I couldn't hear him above the scream of the wind. The force of the rush made the warped metal plates shudder and my face was stinging from particulate debris hurtling past. One word in three, but it was enough, enough to know that he was grateful, that there was safety ahead. And something about going home. Then a slight lull in the roar of air allowed me to hear, "You know where to find me." In the barest of an instant he was gone, and the world seemed to turn, and I was swimming in a cold sea of stars.......

The stars were blurred, and the blurs shifted uneasily, fitfully, and grew together until there was a single blurred star.

Which shrank to a single light casting soft shadows across the ceiling.

My vision was watery. The lights and colors had gloss and sheen from the tears that seemed to flood my eyes. But the smell, the smell was unmistakable: it was astringent, with just enough potency to suggest a taste where none should be perceived.

I was in a hospital.

There was a pleasant, efficient hum to the place, and too much procedural sound and chit-chat for a private room. I had to be in a ward or in triage. I tried to lift my head, which caused the gravitational constant of my portion of the universe to change and urged the room into a spin. I must have moaned from the center of my perceptual whirlpool, because I heard someone say, "She's coming around."

It occurred to me then. I was hearing a familiar voice.

A blur came between me and the light on the ceiling, then the blur resolved itself into a face.

A face I knew.

And one I could not accept as real.

I mumbled "I don't know what you have me tranked with, but the hallucinations are great. Now can you turn off the tumble cycle, I think I'm dry."

He laughed, some of his apparent worry eased by my rather incoherent words. And the laughter was genuine--not just genuine amusement, but laughter of the man himself. Michael Garibaldi.

He pulled a tissue from a dispenser nearby, and dabbed at the corners of my eyes. His face came into sharper focus, but the room was still spinning. I swallowed convulsively a couple of times. He saw me do that, and looked around as if to locate someone. He gestured down at me.

"You'd better give her something before she tosses her spoo."

A small dark blur broke away from the general blur in the distance, and the approaching figure snapped into clear view. Stephen Franklin consulted some hand-held device, then reached over somewhere out of my field of vision and stuck some hypodermic device to the side of my neck before I could even think about flinching. The snick of the instrument echoed in my ears, but the irritation of the injection faded and seconds later the spin of the room slowed and then stopped altogether.

They were still there. Michael Garibaldi. Stephen Franklin. And that meant this was...MedLab.

I tried to sit up, and all I got for my admittedly pathetic attempt were remonstrations from Franklin and the warmth of Michael's firm but gentle hands pushing me back. I grabbed one of his hands, felt his trimmed nails, the fine but wiry hairs on the backs of his fingers, a slight moistness in the folds and crevices of his palm. No dream of mine had ever been so complete, so extravagant in detail. I had to be hallucinating.

Or completely insane.

Or dead.

"Am I dead?" I whispered.

"Not yet. You've only been in MedLab a couple of hours," Michael replied, a wry smile lifting a corner of his mouth.

Stephen Franklin looked at him with mock injury. "Well, thank _you_."

"Don't mention it."

"I won't."

The banter was so familiar, the interplay cued flawlessly by friendship. Michael looked down at his hand, which I still held tightly. Concern played across his face. I let go of his hand, reluctantly, but he captured my hand between his to reassure me. Franklin and he traded looks, then Michael leaned down and asked, "What do you remember?"

I was about two seconds ahead of him. But I was having trouble making sense of what I thought I could remember. There was a feeling of unreality about my memories, as if they were stories told to me, stories without words to bind them to the here and now. Memories of a man and a woman....memories of a book.....memories of water and stone....memories of Michael and the station.....memories as real as the warmth and gentle pressure of Michael's hands around mine. I rummaged about in my mind for a memory that seemed perhaps more real than the rest.

"Stars," I half-said to myself. "I remember stars."

Franklin nodded as if somehow satisfied and then turned away to consult the status monitors. Michael could feel my sudden trembling and rubbed my captured hand as if to warm me.

"The compartment bulkhead collapsed. The section you were in was blown out into space. We were lucky that there were three maintenance teams nearby. One team member snagged you with a tether and got you into a pressurized maintenance hatch in under 20 seconds."

I tried to catch the memories, match them to the events. Metal, torn, wavering....stars....tumbling in space.....it almost fit. Almost.

Franklin turned back from his assessment of the monitor data. I could hear pronounced doctor overtones in his words to me. "Well, I'd say you could recover just as well in your quarters as here."

Michael's eyes were twinkling. They both helped me sit up and balance on the edge of the bed.

"You'll certainly recover faster if you don't have to eat the food here," Michael advised in a stage-whisper as I eased down from my perch and felt the firmness of the floor through the slippers on my feet.

"OK, that's it," Franklin rose to the teasing tone in Michael's voice. "No more special rates for you, no more frequent patient discounts." Michael made a face at him as he held my arm and began to steer me out of MedLab. I suppressed an irrational desire to giggle while struggling to get out a "thank you" as we left Franklin behind us. As the MedLab doors closed, Franklin called out, "And no more payments in pasta!"

Michael was still grinning as we reached the transport tube.

His humor was infectious. I caught myself thinking that I could always tell when Michael was exceptionally amused, because that laugh wrinkle at the corner of his left eye made a little abstract art smiley face. The thought stopped me cold.

Where had that memory come from?

The tube stopped, and a Narn and a human entered, their conversation unbroken. With the Narn had come a heady scent of heated rocks and something like pepper. I could hear the soft friction of the leather of his outer vest against chestcloth, the rattle of the cheela beadwork against the n'vek bindings at the vest edges. The two left at the next stop, still in discussion. I could feel Michael watching me.

I followed Michael out of the car, and then stopped as the doors closed behind me. My slippers were scuffing on the nubby carpet. I raked my fingertips over the textures on the corridor wall, the granular geometric weave down to gray flashing and then a metallic strip painted blue, stretching along the wall. I let my fingers trail along the blue stripe, walking forward, until I ran into someone. I looked up, into Michael's eyes.

"Oooops. Sorry."

He held up his hands as if to indicate that there was no problem, and then gestured that I should precede him. Blinded by embarrassment I followed his direction and walked into the room. And stopped.

I was held by the frantic gaze of the Egyptian God of Frustration.

The shush of the door closing was followed by Michael's command "Lights, full". In full light Daffy's stare lost its immobilizing quality, and the room itself captured my attention.

As I looked around, I was overwhelmed by the scream of my senses that this room, MedLab, the man with me--they were all real. No amount of rational thought or conflicting memories lessened the feel and experience of this place. Everywhere in the room, there were objects, mementos, gifts, possessions accumulated over the span of years, the histories of which I _knew_ and yet could not know.

I felt his gentle hands at my shoulders, and his warm breath at my ear. Without thinking, I closed my eyes and leaned back against him, my reaction at once new and yet completely familiar. There was a brief brush of a kiss along my cheekbone, then he turned me to face him.

"Don't ever do that again." He rested his index finger on my lips to forestall any argument. "I know you needed to get the lurkers out of that damaged section, and thanks to you they made it to safety before the pressure doors dropped. But you went in unprepared, no gear, no lines--" Michael stopped, and I saw tears well up in his eyes. "We...I could have lost you. If Rand's team hadn't been out there working on the section--" His words seemed to hang in the air.

I started to say that I was sorry, but ahead of my words came an ominous rumble, afforded an increase in volume by my parted lips. We looked down in unison at the source of the sound, and Michael's tears were dispatched by a cascade of laughter. I joined him, even though it was with some embarrassment at the demanding nature of my empty stomach.

"Another narrow escape," Michael offered, referring to the prospect of having a meal in MedLab. I shook my head as reproof for his devilish humor. He removed his uniform jacket and without a second thought I took it from him, folding it over my arm and idly resting my hand on the heavy fabric. He rolled up his long sleeves a couple of turns as he headed into the kitchen.

"Fettuccine?" he asked, his hands hovering over the storage containers.

"Please, that would be perfect," I replied. Michael selected the correct container, then retrieved the large burnished pot from its hook on the wall over the sink. Already he was humming, a smile on his lips.

I found the hanger for the jacket on the other side of the door in the bathroom. My memory told me the hanger was there, just as my memory told me that the oddly-striped and pocketed bag hanging on a hook beside it was a Brakiri medicinal pouch, given when the Brakiri honored someone in a ceremony as a teacher and caregiver. I remembered the ceremony, just as if I'd been there.

I _had_ been there.

The first strains of McCoy Tyner's _Fly With The Wind_ overlaid the sounds of Michael being his usual busy and creative self in the kitchen. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. There were spider-like patterns of burst capillaries on my cheeks, the signature of an unprotected jaunt in space. There was nothing to be done about it--the marks would fade with time. I reached deep into the Brakiri pouch and picked out the hairbrush by feel, then brushed the errant and tangled strands of hair away from my face. I returned the brush to the pouch, and unknotted the scarf about my neck. Smoothing it in my hands, I inspected it for damage. It was a relief to see that the scarf had not been ripped or caught on the metal shards when the bulkhead went. It was a silly memento of Disney Planet, but it had given Michael such pleasure to select it....and it had been given in love....

He was still humming and he added a suggestive arch of the eyebrows as he watched me sit on the edge of the bed. I opened the drawer of the nightstand, and carefully tucked the scarf in next to my folded satin nightgown and orderly bundles of underwear...and the book. My journal.

A resilient blade of dried kelf'r grass marked my place, last evening's entry still stark in the black traces of ink on the page. Writing in real ink was a terrible conceit, really, and the ink had been no small trouble to obtain during the conflict with Earth, requiring the somewhat grudging assistance of Centauri traders. Paging back through my entries I could see how the ink faded a bit with time, taking on sepia tones. The ink formed familiar letters, the letters formed familiar words, the words told the story...

I closed the journal, and passed my hand over the cover. There. It helped to close my eyes, to concentrate on the slight pattern beneath my fingertips. Obscured by what looked to be no more than a water ring on leather were indentations, a pattern minutely pressed into the surface. A pattern that was as characteristic as a signature.

I opened the journal to the first page that held writing. The entry was dated some years in the past, and spoke of beginnings and first meetings. But the journal's initial page was adhered to the inside cover, lightly sealed on all edges but the top by errant brush-smears of adhesive at the end of the book binding process. I knew that, as true and complete memory. And I knew, with memory just as real and true, what I would find as I carefully peeled back the first page from the cover.

The image was there, just as I knew it would be. The image sat so perfectly on the page that it seemed wholly a part of the paper. The scene within the image looked almost medieval--a stone desk draped with a woven rug was centered in the picture, and behind the desk stood bulbous gray stone columns with a relief of twining vines. Yellow light spilled from the lamp on the desk, warming the leather-bound books piled on the desk and making the glass bottles of ink sparkle.

He had said, "You know where to find me."

The scene, already so much like a photograph, now came alive, as the view panned around the dimly lit chamber. Dark passageways were suggested by arched openings flanked by more entwined columns. A pile of rubble was discernible in one corner, where the wall and part of the ceiling had caved in. At last, the view returned to settle upon the desk and the stack of books in the light of the lamp.

And on the spine of one book among the many, I could see a symbol. Ornate and distorted as an artful embellishment, it was still recognizable. Within a stylized square, two short lines made a right angle, and the better part of a circle supported them from below.

Now I understood.

His wife's name had not changed much; in fact, as "Kathryn" it was closer to her native "Katran" than the name "Catherine" he had given her. As for him....with phonetic shifts and consonantal drift, only his initials "JMS" lent any hint of his original name...Atrus.

It was pleasantly ironic. They still practiced the Art, still inscribed the envisioning words to forge a link to a specific place in a universe of possibilities, a place exactly and painstakingly described. But now they chose the safer and wiser path of traveling to their newly created ages through the imagination of the reader, rather than creating the Linking Books with their dimensional images as gateways.

What I held in my hands was an obvious and dangerous exception. The book had been given to me in trust, and perhaps out of gratitude. But the real gift was my place, my new home, in this age.

I carefully turned the page and pressed it from the wrong side back into place against the cover. The adhesive bonded as tightly as before, hiding the image from view once more. I glanced over the first entry again, reliving the events from my increasingly vivid memory of them. It was then that I realized that I should write down my other memories, the ones not bound to the here and now but just as true and real, lest I should someday come to think of _them_ as a dream, or a fantasy, or an engaging tale of mythic proportions.

I really should start on it now, I thought.

The scents of fresh tomato and cheese and aromatic basil tickled my nose. I looked up as Michael called to me.

"Hungry?"

I smiled and closed the journal, returning it to the drawer.

"Famished," I replied.

Without Words To Bind Them © 1997 Cathy Faye Rudolph

(Babylon 5 and its characters were created by J. Michael Straczynski, and belong to Joe and Warner Bros., and are used without permission. MYST, Riven, and the characters therein belong to Rand and Robyn Miller and Cyan, Inc. and are used without permission. The rest belongs to Cathy Faye Rudolph.)