Interface (27 page)

"You must forgive us for handling your visit so awkwardly and
discourteously," Mr. Salvador ventured, "as this is the first time that
anyone has ever come to visit any of our patients."
"Ooh, how terribly sad," said Miss Chapman.
"I shall relay news of this situation to the Lady Wilburdon
Organisation for the Visitation of Destitute Invalids here in Delhi,"
Lady Wilburdon said. "Arrangements can be made-"
"Oh, we really couldn't ask-"

"Emotional factors are terribly important. Loneliness can kill just
as surely as nosocomial infections."

"No," Dr. Radhakrishnan said. He had to draw the line somewhere. "You are very generous. But I must rule it out on medical
grounds. Later, when we have the permanent facility constructed,
perhaps we can arrange for routine visitation."

Mr. Salvador cringed visibly. Lady Wilburdon got just a bit
sniffy. "Well," she said, "I count myself fortunate that I was able to
come in and have a lovely visit before this very strict policy was
imposed."

"As you will understand, we did not have to impose a policy
until now."

Mr. Salvador was trying to patch it all up. "But if you can
provide me with a forwarding address in England, I will keep you apprised of our progress."

"England?" Lady Wilburdon said. "Oh, no. We shall be here in
India for another month at least."

"Oh. Well, that's delightful news. Delightful."
"Of course, we will be all over the subcontinent, but sooner or
later we always come back to Delhi."

"Then I shall look forward to dinner with you on at least one
occasion," Mr. Salvador said weakly.

"When does the next fellow, Mr. Singh, have his operation?"
"We have it scheduled for Wednesday."

"Four days from now," Miss Chapman said. She took an
oversized appointment calendar, a desktop model, from her tote
bag, and opened it up. "Mr. Singh has his brainwork done," she mumbled to herself, penciling it in.

Meanwhile, Lady Wilburdon was reading over her companion's
shoulder. "Tomorrow we leave for Calcutta, to inspect the Lady
Wilburdon Institute for the Rehabilitation of Syphilitic Lepers." Both men drew sharp breaths.

"Can
they be rehabilitated?" Mr. Salvador said. He seemed
astonished, verging on slightly amused.

"Syphilitic lepers are easy," Lady Wilburdon said, "compared to
spoiled boys."

Mr. Salvador turned red and shut up, leaving Dr. Radhakrishnan
all alone to terminate the conversation. "Feel free to phone when you return to Delhi," he said.
"Telephone?"

"Yes. No visitation, remember."

"But Mr. Singh will be having his operation in the new facility,
will he not?"

"Oh. Yes, that's right. It should be ready by then."
"So he will recover in the new facility as well."
Dr. Radhakrishnan could only nod.

"See you in a few days," Miss Chapman said, snapping her
appointment book shut and beaming at them cheerily. The two women bustled out and climbed into a waiting car.

Mr. Salvador spun on his heel, went straight across to Building
1, and pulled a bottle of gin out of his desk. He and Dr.
Radhakrishnan sat down across from each other, wordlessly, and
began to drink it, straight, from paper cups. After a minute or two, Zeldo came over and joined them. This was a little troubling in and
of itself, because Zeldo was some kind of a puritanical health freak.
Drinking straight gin from a paper cup was not his style at all.

"What was
that?"
Dr. Radhakrishnan finally said, when he and Mr. Salvador, or Bucky, or B.M. as he was called by his school
chums, both had a few ounces of ethanol pumping through their
systems.

Mr. Salvador threw up his hands. "What could I possibly say to you verbally that would add to the impression you have already received?"

"She knows you."

Mr. Salvador sighed. "My father was Argentine, of German and
Italian ancestry. My mother was British. One of our homes was in
England and that is where I went to school. Once or twice a year,
she
would come seeping through the place to inspect it. She would
sit in the back of a classroom for a few minutes and watch. Made
all the teachers nervous as hell. Students too. She even made the
custodians
nervous."

"You had dealings with her then?"

"None. Never. How she could possibly remember my name is a
complete mystery to me. She must have a photographic memory.
She is a freak of nature," he finally concluded, belaboring the
obvious.

Dr. Radhakrishnan said nothing. He had the feeling that Mr.
Salvador lied to him quite a bit. But this seemed a particularly
obvious lie. Mr. Salvador had been extremely upset. Lady Wilburdon
was more than the titular head of his old school; she must have some
power over him. And the idea of someone actually having power
over the all-powerful Mr. Salvador was certainly interesting.

"What
   
killed
   
Mr.
   
Easyrider
   
is
   
still
   
mysterious,"
   
Dr.
Radhakrishnan said, "but I have high hopes for Mr. Scatflinger."

"I don't," Zeldo said. It was the first time he had spoken since
he had taken to drinking.

"Why not? Everything's going perfectly with him."

"Once we get his chip trained," Dr. Radhakrishnan said,
"presumably he will become a bit more versatile."

"We can't train his chip. His chip is dead," Zeldo said.

"If it were really dead, he wouldn't even be able to say wubba
wubba."

"It crashed. It's stuck. We ran afoul of that bug I was trying to
warn you about."

"So what's it doing?"

"It got caught in an infinite loop."

"An infinite loop?"
Dr. Radhakrishnan was flabbergasted. Infinity
was a mathematical concept, very easy for a bithead like Zeldo to bandy about, but not something that biologist usually had to deal with.

"Yes."

"Meaning?" Mr. Salvador said.

"Meaning that he will keep saying wubba wubba until he dies,"
Zeldo said.

"Hmm. That's not going to make much of a favorable
impression on Lady Wilburdon," Mr. Salvador said.

"We can send him back," Dr. Radhakrishnan said. "Send him
off to the hinterlands. He can found his own religious sect."

16

It was a creepy and surreal morning when they implanted the
biochips in the mind of Mohinder Singh. Dr. Radhakrishnan got
up early, as he always did on the morning of an operation. He went downstairs, eschewing room service, and watched the sun come up
over Delhi from the cafe of the Imperial Hotel. The air pollution
was especially bad this morning. Some kind of dire temperature
inversion had clamped itself down over the city like a bell jar, trap
ping and concentrating the cocktail of dust, automobile exhaust,
coal smoke, woodsmoke, manure smoke, and the ammoniated
gasses that rose up from the stewn excreta of millions of people and
animals. This being winter, the air was relatively humid, or as
humid as it was ever likely to get. The humidity condensed around
the countless nuclei provided by all of that air pollution, so that
when the sun rose, it had to force its way up through a thick cloacal
fog, and turned a furious red color, the color of Elvis's face in his
last moments on earth. When it finally burst free of the horizon, the
sun simply disappeared and became a mere bright tendency in the
burnt-orange sediment of the eastern sky.

Dr. Gangadhar V.R.J.V.V. Radhakrishnan sipped tea and ran over the whole project one more time, wondering if they had
overlooked anything.

Mr. Salvador had been spending even more time than usual on
the telephone recently. This was totally irrelevant to today's
operation, but Dr. Radhakrishnan remained curious about the
American side of this project. Old Bucky had to spend a certain
amount of time every day at the Barracks. The phone would ring,
he would answer it, and he would talk. For hours. And Dr.
Radhakrishnan would stroll back and forth through the Barracks,
tending to his own work, and occasionally cock an ear in old
Bucky's direction, hoping to overhear something.

Most of what he overheard, he already knew; Mr. Salvador was
just relaying information about the project to others. But on one
occasion, wandering around near Mr. Salvador's desk, Dr.
Radhakrishnan heard him involved in a very intense, and very
loud, conversation about something called Super Tuesday.

Dr. Radhakrishnan was sure he had seen this phrase somewhere
before, but he did not have the foggiest idea what it meant. Some kind of American thing. He kept meaning to ask Zeldo if he knew,
but kept forgetting.

After a while, Zeldo came down, murmured a sleepy hello to
him, occupied another table nearby, and began to read the
Times
of
India.

Dr. Radhakrishnan had far too much on his mind to concern himself with politics, and rarely looked at the
Times.
But when
Zeldo moved on to one of the interior pages, opening the paper
and holding it up in the air, Dr. Radhakrishnan could clearly see a
headline, down low on the first page:

U.S. CANDIDATES VIE IN "SUPER TUESDAY"
ELECTIONS

"What is Super Tuesday?" he said.

Zeldo spoke to him through the paper. "It's today," he said. "A bunch of the states have their primaries on the same day."

"Primaries?"

"Yeah. You know. To select the presidential candidates."

Dr. Radhakrishnan didn't want to hear anything more about it. He knew it would cloud his mind. He sat there drinking his tea.
Then it was time to go to work.

It all went smoothly there in the magnificent central operating
theater of the Radhakrishnan Institute. He had never seen the
place, except in his dreams, or in the computer simulations, until
he walked in to begin the operation. The room was circular, huge,
high-ceilinged, a cathedral of technology. The floors were white
and mirror-smooth. The walls were white painted concrete. All the
light was recessed halogen fixtures, painfully bright, and unnaturally
pure in coloration compared to the tainted, smoky-yellow
illumination provided by old-fashioned bulbs. It felt just the way it
should: as though every technological system on earth converged
on this one spot, on the operating table that stood in the middle of
the room.

"Jeez," Zeldo said, walking into the place, "all we need is a
skylight and some lightning rods."

They did it much better this time around. Everything was calm
and quiet. Everyone knew their moves. All the equipment was
brand new and worked perfectly.

They lowered the biochip down a shaft into the middle of
Mohinder Singh's brain and nestled it into the space that had been
cut away. This time it was a perfect fit. The incision had been made
under the control of a computer, there were no gaps, the new cells
would knit together with the old ones much more quickly.

The closing process took a couple of hours but Dr.
Radhakrishnan stayed there through the whole thing, watching his
assistants put Mr. Singh's head back together. Zeldo stood off to the
side at a Calyx console, monitoring the signals from the chip.

By the time they were sewing Mr. Singh's scalp flap back down
over the reassembled skull, lines of data had begun to scroll up the
monitor screen. The biochip had already made contact. Zeldo was
astonished by this, but Dr. Radhakrishnan wasn't. They had done
it right this time.

"What is it?" Mr. Salvador said. He had just come in from the
hotel. Clearly, he had been catching up on sleep, sex, drinking, or some other fundamental bodily function, and had been interrupted
in the middle by Dr. Radhakrishnan's telephone call. Clearly he was not happy about it.