«Not as much as they'd like. Not as little as JSKP would like.»
«Very neat, Doctor. You should go into politics.»
«There's no need to be obscene.»
I stood up and walked over to her window, looking down into the small courtyard at the centre of the hospital. There was an ornate pond in the middle which had a tiny fountain playing in it; big orange fish glided about below the lily pads. «If the company did send a covert agent up here to kill Maowkavitz, he or she would have to be very biotechnology literate to circumvent the habitat personality's observation. I mean, I couldn't do it. I don't even understand how it was done, nor do most of my officers.»
«I see what you mean. It would have to be someone who's been up here before.»
«Right. Someone who understands the habitat surveillance parameters perfectly, and who's one hundred per cent loyal to JSKP.»
«My God, you're talking about Zimmels.»
I smiled down at the fish. «You have to admit, he's a perfect suspect.»
«And would you have him arrested if he is guilty?»
«Oh, yes. JSKP can have me fired, but they can't deflect me.»
«Very commendable.»
I turned back to find her giving me a heartily bemused stare. «But it's a little too early to be making allegations like that; I'll wait until I have more data.»
«Glad to hear it,» she muttered. «I suppose you've also considered it could have been a mercy killing by some sympathetic bleeding-heart medical practitioner, one who was intimate with Penny's circumstances.»
I laughed. «Top of my list.»
Before I went for the implant, they dressed me in a green surgical smock, and shaved off a three-centimetre circle of hair at the base of my skull. The operating theatre resembled a dentist's surgery. A big hydraulic chair at the centre of a horseshoe of medical consoles and instrument waldos. The major difference was the chair's headrest, which was a complicated arrangement of metal bands and adjustable pads. The sight triggered a cascade of unpleasant memories, newscable images of the more brutal regimes back on Earth. What one-party states did to their opposition members.
«Nothing to worry about,» Corrine said breezily, when the sight of it slowed my walk. «I've done this operation about five hundred times now.»
The nurse smiled and guided me into the chair. I don't think she was more than a couple of years older than Nicolette. Should they really be using teenagers to assist with delicate brain surgery on senior staff?
Straps around my arms, straps around my legs; a big strap, like a corset, around my chest, holding me tight. Then they started immobilizing my head.
«How many survived?» I asked.
«All of them. Come on, Harvey, it's basically just an injection.»
«I hate needles.»
The nurse giggled.
«Bloody hell,» Corrine grunted. «Men! Women never make this fuss.»
I swallowed my immediate short-and-to-the-point comment. «Will I be able to use the affinity bond straight away?»
«No. What I'm going to do this afternoon is insert a cluster of neuron symbiont buds into your medulla oblongata. They take a day or so to infiltrate your axons and develop into operational grafts.»
«Wonderful.» Sickly grey fungal spores grubbing round my cells, sending out slender yellow roots to penetrate the delicate membrane walls. Feeding off me.
Corrine and the nurse finished fixing my head in place and stood back. The chair slowly tilted forwards until I was inclined at forty-five degrees, staring at the floor. I heard a hissing sound; something cold touched the patch of shaved skin. «Ouch.»
«Harvey, that's the anaesthetic spray,» Corrine exclaimed with some asperity.
«Sorry.»
«Once the symbionts are functioning you'll need proper training to use them. It doesn't take more than a few hours. I'll book your appointment with one of our tutors.»
«Thanks. Exactly how many people up here are affinity capable?»
She was busy switching on various equipment modules. Out of the corner of my eye I could see a holographic screen light up with some outré false-colour image of something which resembled a galactic nebula, all emerald and purple.
«Just about all seventeen thousand of us,» she said. «They have to be, there's no such thing as a domestic or civic worker up here. The servitor chimps perform every mundane task you can think of. So you have to be able to communicate with them. The first affinity bonds to be developed were just that, bonds. Each one was unique. Clone-analogue symbionts allowed you to plug directly into a servitor's nervous system; one set was implanted in your brain, and the servitor got the other. Then Penny Maowkavitz came up with the idea of Eden, and the whole concept was broadened out. The symbionts I'm implanting in you will give you what we call communal affinity; you can converse with the habitat personality, access its senses, talk to other people, order the servitors around. It's a perfect communication system. God's own radio wave.»
«Don't let the Pope hear you say that.»
«Pope Eleanor's a fool. If you ask me, she's a little too desperate to prove she can be as traditionalist as any male. The Christian Church has always been antagonistic to science, even now, after the reunification. You'd think they'd learn from past mistakes. They certainly made enough of them. If her biotechnology commission would just open their eyes to what we've achieved up here.»
«There's none so blind . . .»
«Damn right. Did you know every child conceived up here for the last two years has had the affinity gene spliced in when they were zygotes, rather than have symbiont implants? They're affinity capable from the moment their brain forms, right in the womb. There was no pressure put on the parents by JSKP, they insisted. And they're a beautiful group of kids, Harvey, smart, happy; there's none of the kind of casual cruelty you normally get in kindergartens back on Earth. They don't hurt each other. Affinity has given them honesty and trust instead of selfishness. And the Church calls it ungodly.»
«But it's a foreign gene, not one God gave us, not part of our divine heritage.»
«You support the Church's view?» Her voice hardened.
«No.»
«God gave us the gene for cystic fibrosis, He gave us haemophilia, and He gave us Down's syndrome. They're all curable with gene therapy. Genes the person didn't have to begin with, genes we have to vector in. Does that make those we treat holy violations?»
I made a mental note never to introduce Corrine to Jocelyn. «You're fighting an old battle with the wrong person.»
«Yeah. Maybe. Sorry, but that kind of medieval attitude infuriates me.»
«Good. Can we get on with the implant now, please?»
«Oh, that?»
The chair started to rotate back to the vertical. Corrine was flicking off the equipment.
«I finished a couple of minutes ago,» she said with a contented chuckle. «I've been waiting for you to stop chattering.»
«You . . .»
The smiling nurse began to unstrap me.
Corrine pulled off a pair of surgical gloves. «I want you to go home and relax for the rest of the afternoon. No more work today, I don't want you stressed; the symbiont neurons don't need to be drenched in toxins at this stage. And no alcohol, either.»
«Am I going to have a headache?»
«A hypochondriac like you, I wouldn't be at all surprised.» She winked playfully. «But it's all in your mind.»
I walked home. The first chance I'd had to actually appreciate the real benefit of the habitat. I walked under an open sky, feeling zephyrs ripple my uniform, smelling a mélange of flower perfumes. A strange experience. I'm just old enough to remember venturing out under open skies, taking backpack walks through what was left of the countryside for pleasure. That was before the armada storms started bombarding the continents for weeks at a time. Nowadays, of course, the planet's climate is in a state of what they call Perpetual Chaos Transition. You'd have to be certifiable to wander off into the wilderness regions by yourself. Even small squalls can have winds gusting up to sixty or seventy kilometres an hour.