Interface. Part 15

"You had dealings with her then?"

"None. Never. How she could possibly remember my name is a complete mystery to me. She must have a photographic memory. She is a freak of nature," he finally concluded, belaboring the obvious.

Dr. Radhakrishnan said nothing. He had the feeling that Mr. Salvador lied to him quite a bit. But this seemed a particularly obvious lie. Mr. Salvador had been extremely upset. Lady Wilburdon was more than the t.i.tular head of his old school; she must have some power over him. And the idea of someone actually having power over the all-powerful Mr. Salvador was certainly interesting.

"What killed Mr. Easyrider is still mysterious," Dr. Radhakrishnan said, "but I have high hopes for Mr. Scatflinger."

"I don't," Zeldo said. It was the first time he had spoken since he had taken to drinking.

"Why not? Everything's going perfectly with him."

"Once we get his chip trained," Dr. Radhakrishnan said, "presumably he will become a bit more versatile."

"We can't train his chip. His chip is dead," Zeldo said.

"If it were really dead, he wouldn't even be able to say wubba wubba.""It crashed. It's stuck. We ran afoul of that bug I was trying to warn you about."

"So what's it doing?"

"It got caught in an infinite loop."

"An infinite loop?" Dr. Radhakrishnan was flabbergasted. Infinity was a mathematical concept, very easy for a bithead like Zeldo to bandy about, but not something that biologist usually had to deal with.

"Yes."

"Meaning?" Mr. Salvador said.

"Meaning that he will keep saying wubba wubba until he dies," Zeldo said.

"Hmm. That's not going to make much of a favorable impression on Lady Wilburdon," Mr.

Salvador said.

"We can send him back," Dr. Radhakrishnan said. "Send him off to the hinterlands. He can found his own religious sect."

16.

It was a creepy and surreal morning when they implanted the biochips in the mind of Mohinder Singh.

Dr. Radhakrishnan got up early, as he always did on the morning of an operation. He went downstairs, eschewing room service, and watched the sun come up over Delhi from the cafe of the Imperial Hotel. The air pollution was especially bad this morning. Some kind of dire temperature inversion had clamped itself down over the city like a bell jar, trapping and concentrating the c.o.c.ktail of dust, automobile exhaust, coal smoke, woodsmoke, manure smoke, and the ammoniated ga.s.ses that rose up from the stewn excreta of millions of people and animals. This being winter, the air was relatively humid, or as humid as it was ever likely to get. The humidity condensed around the countless nuclei provided by all of that air pollution, so that when the sun rose, it had to force its way up through a thick cloacal fog, and turned a furious red color, the color of Elvis's face in his last moments on earth. When it finally burst free of the horizon, the sun simply disappeared and became a mere bright tendency in the burnt-orange sediment of the eastern sky.

Dr. Gangadhar V.R.J.V.V. Radhakrishnan sipped tea and ran over the whole project one more time, wondering if they had overlooked anything.

Mr. Salvador had been spending even more time than usual on the telephone recently. This was totally irrelevant to today's operation, but Dr. Radhakrishnan remained curious about the American side of this project. Old Bucky had to spend a certain amount of time every day at the Barracks. The phone would ring, he would answer it, and he would talk. For hours. And Dr. Radhakrishnan would stroll back and forth through the Barracks, tending to his own work, and occasionally c.o.c.k an ear in old Bucky's direction, hoping to overhear something.

Most of what he overheard, he already knew; Mr. Salvador was just relaying information about the project to others. But on one occasion, wandering around near Mr. Salvador's desk, Dr. Radhakrishnan heard him involved in a very intense, and very loud, conversation about something called Super Tuesday.

Dr. Radhakrishnan was sure he had seen this phrase somewhere before, but he did not have the foggiest idea what it meant. Some kind of American thing. He kept meaning to ask Zeldo if he knew, but kept forgetting.

After a while, Zeldo came down, murmured a sleepy h.e.l.lo to him, occupied another table nearby, and began to read the Times of India.

Dr. Radhakrishnan had far too much on his mind to concern himself with politics, and rarely looked at the Times. But when Zeldo moved on to one of the interior pages, opening the paper and holding it up inthe air, Dr. Radhakrishnan could clearly see a headline, down low on the first page: U.S. CANDIDATES VIE IN "SUPER TUESDAY" ELECTIONS.

"What is Super Tuesday?" he said.

Zeldo spoke to him through the paper. "It's today," he said. "A bunch of the states have their primaries on the same day."

"Primaries?"

"Yeah. You know. To select the presidential candidates."

Dr. Radhakrishnan didn't want to hear anything more about it. He knew it would cloud his mind. He sat there drinking his tea. Then it was time to go to work.

It all went smoothly there in the magnificent central operating theater of the Radhakrishnan Inst.i.tute.

He had never seen the place, except in his dreams, or in the computer simulations, until he walked in to begin the operation. The room was circular, huge, high-ceilinged, a cathedral of technology. The floors were white and mirror-smooth. The walls were white painted concrete. All the light was recessed halogen fixtures, painfully bright, and unnaturally pure in coloration compared to the tainted, smoky-yellow illumination provided by old-fas.h.i.+oned bulbs. It felt just the way it should: as though every technological system on earth converged on this one spot, on the operating table that stood in the middle of the room.

"Jeez," Zeldo said, walking into the place, "all we need is a skylight and some lightning rods."

They did it much better this time around. Everything was calm and quiet. Everyone knew their moves.

All the equipment was brand new and worked perfectly.

They lowered the biochip down a shaft into the middle of Mohinder Singh's brain and nestled it into the s.p.a.ce that had been cut away. This time it was a perfect fit. The incision had been made under the control of a computer, there were no gaps, the new cells would knit together with the old ones much more quickly.

The closing process took a couple of hours but Dr. Radhakrishnan stayed there through the whole thing, watching his a.s.sistants put Mr. Singh's head back together. Zeldo stood off to the side at a Calyx console, monitoring the signals from the chip.

By the time they were sewing Mr. Singh's scalp flap back down over the rea.s.sembled skull, lines of data had begun to scroll up the monitor screen. The biochip had already made contact. Zeldo was astonished by this, but Dr. Radhakrishnan wasn't. They had done it right this time.

"What is it?" Mr. Salvador said. He had just come in from the hotel. Clearly, he had been catching up on sleep, s.e.x, drinking, or some other fundamental bodily function, and had been interrupted in the middle by Dr. Radhakrishnan's telephone call. Clearly he was not happy about it.

"Check this out," Dr. Radhakrishnan said, leading him into the room where Mohinder Singh had, for the last few days, been recovering from the operation.

"Is this going to be more wubba wubba?" Mr. Salvador said.

Mohinder Singh was sitting up in bed, as usual, and smoking, as usual. His scar was nearly obscured by the deepening shadow of his hair. He looked up as Dr. Radhakrishnan and Mr. Salvador came into the room, squinting at them impa.s.sively through cigarette smoke.

Dr. Radhakrishnan spoke to him briefly in Hindi, gesturing in the direction of an ashtray that rested on a table next to the bed on Mr. Singh's paralyzed left side.

Mr. Singh looked down at the hand and it began to twitch. Then it jumped into the air like a small animal spooked by a sudden noise, and came to a stop out in front of Mr. Singh's face. The hand began to move toward his mouth, a few inches at a time, in a zigzagging course, like a sailboat trying to tack upwind into a moorage. As it got closer the fingers began to vibrate nervously. They wanted to close over the cigarette but they didn't want to get burned.

Then, suddenly, he had gripped the cigarette. He yanked it out of his mouth and extended his arm out over the ashtray in one explosive movement, scattering ashes the whole way. His hand vibrated for a moment above the general vicinity of the ashtray, dumping a few more ashes from the end of the cigarette,some of which actually landed in the ashtray.

Dr. Radhakrishnan spoke another couple of words and Mr. Singh's hand dropped straight down into the ashtray, crus.h.i.+ng the cigarette and mostly putting it out. Then he jerked his hand back into his lap, leaving the cigarette in the tray, spinning out a long tenuous line of smoke.

"Astonis.h.i.+ng," Mr. Salvador said. He looked quite awake and considerably less grumpy.

Dr. Radhakrishnan spoke another few words. Then he said, to Mr. Salvador, "I have asked him his name."

Mr. Singh's mouth came open and then closed again, the lips coming together: "Mmmmmo- "Mo," Dr. Radhakrishnan echoed.

"Derrrrrr."

"-der. Mohinder."

"Ssssin."

"Mohinder Singh. Very good." Dr. Radhakrishnan spoke in Hindi again, then translated: "What kind of lorry were you driving at the time of your accident?"

"Ta . . . ta."

"That's right. A Tata 1210."

"Still no signs of tumor or rejection?"

"None."

"Right," Mr. Salvador said, "that's it, then." He spun on his heel and burst out of the room.

Dr. Radhakrishnan waited for a few moments, then followed him.

The offices were upstairs. He entered the stairwell and heard Mr. Salvador above him, taking the steps two or three at a time.

By the time he had followed Mr. Salvador, quietly, up to the office level, old Bucky had already got through to someone on the telephone: "What? All right, I'll speak loudly. Can you hear me? Good. Listen carefully; we are go for launch. Yes.

Yes. Unequivocally. Yes, you have a good day too."

17.

WORKING OUT THE POLITICS OF MARY CATHERINE'S TEMPORARY leave of absence from her residency and arranging the trip to the various and far-flung organs of the Radhakrishnan Inst.i.tute took a few weeks.

The trip itself lasted a week and a half. When Mary Catherine flew home from California, Mel drove his sports car, a Mercedes 500 SL, down from Chicago and picked her up at the Champaign-Urbana Airport. He took U.S. 45 from there; it pa.s.sed within two blocks of the Cozzano house and served almost as a private driveway connecting the family with the outside world. Mel preferred two-lane roads with lots of heavy trucks, because that way he had something to pa.s.s.

Mel tried to make small talk as they blasted along between the snowed-over cornfields. Mary Catherine was preoccupied and spent most of the time squinting out the window. Farm machinery threw spouts of black diesel straight up into the sky, visible from miles away. From time to time the tires of the Mercedes rumbled as they drove over a spot where mud and cornstalks had been tracked across the road by a tractor and then frozen down hard to the pavement. South of Pesotum it became possible to see the towers of CBAP heaving up over the linear horizon, kicking out silvery bubbles of steam that dissolved into the clouds."Something on your mind?" he asked.

"Just a lot of impressions in a short time," she said, shaking her head. "I want to be coherent when I talk to Dad.

Mel grinned, just a bit. So that was it. Even in his current condition, Dad continued to scare the h.e.l.l out of Mary Catherine.

"Just give your professional opinion," Mel said. "After that, we're all grownups."

He slowed the Mercedes and turned off the highway. The tires started to buzz as they drove down brick streets. A plywood sign marked the entrance to town: WELCOME TO TUSCOLA.

ATTEND OUR CHURCHES.

"It's small in terms of staff. It is absolutely gigantic in terms of resources. Everything they own seems to be brand new," Mary Catherine said.

She was sitting on the sofa in the living room. Dad was sitting directly across the coffee table from her, watching her face. Mel was off to the side. Patricia was hovering, throwing logs on the fire, getting coffee.

"If you buy their basic scientific approach, then these guys are certainly equipped to move forward with it,"

Mary Catherine continued. "They have money to burn."

"Do you buy it?" Mel said.

"It works on baboons. It makes paralyzed baboons capable of moving, and even walking again. That has been proved, I think, beyond a doubt."

"Does it work on femelhebbers?" Cozzano asked, using his new word for people.

"I asked them that question many times," Mary Catherine said, "and I might as well have been saying 'femelhebbers' for all the information I got."

Cozzano laughed and shook his head ruefully.

"I was skeptical going in. But what they have done is extremely impressive, and it seems to me that if they could produce one healthy person who has gone through their therapy, then we might actually have something."

"Tell me about your detailed impressions," Mel said.

"I saw the inst.i.tute itself dead last - just this morning. These guys made up the whole itinerary for me, so I didn't have much flexibility."

"Did you feel you were getting the Potemkin Village treatment?" Mel asked.

"Yes. But that's normal."

"True," Mel said.

"First place I went was Genomics, in Seattle. It's south of downtown, near the Kingdome, in a big old warehouse that they gutted and redid. All pretty new and clean, as you'd expect. Most of the s.p.a.ce is used for things unrelated to this project. They have one suite on the top floor where they do brain work for Radhakrishnan.

When I was there they had several cell-culturing projects underway. It's a typical lab with small gla.s.s containers all over the place with handwritten labels stuck to them, and by reading the labels I could pick up the names of some of the subjects they're working on. The names I saw were-" Mary Catherine leafed through her notes for a second, "Margaret Thatcher, Earl Strong, Easyrider, Scatflinger and Mohinder Singh."

An uneasy laugh pa.s.sed around the table. "I know who the first two are . . ." Mel said.

"That's what I thought. But later, when I went to Elton, I found out that Margaret Thatcher and Earl Strong are two of their baboons. They name all the baboons after political figures."

"Did you also see baboons named Easyrider and Scatflinger?" Mel said. "Those sound more like animal names to me."

"No. And I have no ideas on Mohinder Singh, either."