"What's to be done?" he murmured. "Jana, dead? How . . . No, don't tell me. I know she killed herself somehow. I picked it up from Demo during my resurrection." He shook his head slowly, rubbing a broad hand across the back of his neck. "I saw him then, while the rest of you were being blind. . . . No, forget that. I haven't got a good reason for picking on you anymore."
"Well?" asked Krzakwa, "What do you suggest? Is there any way we can get Demo back? You know more about these things that the rest of us put together."
Brendan shrugged. "Nope. He's in there for good, I'm afraid. What can we do? Just pump him full of whatever Jana left behind is all." He laughed. "Hell, maybe she'll be more at home in there!"
"So," said John, dismayed at last. "He's dead forever, and it doesn't bother you?" The man turned to face him, his features looking carefully controlled. "Two points," he said. "One: I didn't say that, you did. Two: why should it bother me?" He turned to look at the body and said, "Don't worry, pal. I'll see you didn't do it in vain. Can't leave you looking like an asshole, now, can we?" John felt some of his rage and confusion recede. Something was going on that he felt capable of understanding. I've seen this all before, he thought.
Some time later Sealock and Krzakwa were in the chamber alone with the electronically supported body of Demogorgon and the cryogenic capsule containing the ice-encrusted remains of Jana Hu. The Arab's head was festooned with leads and Brendan had finished drilling into the dead woman's skull, installing deeply embedded brain-taps and scanners into the ruined tissue. It had been a bloodless operation, free of gore. What was left of her, brittle and harder than iron, looked less than human, more or less inorganic. Having been frozen very slowly, Jana did not even look like a statue. Her face looked like the broken ice on an expanded and refrozen stream.
"Think it'll work?"
Brendan shrugged his answer. "We'll get something. If she's lucky, it'll be enough to give her an intact sense of self and enough to combine successfully with the lower functions that Demo left behind when he went into Centrum."
The Selenite nodded. He had begun to learn. The supposed lower functions were actually the majority of what made up a human mind: the autonomic systems that took care of life and the emotional generators and consciousness mediators of the brain stem. Even above that the human soul was hard-wired in. All the neurolinguistic patterns were built in, add-ons though they might be. Of all the little habit patterns that so many people mistook for "personality," only the highest cortical functions, the parts of the mind that mistook themselves for the total "I," could be stripped off and sent elsewhere. That was, it seemed, the heart of what made Comnet work the way it did. That was the part of Demogorgon that had become embedded in whatever still functioned within Centrum and it was the part of Jana that they were trying to save. Is he still alive in there? Krzakwa wondered, feeling detached. And what will it be like for her? To be invaded by alien emotions . . . and then to find out that you were the invader. People from all centuries past had thought about the horror of being invaded and dispossessed by a dybbuk. Why did no one wonder about how the monster felt?
He caught a fleeting glimpse of what he'd seen in Sealock,then, a recollection from the memories that Centrum had made public property. That was how it felt, perhaps. He felt a small surge of pity for the man. He'd been exposed before them all. Yet they all had, seemingly, seen each other's selves during the final battle. He had been operating on a kind of automatic pilot since coming back, not acknowledging the changes in him, but he had changed.
Sealock was grinning at him. "I don't have to be hooked up to you to read your thoughts," he said, "I can see it written on your face. If I thought you all understood what you'd seen, I might be a little worried, embarrassed or something. None of you did. Having your faces rubbed in an endless sea of vaginas made a pretty good shield for me. I came out of there with a rich haul." He turned to face the machinery. "Let's get this done."
"All right. One thing . . ."
Sealock looked at him questioningly, eyebrows slightly raised.
"What you said about not letting Demogorgon down. Is this what you meant?" That brought a merciless grin. "Nope."
"What then?"
"I'll tell you later. Maybe I'll just let it stand at a firm 'You'll see.' " They turned to the machinery a final time, switched things on, and it began.
The scanners did their work well. They began searching among the rubble that was all that remained of the personality of Jana Li Hu, Hu Li-jiang. All the neurons of her brain had been ruptured by the growing ice crystals, all her interconnections broken asunder. There was much to be found among the destroyed circuitry of her soul. Still, the machines probed. The data were there, waiting to be interpreted. Most of what had called itself "me" in her had been concentrated into a thin cortical layer in the frontal lobes of her brain, a small amount more in the associative areas to either side. Like most other human beings, Jana was just a small packet of intense cognitive drivers and a bundle of language skills. It was easy to pluck out.
Because most of the brain was given over to switchingcenters and data processing and retrieval devices, extreme miniaturization processes had been invoked by nature. Like a primitive computer from the dawn of electronics, most of what made up a person was just keyboard and plastic, and macroplugs . The part that did all the work was far less than one percent of the whole. There weren't enough nerves packed into those few cubic inches to make up a thinking, self-aware being, so it had all been done on a molecular level. Endless trails, endless arrays . . . the electrical patterns were still there, preserved, after a fashion, in the sea of frozen slush.
At the moment of death, or so it seemed now, she had heard her father's voice growling out of a dim Tibetan night: "I don't care what's in her mind, Pi Ling! The parts of a woman I'm interested in could be covered by a few square centimeters of silk! And that's what they ought to be, when I'm not embedded in 'em, by Mao!"
His cronies roared with appreciative laughter, their breath foul with a mixture of kumiss and rice wine, and the sound of it echoed down the corridors of time, waking her from a deep, dark, endless sleep which had been blessedly without dreams.
Li-jiangwas seven years old. She squatted in the dark corners of the apartment building's community toilet, crouching inside a stall. She had her pants down and was holding a little oval mirror she'd found, looking at herself. She was pushing it down between her legs, trying to see all the places she went to the bathroom from. She remembered standing on her father's bed, trying to see her backside in the dresser mirror, and remembered his laughter. It was all funny-looking down there. Unlike everywhere else on her body, things were mushy and unsymmetrical. Her anus she understood, a simple sphincter to open and close tightly. But what was all this other nonsense for? She fingered the thick lips aside and squinted, bending down, trying to get a better look in the dim light. Why was the little hole she peed through mounted on that weird floppy structure? And what was that other hole for? It was unclosed, and nothing ever came out. . . . Shepushed a finger inside a little way and felt its moistness, but the action scared her, so she stopped.
Suddenly the door of the toilet banged open. Li-jianggasped, horrified at the prospect of being discovered at these evil deeds, and tried to escape. She leaped to her feet, panicky, and tried to run, but she tripped over her trousers, which were down around her ankles, and fell on her face to the floor. The newcomer was laughing as he helped her up.