Free Memorymakers by Brian Herbert, Marie Landis

indeed, he thought.
    He dabbed the boy’s right eyelid with a cold, wet fingertip. An ancient iciness of Nebulonia leaped from the fieldman to the boy, linking Squick with the glory and dimming hopes of the Ch’Var race. The subject shuddered as Nebulons slid around the eyelid into his eye, following labyrinthine passageways to the brain. Squick almost whispered the explanation— Nebulons, clever viruses seeking memory cells, embracing them and vacuuming them away.
    Squick’s fingertip was warm now, and for a moment he looked away, toward the girl. Her eyelids were as leaded as her brother’s, and she struggled to keep her head upright.
    The Ch’Var fieldman withdrew his fingertip, then held a glass container beneath the boy’s eyes and caught the flow of luminous purple and yellow fluid. When the flow stopped, Squick sealed the container and slipped it into his pocket.
    He felt extinction beckoning, wondered if his Nebulon count would hold, if like the great ones he would keep it through very old age. Some lost it in their early or middle years, fading away or dropping off suddenly. Some never had it. There was no identifiable pattern. Sometimes people lived almost an entire lifetime without a solitary Nebulon, and inexplicably developed high counts in later years. So for brief periods the very old became teetering fieldman, taking extractions from Gweenchildren.
    Flames before death.
    “Mr. Squick?” A boy’s voice.
    Squick came to awareness, saw the boy gazing up at him. A little unwiped fluid remained on the boy’s cheeks, which he wiped away himself with one hand.
    “You okay, Mr. Squick?” Thomas asked.
    Damn! Squick thought with a visceral sinking sensation. I produced Nebulons, took an embidium, and this boy should be in a coma . . . without his memories!
    Perplexed and terrified, Squick removed the glass container from his jacket pocket. The container was full of swirling purple and yellow fluid, and he flipped open its lid, immersing his wet finger in the tepid liquid.
    The solution clouded momentarily, indicating positively that the extraction had been made. But the boy continued to look at him. How? The girl stared, too, though she should have remained hypnotized from the words that filled all voids.
    “Your name?” Squick asked, looking intensely at the boy.
    “Thomas Harvey, sir. But you already know that. Are you all right?”
    “I’m fine, fine.”
    Squick fumbled with the glass container, closed it and slipped it into a padded briefcase slot beside similar containers, some of which were empty and some of which had fluid in them.
    “What are you doing?” Emily asked.
    Squick thought quickly. “Special things.”
    He brought forth a large piece of white tissue, and with it removed from another briefcase slot what looked like a piece of unwrapped red candy.
    “Ver-r-ry special stuff,” Squick purred. “This candy is so special and so delicate, I don’t want to alter the flavor or aroma with chemicals from my skin.”
    He extended the candy toward Thomas. “Smell this, Tom-Tom, and see if you want it at your party. It’s called scent-candy. You don’t eat it, you smell it. The nose and taste buds have a close affinity, as you must know from reading science. Lose one sense and you can lose another. This treat provides more joys than candy taken into the body the conventional way.”
    He held it under Thomas’s nose.
    “It’s different,” Thomas said. “I like it. Lots of flavor.”
    “And you?” Before Emily could react, Squick knelt over her and let her smell the fullness of the candy, the most intensely sweet and delicious odor of ripe strawberries in her experience. Squick’s eyes became the red of the berries as they stared into hers, invading her, almost caressing her.
    Emily could not tell hours from minutes. Somewhere she lay in deepest sleep, and something touched her heavily on one shoulder. She woke, feeling grumpy, with an unseen prodding and nudging against her. The