The Wunder War

Epilogue

First, of course they asked her name.

"My name is Dimity Carmody."

That was not a We Made It name. But it was not a We Made It ship. The design, the specifications and part numbers showed it had been built on Earth, a long time before.

"What is your position?"

"Special… Special… Special Professor of Mathematics and Astrometaphysics."

"That's not a crew mustering. And you look too young."

They said "look too young," not "are too young." She had been in Coldsleep a long time. She tried to cooperate.

"No… I… I don't know what it is."

"Were you crew?"

"I don't know."

"What happened?"

"I don't remember."

They let her rest, and though it obliterated some memory potential they applied stronger nerve-growth factors and other regeneration therapy to the brain and where the central nervous tissue had been destroyed. They showed her pictures of the ship as it had been when they had boarded it. "What do you remember?" The healers on We Made It were gentle and patient.

"I am Dimity Carmody."

"You came in an Earth ship. Did you come from Earth?"

"No."

"Where do you come from?"

"Munchen. I grew up in Munchen. My father let me play with his computer."

"Munchen?" They looked up an old Earth atlas and found pictures of it. But when they showed her the pictures they meant nothing to her. They found New Munchen in the records and showed her that: the last pictures they had were of a small town of a few thousand people. She did not recognize the old buildings but she recognized the star patterns.

"That's Wunderland." That solved part of the puzzle. And the memory pictures could be Wunderland. Someone showed her flash cards of Wunderland and general human scenes. They showed her a copy of her own memory of the man with the yellow Wunderland beard, and that brought an almost overwhelming response of love and loss and grief so that they feared for her, but she could not put a name to the man and eventually it passed. At a picture of a cat she laid her ears back. Then they examined her ears again and found the characteristic musculature of some of the aristocratic Wunderland families. They found another picture of what looked like a cat, very distorted, in her own memory and showed it to her but it meant nothing though she flinched from it.

"Yes, Wunderland."

"This isn't Wunderland."

"Oh."

"What year is it, Dimity?" They meant, of course, what year did she remember it as being. "I don't know."

She never on that world remembered the Kzin or what had happened on Wunderland, though she remembered her theoretical work at length, when the Outsiders sold We Made It a manual for a faster-than-light shunt whose first operating principles she alone could recognize and understand.