scanner whirred down its upright track-stand to settle around the
top of his head.
A woman entered the room. She carried a wooden instrument
case and wore a loose medical tunic, short skirt, and muddied
plastic boots." Has he spoken?" she said.
Lindsay recognized her gene-line. "Juliano," he said with difficulty.
She smiled at him. She opened her wooden case with a squeak of antique hinges. "Yes, Abelard," she said. She gave him a Look.
"Margaret Juliano," Lindsay said. He could not interpret the
Look, and the inability filled him with a sudden reviving trickle of
energy and fear. "The Cataclysts, Margaret. They put you on ice."
"That's right." She reached inside the case and produced a dark
candy in a little creased paper tray. "Have a chocolate?"
Lindsay's mouth flooded with saliva. "Please," he said reflexively.
She popped the candy into his mouth. It was cloyingly sweet. He chewed it reluctantly.
"Scarper," Juliano told the two technicians. "I'll handle this." The two Superbrights left, grinning.
Lindsay swallowed.
"Another?" she said.
"Never much canned -never much cared for candy," Lindsay said.
"That's a good sign," she said, closing the box. She examined the scanner's screen and pulled a light-pen from the cluster of loose
blonde hair at her ear. "Those chocolates were the center of your
life for the last five years."
The shock was bad, but he had known it was coming. His throat felt dry. "Five years?"
"You're lucky to have any you left," she said. "It's been a long
treatment: restoring a brain altered by heavy dosage of PDKL
Ninety-five. Complicated by changes in your spatial perception,
caused by the Arena artifact. It's been a real challenge. Expensive,
too." She studied the screen, nibbling the end of her light-pen. "But
that's all right. Your friend Wellspring footed the bills."
She had changed so much that it dizzied him. It was hard to
reconcile the disciplined pacifist of the Midnight Clique, Margaret
Juliano of Goldreich-Tremaine, with this calm, careless woman
with grass stains on her knees and loose, dirty hair.
"Don't try to talk too much at first," she said. "Your right
hemisphere is handling language functions through the
commissure. We can expect neologisms, poverty of speech, a
private idiolect . . . don't be alarmed." She circled something on
the display screen and pressed a control key: cross-sections of his
brain snuffled past in bright false-color blues and oranges.
"How many people in this room?" she said.
"You and I," Lindsay said.
"No sense of someone behind you, to your left?"
Lindsay twisted to look, scraping his forehead painfully on an
inner node of the scanner. "No."
"Good. The commissure approach was the right one, then. In
split-brain cases we sometimes get a fragmentation of conscious-
ness, a ghost image overlooking the perceptual self. Let me know if
you feel anything of the sort."
"No. But outside I felt-" He wanted to tell her about the moment when waking had come suddenly, his long epiphanic insight into self and life. The vision still blazed within him, but the vocabulary
was completely beyond him. He knew suddenly that he would never he able to tell anyone the full truth. It was not something that
words could hold.
"Don't struggle," she said. "Let it come easily. There's plenty of time."
"My arm," Lindsay said suddenly. He realized with confusion that his right arm, the metal one, had turned to flesh. He raised the left one. It was metal. Horror overloaded him. He had turned inside
out!
"Careful," she said. "You may have some trouble with space
perceptions, left and right. It's an artifact of the commissural dominance. And you've had a new rejuvenation. We've done a lot
of work on you in the past five years. Just to mark time."
The careless ease of it stunned him. "Are you God?" Lindsay said.
She shrugged. "There've been breakthroughs, Abelard. A lot has changed. Socially, politically, medically-all the same thing nowadays, I know, but think of it as spontaneous self-organization, a
social Prigoginic Leap to a new level of complexity-"
"Oh, no," Lindsay said.
She tapped the scanner, and it whirred upward off his head. She sat before him in an antique wooden office chair, curling one leg
beneath her. "Sure you don't want a chocolate?"
"No!"
"I'll have one, then." She pulled a candy from the case and bit into it, chewing happily. "They're good." She spoke unaffectedly, her
mouth full. "This is one of the good limes, Abelard. It's why they
thawed me out, I think."
"You changed."
"Ice assassination docs that. They were right, the Cataclysts. Right to put me out. I was calcifying. One moment I was floating through the math hall at the Kosmosity, printouts in my hand, on my way to the office, mind full of little problems, worries, schedules. . . . I was dizzy for a moment. I looked around, and everything was gone.
Deserted. Trashed. The printouts were crumbling in my hands,
clothes full of dust,Goldreich-Tremaine in ruins, computers down,
classes all gone. . . . The world leaped thirty years in a moment; it
was total Cataclysm. For three days I chased down news, trying to
find our Clique, learning I was history, and then it came over me in
a wave. I 'preeked,' Abelard. My preconceptions shattered. The
world didn't need me, and everything I'd thought was important
was gone. My life was totally futile. And totally free."
"Free," Lindsay said, tasting the word. "Constantine," he said
suddenly. "My enemy."
"He's dead, so to speak," Margaret Juliano said, "but it's a
question of definition. I have the scans on his condition from his
congenetics. The damage is very severe. He fell into a protracted
fugue state and suffered an accelerated consciousness that must
have lasted for subjective centuries. His consciousness could not
maintain itself on the data it received from the Arena device. It
lasted so long that his personality was abraded away. Speaking
metaphorically, he forgot himself to pieces."
"They told you that? His siblings?"
"Times have changed, Abelard. Detente is back. The Constantine gene-line is in trouble, and we paid them well for the information. Skimmers Union lost the capitalship. Jastrow Station is the capital now, and it's full of Zen Serotonists. They hate excitement."
The news thrilled Lindsay. "Five years," he said. He stood up in agitation. "Well, what's five years to me?" He tried to pace about
the room, swinging dizzily. The left-right hemispheric confusion
made him clumsy. He drew himself up and tried to get a grip on his
kinesics. He failed.
He turned on Juliano. "My training. My kinesics."
She nodded. "Yes. When we went in we noticed the remnants of it.
Early Shaper psychotechnic conditioning. Very clumsy by modern
standards. It interfered with your recovery. So, over the years, we
chased it down and extinguished it bit by bit."
"You mean it's gone?"
"Oh, yes. We had enough cerebral dichotomy to deal with without your training giving you dual modes of thought. 'Hypocrisy as a second state of consciousness' and all that." She sniffed. "It was a
bad idea to begin with."
Lindsay sagged back into the scanning chair. "But all my life.
. . . And now you took it away. With feck - " He closed his eyes,
struggled for the word. "With technology." She took another candy. "So what?" she said indistinctly, munching. "Technology put it there in the first place. You have your self back. What more do you want?"
Alexandrina Tyler came through the open doorway with a swish of heavy fabric. She wore the finery of her girlhood: a puffed, floor-length skirt and a stiff cream-colored jacket with embroidered