But that wasn't her. That was him. Nguyen Seth, the Summoner. Elder Seth, the Unspeakable. The more she picked up about his past, the more she realized how inadequate her vision of the world had been. She had been born to a life of violence, desperation and death, but she had never believed corpses could walk, manshaped creatures could endure for thousands of years, or that another person's mind could leak into your own.
'Don't open your eye yet,' said the Doc. 'I have the lights on.'
The bandages were lifted from her face. Free at last, she wriggled her nose.
The Doc whistled through his teeth.
'Hmmnn, even if I do say so myself, that is quite some job. You could pass for a musickie model.'
Jessamyn raised her hand, and felt her face. The dents in her forehead were gone, and her nose was reset. There was some flesh over her cheekbones again. Her chin was straight. And the improved optic was a solid lump under her left eyelid.
'It's not just a burner,' Doc Threadneedle had told her as he unwrapped it from its tissue like a sugared almond. 'GenTech have upgraded the product to include a kind of bat-sonar, and a heat sensor. You won't be able to see through it, but it will increase your field of perception. One model contains a micro-camera for surveillance, and the DeLuxe Tripball can filter light patterns and transmit them to the brain as psychoactive impulses. At last, a high with no side-effects. You can trip on Christmas Tree Lights.'
She had picked out the combat model. Psychedelics didn't interest her these days. She had long since grown out of her disco dingbat phase.
''Kay, I've dimmed the lights. Ready.'
She opened her eye, and blinked in the gloom. She saw the Doc hovering by the table, and sat up. Her spinesheath buzzed slightly as the bioservos went along with her nerve impulses. Eventually, she wouldn't be aware of the hum, Doc told her. She would accept it just as she accepted her heartbeat and her pulses.
'Try the optic.'
She closed her real eye, and opened the other. Her image of the room was clearer, now, like a line drawing. Doc Threadneedle was a man-sized conglomeration of hotspots. The blobs went from deep orange to bright yellow. The radiator elements shone like the bars of an electric fire. She could even see the faint heat pattern of the cat in the next room.
'Interesting, huh?'
'Snazz,Doc.'
Doc Threadneedle laughed.
'What is it?'
'Snazz. You haven't talked like that since you got here.'
'I suppose not. You have to grow up sometime.'
'Not if you can afford the Zarathustra Treatment.'
She eased her legs off the table. Her blastic-augmented kneejoints were smooth.
She touched the floor, and pushed herself away from the table. She was a little unsteady. A touch of dizziness. The Doc supported her with an arm around her waist.
'Wait a moment. The optic cyberfeed will kick in. Your brain's been told what to expect. It's just warming up.'
He walked her to the centre of the room, and let her go. She tottered, and put her arms out. The Doc pushed the wheeled table back against the wall, giving her some space.
It was like a click inside her. The dizziness went away.
'Try it,' the Doc encouraged her. 'The flamingo position.'
She tucked one foot into her crotch, sticking out her knee, and lifted her heel from the floor. Finally, she was balanced in perfect comfort on the ball of her big toe.
'How does it feel?'
'Wonderful. There's no strain.'
'You should be able to stand like that for a week before the nerve implants get tired. Here, catch…'
He tossed a book at her. She reached out and caught it without so much as wobbling.
'You could take up ballet.'
She balanced the book on her head, and laughed, turning in a slow pirouette on her toe.
Doc Threadneedle slowly turned up the lights. The line drawing faded, and she saw the colours as well as the warmths.
She looked down at herself. Below her hospital gown, her legs were still as she remembered—although her reinforced thigh and shin bones made them two and a half inches longer. She still had the faint white scar on her ankle, although the cross-hatch of scratches on her right knee was gone.
She dropped her other foot to the floor, and turned around. She felt good. The Doc's patented micro-organisms were beavering away inside, keeping her at the peak of perfection. She was hungry, not with a need for food but with a desire for tastes.
'Makes you feel kinda sexy, doesn't it?'
She smiled. 'Well…yes.'
'Everything will be better, Jessamyn. Food, sex, exercise. You should develop an ear for good music. Forget sovrock and get into Mozart and Bach. You've got the grey mass for it now.'
'Doc, have you…?'
He grinned. She realized she didn't know, couldn't imagine, how old he really was.
'Yes, of course. You don't think I'd do anything to a patient I wouldn't have done to myself?'
He put his hands out and fell to the floor, as if to do fingertip push-ups. Tipping himself forwards, he touched his forehead to the tile and kicked into the air. He straightened out, feet extended towards the ceiling, and rose into a handstand. Then, balanced on the fingers of his left hand, he put his right into the pocket of his labcoat and brought out a packet of sweets. He poured one into his mouth and offered the pack to her.
'Showoff,' she said.
He pushed the floor, and flipped over in the air, landing on his feet. Straightening up, he was a middle-aged, rangy black guy again.
'Yes, of course. I don't get much chance to, you know, out here in the sand.'
'Couldn't you…?'
'Go back?' Wrinkles appeared on his forehead. The fun sapped out of him. 'No. GenTech doesn't forget. Zarathustra won't forget. One day, he'll try to take me out, you know. That's the real reason for all these 'improvements.' One slip, and you're excommunicated. He's not like he seems on the talkshows. They called me a Frankenstein, but his ambitions go further. He's a Faust, a Prometheus…and, in the end, I'm afraid he's a Pandora.'
'You've lost me. Frankenstein I know from the videoshockers, but who are the others?'
'It doesn't matter, Jessamyn. I'm not like him. I've changed your body, and I tried to rewire a few of your neurons, but I've left you alone where it counts.'
'And Zarathustra?'
'He doesn't want to improve the quality of an individual life. He wants to recreate the human race in the image of his ideal. Zarathustra isn't his real name, you know. It's something German, really.'
'He's a…what was that old gangcult called…Nazti?'
'Nazi. Maybe. There are still a few left. The Mayor of Berlin, for instance, Rudolf Hess. Zarathustra has certainly dosed himself on some of his own miracle rejuvenators.'
They left the surgery, and Doc Threadneedle locked up that part of the house. He had a large place, with as many modern conveniences as a sandhole like Dead Rat could offer, but it wasn't what someone with his skills could rate in a PZ.
He didn't seem to miss the gadgets and gizmos, though. His house was full of things she had only ever seen in old films with Rock Hudson and Doris Day: a vacuum cleaner, which did the work of a suckerdrone; a gramophone, which played unwieldy round black musidiscs with added scratch and hiss as part of the music; an electric kettle that took ages, maybe two minutes, to heat up enough water for a cup of recaff, and didn't do anything about the impurities and pollutants.
Buzzsaw, the cat, curled around Jessamyn's legs.
