SEVEN

When he woke up he was dead.

Utter blackness, total silence. Nothing.

No smells. There should be the clean, efficient scent of a medical center.

No background rustle of steps. No drone of air conditioning, no distant murmur of conversations, no jangle of a telephone.

He could not feel any press of his own weight. No cold table or starched sheets rubbed his skin.

They had disconnected all his external nerves.

He felt a rush of fear. Loss of senses. To do that required finding the major nerves as they wound up through the spine. Then a medical tech had to splice them out of the tangled knot at the back of the neck. Delicate work.

They were preparing him for the Sleepslots. Shutting him down this far meant he was going into semipermanent storage. Which meant he had failed the medmon exam, and badly.

But they never slotted you without telling you. Even critically ill people got to say good-bye, finish up details, prepare themselves if at all possible.

Which meant Ted had lied. The smooth casual manner, bringing Carlos along to deflect Nigel’s attention onto the other man—yes, that was his style. Avoid confrontation, then act decisively. With Walmsley’s Rule disproved, his medical deception uncovered … a good time to swat Nigel’s gadfly, bothersome buzzing.

The medmon had probably turned up some incriminating information, but that was certainly not enough to slot him without warning. No, it had to be a pretext— one he could contest only years later, Earthside.

He fought the rising confusion in his mind. He had to explore this, think.

Was he fully dead? He waited, letting his fear wash away.

Concentrate. Think of quietness, stillness …

Yes. There.

He felt a weak, regular thump that might be his heart.

Behind that, as though far away, came a slow, faint fluttering of lungs.

That was all. The body’s internal nerves were thinly spread, he knew. They gave only vague, blunt senses. But there was enough to tell him that the basic functions were still plodding on.

There was a dim pressure that might be his bladder. He could pick up nothing specific from legs or arms.

He tried to move his head. Nothing. No feedback.

Open an eye? Only blackness.

Legs—he tried both, hoping that only the sensations were gone. He might be able to detect a leg moving by the change in pressure somewhere in his body.

No response. But if he could sense his bladder, he should have gotten something back from the shifting weight of a leg.

That meant his lower motor control was shut off.

Panic rose in him. It was a cold, brittle sensation. Normally this strong an emotion would bring deeper breathing, a heavier heartbeat, flexing muscles, a tingling urgency. He felt none of that. There was only a swirl of conflicting thoughts, a jittery forking in his mind like summer lightning. This was what it was like to be an analytical thing, a machine, a moving matrix of calculation, without chemical or glandular ties.

They weren’t finished, or else he’d never have come awake again. Some technician had screwed up. Shut off a nerve center somewhere, using pinpoint interrupters, perhaps pinching one filament too many.

They worked at the big junction between brain and spinal cord, down at the base of the skull. It was like a big cable back there, and the techs found their way by feedback analysis. It was easy to get the microscopic nerve fibers mixed up. If the tech was working fast, looking forward to coffee break, he could reactivate the conscious cerebral functions and not notice it on the scope until later.

He had to do something.

The strange, cold panic seized him again. Adrenaline, left over from some earlier, deep physiological response? He was afraid now, but there was no answering chemical symphony of the body. His gland subsystems were shut down.

There was no way to tell how rapidly time passed. He counted heartbeats, but his pulse rate depended on so many factors—

Okay, then—how long did he have? He knew it took hours to shut down a nervous system, damp the lymphatic zones, leach the blood of residues. Hours. And the technicians would leave a lot of the job on automatic.

He noticed a faint background sensation of chill. It seemed to spread as he paid attention to it, filling his body, bringing a pleasant, mild quiet … a drifting … a slow slide toward sleep …

Deep within him, something said no.

He willed himself to think in the blackness and the creeping cold. The technicians always left a pathway to the outside, so if something went wrong the patient could signal. It was a precaution to take care of situations like this.

Eyebrows? He tried them, felt nothing.

Mouth? The same.

He made himself think of the steps necessary to form a word. Constrict the throat. Force air out at a faster rate. Move the tongue and lips.

Nothing. No faint hum echoing in his sinus cavities to tell him that muscles worked, that breath strummed his vocal cords.

The easiest slotting method was to simply shut down a whole section of the body. That must be what was happening. Right. His head was out, legs out. Feet gone, too. And genitals, he thought wryly, weren’t under conscious control even at the best of times.

Arms, then. He tried the left. No answering shift of internal pressures. But how big would the effect be? He might be waving his hand straight up in the air, and never know it.

Try the right. Again, no way to tell if …

No; wait. A diffuse sense of something …”

Try to remember which muscles to move. He had gone through life with instant feedback from every fiber, anchoring him in his body, every gesture suggesting the next. Now he had to analyze precisely.

How did he make his arm rise? Muscles contracted to pull on one side of the arm and shoulder. Others relaxed to let the arm swing. He tried it.

Was there an answering weight? Faint, too faint. Maybe his imagination.

The right arm could be jutting up, and he wouldn’t know it. The attendants would see it, though, and patch into him, ask what was going on … unless they weren’t around. Unless they had gone off for coffee, leaving the sagging old body to stage down gradually into longterm stasis, with the medmon checking to be sure nothing failed in the ancient carcass …

Suppose the arm worked. Even if somebody saw it, was that what he wanted? If they turned his head back on, what would he do? Demand his rights? Ted had undoubtedly disposed of that issue by now. The attendants were certainly under orders to slide him into a slot, no matter what he said. For his own good, y’know.

Despairing, he stopped his concentration, willed the muscles to go suddenly slack.

And was rewarded with an answering thump.

It had hit the table. It bloody well worked.

He waited. Nothing came to him in the blackness. No attendant came tapping in to correct the mistake.

He was probably alone. Where?

Not already in a slot, or else he wouldn’t be able to think clearly. On a medmon slab, then.

He tried to remember the arrangement. The access terminals were on both sides, mirroring the body. So maybe, if it stretched, the right hand could reach half the input switchings.

He concentrated and brought the arm up again. The hand probably worked; it would’ve been too much trouble to disconnect it while the arm stayed live. Remembering carefully, he lowered the arm, rotating it—

A thump. Someone approaching? No, too close. The arm had fallen.

Balance was going to be hard. He practiced rotating the arm without raising it. No way to know if he was successful, but some moves seemed correct, familiar, while others did not. He worked without feedback, trying to summon up the exact sensation of turning the arm. Dipping it to the side, over the edge. Working the fingers.

He stopped. If he hit the wrong control he could turn off the arm. Without external nerves, there was no way to tell if he was doing the right thing.

Pure gamble. If he had been able to, Nigel would have shrugged. What the hell.

He stabbed with straightened fingers. Nothing.

He fumbled and somehow knew through dull patterns that his fingers were striking the side of the slab. The knowledge came from below, some kind of holistic sensation from the thin nerve nets deep inside him. The body could not be wholly cut up into pieces; information spread, and the mute kidneys and liver and intestines knew in some dim way what went on outside.

A wan answering pressure told him that his fingers had closed on something, were squeezing it. He made the fingers turn.

Nothing happened. Not a knob, then. A button?

He stabbed down. In his sinus cavities he felt slight jolts. He must be smacking the slab hard, to do that. With no feedback there was no way to judge force. He stabbed; a jolt. Again. Again—

A cold tremor ran up his right calf. Pain flooded in. His leg was in spasm. It jerked on the slab, striking the medmon. The sudden rush of sensations startled him. In the heady surge he could hardly tell pain from pleasure.

The leg banged on the slab like a crazed animal. His autonomic system was trying to maintain body temperature by muscle spasms, sucking the energy out of the sugar left in the tissues. A standard reaction; that was one reason why he was shut down.

But he had activated a neural web, that was the point. He stabbed blindly with his fingers again.

A welling coldness in his midsection. Again.

More cold, now in the right foot. Again.

A prickly sensation on his lips, on his cheeks. But not full senses; he could not feel his chest or arms. He started to press another button and then stopped, thinking.

So far he had been lucky. He was opening the sensory nets. Most of his right side was transmitting external data. His leg was jerking less now as he brought it under control.

But if he hit the shutdown button for his right arm next, he was finished. He would lie there helpless until the technicians came back.

Nigel worked the arm back onto the slab. He made it shift awkwardly across his chest. His motor control must extend into his upper chest and shoulders to let him do this, but without any input from there he did not know how much he could make work.

He willed the muscles to lurch to the left. A strange impression of tilting came into him. A tension somewhere. Muscles straining, locked, clenched and reaching, a stretching—More—

A warm hardness on his cheek. His nose pressed against it but he had no sense of smell. The slab top. He had rolled himself partway over.

He felt a gathering, diffuse weariness. The arm muscles were broadcasting to the surrounding body their agony, fed by the buildup of exhausted sugar-bearing molecules.

No time to rest. The muscles would just have to keep working. He willed the arm to reach over the left side of the slab. He could feel nothing, but now he could make no fatal mistake.

He punched down at random, searching. A spike of pain shot through his left side. Behind it came biting cold. Slabs of muscle began shaking violently, sending rippling pain through his left side.

He stabbed down with fingers again. Light poured in on him. He had hit the optical nerve net. A gaudy, rich redness. He realized his eyes were still closed. He opened them. Yellow flooded in. He closed them against the glare and punched down again.

The crisp, chill hospital smell. Another stab.

Sound washed over him. A mechanical clanking, a distant buzz, the whir of air circulators. No voices.

He squinted. He was lying on a white slab, staring up at fluorescent lights. Now that he could see, he got back the rest of his nets quickly.

He reached up toward his neck—and his hand went the other way. He stopped it, moved the fingers tentatively. His arm was coming from above his head, reaching down … but that was impossible. He moved the other arm. It came into his vision the same way, from above.

Something was wrong with him. He closed his eyes. What could make …?

He rolled over partway and looked around the medmon bay. The sign on the door leaped out at him. It was upside down. He reached out, clutched the edge of the slab. It was upside down, too.

That was it. When the eye took light and cast it on the retina, ordinary optics inverted the image. The retinal nerves filtered that signal and set it upright for the brain.

So the med tech had screwed that up, too. The retinal nerves weren’t working right. That might be easy to fix, just move a fine-point fiber junction a fraction of a millimeter. But Nigel couldn’t, didn’t know how. He would have to manage.

Nigel began to fumble with the thicket of leads that snaked over his body. It was easier if he didn’t look at what he was doing. He had to carefully disconnect the tap-ins at nerve nexus points. The big knot of them at the nape of his neck was hard to detach. It jerked free.

He felt a hot, diffuse pain from the region, spreading up into his skull. The nerves were exposed, sending scattershot impressions through the area, provoking spasms in the muscles.

He rolled over and studied the work table next to the slab. It was a jumble of connectors, microelectronics, and coils of nearly invisible wires. There was a patch that looked the right shape. He reached out for it and missed. His brain saw his arm moving up and corrected, always in the wrong direction.

It took three tries before he could override his own coordination. He snagged the patch and nearly dropped it. Carefully he brought it to his head. The floppy oval of wires fitted over the gaping hole at the back of his neck. He fiddled with it until it slid—snick—into place. The pain tapered off.

He sat up. Spasms shot through him. He gasped. Pain blossomed with every move. But he felt fully awake and deeply angry. He was in a deserted medical bay.

He studied the liquid-optical readouts on his medical monitor. The program profile was mostly numbers. He couldn’t tilt his head far enough over to read the upside-down numbers. He worked on reading them directly. After a moment it wasn’t so hard. The winking digital program profile told him that his shutdown was scheduled to take another fifty-seven minutes.

He got to his feet, shaky and light-headed. It was good to have his own chemistry back. He was tempted to rest for a moment and let the endless river of sensations wash over him. Even this sterile room of barren white light was lurid, packed with details, smells, sensations. He had never loved life so much.

But he wasn’t safe. Coffee breaks didn’t last forever. He would have to find his clothes, get out—

He started for a side door. The first few steps taught him to keep his head tilted down, toward his feet. He had to move his eyes the opposite way, though, to shift his vision. He bumped into the medmon and nearly fell over a desk. After a moment he could navigate around things. He went carefully, feeling each twinge of lancing pain as his left side protested. His right arm ached and trembled from spasm.

He reached the door, opened it slightly, peered through. The equipment beyond was hard to recognize upside down. Clothes on pegs jutted straight up. Chairs clung to the ceiling. He fought down a sense of vertigo. His eyes were telling his brain that he was standing on the ceiling, and somewhere inside him alarm systems clamored to be heard.

There were open drawers of surgical instruments, a wash up station, electronics gear. A prep room. He eased through.

He found his clothes hanging in a locker, defying gravity. It was easier to put them on if he closed his eyes, going by feel alone. Too bad he couldn’t walk that way.