"Why did you have to hit him like that? Couldn't you use knockout drops or something?"
Ellen shook her head. "His metabolism is very different, Demeter. He's been primed for exposure to many different and subtle poisons, out on the planet's surface. Plus, with Jory's electronic stimulation, we'd half-kill him trying to knock him out chemically."
"And now what?"
"In a moment—" Sorbel turned toward the inner tunnel. "—we're going to do a little brain surgery. Do you want to watch?"
"No!" Demeter yelped instinctively. Then she thought about it. Despite his thoughtless manner and infantile fixations, Jory had been her first friend on Mars. In many ways, he was like her lost chrono, Sugar: young, eager, and wholly predictable. Although she trusted Ellen and was half in love with Lole, she sensed a distancing in their voices when they talked about Jory now, in here. Somebody ought to stand by and watch out for him. That somebody was her. "Yes ... I mean, I'd like to help."
"All right," Ellen said—after a long, hard look into Demeter's eyes. "I'll get us suited up while he's being prepped."
Dr. Wa Lixin studied the array of surgical implements laid out on sterile paper in the tray beside the Creole's draped head. He was adept, of course, with the variously sized and curved scalpels, the card of polymer-threaded needles, the staple-stitcher, the bone drill and clamps, the laser hemostat. Less familiar were tools for the cybernetic side of the upcoming procedure: the logic probes, chip extractors, digital multimeter, jeweler's screwdrivers, and pinpoint No. 00 soldering tip.
Although he had never worked on a full-body Cyborg before, Dr. Wa understood the principles involved. He would have to maintain circuit integrity, voltage, and cooling as well as blood pressure, hematocrit, and electrolyte balance. Keeping the surgical domain sterile would be as important as with any human patient, but he would have to work without the ultraviolet field. Too many programmable memory chips were susceptible to erasure under that part of the radiation spectrum. Anesthesia would not only be a matter of doping the bloodstream with opiates and blockers, but of quickly finding and grounding the appropriate chips in the Creole's sensory net.
Dr. Lee had been studying those and related techniques for the past fourteen hours—ever since Lole Mitsuno had informed him of the marvelous opportunity the Coghlan woman was practically throwing at them.
What worried the doctor most was working without a cybernetic coach. The computer that ran the examination table back in his office was responsible for ultrasonics and imaging on his patients, for diagnostics and on-line expert advice with his procedures, for his medical recordkeeping and dispensing. It was also controlled by the grid and deeply tied to its databases and echelons of rote knowledge. Without the table, Dr. Lee would be flying blind, relying on his own experience and the skill of his hands.
Would they be enough?
Of course, there was the crude machine laid out on the board behind him. From what Ellen Sorbel told him, it had sufficient raw brainpower but lacked the programming and peripherals to help him. Besides, that machine had other purposes in this business.
Ellen must have noticed Wa Lixin's hesitation. She did not touch him, as that would have compromised sterility for both of them. Instead, Sorbel pushed her face around in front of his and stared hard over the top of her green gauze mask.
"Time to begin, Lee."
He nodded and turned again to the tray of instruments. He picked up the scalpel with a curved blade, for taking thin slices out. of taut skin, and addressed the bronzed dome of Jorys hairless head. Again the thought crossed Dr. Lee s mind that, for the first time in his career, he was opening a wound in a patient without the express desire to heal. But then, as Ellen and Lole had taken pains to point out, Jory den Ostreicher was not his patient.
When the two conspirators had first discussed this treatment modality with him, Dr. Lee had refused. He did not balk at simple murder, of course; the game had gone too far for that. The necessary eradication of an overtly inquisitive party—a sharp rap on the head and a nighttime visit to the municipal recycler—that was one thing. Lole in his day had done worse. But this was a medically invasive procedure, intentionally carried out under less than sanitary conditions. Moreover, what Dr. Lee was about to do was a kind of therapeutic vandalism, a species of theft.
What had swayed him in the end, what had obtained his willing participation, was Ellen's final argument. She had declared that she was ready to undertake the operation herself, with her own two hands. Ellen had, she said, been studying the procedure in V/R simulation, which itself was a breach of security, and she was now ready to proceed. Ultimately, Dr. Lee could not allow that.
He made the first cut, fifteen centimeters long down the median suture.
Instead of the welling blood he would normally see, the slit leaked a clear fluid with a viscosity somewhat heavier than blood. That would be the silicon under-layer, an impact and thermal buffer serving the same purpose in a Creole as the layer of subcutaneous fat in a human. He retracted the lips of the cut with his gloved fingers and inspected the exposed surface. White membrane sheathed the muscles of the scalp.
With second and third strokes, he parted those and laid bare the bony plates of Jory's skull. Now there was blood, though not much of it. The portable biomonitor hooked onto the Creole's throat had slowed his heart rate and lowered his arterial pressure. It also dripped in painkillers that would soothe what Dr. Lee was coming to think of as the "meat side" of Jorys physical makeup.
Wa Lixin used the first of many disposable suction tips to clear the site and sealed the remaining leakers with short, controlled bursts from the hemostat.
The white bone had been fought over before. He could trace the edges of at least three invasive procedures from this one flap. Like any healthy young boys, Jorys bones had healed with good ridges of scar tissue. Still, the doctor could see the flat bows of bone clips and the heads of tiny screws where the previous surgeons had made sure of their handiwork. Those bits of metal would complicate his efforts.
He picked up the drill, already fitted with a retractor cowling. The moment it was through the bone, the cowl would instantly respond to the release of pressure by pulling back the cutter bit. That way, Dr. Lee could not possibly plunge his drill into the patient's—into Jory's—brain.
"Let me see that drawing again," he said to no one in particular.
Ellen Sorbel made stabbing head motions to someone standing nearby to fetch a notepad from the back table. It was the woman who had started all this, his civic-practice patient from several weeks ago, Demeter Coghlan. She was now gowned and masked. The sketch, made by Dr. Lee's own hand after his brief study of standard Creolization procedures in the grid's medical records, showed the top view of a head. Blocked out underneath were the locations of several circuit cards and their interwoven neural networks touching on various brain structures.
"Thank you," he whispered.
The notepad was withdrawn.
Lee depressed the drill's trigger and heard the satisfying burr of its motor. He lined the cutter bit up on the first apex of the incision he planned to make and started boring in. White smoke rose off the bone surface. Chips like snow flaked out of the hole, caught in a swirl of the airflow that cooled the motor, and stuck against the red flesh on the side of Lee's flap.
He ignored it all, engaged in cutting open the head just so.
Only when the Creole's whole body made a convulsive surge and one arm flopped off the table did Wa Lixin look up.