Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [116]
"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 shuffled 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 consciousness, 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 be 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 times, Abelard. It's why they thawed me out, I think."
"You changed."
"Ice assassination does 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,