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the body, ringing the counter, leaning forward, peering downward and inward like gamblers around a dice table, and over the wall speaker came the tinny reproduction of a splintering whine as Ezawa broke into Magnusson's skull.

Chapter 8

May 3 - May 17, 1987

'Looking onto the top of the brain,' said Ezawa, 'I find the usual heavy infestation of the visual cortex... Is the recorder on?'

Dr Brauer assured him it was; some of the doctors whispered and exchanged knowing glances. Between their shoulders Donnell saw a halation of green radiance, but then they crowded together and blocked his view entirely.

'In addition,' Ezawa continued, 'I see threadlike striations of bioluminescence shining up through the tissues of the cerebral cortex. All right.' He brushed a lock of hair from his eyes with the back of his hand, which contained a scalpel. 'I'm now going to sever the cranial adhesions and lift out the brain.'

The doctors attended Ezawa with the silent watchfulness of acolytes, bending as he bent to his labor, straightening when he straightened, bending again to see what he had removed. 'Let's get some shots of this,' he said. The doctors moved back, enabling one of the orderlies to obtain good camera angles, and Donnell had a glimpse of the brain. It was resting on Magnusson's chest, a gray convulsed blossom with bloody frills and streaks of unearthly green curving up its sides, like talons gripping it from beneath. He looked away. There was no need to watch any more, no need to puzzle or worry. Form had been given to the formless suspicions which had nagged him all these weeks, and he was surprised to discover that he had already accepted a death sentence, that this crystallization of his worst fears was less frightening than uncertainty. Veils of emotion were blowing through him: anger and revulsion and loathing for the glowing nastiness inside his own skull, and - strangely enough - hope. An intimation of promise. Perhaps, he thought, riffling the pages of the ledger, the intimation was simply an instance of the knowledge springing - as it had to old Magnusson - unbidden to his brain.

Flashcubes popped. He wondered if they would pose with their bloody marvel, link arms and smile, get a nice group shot of Ezawa and the gang to show at parties.

Ezawa cleared his throat. 'On the ventral and lower sides I find a high concentration of bacteria in those areas traversed by the catecholamine pathways. Patches of varying brightness spreading from the hind brain to the frontal cortex. Now I'm going to cut along the dorsal-ventral axis, separating the upper and lower brain.'

The doctors huddled close.

'God! The entorhinal system!' Brauer blurted it out like a hallelujah, and the other doctors joined in an awed litany: 'I told Kinski I suspected...' 'Brain reward and memory consolidation...' 'Incredible!' The babble of pilgrims who, through miraculous witness, had been brought hard upon their central mystery.

'Doctors!' Ezawa waved his scalpel. 'Let's get an anatomical picture down on tape before we speculate.' He addressed himself to the recorder. 'Extremely high concentrations of bacteria in the medial and sulcral regions of the frontal cortex, the substantia regia, the entorhinal complex of the temporal lobe. It appears that the dopamine and norepenephrine systems are the main loci of the bacterial activity.' He began to slice little sections here and there, dropping them into baggies, and Magnus-son's chest soon became a waste table. He held up a baggie containing a glowing bit of greenery to the ceiling lights. 'Remarkable changes in the ventral tegumentum. Be interesting to run this through the centrifuge.'

Donnell switched off the speaker. A wave of self-loathing swept over him; he felt less than animal, a puppet manipulated by luminous green claws which squeezed his ventral tegumentum into alien conformations. The feathery ticklings inside his head were, he hoped, his imagination. Magnusson was right: logic dictated escape. He could not see what was best for himself unless he left behind this charnel house where crafty witch doctors chased him through mazes and charted his consciousness and waited to mince him up and whirl his bits in a centrifuge. But he was going to need Jocundra's help to escape, and he was not sure he could trust her. He believed that her lies had been in the interests of compassion, but it would be necessary to test the depth of her compassion, the quality of the feelings that ruled it. Having thought of her for weeks in heavy emotional contexts, it amazed