My Brother's Keeper by Charles Sheffield

joints even to move the position of the shielding plates.
    I became bored with it after a while, and almost went on down the corridor without even looking into the next room along. But when I cracked the door open a few inches for a quick and casual glance inside, a thrill of excitement—and fear—shot through my whole body. Standing against the far wall was an old, upright piano.
    The question had been staring me in the face for months, but I had managed to look the other way. There had been no piano—so far as I knew—available in the hospital. It had been possible to avoid the central issue: how much had I lost in the crash, and how much more had gone because of lack of practice?
    I opened the lid, pulled over a chair, and sat at the keyboard. It was thirty seconds before I could bring myself to touch a key, and when I did my mouth was dry and my tongue felt two sizes too big.
    I hit two or three timid notes. The instrument was badly out of tune, and the keys didn't strike evenly—damp had done its work. Well, so what? I took a deep breath, just like a diver standing on the high board, lifted both hands high, and plunged into the final Allegro of Schubert's Sonata in C Minor.
    It was horrendous, with fistfuls of wrong notes all over the place. My left hand jumped and twitched over the bass like a demented grasshopper. I didn't care. I plowed on through every discord, and I enjoyed every note. It took me a few seconds to realize that I was getting more than a simple musical response to my playing. During every left hand run in the bass, patterns of smoke blossoms appeared as images in my left eye. They meandered up the field of view, thinning to blue and purple as they rose. If I closed my left eye they disappeared.
    I switched to some of the old Czerny velocity exercises, up and down the keyboard with all the grace and elegance of a three-legged racehorse, then jumped straight into the Brahms D Minor Concerto, attacking the octave trills. While I played, regular columns of green insects came into view over the top of the piano, marching steadily to the right until they disappeared from view past the end of my nose. As I stared, the last of the moving bugs changed color, and became an unmistakable exact copy of the gold tie clip that Leo had worn in the helicopter.
    Perspiration was running down my forehead and into my eyes, but I wasn't quite ready to quit.
    My last effort was probably a mistake. I wanted to get a feeling for just how much coordination I could summon between my left and right hands. The C Minor Fugue, Number 4 from the Well-Tempered Clavier , would normally have been a fair test, but I was in poor condition and easily tired. To do Bach justice called for much more finger control and mental equilibrium than I could muster. It was a total loss. I didn't get a single visual image as I hacked and threshed my way through to the conclusion of a travesty of a performance.
    When I was done, I discovered that I had wet my pants.
    That ended the first Lionel Salkind post-operative recital. I slunk back to my room, thoroughly disgusted with myself and wondering if I had accidentally created a twenty-first century art form to surpass punk rock. Sonata for piano and incontinent. Serenade for tenor, flatulent, and strings. Concerto molto grosso.
    I told Sir Westcott about the whole thing when he came on his rounds, and he nodded cheerfully.
    "Synesthesia. Perfectly natural. Until you get some decent regeneration in the corpus callosum, there'll be referred signals like this. Look on it the way that I do—positively. The main thing is that you're beginning to get signals in from that left eye. They're bogus ones, generated on the right side and cross-switching in somehow to the left, but that's just the beginning. As I said, give it time."
    "But why did I lose bladder control? That's not synesthesia, surely."
    He stood up from the chair—I had progressed to the point where I had a room with normal furniture, rather