Lena looked over at Takahashi. He was staring back at her coldly, impassively.“I heard rumors.They said before Biotek Afrika burned, Morgan’s people got what they were after. Implant wetware. Biological
circuitry. Supposedly Pulsystems now has working organic roms.”
“roms?” Molly said.“You mean there’s programming in that thing?”
“I told you it was just a guess. But look where it is. Kane’s right-handed, so that’s the mirror image of Wernicke’s area in his left brain, his prime language center.The two lobes are connected, here, through the anterior commissures. So programming inserted where that thing is, in a basically unused part of the brain, would go straight over to the language center.”
“And then?” Reese asked.
“Well...stimulating that area of the right brain is supposed to cause hallucinations.Voices. People hear their dead parents talking to them.”
“Morgan,” Reese said.
“You—” Lena broke off, then started again.“Wait a minute.You think Morgan did this to him? To his own nephew?”
“We went into Houston one afternoon.We brought back some kind of cylinder containing cryogenic material. Right after that he was gone for two days.That’s when they must have put it in him. Christ. He nearly killed a guy to keep it from being stolen. Do you believe that?”
“You can treat it,” Lena said.“Stelazine or Thorazine or any of the anti-psychotics. It’s clinically similar to schizophrenia.”
“What I want to know,” Molly said,“is what it’s doing to him.What’s it telling him? What’s it trying to make him do?” She glanced to her left, saw Takahashi leaning against one wall, his eyes narrowed as he watched the crt display.
He knows, she thought.Takahashi had said he was a vice president, and she suspected he was more than that. Pulsystems had always had major Japanese funding, and she had a suspicion that it had been a large infusion of New Yen that had held the company together through the collapse of the US government.Was Takahashi the watchdog for the Japanese faction? Just how important was he?
Reese must have been thinking the same thing.“Okay,Takahashi. It’s too late to make any difference to anybody.What did Morgan do to him?”
“Why are you asking me?” Takahashi said.
“He wouldn’t risk sending Kane up here with an implant unless one of us knew about it. It’s not me and it’s not Lena.You might as well tell us.”
Takahashi sighed.“All right.It’s pretty much the way Lena guessed it. But it was necessary. Morgan tried the new techniques on Kane to save his life. His skull was fractured in Luxor, not just cracked, but sliced wide open.Without the operation he would have been dead,at best a vegetable.”
“What is that...thing?” Molly asked.“That yellow box?”
“That’s the processor,”Takahashi said.“The programs are interchangeable.The first software they came up with was crude, barely let him function.When they get a more sophisticated implant, they can change it out, almost like changing a diskette.That’s what you saw Kane bringing from Houston. Just the latest update.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Lena said.“What do they need to put software in there for? That area has nothing to do with his motor control, or his language, or his memory, or anything.”
“You’re asking the wrong person,”Takahashi said.“If you want to know that you’d better ask Morgan.”
“Speaking of which,” Reese said.“Did you get through to him?”
“I told him about the colony. He said to rest up and just play it as it comes.”
“That’s it?” Lena asked.“Wasn’t he even surprised?”
“Didn’t seem to be.”
“ ‘Play it as it comes?’” Reese said.“That doesn’t sound like Morgan.”
“Now what?”Takahashi said, flushing.“Do you think I’m lying about it?”
“Why not?” Lena said.“You didn’t say anything about Kane all this time.That doesn’t really inspire a lot of trust.”
“If you’d known Kane had a brain implant there would have been even more tension on the flight out than there already was.Weren’t things bad enough?”
Lena walked out and Molly turned back to the scanner. She cut the power to both it and the blood processor and waited for the tubes to turn white before she pulled them from Kane’s leg.A single drop of dark red swelled up at the arterial puncture and she pressed a piece of gauze against it, feeling the tension in his sartoris muscle as his body resisted the Valium, aware of the heat of his half-erect penis, only a few centimeters away.
“Takahashi?” she said, and he helped her move Kane back onto the gurney and from there back onto his cot. Most of the other patients in the sickbay had fallen back into sedated oblivion, but two of them were still awake, awake and staring with confusion and fear at the aliens from Earth.
“Go to sleep,” she said to them, and the eyes closed. She turned back to Lena and said,“I’ll get you some Stelazine. In case he wakes up again.”
Reese followed her back to the pharmaceutical closet and blocked the doorway. In his black clothes he looked like an overgrown teenage thug, threatening but anachronistic, out of place.
“We need to talk,” he said.
“I know.”
“What about Sarah? Is she...?”
“Still alive?Yeah,she’s alive.”Molly took a vial of Stelazine off the shelf and turned around.“It’s strange,Reese.It’s stranger than you can imagine.”
“It’s not my fault,” Reese said.“I was coming back.You know I was. It just took me this long to get here.That’s all.”
“I know,” she said.“It’s not like there’s anything you could have done.” Her throat ached with an inappropriate desire to cry.“I didn’t mean it to sound like I was blaming you for anything.”
“I want to see her.”
“I know you do.” She’d expected this to happen, still had no easy answer for him.“I’m just not sure if it’s a good idea, that’s all. It’s like there’s nothing in her universe but physics. She won’t even let us call her Sarah anymore, did you know that? Of course you didn’t, how could...but...I mean, it’s all of them.All the...different ones, it’s like a badge or something. If you’ve got an extra finger or there’s a hole in your liver then you get to have a new name and then you’re in the club, and you get to live—” She broke off before she gave too much away.
“Easy,” Reese said, putting a hand behind her neck and squeezing gently.The familiar gesture, taking her back to her childhood, made her feel instantly calm.
“I’m okay,” she said.“Really. I need to talk to you, too.There’s just been so much...” She was suddenly aware of the open door, of the others waiting outside it.“Tomorrow,” she said.“When you’re rested.We’ll talk some more.”
“And Sarah?”
“I’ll see. I’ll talk to her.”
She pushed past him, handed the Stelazine to Lena, locked the closet and put the key away.“Tomorrow,” she said to Reese again, and then she walked back out into the fluorescent night of the dome.A sudden, powerful urge to see the stars sent her past the animal pens and into an observation bubble in the side wall. Here, in the shadows, she could see the lifeless plains outside and the deeper, colder darkness above them. This was normal.This was the way things were. How could she put that into words that Reese would understand? Because until he understood that much, he had no hope of understanding Verb, or Zeet, or Pen-ofmy-Uncle, or any of the others. Having been the first man to set foot here wasn’t enough, the few months he’d spent in the dome weren’t enough, not even sympathy and love and gallows humor were enough.
The lights were off in their surreal, high-tensile styrofoam cottage. She undressed and got into bed, hoping that Curtis was already asleep. He let her get settled and comfortable and then he said,“Well?”
She jumped a little, in spite of herself.“We sedated him,” she said.
“That’s all? I mean, you were gone a long time to just administer a sedative.”