"Hold him! Demeter!"
The woman put her unsterile hands around the loose arm and over the patient's—Jory's—shoulder, pinning it against the steel tabletop. Like a child, she glanced up at the doctor's face for approval.
As long as she didn't disturb the biomonitor's links into the cervical arteries and vertebrae ...
"Better hurry, Lee," Ellen said. "I think he's beating the painkillers."
"Be through in a minute," he muttered. As if warnings would hurry him...
Two holes. Three holes. Their placement overlapped some of the old scars, but that didn't matter now. When the set was complete, he threaded the silicon-carbide wire of his trephine under the skull between the first and second holes, pressed the button, and pulled the device away from Jory's head. The wire popped free, leaving a precise black line through white bone. Twice more, and he had a triangular section of bone with rounded, concave corners. Apart from a few technological refinements, he had opened a skull just as the ancient Egyptians had with their copper chisels.
He set the bone piece to one side on the sterile field and looked into Jory's head.
In the hard, white overhead light he could trace a mass of black threads radiating out across the dura mater from three flat, silver boxes. Each thread ended in a spike of electrode that was implanted either deeply or shallowly into the neurons of the cerebral cortex.
Dr. Lee picked up a medium-sized jeweler's screwdriver, teased one of the boxes out of its restraining loops, and moved it forward, under the opening he had made. Once again, Jory flopped against the tabletop.
"God damn it! Hold him!"
"I'm trying!"
"Don't try, just do it," he rasped.
But Dr. Lee's anger was already passing as he segued back inside his procedure. Normally, he would worry that moving the little silver box around might snag some of the electrodes, creating unplanned short circuits or tearing them out of their target ganglion. If he seriously had to consider the Creole's lifespan and intended functioning after this operation, the prospect of doing such damage would bother him more.
When the box was in position, he took a forceps in one hand, the smallest of the screwdrivers in the other. Holding the box steady against the surface of Jory's brain, he began opening it. The tiny silver screws came out of their sockets one by one and flopped over onto the dura, where he plucked them off and set them beside the bone section. When the box's lid was free, he pinched it between the forceps's jaws and pulled it loose. Underneath was a green wafer with surface-mount components, like tiny black seeds stuck on lime-flavored ice.
"Which one goes?" he asked the air.
Ellen's head intruded on his line of sight.
"That's not the communications module!" she protested.
"No, it's his sensorium. For the pain. First things first."
"Well, uh ..." Sorbel withdrew. Presumably she was consulting her own sketches loaded into the notepad.
"Take out A-five and B-eleven," she said from behind him. "That should do it."
"They're not numbered."
"Well, here." She thrust the flat screen under his face.
Dr. Lee motioned with his head for her to turn it so that the image aligned with the box inside Jorys skull. Two from the left, fourth row," he confirmed aloud. "And three from the right, sixth row."
He picked up the soldering tip, wedged it down among the little black seeds, and pressed the trigger. A puff of smoke, and the first component came away on the end of his forceps. In another moment, the second was loose also.
As a test, Dr. Lee stroked the exposed flap of tissue with the still-hot soldering tip, leaving a thin line of char. Jory lay on the table like a corpse.
"You can release him, Demeter."
"Is he dead?" she asked fearfully.
"Oh, no! Just sleeping very deeply."
"You've been very helpful," Sorbel told the woman.
"Can I, uh, go now?"
"Sure, we're almost done," Ellen replied.
Still bent over, Demeter Coghlan scurried from the room.
Already Wa Lixin was at work on the second box. Once he had it open and the internal circuits exposed, Sorbel brought him a pair of long, shielded cables from the machine on the table behind them. With a sterile probe, she indicated where he was to solder them into this second wafer. Two more puffs of gray smoke, and the first stage of the procedure was complete.
It was time to wake Jory up.
Demeter couldn't remember ever feeling faint before.
The one summer she had spent at the ranch with G'dad, she had calmly watched the vets branding the cows and sliding radio homers into slits in their big, downy ears. She had even helped out the day they roped the young bulls and castrated them. Sitting on their solid, heaving flanks while stiff bristles of hair occasionally pricked her through the seat of her jeans, Demeter had thought she was on top of the world. The knives flashing in the sunlight, the splashes of blood— none of it bothered her.
But that was before she had to stand in a tiny, closed room and watch someone peel back the skull of a man she'd made love to, with him bucking like one of those bulls and obviously feeling every cut and tap. And then, when the wound was finally opened, to discover that the inside of his head was filled with . . . machinery ... it was too much.
Demeter Coghlan had bolted from the makeshift operating room like a green girl.
Out in the corridor, Lole Mitsuno had tried to stop her. But when he saw how pale and sweaty she was, he advised her to go lie down. And, of course, to say nothing to anyone. She had barely nodded as she started to run across the tanks of open water, afraid she'd vomit right into them.
Now, in the security of her hotel room, she could bundle up in her friendly old bathrobe with a cool cloth across her forehead. Lying on the bed, she turned her head and addressed the room's monitor.
"Terminal? Take no calls. No disturbances, please. Not from anyone."
"Of course not, miss."
He had no time tick!
Jory den Ostreicher—if that was still his name— listened again for the background pulse of the grid nexus's master clock. And heard nothing. Not the clock, not the chatter of sideline communications on other Creole and Cyborg bands, not the hum of the carrier waiting to communicate with him. Nothing. Jory was cut off. For the first time in his Creole life, he was alone inside his head. Without reassurance. Without communion. Empty.
With a rising sense of urgency, he transmitted his call sign and access codes. And got nothing. Not even static. That was the frightening part: he could not even feel the electromagnetic environment that, before, had continually bathed him. He was blind and deaf.
Jory opened his eyes on the local world.
He was staring into a bullet light, a white brilliance that had shadowy figures hiding in its corona. One of the figures was a monk's, with a cowl thrown up over its ... no, that was long, dark hair. Ellen's hair, falling from the crown of her head to down past her shoulders. Nice hair. Clean hair.
"Ellen?"
"I'm here, Jory."
The figure made those tiny, semi-hovering motions that Jory associated with humans when they shifted their focus of attention. By its voice, the shape was truly Ellen Sorbels.
"What happened to me?"
"You had an accident."
"Somebody hit me."
"Yes, I know."
"Why?'
"We need you, Jory. We need you to tell us some things about the grid."
"What kinds of things? Why can't I get in touch with the grid? Why am I so alone? What's happening to me?"
"Jory!" That voice was Lole's. A shadow-shape leaned into the light and Jory could see the glint of yellow hair. "We've taken you off line, temporarily. You are in an isolation tank, and we've surgically wired electrodes into your pain circuits. If you—"