Part 29 (2/2)

May his presence among us lead to the vision of limitless truth and reveal to us the beauty of your love.

And now I'm going to leave you here to do what you think you have to do. I think I'll wander down to the spring before it gets too dark. It might be cooler there, and I think mushrooms may be coming up. Can't resist those 'shrooms. It's the Siberian in me.”

He laid his hand on the baby's head and blessed him. MaryDedra said, ”May I come with you, Brother?”

”Suit yourself,” said Anatoly, ”but don't expect me to share.”

He held the nursery door open and the two of them went out.

Elizabeth and Minanonn, linked, seemed to be suspended within a vast glowing fabric, a vinelike tangle that penetrated as well as surrounded them. The a.n.a.log of the infant mind was multidimensional, surreally coloured, athrob with sickly vitality.

Bursts of hectic energy zipped along the conjoined strands in apparently random paths, like meteoric mice hurtling to and fro in a maze of crystalline tubes.

Now press this way, Elizabeth directed Minanonn. Now that.

Good! And as I open here, where I must cauterize, dam back the surge that will arise, lest it trigger an epileptic seizure, aggravating the dysfunction ...

And so the two manipulators worked, reaming and weaving, forming fresh junctures and bypa.s.sing others, refas.h.i.+oning the neural tapestry so that the errant mental energies might function in harmony with other aspects of the baby's mind, rather than ramping and warring to the death.

Strength. That had been the breakthrough. When Elizabeth had previously attempted this procedure together with Dionket and Creyn, fellow redactors, she had been hopelessly balked by the intractability of the immature will. The baby ”refused” to learn the thought-revisions that might save him, his young mind incapable of responding to subtlety. Nevertheless, Elizabeth had remained confident that her redactive salvage program would work, if only it could be imposed. And so she had gambled, designing a new configuration that included a powerful coercer-Minanonn-and sacrificing finesse for the cruder but practicable technique utilizing main strength.

Together, they pounded and bored, spliced and cut. And it worked. But it was taking too long.

She signalled a pause, for they had finally completed a section of rechannelization in the cerebral commissures, the fibres connecting the right and left hemispheres. It was an operation that Elizabeth had adjudged critical, and if it succeeded it would at least vindicate the basic design of the salvage program.

The two of them seemed to hover within a webwork shot with speeding lights. Elizabeth directed Minanonn to hold off from his damming function so that the new channels could be tested; and then with her redaction precisely tuned, she stimulated a certain region of the right cortex.

The entire mental hologram responded, swelling into a lattice of glorious, consonant light. For one brief moment, the baby owned a normal mind ... and more.

Then it was as before.

Elizabeth withdrew, dragging Minanonn with her.

”Did you see!” she gasped out loud.

”Almighty Tana-it was magnificent. But what was it?” He had been lying on a couch with his head close to the baby's basket while Elizabeth sat in a chair beside them. Now he pulled himself up, trembling and so drenched in perspiration that the blue silk of his robe clung to almost every contour of his herculean frame.

”My program,” Elizabeth whispered. She reached out to the baby, who whimpered fretfully and plucked at his torc with swollen little fingers. At her touch he subsided and breathed easily.

”It's working, then?” Minanonn asked. ”We'll be able to cure him?”

Elizabeth seemed frozen except for her hand, which caressed the front fastening k.n.o.b of the infant's torc. Minanonn repeated his questions and she said, ”I don't know if we'll be able to cure him. We're working so slowly ... it's taking a tremendous toll of your coercive strength. But the program itself-” She lifted her head and met his gaze. ”Minanonn, just for an instant, the baby went operant.”

He stared, uncomprehending.

”That beautiful flash of harmonious function,” she said. ”He was bypa.s.sing the old torc-generated neural circuitry completely, using more than the fresh channels we'd opened.

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