He went directly to the controller, ignoring the two women, and shut off the EEG. He removed a couple of packages from his cart, opened them, and carried them to a stepladder built into the back of the tank. Inside the packages were spools. One spool was wound with silvery thread and the other with a narrow, whitish ribbon. He slotted these into an armature at the top of the tank, all without uttering a word. He wore a clinic uniform like Hattie’s, but with a tan jacket. His name badge read, “Matt.”
Matt wasn’t any iterant type Mary knew, which meant he was of wild stock, a free-ranger. He seemed unfriendly enough to be a chartist.
Matt returned to the control unit and began to dictate instructions. As he spoke, the armature with the spools lowered itself into the yellowish liquid of the tank, and two delicate waldo fingers picked up the ends of the threads and began to stitch them to the top of the skull.
“What’s that?” Mary said when her curiosity became too great.
Matt gave her a brief, dismissive glance and returned to his task.
“That’s nerve and vein tissue,” said a pleasant voice. It was Concierge, at the door. The mentar entered and joined them at the tank. “And this is Matt Coburn, Medtech 3, and one of our finest people. Say hello to the ladies, Matt.”
“I prefer to be called Coburn,” the man said.
“Matt is attaching nerve and vein tissue from Myr Starke’s own tissue bank,” Concierge continued. “Tomorrow we’ll start layering muscles, and then wrap the whole skull in skin gauze.”
“Fascinating,” said Mary. “Are you going to—ah—reassemble her entire body with replacement parts?”
“We might have gone that route, if her body were mostly intact,” Concierge said, “but when you need a whole body, it’s best to grow it from scratch. It’s even faster, and you’ll be sure that all the pieces fit together. If you look at the base of Myr Starke’s skull; you’ll see we’ve already started a new body.”
All Mary saw was a wad of fine mesh netting.
“Come around to the back. You’ll see better.”
Mary and Renata followed Concierge to the back of the tank. Nestled in the netting and connected to the skull by a skein of threads was a tiny, curved creature. Mary squinted at it through the glassine tank and syrupy fluid. It was a headless human fetus. Or rather a fetus with a giant head. A tiny knot of red, visible through translucent skin, was furiously beating and driving a trickle of blood throughout the tiny body.
“Oh,” Renata said, “it looks like a prawn.”
“I suppose it does,” Concierge said. “It’ll be a while yet before the prawn will be able to support the head.” Subvocally, the mentar added, Unfortunately, she’s not thriving as well as she should be.
Mary was startled by the aside. When she looked at Concierge, he smiled sadly and returned to the front of the tank. “We’ll have you up and out of here in no time, Myr Starke,” he said brightly.
3.3
Fred had comp time coming to him, and he could have slept in if he wanted to. But russes were constitutionally unable to oversleep, and he awoke, as usual, at six. Mary was gone, and he lay in bed for a while letting his mind wander through his mine field of newly acquired troubles. Finally, he ordered coffee, and when he could smell it brewing, he threw off the covers and padded to the kitchen. He took his coffee to the living room and watched the view outside someone else’s window for a while. But his troubles kept intruding, so he did what russes often did to take charge of their destiny—he made a list:
Mary/Cabinet
Rendezvous
Clone fatigue
Having itemized and prioritized his worries, Fred felt better. A good list, as every russ knew, was a mood elevator. A good list could cut through the fog of indecision and marshal the forces of reason and practically. Fortified, Fred plunged in:
1. Mary/Cabinet—If only he had spoken up immediately when Cabinet appealed for his help under the lake. Then he wouldn’t be here worrying whether or not Nick at Applied People or, worse, Nameless One at the Homeland Command had eavesdropped on their secret exchange. Merely by not informing his superiors of Cabinet’s appeal, he was culpable of aiding and abetting it. And now that Cabinet was through probate, the imperious mentar had leverage over him. By involving Mary in its schemes, it only increased this leverage.
For crying out loud, Fred thought, evangelines were neither trained nor compensated for hazardous duty, and being anywhere near that Starke woman was hazardous in the extreme.
What to do? He could go to Marcus and report the whole thing, take his lumps, which might be as mild as a negative report in his file, or as severe as a reduction in rank. Whichever the case, it was better than sitting and stewing about it. However, though he could face the mentars, he could never face Mary. She would kill him for lousing up her companion duty. She would never forgive him, even if he acted out of concern for her safety.
2. Rendezvous—The 57th World Charter Rendezvous, which would attract fifty thousand plus chartists, was taking place tomorrow. He’d had everything nailed down for its security until the head of the organizing committee, the free-range boob Myr Pacfin, had thrown his tantrum about the pikes.
What to do? Easy, go down to the BB of R and talk to the proxy he cast to deal with the situation.
3. Clone fatigue—There was no such thing. It was all a pile of psychobabble hooey invented by free-rangers to steal work from iterants. It claimed that over time even identical clones diverged from each other, losing germline integrity and acquiring new, less reliable traits. And since the whole market appeal of iterant labor was based on the uniformity of their core personalities, trait instability would diminish their market value. Iterant temp agencies like Applied People and McPeople would falter, and Fred and about a billion other clones would be out of work.
It was hogwash, of course. There was no such thing as identical clones in the first place. Though a germline may start with the same genome, maternal factors, such as mitochondrial DNA and exogenic womb environments and the scattering techniques of induced allele shifting, guaranteed that they were all slightly different from each other. Closer than siblings but more different than natural monozygotic twins tended to be. Even their personalities varied a little, though their core traits were true to type: jennys were nurturing, lulus were hot, and russes were loyal to a fault and addicted to lists.
And another thing, if there were such a thing as clone fatigue, it would only affect new batches, not individuals already almost a hundred years old.
Still, it was a touchy subject for Fred, and he didn’t know why. It seemed to him that he was behaving oddly lately. For all he knew, he was undergoing some normal life change that all russes experienced. Perhaps all russes, at some point or other, cherished a secret lust for hinks (Inspector Costa!) or questioned their own loyalty to their employer. And if they did, how would he ever know, since one of the cardinal core traits of russdom was the total inability to talk about their feelings, even to their brothers?
On the other hand, for all he knew, there was a secret volume hidden in the Heads-Up Log, one that no one talked about but which russes stumbled across in their time of need. A hidden brotherhood within the brotherhood. The fact that he, russlike to the bone, thought of this meant that other russes must also have thought of it. It only made sense.
What to do? Go to the BB of R and research the Heads-Up Log.
So Fred got up off the couch, put on some clothes, and dragged his bruised tired self to North Wabash.