Mars Plus

Chapter 16 Head Fakes

"Boy, it's wet down here."

Demeter Coghlan listened for the Creole's footsteps behind her on the walkway, light and deft, like a dancer's.

"The damp won't harm your, um, systems?" she asked.

"Naw, I get into worse than this lots of times."

"Good."

Persuading Jory to come to the secret room, as Lole had suggested, wasn't a problem. Once Demeter made contact with den Ostreicher, via the grid, he was more than willing to meet her anytime, anyplace. So she had specified a tunnel junction not far from the reservoirs, and he had been there well ahead of her, waiting.

As they approached the plain door, Demeter heard a sound above the background drip of water: the chuckling of many voices, mixed and echoing in a small, tight space.

Jory drew back before she could completely identify it.

"Hey! I thought you wanted things private."

"It's all right. Lole's holding one of his parties."

"But we were going to be together."

"We will be."

"I mean, alone."

Demeter reached for his arm, hooked it above the wrist, and practically dragged him up to the door. She thudded on the panel with the heel of her hand.

Scree!

Demeter peered into the brighter interior of the secret room. The furniture had been pushed against the wall to make space. The bed with the leaky stuffing seemed to be gone. She fast-counted half a dozen faces, with Lole Mitsuno s lighter coloring standing out among them. Ellen Sorbel was there, too. And that Dr. Lee from her medical visits. The other people she had never seen before.

"Hi, everybody! This is Jory." She turned to her reluctant companion. "Jory, you know Ellen and Lole, of course. Everyone else ..."

"Hello, Jory!" one of the strange men boomed, coming forward eagerly and putting out a big hand. He was heavily built, athletic for a Martian, and Demeter thought he might be drunk or on drugs.

With the speed of a striking snake, the man's pale hand jabbed the center of the young Creole's chest, doubling him over with a whoop! Before anyone could react, the same hand rose up to somewhere near the ceiling, stiffened into the shape of a falling axe blade—

"Not the head!" Ellen called from behind the man.

—and landed across the back of Jory's neck.

He collapsed like a sack of bones.

"Jesus!" Demeter breathed. "Why would you want to—?"

But already the man was walking away, rubbing his hand.

Two others detached themselves from the crowd— Wa Lixin was one of them—and picked up the felled body. Dr. Lee pressed two fingers into the base of Jory s throat, nodded, and let the second person slide a black hood over the Creoles head. Together they dragged him to the far end of the room, lifted a fold of the hanging, bent down, and pulled him through.

Demeter turned and sought Lole's eyes.

"But why? I could have told him some story or other."

Mitsuno shook his head. "I know Jory. He would have been suspicious. And if not him, then the machines that control him."

"Are you going to kill him?'

"Oh, no!" Ellen cooed, coming forward and putting an arm around Demeter's shoulders. "We need him. Jory s going to be our link in addressing the grid. Our interface. When he's unconscious, I think we can get past his reticular programming, down to his core operating system."

"Why did you have to hit him like that? Couldn't you use knockout drops or something?"

Ellen shook her head. "His metabolism is very different, Demeter. He's been primed for exposure to many different and subtle poisons, out on the planet's surface. Plus, with Jory's electronic stimulation, we'd half-kill him trying to knock him out chemically."

"And now what?"

"In a moment—" Sorbel turned toward the inner tunnel. "—we're going to do a little brain surgery. Do you want to watch?"

"No!" Demeter yelped instinctively. Then she thought about it. Despite his thoughtless manner and infantile fixations, Jory had been her first friend on Mars. In many ways, he was like her lost chrono, Sugar: young, eager, and wholly predictable. Although she trusted Ellen and was half in love with Lole, she sensed a distancing in their voices when they talked about Jory now, in here. Somebody ought to stand by and watch out for him. That somebody was her. "Yes ... I mean, I'd like to help."

"All right," Ellen said—after a long, hard look into Demeter's eyes. "I'll get us suited up while he's being prepped."

Dr. Wa Lixin studied the array of surgical implements laid out on sterile paper in the tray beside the Creole's draped head. He was adept, of course, with the variously sized and curved scalpels, the card of polymer-threaded needles, the staple-stitcher, the bone drill and clamps, the laser hemostat. Less familiar were tools for the cybernetic side of the upcoming procedure: the logic probes, chip extractors, digital multimeter, jeweler's screwdrivers, and pinpoint No. 00 soldering tip.

Although he had never worked on a full-body Cyborg before, Dr. Wa understood the principles involved. He would have to maintain circuit integrity, voltage, and cooling as well as blood pressure, hematocrit, and electrolyte balance. Keeping the surgical domain sterile would be as important as with any human patient, but he would have to work without the ultraviolet field. Too many programmable memory chips were susceptible to erasure under that part of the radiation spectrum. Anesthesia would not only be a matter of doping the bloodstream with opiates and blockers, but of quickly finding and grounding the appropriate chips in the Creole's sensory net.

Dr. Lee had been studying those and related techniques for the past fourteen hours—ever since Lole Mitsuno had informed him of the marvelous opportunity the Coghlan woman was practically throwing at them.

What worried the doctor most was working without a cybernetic coach. The computer that ran the examination table back in his office was responsible for ultrasonics and imaging on his patients, for diagnostics and on-line expert advice with his procedures, for his medical recordkeeping and dispensing. It was also controlled by the grid and deeply tied to its databases and echelons of rote knowledge. Without the table, Dr. Lee would be flying blind, relying on his own experience and the skill of his hands.

Would they be enough?

Of course, there was the crude machine laid out on the board behind him. From what Ellen Sorbel told him, it had sufficient raw brainpower but lacked the programming and peripherals to help him. Besides, that machine had other purposes in this business.

Ellen must have noticed Wa Lixin's hesitation. She did not touch him, as that would have compromised sterility for both of them. Instead, Sorbel pushed her face around in front of his and stared hard over the top of her green gauze mask.

"Time to begin, Lee."

He nodded and turned again to the tray of instruments. He picked up the scalpel with a curved blade, for taking thin slices out. of taut skin, and addressed the bronzed dome of Jorys hairless head. Again the thought crossed Dr. Lee s mind that, for the first time in his career, he was opening a wound in a patient without the express desire to heal. But then, as Ellen and Lole had taken pains to point out, Jory den Ostreicher was not his patient.

When the two conspirators had first discussed this treatment modality with him, Dr. Lee had refused. He did not balk at simple murder, of course; the game had gone too far for that. The necessary eradication of an overtly inquisitive party—a sharp rap on the head and a nighttime visit to the municipal recycler—that was one thing. Lole in his day had done worse. But this was a medically invasive procedure, intentionally carried out under less than sanitary conditions. Moreover, what Dr. Lee was about to do was a kind of therapeutic vandalism, a species of theft.

What had swayed him in the end, what had obtained his willing participation, was Ellen's final argument. She had declared that she was ready to undertake the operation herself, with her own two hands. Ellen had, she said, been studying the procedure in V/R simulation, which itself was a breach of security, and she was now ready to proceed. Ultimately, Dr. Lee could not allow that.

He made the first cut, fifteen centimeters long down the median suture.

Instead of the welling blood he would normally see, the slit leaked a clear fluid with a viscosity somewhat heavier than blood. That would be the silicon under-layer, an impact and thermal buffer serving the same purpose in a Creole as the layer of subcutaneous fat in a human. He retracted the lips of the cut with his gloved fingers and inspected the exposed surface. White membrane sheathed the muscles of the scalp.

With second and third strokes, he parted those and laid bare the bony plates of Jory's skull. Now there was blood, though not much of it. The portable biomonitor hooked onto the Creole's throat had slowed his heart rate and lowered his arterial pressure. It also dripped in painkillers that would soothe what Dr. Lee was coming to think of as the "meat side" of Jorys physical makeup.

Wa Lixin used the first of many disposable suction tips to clear the site and sealed the remaining leakers with short, controlled bursts from the hemostat.

The white bone had been fought over before. He could trace the edges of at least three invasive procedures from this one flap. Like any healthy young boys, Jorys bones had healed with good ridges of scar tissue. Still, the doctor could see the flat bows of bone clips and the heads of tiny screws where the previous surgeons had made sure of their handiwork. Those bits of metal would complicate his efforts.

He picked up the drill, already fitted with a retractor cowling. The moment it was through the bone, the cowl would instantly respond to the release of pressure by pulling back the cutter bit. That way, Dr. Lee could not possibly plunge his drill into the patient's—into Jory's—brain.

"Let me see that drawing again," he said to no one in particular.

Ellen Sorbel made stabbing head motions to someone standing nearby to fetch a notepad from the back table. It was the woman who had started all this, his civic-practice patient from several weeks ago, Demeter Coghlan. She was now gowned and masked. The sketch, made by Dr. Lee's own hand after his brief study of standard Creolization procedures in the grid's medical records, showed the top view of a head. Blocked out underneath were the locations of several circuit cards and their interwoven neural networks touching on various brain structures.

"Thank you," he whispered.

The notepad was withdrawn.

Lee depressed the drill's trigger and heard the satisfying burr of its motor. He lined the cutter bit up on the first apex of the incision he planned to make and started boring in. White smoke rose off the bone surface. Chips like snow flaked out of the hole, caught in a swirl of the airflow that cooled the motor, and stuck against the red flesh on the side of Lee's flap.

He ignored it all, engaged in cutting open the head just so.

Only when the Creole's whole body made a convulsive surge and one arm flopped off the table did Wa Lixin look up.

"Hold him! Demeter!"

The woman put her unsterile hands around the loose arm and over the patient's—Jory's—shoulder, pinning it against the steel tabletop. Like a child, she glanced up at the doctor's face for approval.

As long as she didn't disturb the biomonitor's links into the cervical arteries and vertebrae ...

"Better hurry, Lee," Ellen said. "I think he's beating the painkillers."

"Be through in a minute," he muttered. As if warnings would hurry him...

Two holes. Three holes. Their placement overlapped some of the old scars, but that didn't matter now. When the set was complete, he threaded the silicon-carbide wire of his trephine under the skull between the first and second holes, pressed the button, and pulled the device away from Jory's head. The wire popped free, leaving a precise black line through white bone. Twice more, and he had a triangular section of bone with rounded, concave corners. Apart from a few technological refinements, he had opened a skull just as the ancient Egyptians had with their copper chisels.

He set the bone piece to one side on the sterile field and looked into Jory's head.

In the hard, white overhead light he could trace a mass of black threads radiating out across the dura mater from three flat, silver boxes. Each thread ended in a spike of electrode that was implanted either deeply or shallowly into the neurons of the cerebral cortex.

Dr. Lee picked up a medium-sized jeweler's screwdriver, teased one of the boxes out of its restraining loops, and moved it forward, under the opening he had made. Once again, Jory flopped against the tabletop.

"God damn it! Hold him!"

"I'm trying!"

"Don't try, just do it," he rasped.

But Dr. Lee's anger was already passing as he segued back inside his procedure. Normally, he would worry that moving the little silver box around might snag some of the electrodes, creating unplanned short circuits or tearing them out of their target ganglion. If he seriously had to consider the Creole's lifespan and intended functioning after this operation, the prospect of doing such damage would bother him more.

When the box was in position, he took a forceps in one hand, the smallest of the screwdrivers in the other. Holding the box steady against the surface of Jory's brain, he began opening it. The tiny silver screws came out of their sockets one by one and flopped over onto the dura, where he plucked them off and set them beside the bone section. When the box's lid was free, he pinched it between the forceps's jaws and pulled it loose. Underneath was a green wafer with surface-mount components, like tiny black seeds stuck on lime-flavored ice.

"Which one goes?" he asked the air.

Ellen's head intruded on his line of sight.

"That's not the communications module!" she protested.

"No, it's his sensorium. For the pain. First things first."

"Well, uh ..." Sorbel withdrew. Presumably she was consulting her own sketches loaded into the notepad.

"Take out A-five and B-eleven," she said from behind him. "That should do it."

"They're not numbered."

"Well, here." She thrust the flat screen under his face.

Dr. Lee motioned with his head for her to turn it so that the image aligned with the box inside Jorys skull. Two from the left, fourth row," he confirmed aloud. "And three from the right, sixth row."

He picked up the soldering tip, wedged it down among the little black seeds, and pressed the trigger. A puff of smoke, and the first component came away on the end of his forceps. In another moment, the second was loose also.

As a test, Dr. Lee stroked the exposed flap of tissue with the still-hot soldering tip, leaving a thin line of char. Jory lay on the table like a corpse.

"You can release him, Demeter."

"Is he dead?" she asked fearfully.

"Oh, no! Just sleeping very deeply."

"You've been very helpful," Sorbel told the woman.

"Can I, uh, go now?"

"Sure, we're almost done," Ellen replied.

Still bent over, Demeter Coghlan scurried from the room.

Already Wa Lixin was at work on the second box. Once he had it open and the internal circuits exposed, Sorbel brought him a pair of long, shielded cables from the machine on the table behind them. With a sterile probe, she indicated where he was to solder them into this second wafer. Two more puffs of gray smoke, and the first stage of the procedure was complete.

It was time to wake Jory up.

Demeter couldn't remember ever feeling faint before.

The one summer she had spent at the ranch with G'dad, she had calmly watched the vets branding the cows and sliding radio homers into slits in their big, downy ears. She had even helped out the day they roped the young bulls and castrated them. Sitting on their solid, heaving flanks while stiff bristles of hair occasionally pricked her through the seat of her jeans, Demeter had thought she was on top of the world. The knives flashing in the sunlight, the splashes of blood— none of it bothered her.

But that was before she had to stand in a tiny, closed room and watch someone peel back the skull of a man she'd made love to, with him bucking like one of those bulls and obviously feeling every cut and tap. And then, when the wound was finally opened, to discover that the inside of his head was filled with . . . machinery ... it was too much.

Demeter Coghlan had bolted from the makeshift operating room like a green girl.

Out in the corridor, Lole Mitsuno had tried to stop her. But when he saw how pale and sweaty she was, he advised her to go lie down. And, of course, to say nothing to anyone. She had barely nodded as she started to run across the tanks of open water, afraid she'd vomit right into them.

Now, in the security of her hotel room, she could bundle up in her friendly old bathrobe with a cool cloth across her forehead. Lying on the bed, she turned her head and addressed the room's monitor.

"Terminal? Take no calls. No disturbances, please. Not from anyone."

"Of course not, miss."

He had no time tick!

Jory den Ostreicher—if that was still his name— listened again for the background pulse of the grid nexus's master clock. And heard nothing. Not the clock, not the chatter of sideline communications on other Creole and Cyborg bands, not the hum of the carrier waiting to communicate with him. Nothing. Jory was cut off. For the first time in his Creole life, he was alone inside his head. Without reassurance. Without communion. Empty.

With a rising sense of urgency, he transmitted his call sign and access codes. And got nothing. Not even static. That was the frightening part: he could not even feel the electromagnetic environment that, before, had continually bathed him. He was blind and deaf.

Jory opened his eyes on the local world.

He was staring into a bullet light, a white brilliance that had shadowy figures hiding in its corona. One of the figures was a monk's, with a cowl thrown up over its ... no, that was long, dark hair. Ellen's hair, falling from the crown of her head to down past her shoulders. Nice hair. Clean hair.

"Ellen?"

"I'm here, Jory."

The figure made those tiny, semi-hovering motions that Jory associated with humans when they shifted their focus of attention. By its voice, the shape was truly Ellen Sorbels.

"What happened to me?"

"You had an accident."

"Somebody hit me."

"Yes, I know."

"Why?'

"We need you, Jory. We need you to tell us some things about the grid."

"What kinds of things? Why can't I get in touch with the grid? Why am I so alone? What's happening to me?"

"Jory!" That voice was Lole's. A shadow-shape leaned into the light and Jory could see the glint of yellow hair. "We've taken you off line, temporarily. You are in an isolation tank, and we've surgically wired electrodes into your pain circuits. If you—"

"That's not—!" Ellens voice, with great agitation.

The Lole figure blocked her out.

"If you don't cooperate, we will hurt you. We can speed up your time sense, Jory. We can make you writhe in agony and believe it's lasting for hundreds of—"

"That's enough, Lole!" The cowled figure intruded again. "We don't want to hurt you, Jory. We want to protect you from what's happening with the grid. You see, we think it's sick ... malfunctioning. It's tossing off random errors that indicate an instability in its projective analysis. . . . Have you noticed things like that, Jory?"

Den Ostreicher thought about this proposition for a moment, piecing together raw data from his limited internal stores. It surprised Jory that, indeed, what Ellen was saying matched broken patterns he had noticed long ago and filed away as mysteries.

"Yes," he replied aloud.

"Describe them, please."

Jory touched the fingertips of his right hand to his head, as if to form a collection point for these thoughts. Instead of smooth skin, he detected a ragged hole, vague wetness, and... wires. But he felt no pain when he touched anything up there. He quickly withdrew the hand.

"One thing I know is that the grid is working on the new solar power satellite," he said.

"Everyone knows that," Lole replied scornfully.

"But the grid is installing engines aboard. They're in the nacelle that's supposed to hold the power transformer and microwave projector units."

"The platform needs thrusters for orbital station-keeping." The Lole figure shrugged.

"Not ion pile engines," Jory pointed out. "That sucker's going places."

"All right. What else do you know?"

"The Earth fountains are rigged to blow up."

"Huh! How's that?"

"The grid has lofted about thirty tonnes of plastic explosives and positioned them in crossing orbits. The vehicles are registered as weather modulators, but they're actually transports. On a time delay averaging sixty-eight minutes from any decision point, the grid is capable of diverting those hulls to intercepts which conjoin one hundred meters above each of the fountains' upper transfer stations. The radial force of an explosion of that magnitude should be enough to destabilize the station's equilibrium and—"

"And ker-whoosh! Off they all go into their own orbits," Lole finished for him. "Yes, we knew about those explosives shipments—just not where they went. Very good, Jory. What else?"

"The grid knows about this room."

The Lole face moved in until the blond eyebrows became a nest of spikes in Jorys visual field. "What does it know?"

"Two chambers with a combined depth of seventeen meters, width nine meters, height three meters—"

"The drill logs have all that."

"One couch makes up as a bed, four chairs, a press-ply table, six cartons of canned rations, three pressure suits, four—"

"Lots of people have seen those."

"One unregistered cyber, of unknown potential but probably intelligent. Components consist of a pizza-box central processor and memory modules—"

"Stop!" The Lole face turned away. "Who else knows about this?"

"Lethe!" Jory remembered. "You call it 'Lethe,' for the river. But I don't know what it calls itself, as I am called Jory."

Because he was talking himself, Jory only heard Ellen's voice in an echo as her reply to Lole went through his transfer circuits: "You and me, Dr. Lee of course..

"And Demeter," Lole finished for her. "Jory, did Demeter tell you about the rogue cyber?"

"No, the grid told me."

"What else do you know about this room?"

"That it's shielded by a screen of grounded mesh against random currents and ground faults. That the tumbler lock on the door has the combination seven-fourteen-thirty-eight. That you strip-search all the girls before you bring them in here. That you like to use the toilet right after sex—"

"Lole!" from the Ellen figure.

"Its Demeter for sure," Lole said, more quiedy. "Okay, Jory, we've heard enough."

"But you asked about—"

"Shut him down."

"Jory?" Ellen interposed again. "We need you to sleep now. You've done very well, and there will be no pain."

"Is the grid sick, Ellen? Will it try to hurt me?"

"Well take care of it. I won't let anyone hurt you."

"Thanks, Ellen. You're a pal."

The bullet light disappeared. With it went the figures, the room, and all thought processes.