told me the story of the last week from his point of view. Like Mom, he was forty-one years old. He had blue eyes and dark hair, almost black. He was about medium height, but he had a heavy frame.

We chatted in between a parade of doctors who came in and out to check on me. It was agreed that I could go home the next afternoon if everything still looked good. When the nurse brought me in some bland lunch, I encouraged my parents to go ahead and get on with their day. "I feel a bit weak, but other than that, I'm fine. Why should all three of us sit here and be bored silly?"

"We are parents," Mom said. "It is our duty to be bored silly for the sake of our children."

"You have done your parental duty. I'll find some way to keep myself amused. I might even watch game shows on that fine television hanging on the wall." After a bit more encouragement, they left, and I ate some of the alleged food while I thought.

I had desperately wanted to get alone for a while. I had a lot to think about, including an alarming situation: I now had at least two sets of memories in my head. The smallest set of memories was of growing up in a suburb of Detroit. In those memories, I was an eleven-year-old boy who had recently entered puberty, the eldest child of a fairly large family. I was in grade six in the public schools.

The other set or sets of memories were vast. In them I was an old--no, ancient--man, but I was in excellent health and kept that way by magic. Not advanced technology indistinguishable from, but actual magic. I was a magician, a wizard, who had lived for so long in so many different places that I had literally forgotten how old I was, but it was well over a millennium.

As I reclined in the hospital bed, I wondered what in the world was going on. I had never before had the memory of being an ancient wizard. Was I going crazy? I felt another panic attack coming on, but then the voice in my head that had frightened me before said Relax. You are fine.

The voice didn't frighten me so badly the second time. A memory came to me out of my supposed previous life. I began taking slow breaths, filling myself with air from the bottom of my lungs to the top. Once the breathing pattern was established, I curled up my toes as tightly as I could and then relaxed them totally. Then I tightened and relaxed my calf muscles, then my thighs. I worked my way up to my forehead and then just lay there feeling pleasantly loose. I concentrated again on my breathing until it was the only thing I concentrated upon. After a while, I was concentrating on nothing at all.

I lost track of the passage of time, but Nurse Adler (I finally looked at her ID badge) eventually interrupted my meditation. "We're going to have to remove your urinary catheter and get you out of bed to walk around some." She forthrightly turned back the covers and lifted my gown.

The catheter removal embarrassed the eleven-year-old part of me, but I was glad to be able to get out of bed. My IV was suspended from a wheeled stand, so I could drag it with me as Nurse Adler walked me up and down the hall a few times. I felt weak, but I didn't have any trouble walking around.

Once she was convinced that I was steady on my feet, she took me back to my room and gave me a towel, comb, sponge, clean gown, and a bottle of soap that doubled as shampoo. She taped a plastic bag over my left hand to protect the IV site and then sent me into the bathroom to take a shower.

"Do you think you will need any help getting cleaned up?" she asked in a teasing voice.

The voice in my head said, I bet her help would be lots of fun.

The juvenile part of my mind was somewhat embarrassed, and I just said, "I'm pretty sure I can manage, thanks," but then the voice in my head said aloud, "but if your heart is set on helping, you can wash my back." Oh my God! It could take over my speech!

She laughed and said, "I'm sure you can handle that on your own." She stayed near, just outside the door, for a little while and then told me she was leaving.

The ancient resident in my mind took the opportunity to inspect its new body as I gave it a thorough scrubbing by rote action. I had a few hairs under my arms and near my groin, so I definitely had entered puberty. I was a bit pudgy. I had a lot of freckles. My memories told me that I was in the middle of a growth spurt and currently was tall compared to most of the other boys my age. I had the reputation of being rather clumsy.

I stuck my head out of the shower and took a good look in the bathroom mirror. The old mind noted that my hair was very dark brown and somewhat long. My eyes were blue. There weren't any major disfigurements. I had a medium-size nose. My ears were back against my skull. My chin looked decent. We look just like I remember me looking as a kid, he thought at me. I could "hear" the satisfied tone in his thoughts.

What are you doing in my head? I thought back at him.

Hmmm, that's and excellent question. I don't know, but it feels like I should know. If you know what I mean. Actually, I did know what he (it?) meant. I was rapidly getting used to the extra voice being there, and I realized that I could feel what it felt.

You really a wizard?

Yeah.

You have a name?

Pretty sure I do. I think it's Ursus, but don't quote me on that.

I turned off the water, put the bag for my hand on a shelf, and dried myself. Then I put on the fresh gown and the paper slippers they had issued me. I shuffled over and took a look inside the wardrobe across from my bed and found the pajamas I remembered putting on before this ordeal started. I gratefully pulled on the bottoms. The backless gown had made me feel unpleasantly vulnerable. What an utterly damnable garment thought the voice of the wizard.

After that, I made myself comfortable and started sorting through what were apparently memories of two different lives. There were a lot to sort through. Other than the occasional interruptions of medical personnel coming to check on me, it kept me occupied the rest of the afternoon. I several times tried to recall how I had managed to get myself into this situation, but the memory felt just out of reach.

By the time supper came around, I was feeling ravenous and ate everything they gave me, even though I didn't like most of it. (The lime gelatin was OK.) A half hour or so later, my parents showed up with my siblings. Mom handed me a chocolate milkshake. "Bless you," I said. Talking in multiple streams, the kids told me their accounts of the previous week's events. I had now heard it in three different versions, but in a family our size, such repetitions were the norm.

I started making big yawns. "Sorry," I said.

"We better let Art get some sleep," Dad said. "It sounds like his body needs some more rest."

Mom looked worried. "What if he has trouble waking up again?"

"Did the doctors say to keep him awake?"

"No. I'm worried, though."

"I can't give up sleeping, Mom."

Mom must have decided there wasn't anything she could do, because they all soon cleared out. I had a dream-fraught night, but I didn't have any trouble waking up. In the morning, I had a bunch more memories to sort through.