She wished she could see more. She had no control over the sensor head, of course; that was reserved for the program directing this machine's work. But from the views she snatched as the robot glanced here to gather one piece, there to align another, she figured out that this particular segment of the construction work was taking place inside a large, hollow cylinder some tens of meters in diameter. The space was already enclosed, the scene illuminated by high-intensity worklights. The robot seemed to be adding a second, interior wall to the one that defined the canister.
What land of a double-walled bottle would be needed on a solar power station? Demeter understood from the earlier narration that these satellites were fully automatic and so required no human habitations. And the nacelles for the transformers and microwave horns were small things, weren't they? Three or four meters in any dimension, tops.
Putting up two layers of thick metal might serve to protect critical components from asteroid strikes, especially this close to the Belt. But that didn't seem to be the pattern of Martian orbital construction, at least as far as she'd seen it. The solar satellites apparently relied on redundant function and constant, mobile maintenance. Building bunkers in the sky just didn't fit the established profile.
"Narrator? What am I looking at? Is this some kind of hybrid station, maybe, with a reactor pressure vessel supplementing the—?"
The goggles went dead black. No stars, no wire guides, no compass pattern. Demeter's head filled with nothing. Her gloves clenched once, spasmodically, and went limp. The phone beads in her ears generated a steady, low hum.
After thirty seconds—or perhaps thirty minutes, thirty hours—of this induced sensory deprivation, the voice of the AI narration returned.
"I am sorry. You were plugged into an incorrect data feed."
"Oh. Then that wasn't Solar Power Station Six?"
"It was . .. not. What do you think of the geology of Mars so far, Miz Coghlan?"
"The geol—?" For just a moment, her tongue clung to the roof of her mouth. It took an act of will to unstick it. "What the hell are you talking about?"
"Nothing. ... This concludes your simulated tour of the Mars power stations. Have a nice day."
The low humming in her ears stopped. The goggles clicked once and turned themselves off without going through the closing logos and date-time sequence she had come to expect with these things.
Shaking her head, Demeter pulled off the V/R helmet and stripped off the gloves. Suddenly, she didn't feel very well.
Dr. Wa Lixin was surprised when the grid warned that he would have to take an afternoon appointment out of rotation. It wasn't the disruption to his schedule that surprised him, but the fact that he could not identify the patient as one of his own.
"Coghlan? Demeter?" he asked, searching his memory. "Do I know him?"
"She is a transient casual," the disembodied voice replied. "You gave her a preliminary examination last week as part of your reimbursed civic practice. Now she claims to have symptoms and wants to see you again."
"Oh, all right." Wa Lixin sighed and closed the journal file he had been reading. He sat up straight in his office chair and sent the screen into a neutral moire pattern. "Send her in."
As the young woman stepped through the door, he recognized her. The plump Caucasian girl with the supposed cranial accident. "Hello, Miss Coghlan. Nice to see you again—I hope?"
"Hi, Dr. Lee. . . ." She perched on the edge of his examination table, rather than taking the chair facing him across the desk. "I wanted to ... um, that is ..."
"Yes?"
"When I was here last time did I mention, well, mental problems?"
"Let me see." Wa turned to the screen and pulled up her file from the archives. It was fragmentary but did include his comment about intermittent complaints of "inability to integrate," which she appeared to have fully compensated.
"You said you had occasional trouble concentrating."
"Yeah. I fall asleep at odd times, too. And, just since I got here, I've had the hardest time, well, sticking to things. Like, personal decisions I just made."
"Since you got here?" He picked up the verbal clue right away. "But not before?"
"I don't remember it coming up before. Maybe I'm all turned around by the cultural differences, meeting new people, that sort of thing. But I feel I've been acting, well, weird,"
"For example?"
"Well, twice now I've had sex with a man whom I find totally immature. Even a little repulsive. In an alien kind of way."
"Is he ... not of your race?" Wa Lixin had heard that most continental Americans, Texahomans especially, were closet xenophobes.
"He's a—what you call a Creole."
"Ah? Yes, I see. You would find such a person exotic."
"Well, at first. Now he's just crude and boring."
Dr. Lee smiled. "You are not the first person to be seduced by a foreigner, Miss Coghlan. Or by a Cyborg."
"All right, I guess I needed to hear that. But what about the other? The drowsiness—"
"We have a longer day here."
"—and the zoniness."
"Pardon?"
"My head's up in the clouds half the time," she said. "I say one thing and something else seems to come out—the wrong word, or sometimes even a completely different thought. It's like my head's stuffed with cotton wool."
The doctor tried to imagine such a substance and failed. "These are the same symptoms as before?" he asked. "Having to do with your concentration problems?"
"Yeah, I guess."
"And, after the accident, did your doctors or therapists prescribe anything for it?"
"Cocanol."
It was the brand name for a synthetic alkaloid, derivative of cocaine, that enhanced the action of neurotransmitters in the brain by delaying the enzymic breakdown of acetylcholine at the point of synapse. Cocanol was supposed to be nonaddictive, but Wa Lixin had his doubts. Any patient who came in complaining of vague symptoms but pronouncing a ready affinity for the drug aroused his suspicions.
"I see." He kept his face an unreadable blank.
"Cocanol seemed to help, back on Earth. At least, I could think of something for longer than ninety seconds at a time."
Patients who took Cocanol in clinical tests reported having "a mind like a laser" and being able to "see through a brick wall." Or that was their perception, anyway. Then Wa Lixin decided to relax and give the woman what she wanted—so long as a check with Earth's grid nexus confirmed her previous prescription. After all, Demeter Coghlan wasn't really his patient.
"As your locally assigned physician, I can prescribe for you," he told her. "I'll make sure the grid issues you a supply. It will be waiting at your hotel."
"Thank you, Dr. Lee." With a brief, reflex grin she jumped down from the table. "That's all?"
"Subject to the usual billing. I still have your account number."
'Ta, then." And, once again, she passed through his waiting room and out of his life.
The doctor was as good as his word: when Demeter put her thumbprint to the touchplate that protected entry to the Golden Lotus's suite, the doorkeeper announced that a package was waiting for her at the front desk.
She took the parcel back to her room and opened it. A month's supply of patches spilled out on the bed. Demeter peeled one and slapped it against the skin behind her left ear. The darkened flesh tone of the disk's outer covering blended with the short hairs at the nape of her neck, concealing her use of it.
Almost instantly, the familiar licorice flavor filled the back of her throat, the sign that her bloodstream was receiving the medication. In a minute or two, Demeter could feel her head clearing, her thoughts untangling, her brain coming alive.