“Maybe I could come out there instead.”
“You’re sure?”
“Why not? I’m the one with the questions.”
“You’d need to drive. Are you mobile?”
“That’s something I was planning on taking care of anyway,” Kieran said. He thought rapidly. There was enough time to find himself a vehicle and get out there. “How about if I make it late this afternoon?” he suggested.
“That sounds good. I’ll give you directions on how to get here. . . .”
Kieran finished the call and put the comset back in his jacket pocket. “Come on,” he said to Guinness. “It’s time we stopped by and paid our respects to Brother Mahom.”
9
June picked her way through to Tom Norgent’s paper-strewn desk and work terminal, located amid the clutter of electrical racking, pipe mazes, and other equipment surrounding the reconstitution chamber in the R-Lab. A few other people were working in the vicinity, but the frenzy of activity that had characterized the previous couple of days had largely abated.
Tom was in his sixties, with a grizzled beard, button-nosed, Mars-tanned face, and a balding scalp merging with his forehead to leave an atoll reef of whitish hair fringing the back and sides. He greeted her in shirt sleeves and loose khaki pants, pulling a folding chair out from a gap by a table with charts and manuals on top, and having to clear some boxes and a piece of instrumentation out of the way to make room.
June had dealt with him intermittently through her time with the project, finding him genial enough, if a bit inclined toward fussiness—Santa Claus out of uniform, fresh from a beard trim. During the ride back into Quantonix, the thought had crossed her mind that Elaine might not have been the only person involved in this, and if Sarda’s partial amnesia had indeed been brought about by neural manipulation, it would have needed precisely the kind of inside expertise that Norgent possessed. All the same, although she had learned to be wary of external impressions, she found it all but impossible to picture him in the role of accessory to dire conspiracy and intrigue.
“I was wondering when it would be my turn to get the treatment,” he said after he had sat down and cleared space on the desk for his elbows. “Leo says you’ve been squeezing everyone else’s brains like lemons. . . . Do you know where Leo is, by the way? Max said he went rushing off this morning with some kind of personal problem, and we haven’t seen him since.”
June shook her head. “I’ve just got back in.”
“Where’s that friend you had here the other day—Kieran, was it?”
“Oh, out on business. He’s thinking of getting a place here. He moves around a lot—has places everywhere.”
June produced a paper pad from the folder she had set by the chair, and a pen from an inside pocket. Tom seemed surprised. “What? Aren’t I going to be taped or something?”
“Some things, I like to do the old-fashioned way.” That seemed to put him more at ease, and he settled more comfortably. June went on, “I’ve never really had a chance to get into the neural dynamics: transferring the activity pattern that defines a personality from one neural system to another. I was hoping you could point me in the right direction to finding out more about it.”
“Ah, yes.” Tom was obviously on home ground. “That was the other big breakthrough that made TX possible, along with data-mining the DNA. I take it Leo’s been through all that with you?”
“Pretty much.”
“But of course, DNA can’t supply the brain modifications acquired after conception—every experience from the beginning of growth can alter how neurons connect up and communicate. Indeed, they have to. That’s what makes us who we are.”
June nodded. “Right. I follow that.”
Tom unclasped his hands to show a palm. “But it turns out that a mathematical map of the neural connection pattern is sufficient. It contains all the information you need to regenerate the personality. That means you can infer what you need from the wave functions without having to specify detail at the molecular level. That makes the problem tractable.”