Филип Керр - The Second Angel

‘How are you doing?’ said Gates.

Cavor regarded the big man with suspicion. Since his arrival back from the Moon, having his new arm fitted, and trying to adjust to life on Earth outside of the Zone, he regarded everyone he met as a potential threat. Even inside the comparative safety of the Clostridium, he had learned to keep to himself. Some of the other guests were crazy.

‘Do I know you?’

‘We came back from the Moon together.’

‘Then you’ll excuse me for not remembering. I had one or two other things on my mind. Like whether I was going to live or not.’

‘How’s the new arm?’

Cavor looked at him, trying to recall the face.

‘Were you there when I had my accident?’

‘We met on the Superconductor.’

‘Oh.’ Cavor lifted the prosthetic for Gates’s inspection. ‘What do you think of it?’

‘Not bad at all,’ said Gates.

‘You think so? I used to be a piano player.’ Cavor sighed. ‘Not any more. Ravel’s Concerto for Left Hand isn’t much of a repertoire.’ He tried to make a fist out of the tan-colored hand. ‘The fingers are a bit stiff. That’s the main reason I’m here. They tell me hyperbaric is very good at helping restore the blood supply to the muscles and nerve endings nearest to the site of amputation.’

‘It is. What exactly happened anyway?’

‘I had an accident with a rock crusher.’

‘And before that?’ In Gates’s eyes, Cavor looked too small and sensitive to have committed the kind of crime that merited being sent to a lunar penal colony.

‘You mean, how did I end up on Artemis Seven?’ Cavor shrugged. ‘I killed my wife. That was pretty much an accident, too. I found out she was seeing some other guy, and so I hit her. A little too hard, as it happened.’

Cavor squeezed his temples painfully.

‘Headache, huh?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Could be the LH canisters [63] Lithium hydroxide. in your chamber want changing. You have to watch out for that kind of thing, because no one else will. This place isn’t exactly ten stars.’ Noticing the knit of Cavor’s eyebrows, Gates added, ‘They’re there to scrub the exhaled carbon dioxide out of the air. More than likely it’ll be your own CO 2that’s giving you the headache. Call Maintenance and get some new ones. Otherwise you’re liable to fall asleep and not wake up again.’

‘Thanks for the tip. You seem to know a lot about it.’

‘What, air? Sure. I used to be a pilot. Astroliner. Before I was promoted to being a bloody convict.’

‘What did you do?’

‘Got caught.’

‘Is that all?’

‘You want more, then you’d better read Victor Hugo. I’m not much of a storyteller.’

Cavor nodded, thinking the big man was indeed the stuff of some epic story: tall, strong, and roughly handsome, he was over life-size in almost every way, with an exaggerated tautness about him, like some weather-beaten bronze figure outside a museum. Even his name, Rameses Gates, put Cavor in mind of something monolithic. But he seemed quite friendly, and Cavor judged it could only be good for a small one-armed guy like himself to have a big two-armed guy like Gates as a friend. Cavor remained unaware of how much Gates had already done for him: of how Gates had prevented him from suffocating inside the G-pod aboard the Superconductor. Gates didn’t feel inclined to explain the exact circumstances of their first acquaintance: He was not the kind of man who enjoyed having people feel obliged to him. Gratitude, like responsibility, can sometimes weigh heavily.

‘How long are you planning to stay here?’ asked Cavor.

‘Don’t know,’ said Gates. ‘Depends...’

‘On what?’

‘Hmm?’ Gates was distracted by the arrival in the hotel’s induction area of a tall, pale-looking man wearing an expensive fur coat. ‘I wonder who he is?’ he murmured.

‘Who?’

‘The guy who just checked in.’

Cavor glanced at his watch and was surprised to see the time. ‘It is kind of late to be arriving.’

‘Actually, that’s not so unusual,’ remarked Gates. ‘If people wake up in the middle of the night and they find they’ve developed the rash and are on the verge of an aplastic crisis, they tend not to wait until morning before checking into a place like this.’

‘I get your point,’ said Cavor.

‘This is a kind of sanctuary,’ said Gates. ‘A place like this gives hope to the soul. The victims of the virus come here just the way people flocked to a church to be baptized during the plague that afflicted ancient Carthage during the second century A.D.’

The history of plagues and pestilence was the only history Gates knew. Like most people who had the virus, it was the only history he had ever been taught. And since disease has been one of the fundamental parameters — if not the fundamental parameter — of human history, who is to say that this was not as good a way as any to have formed a substantive conception of the life of societies of men, of their ideas, and the changes they have gone through? Rameses Gates had read Thucydides, Hippocrates, Plutarch, Democritus, Procopius, Boccaccio, Fracastorius, Cotton Mather, Pepys, Defoe, Gibbon, Malthus, Fiennes, Garrett, and Preston. He could have described the ecology of the anopheles mosquito, or told you how fear of Catholicism prevented Oliver Cromwell from finding relief from his malaria; [64] He is said to have refused to take an infusion of the ‘Jesuit bark’ of the cinchona tree, in the mistaken assumption that there was a Popish plot to poison him. The medically active ingredient in the bark is quinine. he had knowledge of the conquest of Mexico not by Cortes, but by the smallpox the Spaniards brought with them, just as he knew that the use of the word ‘leprosy’ in English versions of the Old Testament is a mistranslation of the original Hebrew word tsaar’at. [65] The word was originally used to signify any disfiguring skin disease, including eczema and syphilis. When the Old Testament was translated into Greek, tsaar’at became lepra, which had a similar usage and had nothing to do with Mycobacterium leprae, which only became widespread under the Romans, long after Old Testament times. It was true that he looked like an ox of a man, but in his own way, he was an educated one.

‘A kind of sanctuary, yes,’ agreed Cavor. ‘Except that oxygen is more immediately efficacious than prayer. That’s been my experience, anyway.’

The man checking in at the induction desk glanced around nervously, and seeing Gates and Cavor, looked quickly away. His expression, his whole demeanor gave him the kind of hunted appearance an ex-convict like Gates was well qualified to recognize.

‘He looks too healthy and too rich to be in a place like this,’ said Gates. ‘That’s not the kind of coat you wear if you’ve got bad blood. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he was RES Class One.’

‘So what’s he doing here?’ asked Cavor.

‘That’s a good question. Whatever the reason, he must have arrived in a hurry. Man’s not carrying any luggage.’

‘Maybe he just found out he’s got the virus,’ suggested Cavor. ‘That’s the kind of news that could throw anyone into a panic.’ Cavor was speaking from experience. He was still trying to come to terms with the fact of his own illness — the knowledge that the transfusion of blood substitute he had received on the Moon, which had saved his life, had also infected him with the virus. There were times when he could almost feel the contagion lurking inside his own bone marrow. It had replaced the feeling of guilt about killing Mina that had been with him for a long time.

‘Could be,’ allowed Gates. ‘In which case he might still have some money.’