WHEN Jeff awoke he was sure that this time he had been unconscious for a much longer period. First, he was in a different room, a square-sided blue-walled chamber with a door on one side and an outside port in the wall opposite. Second, he was lying on a normal bed, with no sign of medical equipment. Third, his whole body cast had been removed. He looked down at himself and found that he was dressed in shirt and pants of a soft dove gray, with comfortable loafers on his feet.
Finally, and most important, he did not hurt. Anywhere. He turned his head. Not a twinge. He could sit up easily, swing his feet to the floor, stand up, and head across to the port. Nothing felt sore or damaged or delicate. In fact, he felt better than he had ever been. There was only one source of discomfort—a hunger that started to gnaw inside him as he approached the port.
He was tempted to turn and go at once to find something to eat, but the sight of the sky outside held him. Although he was still in the Messina Dust Cloud, this was a different part of it. Here, the great dust rivers coiled and curled and twisted, in braided strands of gold and pink and deep purple. This was where the streams of ionized dust, moving in response to the Cloud's gravitational and electromagnetic fields, must meet and intermingle.
Not everything visible was a natural feature. To the left and to the right he could see long linear constructs like cylindrical spokes, glowing lilac and magenta in reflected light from the Cloud. The thirty-meter-thick spokes began at the main body of the structure, close to where he stood, and stretched away kilometer after kilometer to infinity.
This could not be a ship. It was too big. It could only be Confluence Center.
And if he were here—memories of his last awakening were returning—then Eliot Dufferin was already Sol-side, reporting on Jeff's failure. It was unlikely to surprise any of his family. Except for his mother and Uncle Lory, no one would really be upset.
As he examined the sky again, seeking some pattern that might tell him the direction of the node, he became aware of another mystery. He had weight, not far from the weight he had on Earth. Confluence Center was big, but not big enough to produce a gravitational field. Unless the Center was rotating fast enough for centrifugal force to give the sensation of weight, he should be floating. Yet his view of the Cloud was static, with no sign that he was turning in relation to it.
He could see no sign of the node that the Aurora had used to reach the Messina Dust Cloud. The change from his last Cloud position made everything unfamiliar. The node could be beyond any one of the glowing patches—or behind him, on the other side of the sky.
That would have to wait. His hunger had passed beyond reasonable to ravenous. He turned to head for the open door and heard an odd scuffling beyond it.
As he walked forward, he heard a hissed "Stop that! I only wanted to look. I've never really seen one."
"You can't." More scuffling. Then, "You were told to stay away. Come on. Ouch!"
"It's your own fault. Let go of me!"
Not Hooglich, and not that funny machine, either. What was it called, Tiddler? No, Tilde. He must still be a bit groggy from waking up.
Jeff walked through the open door and emerged into a blue-walled corridor that ran thirty or forty meters before curving away out of sight. Just outside the door a strange tableau met his eyes. A stocky boy of six or seven with bright black eyes and a mop of dark curly hair was trying to pull free. Holding him from behind, one hand on his shoulder and her arm around his neck, was a tall, strongly built girl about Jeff's age. She had short-cut hair the color of fresh straw, and his first impression was of a younger version of his own cousin, Myra. That changed when the struggling pair moved and he had a good view of her face. She was panting with the effort, and fair devil's eyebrows scowled above a pair of startling blue eyes.
The two caught sight of Jeff at the same moment. They stopped tussling and slowly moved apart. They stared at Jeff, the girl sheepish and the boy openly curious.
At last the boy spoke. "Huh," he said. "He doesn't look anything special. He looks normal"
"I told you," the girl said. "What did you expect? A freak show?"
"Well, when people say he's a Kopal and a cyborg, you'd think—"
"Do you mind?" Jeff stepped closer. They were talking about him as though he wasn't there.
"It's his fault." The girl was speaking to Jeff but she gave the boy a punch on the shoulder. "We knew you'd be waking up now, and I was told to come and get you. Before we go inward, I'm supposed to see if you need anything. But nobody asked him along."
"Nobody said I couldn't."
"You're a piece of space junk, Billy. I don't know why we didn't leave you there."
"Hey!"
"Shut up." Then, to Jeff, "I'm Lilah Desmon."
"I'm Jeff Kopal."
"I know. And this disgusting bit of space flotsam is Billy Jexter. Do you need anything, Jeff Kopal?"
Jeff had the dizzying feeling of a situation totally beyond his comprehension. But he could answer her question without having to think.
"I need food. Lots of food."
"Easily done. Come on."
Lilah led Jeff along the corridor. The boy trailed along behind, muttering, "Cyborgs do eat, then."
"Billy!" the girl said warningly. "Just ignore him, Jeff. He's a total animal."
Jeff wasn't taking much notice. As they walked, he seemed to become lighter and lighter. Also, something very strange was happening inside him. Was it all the side effects of hunger? The pangs had grown and grown until he was unable to think about much else. He didn't care what he was given to eat, he would chew happily on a dead dog. His mouth watered at the prospect. "Can we hurry?"
"Nearly there." She took them along a curved section of the corridor, and into a room leading off it. Haifa dozen tables sat in the center, and one wall held half a dozen autochefs.
Lilah waved her hand. "It won't be anything much, unless you are willing to wait a few minutes. I can—"
"No. No wait."
She turned to stare at him. "Well, all right. Sit down."
The next two minutes were the longest in Jeff's life. It became worse when the smell of hot food wafted over from the autochef. Billy Jexter had seated himself opposite and was staring steadily at Jeff, who scowled back. When a bowl of soup and a loaded plate appeared in front of him, he stopped looking at anything. He ate and drank and drank and ate until there was no room inside for another morsel. At that point he stopped, leaned back, and took notice again of his surroundings and the other two people.
Billy Jexter was still staring at him, but with a new expression. "Wow. I've seen Link Musterthwaite eat, and I've seen Fat Winkleman. But I've never seen anybody eat as much and as fast as that."
Jeff recognized a compliment when he heard one, and he realized that the look was admiration. He didn't deserve either. He had never gulped down food like that before, and he didn't think he ever would again. He must have been badly starved—and there was an obvious explanation.
"How long was I unconscious?"
"Let's see now." Lilah began to count on her fingers. Jeff waited. He wouldn't be surprised by any answer, weeks or months or even a year. To heal the injuries he had suffered took a long time.
She finished her figuring and said, "Altogether, from the time you were hurt, it's been ten days."
"That can't be right!"
"Why not?"
"Well, Hooglich told me it was nine days from the sounder encounter when I first woke up. I felt terrible then, and she told me I was in awful shape. Now you are telling me that it's less than forty-eight hours later, and I feel better than I've ever felt."
She sat down opposite and regarded him with her head to one side. "You don't know, do you? You really have no idea."
"I'm not sure he is one," Billy said. "I think they were kidding. He doesn't look like one."
"One what?" Jeff had taken as much gibberish as he could stand.
"A cyborg," Lilah said quietly. "But there's no doubt about it. You are."
A cyborg? Jeff stared down at his hands, as though they might suddenly turn to metal claws. "What are you talking about? I'm not a cyborg."
"You are," she repeated. "If I hadn't known before I saw you eat, I'd know it now."
"You're crazy. This is Cyborg Territory, but I'm not one."
"Sit down." Jeff had started to stand up—amazingly, he was starting to feel hungry again. He ignored her and kept going. "Look," she said as he headed across to the autochef. "I think we're talking past each other. What do you mean when you say 'cyborg'?"
"A combination of human and machine." Jeff wasn't quite sure what that meant. His own mental picture was of a poorly defined image of flesh and metallic parts, combined in some vague yet definitely unpleasant way. "Perhaps a man's body with artificial arms and legs. Artificial eyes, too, maybe."
Billy snorted in disbelief, and Lilah asked, "Why would anybody make a thing like that?"
"I don't know." Jeff spoke through a mouthful of bread. "To fight as a soldier? You ought to be the one to answer that. I'm from Earth, this is Cyborg Territory."
"It is not. Look at Billy, and look at me. Do you think we're part machine?"
He turned and stared at both of them, seeking anything he might have missed on the first inspection. Either of them would not have been out of place on Earth. "No," he said at last. "I don't. But you say I am. I don't see the difference between us."
"There's a huge difference." She came to stand by him. "You ate a ton of food a few minutes ago. Now you're eating again."
"So what? I'm hungry."
"I can see that. Don't you know why? The big difference between us is that Billy and I weren't in a major accident ten days ago, and just about killed."
"So?"
"So you needed medical treatment—urgently. Our people didn't wait to ask. We just did it."
"I appreciate whatever you did."
"I hope you will when you know what we did. We didn't want you to lie helpless and miserable for weeks and weeks as your body recovered naturally. Our engineer doctors examined your injuries, then added the machines to you."
"Machines?" Jeff took another look at his hands and arms. "I don't see any machines."
"Of course not. They were injected, just a few milliliters of them. Tiny machines, too small to see, the size of a cell or smaller. Smart machines, too, able to recognize and repair bodily damage. And self-replicating machines, that would multiply as needed using your own body's supplies of raw materials. That's why you're starving—you have to keep them supplied and you're swarming with them. Like it or not, Jeff Kopal, at the moment you are a man-machine combination—a cyborg, if you prefer to use the word that Sol-siders seem to like."
"What's going to happen to me?" Jeff had a vision of himself as the machines inside took over, turning him into some kind of clanking mechanical monster. "Am I going to . . . change?"
"Sure." She seemed to be confirming his nightmare, but before he could react she continued, "You're already changing—back to the way you were before you were hurt. If you're feeling well, it means that the nannies—nanomachines—have rebuilt you inside and are close to finishing their job. They made you eat because they needed raw materials, and they'll make you sleep if they want your nervous system closed down for adjustments. They'll stop functioning when they are all done, in another day or two; then the nannies will be naturally excreted from your body."
"I know what naturally excreted means," Billy said happily. "It means you'll shit machines. It sounds painful."
"Billy Jexter!"
"Well, it does."
"You don't have to say things like that." Lilah spoke as though her argument with Billy was an old one. She turned to Jeff. "You can see why nobody wants him around."
Jeff had little interest in talking about Billy Jexter's habits. Something else was on his mind. "Is that the only kind of cyborg you have—little machines that you use in medicine?"
"No. There are other kinds of nannies that we use to build things. That stuff's boring, and I don't know much about it. Why does it matter?"
"Back on Earth, the Messina Dust Cloud is called Cyborg Territory."
"That's only 'cause Earth is afraid of machines. You don't have them there, do you? You have slaves instead."
"We have machines, of course we do." But Jeff knew it was a half-truth. Smart machines, like Logan, were prohibited.
"What about human slaves, then? People whose job is just to serve other people. Are you going to tell me you don't have them?"
"Well . . . ." The servants in Kopal Manor didn't have to work there, they could leave anytime. But no one did, because the alternative was the Pool. Hooglich had made it clear how unpleasant that option was. People would hang on to their jobs no matter what. Maybe there was slavery on Earth, even if it wasn't called that.
"See," Lilah said. She had correctly read Jeff's hesitation.
"Which would you rather have: intelligent machines to help you, or human slaves?"
The answer was obvious, but a sudden memory prevented Jeff from speaking. He recalled his mother, fighting for breath with her ruined lungs. The nannies could have cured her in days, rebuilding everything damaged in the accident. The difficult operation for lung replacement would have been avoided.
Lilah seemed to have a natural ability to read his emotional state. This time she stood up and quickly said, "Well, never mind that. We'll have time to talk about anything we feel like . . . later. But now we have to get moving. I was sent to bring you to central axis, and she'll be wondering where we've got to."
"Who will?"
"Mo—Connie Cheever." Lilah had an odd smile on her face, and Billy hooted with laughter. At Jeff's blank look, she added, "She's—er, the general administrator of Confluence Center. The nearest thing in the Cloud to an overall boss of operations."
"Why does she want to see me?"
"You'll have to ask her. But it makes sense. I mean, you are a Kopal, you must know what the Sol navy is up to. And as for you"—she turned to Billy Jexter, who had stood up with the other two—"you are specifically not included in this invitation. So bug off."
Billy scowled and stuck his tongue out at her. "I don't care if I go with you or not. I bet he doesn't know anything worth hearing."
He ducked under Lilah's swipe and skipped out of the door. Lilah moved after him. "I'll get you, Billy Jexter," she shouted along the corridor.
Jeff, watching the two of them, decided that Billy didn't deserve punishment. He had the situation exactly right. Jeff knew nothing worth hearing, and he wanted to be informed as much as anyone.
What was the Sol navy doing? Was Jeff's own presence in the Messina Dust Cloud tied up with that? And was Uncle Giles Lazenby, the smiling and devious master plotter, somehow behind it all?