Филип Керр - The Second Angel

‘A hundred years ago, when the disease was a little more common, the treatment was based on regular blood transfusions aimed at maintaining hemoglobin at the kind of level that would meet her body’s oxygen demands and prevent skeletal changes.’ He paused to allow the import of what was said there to sink in. ‘That was before blood became intrinsically valuable. No one would have thought anything of offering the victim of thalassemia a complete change of blood every month or two. Of course, these days things are rather different. Such a course of treatment would be ruinously expensive. Even for people such as yourselves. It would be a simpler matter to be cured of P2. That requires only one complete change of blood. This would require an infinite number of transfusions.’

‘What alternative do we have?’ demanded Aria. ‘She’s our daughter. We can’t just give up on her. Can we, Dallas?’

‘It might be better if you did,’ said Dallas Senior. ‘You know, there are euthanasia programs to help with this kind of situation. And there’s no need for you to feel bad about it. Not these days. Mercy killing is completely normal. And quite painless.’

Aria shook her head numbly. ‘We went through too much to get her just to let her die now,’ she said. ‘Tell me this. Without the transfusions, she’ll die, right?’

‘Oh certainly. From congestive heart failure or complications secondary to repeated pathological fractures of her weakened bones. I’m afraid it’s merely a matter of time.’

‘Then there’s no question but to proceed,’ said Aria.

‘Look, why don’t you both take some time to think about this. Maybe take some advice from your blood bank manager. A few more days won’t make any difference to your daughter.’

Taking her hand in his own, Dallas faced the Motion Parallax of his own father and nodded.

‘I guess you’re right,’ he said.

But it was plain what Aria thought about that.

‘When could she have the first transfusion?’ asked Aria.

‘Today. That is if you’re sure about what you’re doing. I’d still feel better if you were to speak to your blood bank manager.’

‘We’re sure,’ said Aria. ‘Caro’s waited long enough. Hasn’t she?’

She glanced at Dallas, who avoided her eyes but nodded.

‘Then all I need from you are your blood bank details. As soon as we’ve confirmed that you have sufficient reserves, we can proceed.’

‘I was thinking,’ said Dallas. ‘If the statutory fluid replacement period has been completed, then it might save a bit of time if we could both make deposits while we’re here and then we could use those units for the first treatment instead of touching our own reserves.’

Aria consulted her watch and confirmed that the eight-week SFRP was about to be completed for them both. [36] With adequate fluid replacement, total fluid volume is restored to a blood donor within seventy hours. It is normally eight weeks, however, before the donor’s iron stores can be completely replenished and before the donor is legally eligible to make another deposit. This safeguards against people building up deposits of blood in their accounts at the expense of their own health.

‘Good. I’ll tell the phlebotomist to expect you both.’ With that, Dallas Senior nodded and, as was the practice in crossover hospitals, drew his wrists together and extended his hands in the shape of an inverted Y. This was a sign of respect for the blood they had discussed, and a reference to the ancient Sumerian pictograph for blood — the earliest known example of the use of a symbol for blood in any written language. At the same time, he said, ‘Blessed Are the Pure in Blood.’

Dallas and Aria made the sign, repeated the formal trope, and then went to find the transfusion center.

As soon as they were back in their apartment, Aria went into the library to check out thalassemia and to remind herself of such related subjects as Gregor Mendel, genetics, and malaria. Curiously she found herself aggrieved, even somewhat offended by what she read about Mendelian genetics. Mendel, an Augustinian monk, had made a series of crosses between pairs of strains of true-breeding peas, and it was the realization that what applied to peas could also apply to herself and to Dallas — as if he was a tall yellow seed, and she was a short green one — that she found to be nothing short of distasteful. All of it — the Laws of Independent Assortment and the Laws of Independent Segregation — made perfectly logical sense, of course, and Aria was even able to construct a pedigree chart to demonstrate the inheritance of genes within her family. But it provided her with no comfort and still left her possessed with the notion that medicine had failed if things could still be determined at such a fundamental level by two pairs of alleles. When the only treatment available offered not a cure, but a respite.

The injustice of such a disease.

And not only the injustice, the indignity as well. What would they tell people? The neighbors? Their friends? How could they face them? Incurable diseases were for the masses. Decent people didn’t get such afflictions.

With growing irritation, she studied Dallas as he watched an old movie. Medicine might have failed her, but was there any reason why her husband should fail her too? How many times had he overcome an obstacle that had been placed in his intellectual path, using nothing other than his sheer brainpower? Was he not known throughout America as an inventor? Were not his high-security systems and multicursal routes the subject of endless features in magazines both artistic and technical? But now, when he encountered a problem that affected his own child, he seemed unwilling even to try and exercise that famous ingenuity. Finally she could stand his inactivity no longer.

‘Are you just going to sit there?’ she demanded. ‘Can’t you think of something?’

‘Despite all appearances to the contrary,’ he said, ‘I’ve been doing little else.’

But try as he might, Dallas could see no other solution than to adopt the treatment that the hospital had suggested — and which he knew would surely leave him bankrupt. It was only a question of time.

The Terotechnology Stereoscopic Theater was built in-the-round. Wearing a pair of lightweight stereoscopic glasses, you sat in the center of the room and watched a three-dimensional projected image inside the control space. For Dallas, it was a useful way of presenting the director with a new design for a Rational Environment, and only when King was satisfied in every detail did a copy of the computer program get sent to the client, which in this case was the Deutsche Siedlungs Blutbank.

The world inside the program looked real enough. Surfaces looked solid, light behaved as it was supposed to, even when reflected on or through water, and both Dallas and King could see each other as clearly as in real life. The only difference between the program and reality was in the lethality of the actual environment: None of the high-security systems could injure or disable the viewer, which was just as well given their number and the way they were designed to take the interloper unawares. Each of his Rational Environments contained as many surprises as possible. Dallas enjoyed imagining his potential adversaries and tried to anticipate their every move. But he always sought to devise something new to complement some of his more tried and tested systems. Novelty was the essence of good security, for it was remarkable how quickly bank robbers were able to understand and defeat new systems.

‘There’s an invisible barrier in front of you,’ he told King. ‘As soon as you cross it, you set off an infrasound generator that emits very low-frequency sound waves.’