The doctor turned his attention back to the eye replacement.
Simon watched the operation on the screen. The doctor used a syringe to deposit the nanobots into Leah’s eye socket. For a moment it only looked as if the space were half filled with silver.
“It will be a few minutes before you start to see results, Lord Cross,” the surgeon said.
Automatically, Simon cued the suit’s AI to let him know when five minutes had passed. He wasn’t wearing his helmet, but it still projected audibles.
The observation room door opened and Nathan entered. “Hello, mate.” He held up a cup. “Heard you were here. Thought maybe you could do with a spot of tea. Maybe a bit of company.”
“Thanks,” Simon said.
Nathan joined him at the window. They stood in companionable silence for a few minutes. “You just going to stand here the whole time?”
“The chairs weren’t built to handle the weight of the armor. Standing’s the only option.”
“Right. You and I know that, but do you think that doctor is going to feel at least a little bit intimidated?”
Simon knew his friend was right. He took a deep breath and relaxed. “I promised Leah I would be here.”
“You are. Even if you weren’t here, you’d be here. There’s nothing you can do here. She’s in good hands, mate. You knew that or you wouldn’t have brought her here.”
“I know.”
The suit’s AI chimed. “Five minutes have elapsed.”
Simon studied the monitor. He made out the new blood vessels and nerves that the nanobots created and grafted to the inside of Leah’s eye socket. The surgery team had set the program up to identify the various parts of the eye the nanobots were working on.
“That,” Nathan said, “is gross, mate.”
“You’re queasy? After all the fighting we’ve been doing for the past four years?”
“It’s eyes, mate. I’ve always had a thing about eyes.” Nathan shivered and looked away.
A twinge of queasiness settled like a rock in Simon’s stomach as well. But he couldn’t look away. The chances were good, 93 percent, that Leah would get her sight back better than before. There was no anxiety about that. But Nathan was right: there was something about eyes that invoked the gross-out factor.
“Don’t you have anything else to do?” Simon asked Nathan as he continued to stand beside him. Nathan pointedly didn’t look at the screen, though.
“Nope. I’m all yours, mate. Thought maybe I could help you through this.”
“I appreciate it.” Simon had to admit that it felt good having someone there.
Three hours later, the eye began to look like an eye. It stared, vacant and without reaction, up into the OR’s bright lights. The sight of a nonreactive eye disturbed Simon because it looked repellant and artificial, but it took on the same violet hue that he remembered Leah’s eyes had.
“How long does this take?” Nathan asked.
“I was told the eye construction would take between twelve and thirteen hours. Creating a new kidney or liver is done in less than half the time. The eye mechanisms and nerves are more complicated.”
“I heard Murdoch’s had an eye replaced.”
“Both eyes, actually.”
Nathan shook his head. “Personally, I don’t like the idea of those robots crawling around inside me. I’d be wondering all the time when they were going to try to take over.”
“It doesn’t work like that. Once the nanobots have completed whatever they’ve been tasked, they deactivate and flush out of the system.”
“Lovely. I don’t even want to know how.”
The observation door opened and Wertham stepped through. He was broad and stocky, with gray hair and a short gray beard.
“Lord Cross,” he greeted.
Simon knew nothing was wrong. Otherwise he’d have been notified over the suit’s AI. He said hello to the other man and waited.
“How’s everything going?” Wertham glanced down into the OR.
“Good so far,” Simon answered. “But you didn’t just come by to inquire about Leah’s health.”
“It is a concern, of course, Lord Cross. I happen to like the young lady quite a lot. But inquiring after her health is not the reason I looked you up. Professor Macomber and Brewer would like to have a word with you. They appear to have made some breakthroughs.”
“In the Goetia manuscript?”
“Yes, my lord. And in the construction of the Node fields.”
Simon hesitated.
“The doctor will call you if there’s anything that goes on that you need to now about,” Nathan said. “Macomber and Brewer have been pushing themselves for months to get a handle on their projects. They haven’t been talking to anybody. I, for one, am curious that they’d want to see you now.”
“Let’s go see what they’ve discovered, then.”
Wertham opened the door, and Simon led the way out.
“What we’ve discovered is that the Goetia manuscript was written in eight different languages,” Professor Archibald Xavier Macomber told Simon.
“Possibly ten,” Gerald Brewer put in. Despite the quiet of the lab where they worked, his voice boomed.
Macomber waved that away. “As you can see, we’re not quite in agreement over that.”
Simon wasn’t surprised. The two men didn’t often agree on anything until they felt they had a true answer to some of the questions they had about the manuscript. Unfortunately, there were a lot of questions.
In his sixties, Macomber was a frail man with slow, thoughtful movements and a soft voice. Scars showed on his face and hands from the hardships he’d suffered while an unwilling resident of a Parisian sanitarium. There were more over the rest of his body. Simon knew the mental scars would never show, but he also knew they were there. Macomber was bald with a fringe of silver hair and a short beard.
“Luckily,” Macomber went on, “between us we’ve had the skills to decipher most of those languages.”
“That decryption has been even
