«I'd say just about everyone. The whole habitat had heard about her accident.»
I sighed. «Everyone but me.»
«Oh, dear.» Corrine grinned impetuously. «Penny was exposed to a lethal radiation dose eight months ago. She was on a review trip to Pallas, that's the second habitat. It was germinated four years ago, and trails Eden's orbit by a thousand kilometres. Her division is responsible for overseeing the growth phase. And Penny takes her duty very seriously. She was EVA inspecting the outer shell when we had a massive ion flux. The magnetosphere does that occasionally, and it's completely unpredictable. Jupiter orbit is a radiative hell anyway; the suits which the crews here wear look more like deep-sea diving rigs than the kind of fabric pressure envelopes they use in the O'Neill Halo. But even their shielding couldn't protect Penny against that level of energy.» She leant back in the chair, shaking her head slowly. «That's one of the reasons I was chosen for this post, with my speciality. Those crews take a terrible risk going outside. They all have their sperm and ova frozen before they come here so they don't jeopardize their children. Anyway . . . the spaceship crew got her back here within two hours. Unfortunately there wasn't anything I could do, not in the long term. She was here in hospital for a fortnight, we flushed her blood seven times. But the radiation penetrated every cell, it was as if she'd stood in front of a strategic-defence X-ray laser. Her DNA was completely wrecked, blasted apart. The mutation—« Breath whistled painfully out of Corrine's mouth. «It was beyond even our gene therapy techniques to rectify. We did what we could, but it was basically just making her last months as easy as possible while the tumours started to grow. She knew it, we knew it.»
«Three months at the most,» I said numbly.
«Yes.»
«And knowing that, somebody still went ahead and murdered her. It makes no sense at all.»
«It made a lot of sense to somebody.» The voice was challenging.
I fixed Corrine with a level gaze. «I didn't think you'd give me a hard time over being a company man.»
«I won't. But I know people who will.»
«Who?»
Her grin had returned. «Don't tell me Zimmels didn't leave you a bubble cube full of names.»
My turn to grin. «He did. What nobody has told me is how widespread Boston's support is.»
«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 . . .»