Филип Керр: The Second Angel

It was another bright, cold day on the Moon and the atomic clocks were flashing three hundred. Three hundred and twenty-four hours is the length of a lunar-equatorial day, which means that one day on the Moon is worth two full weeks on Earth. Few if any of the people working in Artemis Seven, a penal cave-mining colony, would have agreed with this value. For time passes slowly in a penal colony, especially a hard-labor facility operating in the constant, artificial light of an airtight underground lunar cavern at minus twenty degrees Celsius.

The penal colony was in a cavern under the overhanging lip of a large crater in the Moon’s Carpathian foothills. Ten miles long, two to three hundred yards wide, and almost as high, it held more than three thousand men and women, all of them convicted of a variety of felonies, from simple theft to premeditated murder. The shortest sentence was five years, and the longest, fifteen. There were no lifers in Artemis Seven. Hard time in a lunar colony is considered sufficient punishment for all but the most heinous crimes.

Seen through the dust-covered windows of Artemis Seven, the vibrant Earth’s blue and white sphere contrasted sharply with the lifeless gray surface of the Moon. It seemed almost to have been placed there, like a bunch of purple grapes forever out of reach, to torment those being punished, as in the story of Tantalus — a constant reminder of the full extremity of their exile.

None paid Earth more attention than Cavor, sentenced to a ten-year exile. His life back home had been better than most of those who worked alongside him. When he wasn’t looking at Earth’s bright blue eye and dreaming about his former terrestrial life, he was staring at the flashing green digits of the lunar clock and thinking about his next rest period. Cavor was halfway through his thirteenth eight-hour shift, and had one more shift to work before his next scheduled seventy-two-hour rest period. He was operating a rock crusher, a solar-powered machine that begins the process whereby helium is extracted from Moon rock, when the voracious unit caught the dusty sleeve of Cavor’s thermal coat and pulverized his right arm. One moment he had been looking forward to his rest period and a meal, and the next he was himself being eaten up by the rock crusher. Before another convict managed to turn the machine off and summon help, it had chewed beyond his elbow. [1] Accidents are common on the Moon. With one-sixth Earth gravity, bodily movements are much slower than machinery and there is less time to rectify any mistakes, fust about the only physical activity enhanced on the Moon is sex. Most people still prefer to have sex slowly, perhaps now more than ever in these frantic modern times in which we live.

Several convicts carried Cavor from the back of the cavern where he had been working to an electric car which drove him to the infirmary, located close to the colony’s unguarded entrance. Security was relaxed in Artemis Seven, with few restrictions placed on convicts other than the requirement that they work. There wasn’t anyplace any of them could go anyway. The infirmary itself was located on an upper level in one of the honeycomb of caves that led off the main cavern. Its metal floor conducted an electrical field that enabled the infirmary to work in almost normal gravitational conditions, but the walls and ceiling were rock, and this meant that when the air-filtration system broke down, as it often did, everything — equipment, instruments, and patients — became covered in a fine layer of moondust. The area smelled strongly of disinfectant, except when the air-filtration system was working, in which case the various pipes and conduits entering the infirmary merely transferred the air from the dining hall, full of cigarette smoke and entomophagic [2] Following the failure of the Chinese rice harvest in 2005, insects came to be regarded as a major source of nutrition. Naturally there were many countries that always regarded entomophagy as perfectly acceptable; it was only in the West that people were more squeamish about such things. Quite apart from crickets, ants, grasshoppers, grubs, and caterpillars, all containing an abundance of vitamins and proteins, the Chinese developed several new breeds of worms: One of these, a highly nutritious variant of the mealworm, when treated with artificial flavorings such as beef, chicken, or fish, forms the staple diet of many Westerners. However, the Chinese scientists did not stop there: One particular breed of worm, a cross between a silkworm and a mealworm that fed on coca leaves, was found to contain a new kind of protein that had a dramatically stimulant effect. Further research on this particular worm, the breedworm, was taken over by the Chinese military. Consumed in small quantities, the breedworm resulted in an immediate and massive increase in a human being’s physical power (especially useful for a physically small people like the Chinese). In the short term, the breedworm was used by Chinese athletes seeking to increase their performance. And the results were astonishing. In the 2016 Beijing Olympics, the Chinese won 80 percent of all the track and field medals. Since the protein occurred naturally, there was no way of screening athletes for breedworm consumption. It was another ten years before the Chinese government made breedworms available to the world at large. Since then, the World Health Organization’s resulting entomophagy program has been highly successful in reducing starvation levels in third world countries by almost half. An entomophagic diet has proven to be suitable for Moon colonists, being a cheap, highly nutritious, and abundant source of food in this difficult environment. cooking odors.

In the emergency room, there were two medical personnel on duty, both of them convicts. Raft, the medical officer, helped his nurse, Berger, to cut away the clothing from the badly injured Cavor, and then to lift him onto the flatbed diagnostic scanner. While they waited for Florence, [3] Named after Florence Nightingale. the computer, to begin its clinical examination of Cavor, the two Moon colony medics quickly set about administering a trauma infusion — an admixture of anesthetics, inotropes, antibiotics, glucose, insulin, and sodium bicarbonate — to stabilize his body functions. But even before Florence had started speaking, Raft saw that Cavor’s shapeless arm would have to come off. This was not something he could delegate to Florence. The crude, most physically demanding part of surgery was his. He grimaced, disliking the butchery it entailed. Amputation, the principal mainstay of emergency surgery for centuries, and traditionally used as a desperate and often unsuccessful attempt to preserve life, was, despite vastly improved modern techniques, still a bloody business.

‘Peripheral pulses assessed,’ announced Florence. ‘Transcutaneous Doppler recordings completed. Thermography, radioactive xenon clearance, and transcutaneous potassium levels all checked. Estimated blood loss, two thousand mills and counting. All radiographs and tomograms indicate elective amputation procedure. You should probably obtain the patient’s consent to amputate, if necessary more proximally than you intend.’

‘The patient is unconscious, Florence,’ sighed Raft. ‘I don’t think the patient’s any more likely to give his consent than he is to whistle a happy tune, do you?’

‘If consent is not obtainable, then you should go ahead and amputate the patient’s arm, cutting through the humerus just above the deltoid muscle.’