Revealed here on the flatscreen, as she had never seen it confirmed before, her excellence was enough to make her weep.
The doctor was immediately at her side. “Is something wrong?” She wiped at her tears and shook her head, but he gently insisted. “It’s my job to be of help.”
“It’s only—I wish they could tell me,” she said. “Tell me themselves. That I’m doing all right.”
He pulled a chair around and sat beside her. “They would if they could, you know. They really can’t. Under the circumstances.”
She nodded but did not answer. She advanced the file.
How would she respond to what came next? he wondered, and watched with what he hoped was strictly professional curiosity. Her memories terminated abruptly in her seventeenth year. The file did not. She was almost twenty-one now. . . .
She frowned at the screen. “What is that evaluation?
‘Cellular programming.’ I never studied that. I don’t even know what it is.”
“Oh?” The doctor leaned forward. “What’s the date?”
“You’re right.” She laughed. “It must be what they’re planning for next spring.”
“But look, they’ve already assigned you scores. A whole group.”
She laughed again, delighted. “They probably think that’s what I ought to score.”
For him, no surprises after all—and in her mind, no surprises would be permitted. Her immersion in the reality her brain had recreated for her could not be drained by a few numbers on a flatscreen. “They think they know you pretty well,” the doctor said dryly.
“Perhaps I’ll fool them.” She was happy at the prospect.
The file ended abruptly at the conclusion of her standard training, three years ago. On the screen, only the logo of the Multiple Intelligence agency: the fox. The quick brown fox. The fox who knows many things . . .
The doctor observed that her cheerfulness persisted longer than usual, while she stared at that logo. Perhaps it maintained her in a present of some continuity with her past.
“Perhaps you will,” he murmured.
Leaving her at the door of her room—she already forgetting him, having already forgotten what they both had seen—he moved his bulk ponderously down the old stairs to his office. The high-ceilinged, drafty brick building, built on the flanks of the Rocky Mountains in the late 19th century as a tuberculosis sanatorium, now two hundred years later well served its role as a private asylum for disturbed members of the families of the modestly wellto- do. The doctor did his best for those who were innocently committed here, but case L. N. 30851005 was quite different, and increasingly absorbed his attention.
On his own flatscreen he called up the clinical file the institution had kept since her arrival. An odd emotion took hold of him then—when decision overtakes a mind, even a normal one, it often happens so quickly it erases the track of its own processes—and the doctor was shaken by a shuddering warmth, the certainty of revealed truth.
He pressed his finger against his ear and keyed his commlink with the sanatorium staff. “I’m concerned that Linda has not been sleeping well this week.”
“Really, Doctor?” The nurse was surprised. “Sorry. We haven’t noticed anything unusual.”
“Well, let’s try sodium pentobarbital tonight, shall we?
Two hundred milligrams.”
The nurse hesitated, then acquiesced. “Certainly, Doctor.”
* * *
He waited until everyone was asleep except the two night nurses. The man would be prowling the corridors, supposedly alert for trouble, actually nursing his own insomnia.
The woman would be dozing in front of the videoplate monitors at her station on the main floor.
He nodded to her as he passed by, on his way up the stairs. “I’ll just have a look around before I go home.” She looked up, belatedly alert.
Everything he needed fitted easily inside his luxurious Chesterfield without appreciably adding to his bulk. He climbed the stairs and moved down the second floor corridor, conscientiously poking his head into every ward and private room.
He came to L. N. 30851005’s room and entered. The photogram camera was watching from its invisible position high in the corner; he could keep his back to it, but someone passing in the hall would have a different angle of view, so he casually swung the door half closed behind him.
He bent over her unconscious form, then swiftly turned her head upright. Her respiration was steady and deep.
First out of his pocket was a flat CT scope the size of a checkbook. He laid it across her closed eyes; its screen displayed a map of her skull and brain as if they had been sliced through. Digital coordinates appeared in one corner of the screen. He adjusted the CT scope’s depth finder until the gray matter of the hippocampus was centered.
He was still bent over her. He drew a long hypodermic from his sleeve, a seemingly primitive instrument frightening in its undisguised purpose. But within the shank of the steel needle nested other needles, needles within needles, graduated in fineness until the slimmest of them was finer than a human hair, invisible. They were needles that possessed a mind of their own. He dipped the tip of the barrel in disinfectant in a small, clear vial. He felt the bridge of her nose, pressed his fingers down to widen her nostrils, then carefully, inexorably—watching its progress on the miniature screen—he shoved the long, telescoping shaft into her brain.
II
The olfactory lobes are perhaps the most atavistic portions of the brain, having evolved in the nervous systems of blind worms that felt their way through the opaque muck of Cambrian seas. To function they must be in close contact with the environment, and so, beneath the bridge of the nose, the brain is almost completely exposed to the outside world. It is a dangerous arrangement. The body’s immune system is incompatible with the brain’s processes, everywhere sealed out by the blood-brain barrier—except in the nasal passages, where mucous membranes are the brain’s only defense, and every winter cold is an all-out struggle against brain disease.
When the defenses are breached, the brain itself feels nothing; the flower of the central nervous system is itself nerveless. The micro-needle that probed past L. N.’s olfactory lobes and into her hippocampus left no internal sensation.
It did, however, leave an infection, spreading fast. . . .
* * *
Waking late, the woman who thought of herself as Sparta felt an itching sensation high in her nose, beside her right eye.
As recently as yesterday she had been in Maryland, at the project facilities north of the capital. She had gone to bed in the dormitory, wishing she could be in her own room at her parents’ home in New York City but accepting the fact that that would be inappropriate under the current circumstances. Everyone had been very good to her here.
She should have felt—she tried to feel—honored to be where she was.
This morning she was somewhere else. The room was high-ceilinged, layered with a century’s accumulation of white enamel, and its tall windows, hung with dusty lace, were fitted with panes of imperfect glass whose pinhole bubbles refocused the sun into golden liquid galaxies. She didn’t know where she was, exactly, but that was nothing new. They must have brought her here in the night. She would find her way around, as she had in many other strange places.
She sneezed twice and briefly wondered if she were catching a cold. The stale taste of her mouth unpleasantly grew to dominate her sensations; she could taste what must have been last night’s dinner as vividly as if it were in front of her, except that all the flavors were here at once, green beans mingling with custard, a fragment of rice throbbing with odors of gunny sack, crumbs of ground beef stewing in saliva . . . Vaguely apprehended formulas of amines and esters and carbohydrates danced through her mind with a slippery, tickly quality that was familiar although she had no idea what they signified.
She rose quickly from the bed, put on gown and slip- pers—she merely assumed they were hers—and went off in search of someplace to scrub her teeth. The smell in the drafty hall was overwhelming, wax and urine and ammonia and bile and turpentine—insistent odors and their accompanying, ungraspable mathematical analogues summoning ghosts, the ghosts of vanished supplicants and benefactors, workers and inmates of this building, and their visitors and keepers, everyone who had passed this way for a century. She sneezed again and again, and fi- nally the clamorous stench subsided.
She found the bathroom without any trouble. Peering at herself in the mirror on the wooden cabinet, she was suddenly thrust out of herself—her image appeared to enlarge —until she was staring at an immensely magnified view of her own eye. Dark brown, liquid at its surface, it was an eye of glassy perfection. At the same time she could still see her ordinary reflection in the glass; the giant eye was superimposed upon the familiar face. She closed one eye—she saw only her face. She closed the other—she was staring into the liquid depths of an immense open pupil. The blackness within was unfathomable.