Read Online The Medusa Chronicles by Stephen Baxter - Free Book Online Page B

formless and white. Soon shapes and colours coalesced, and Falcon heard the whirr of focusing elements and the click of filters as his vision optimised to the environment.
    A room took shape around him, all clean geometries, walls and ceilings a grid of white tiles. A window was off to one side, just a rectangle of darkness. Around him were various surgical devices, robots sheathed in sterile transparent covers, looking as if they were fresh from the showroom. Doctor Hope Dhoni stood a little closer than the machines, dressed in a green surgical smock, a sterile cap on her head, mask hanging limply from the straps around her neck, her gloved hands clasped before her. She was “standing,” but he was sure now that the ambient gravity was much less than a tenth of a gee. The young nurse who had cared for him at Luke Air Force Base was in her sixties now, and any cosmetic intervention had been graceful; her expression seemed as gentle as it had ever been.
    â€œI see you, Hope. You look well. Not a day older.”
    â€œIf that’s not flattery your imaging system needs adjusting.”
    â€œHow long did you keep me under this time?”
    He didn’t spend much time around humans these days, but he was still capable of recognising her smile. “How long do you think?”
    He still had no firm idea of where he was, nor of the immediate circum­stances leading up to the surgery. “Feels longer than last time. Months, rather than days or weeks.”
    â€œMake it a couple of years.”
    â€œYears!”
    â€œIt sounds worse than it was. We ran into some complications, it’s true. In doubt, we always prefer to back off and consider our options. You’re too valuable to risk a mistake.”
    â€œSo I just lie there on the slab while you organise an academic conference to decide where to cut next?”
    â€œIf I told you that was alarmingly close to the truth, would it upset you? There were some good papers, actually. Better safe than sorry, Howard—that’s always the motto. And besides, there have been some political problems. The risk was low. We kept you cool, slowed your cellular metabolism down as far as it would go.”
    Cautiously he shifted his point of view to take in as much of himself as his position allowed. He found he was speaking to her from an angled position, like a patient raised up in a bed. But there was no bed. He had come around—been switched back on, to be precise about it—in a heavy-duty cradle, a metal framework supporting his mechanical anatomy. A cradle that might have been used to move spacecraft parts around a clean-room. Looking down, he surveyed the armoured cylinder that now sufficed for his life-support system: a bronze cylinder, replacing the old golden-­statuette edition, narrower from front to back, and somewhat sleeker in design, with a definite taper from the top to the bottom.
    Things were coming back to him, at last. Memories of pre-operative briefings, long discussions with Hope and her team. Falcon had sat through hours of it, watching the doctors argue over images and schematics of hisinsides. Falcon was no physician, he did not pretend to understand the planned medical work, but the machinery was more his field. His support systems had been subjected to a complete redesign, improving not only their reliability but also expanding the range of conditions that Falcon could easily tolerate. The new cylinder, being more compact, would allow Falcon to squeeze into the smaller, nimbler spacecraft of the mid twenty-­second century. Its internal fusor was of the latest design, and would not need replacing for many decades. And so on. Along with that overhaul, some of the living parts that he still carried with him had been eliminated, their functions supplanted by smaller, more robust and efficient machines.
    His wheeled undercarriage had yet to be reattached to the base of the cylinder, and he knew a range of new ambulatory