Eric Chow's voice from the console said, 'Charley, we've got
a problem.'
Charley started to reach for the console, then stopped and
said, 'Do you want to watch this?' He looked at both Lizzie and
Gonzales.
'I need to,' Lizzie said.
'Me, too,' Gonzales said.
Charley waved his hands in the air and said, 'Okay,' and
flipped a switch. The console's main screen lit with a picture of
the radical care facility where Jerry was being maintained. Half
a dozen people floated around the central bubble; they wore white
neck-to-toe surgical garb and transparent plastic head covers.
Inside the bubble, the creature that had been Jerry spasmed inside
a restraining net. His every body surface seemed to vibrate, and
he made a high keening that Gonzales thought was the worst noise
he'd ever heard.
'Eric, have you got a diagnosis?' Charley asked.
Eric turned to face the room's primary camera.
'Yeah, total neural collapse.'
'Prognosis?'
'You're kidding, right?'
'For the record, Eric.'
Gonzales noticed with some fascination that Eric had begun to
sweat visibly as he and Charley talked, and now the man's eyes
seemed to grow larger, and he said, 'He's deadhe's been dead, he
will be deadand he's worse dead than he was before he'll tear
himself to pieces on the restraints, I supposethat's my
prognosis. This is not a goddamn patient, Charley. This is a
frog leg from biology class, that's all. Man, we need to talk
this thing over with Aleph.'
Charley said, 'We can't contact Aleph; no one can.'
'Fucking shit,' Eric said.
Gonzales turned as the door behind him opened, and saw
Showalter and Horn coming in. Showalter's nostrils were flared
she was angry and suspiciouswhile Horn was trying to look poker-
faced, but Gonzales could see through him like he was made of
glassthe motherfucker was happy; things were going the way he
wanted.
'The report I got was half an hour old,' Showalter said.
'What's new?'
'Talk to Eric,' Charley said.
Lizzie went toward the side door, and Gonzales followed her
out of the room, along the narrow hallway and into the room where
Diana lay under black, webbed restraining straps. Her face was
pale, but her vital signs were strong, and her neural activity was
high-end normal in all modes. The twins sat next to her, making
comments unintelligible to anyone but themselves and intently
watching the monitor screen, where amber and green were the
predominant colors.
A great beefy man walked circles around Diana's couch. He
had thick arms and a pot belly and a low forehead under thick
black hair; and his brow was wrinkled as if he were to puzzling
out the nature of things. As he walked, the words tumbled out of
him. When he saw Lizzie and Gonzales, he said, 'Very unusual,
very tricky. Troubling. Troubling but interesting. Very
troubling. Very interesting. When whenwhenwwhenwhenwhen when
I find, find it, hah, I'll know then.'
Lizzie said, 'Any recent changes?'
Shaking his head sideways, he continued to walk.
Lizzie went back into the hallway, and Gonzales stopped her
there by putting his hand on her arm. He asked, 'Are you all
right?'
'I don't know,' she said, and he could read some of his own
trouble in her face. But there was something else there, a closed
look to her face. She said, 'Please don't ask questions. Too
much is going on now.'
The door opened immediately when they came up, and they found
Showalter saying, 'We are not meddling in those matters. We are
asking you to give us a choice of actions.'
'What's up?' Lizzie asked.
The four of them turned to look at the screen, which had
suddenly gone silent.
#
On the polished steel of the table, a gutted carcass lay. On
the corpse's ventral surface, flaps of skin had been peeled back
to reveal the empty abdominal and thoracic cavities; on its dorsal
surface, the spine stood bare. The top of the head had been sawn
off, the brain removed, the scalp dropped down to the neck.
A sam moved around the table, its stalks whispering beneath
it. It pulled a steel trolley on which sat a number of labeled
plastic bags, each containing an organ. The sam stopped and took
one of the bags from the table and set it next to the carcass's
open skull. It slit the plastic with a serrated extensor, then
reached into the bag with a pair of spidery seven-fingered
'hands,' gently lifted the brain inside, tilted it, and placed it
into the skull, then fit the skull's sawn top back in place.
Using surgical thread and a needle appearing from an extensor, the
sam quickly basted the scalp flaps to hold the two parts of the
skull together. As the minutes passed, the sam worked to replace
the carcass's organs and stitch its frontal edges.
The sam pushed the trolley aside and brought up a gurney with
a shroud of white cotton lying open on it. One extensor under the
corpse's thighs, the other under the top of its spine, the sam
lifted the corpse and placed it into the shroud. It brought the
sides of the shroud together and, using again the silk thread and
needle, sewed the cotton shut.
The sam stood motionless for a moment, this part of the job
finished, then gathered the empty plastic bags and placed them in
a disposal chute. It scrubbed the autopsy table, working quickly
