I awoke on the furry couch-bed a second time, this time seeing a soft light glowing in the room, and this time knowing exactly where I was.  I took a deep breath and found that I was braced for pain, but there was none.  No pain, no discomfort, just a feeling of health and vitality and well-being.  I hadn't expected the aftermath to be that easy, not after seeing the array of equipment the clinicians had had.  I'd been weighed and measured and probed and scanned and practically turned inside out, and then I'd been put to sleep.  That last step had taken longer than it should have, I was told, simply because my readings were different from everyone else's, different in a way difficult to measure.  They'd had to do a lot of delicate recalibration before they were ready to start on me, and after all that build-up I'd missed the procedures themselves by being unconscious.  I wasn't awake long enough or fully enough to be annoyed, but once I was I expected to be.

I sat up on the couch-bed and ran my fingers through my hair, wondering if my last thought made any sense at all.  Despite the feeling of glowing good health I was also feeling faintly fuzzy around the edges, as though I'd just been roused out of a very deep sleep.  The room light brightened to a point just short of eye-hurting, letting me look down at myself and the delicate pink, slim-strapped body suit someone had put on me.  The clinicians must have thought my sense of modesty needede protecting, but all the suit's presence did was increase my annoyance.  I never slept in anything, and if they'd had the good sense to ask first -

he argumentative train of thought was ended completely by the appearance of a thick lock of hair falling over my left shoulder.  It wasn't as though that was the first time it had ever happened, but the lock of hair was red!  I grabbed more hair and brought it around to see it, and it was red, too!  The excitement rising in me said I may have accepted Dameron's procedures intellectually, but emotionally I hadn't believed they could do it.  I put my hands to my face, trying to detect differences, but didn't know my own features well enough that way to make anything out.  What I needed was a mirror.

I stood up fast and looked around, but all the salmon and green room held was what it had held before: the couch-bed, the round thing next to it, and a lump chair.  I was about to go storming out into the corridor yelling for Dameron, but the need to search the salmon-colored panels for the one that was the door brought me up short.  Dameron had done so much with the wall panels that it would be stupid of me not to try them first.  I strode over and began touching them here and there, finding absolutely nothing until my fingers slid over an invisible, yielding patch.  A door popped open to my left, allowing access to a narrow space between the walls - and on the back of the door was a full-length mirror.