Free My Brother's Keeper by Charles Sheffield

his desk. "Don't undo all my work, that's all. First sign of another hallucination, I want you back in here fast enough to set fire to your pants. Verstehen? And good luck."
     
    Sir Westcott's secretary had given me another parting present when I checked out of the hospital: a big, four-color chart of the structure of the human brain, with views from front, back, side, top and bottom. The first thing I did in my flat was hang it in pride of place on the bedroom wall. Before I pushed in the last thumbtack I had second thoughts. Tess had agreed to dinner, but postponed it for one day. If she somehow found herself here, in the bedroom, a detailed diagram of the brain might not be the most romantic thing to find on the wall. . . .
    I left it up. Maybe it would make her feel at home. I went back to the little box-room that I thought of as the study and opened the desk drawer. I reached for the colored pens, then paused. Somebody had been searching the desk. Unless my visual memory was playing me tricks—a possibility I couldn't rule out—the pens and pencils had been reversed since I last saw them.
    Other things in the flat had been moved, too. That was obvious as soon as I took a good look at my clothes, CDs, and books. And I never left the piano lid open, the way it was now. Nothing seemed to be missing, though, so at last I went back, much puzzled, to the bedroom.
    I took blue and red felt-tipped pens and went across to the diagram on the wall. It gave me a perverse pleasure to mark there, as closely as I knew, regions as "LEO" (blue) and "LIONEL" (red).
    Now for the spooky bit. I transferred the red pen to my left hand, closed my right eye, and lifted my hand towards the diagram. Sir Westcott had suggested this experiment, but I'd only tried it once before, with no results.
    No signals were coming in from my left eye now. I stood there, knowing that my left hand was moving. There was the scratch of felt tip against paper. It took a lot of self control to stand there patiently, waiting until that noise ended and my left hand stopped moving.
    For the first month after I woke, the left side of my body had been almost paralyzed. Fingers and toes would move reluctantly, and they felt wooden and poorly controlled. I had been scared, but Sir Westcott had expected it. "I told you," he said, "the left half of your body takes its marching orders mostly from the right side of the brain. You're having to scramble for control right now—lots of that hemisphere was cut out. When the links to Leo's brain tissue come into action that problem will all go away."
    I wiggled my fingers, willing them to move faster and easier. "How can I function with thirty percent of my brain out of action?"
    "Redundancy. There's one hell of a lot of redundancy in all of us—youngsters do well even if they lose half their brain. They just rewire themselves. No trouble."
    "What about adults? I'm not a youngster." I still feared that I would be a permanent cripple.
    "You'll be surprised. Look, if you want to see how much Leo's active in the system without your control, there's an easy test you can do for yourself. Get a piece of paper, put a pencil in your left hand, and cover your right eye. That'll let the left hemisphere in on the action."
    Trying that now in my own bedroom, there was an insane temptation to peek. Finally the pen stopped moving, and I opened my right eye. While the pen drew, I had been concentrating my attention on the functions of the brain, and how it was structured, and I expected to see something like that on the diagram—perhaps a different region marked "LIONEL." Instead, the red pen had drawn on a clear area of the diagram. Two wobbly ellipses sat there, side by side.
    What were they? Not quite zeroes, or eggs—they were slightly pointed at the long ends. Lemons? A pair of lemons.
    No sense there. I found that I was bathed in a cold, pouring sweat while I struggled to interpret the figures in front of me. It felt like the day in my