‘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]
‘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.
3
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.’
King looked unimpressed. ‘So does my car radio,’ he said.
‘I doubt it. These are the kind of low-frequency sound waves that can be used to cause disorientation, or something worse.’
‘Like what?’
‘Nausea, vomiting, complete loss of bowel control. An uninvited guest crosses that barrier and he’ll wish he’d stayed in bed. There’s not much of a threat you can pose to a high-security installation when you’ve been virtually crippled with diarrhea.’
‘You’re joking,’ guffawed King.
‘I never joke about these things, you know that. The effect of the device is almost instantaneous, and at sufficiently low frequencies, it’s potentially lethal, although I can’t actually be sure. It’s only ever been tested on animals. In my job that’s always half the problem. We’re never around when these Rational Environments are broken into and tested.’
‘You sound as if that’s a cause for some regret,’ remarked Bang.
Dallas shrugged. ‘In a way it is. After all, it’s only human nature to want to see what you’re up against, to see how the systems perform.’
‘Deterrence matters a great deal more to our clients than simple expediency,’ King said stiffly. ‘They would rather not discover just how well their systems work.’
King glanced away for a moment, allowing Dallas an opportunity to look at the Terotechnology CEO more closely. For there was something about the colors existing within the stereoscopic program that helped you to capture a subtly different mental image of someone. In here King looked more supercilious somehow, his nose more hooked than Dallas had noticed before, his beard grayer and more unkempt, and his dark eyes so noticeably hooded that he appeared to be almost blind. The overall effect was of some capricious Eastern tyrant. King pointed toward the multicursal route that led ahead of him.
‘And the vault? I assume it’s at the other end of the labyrinth?’
‘Yes.’
‘What level of integrity?’
‘Solid state, synchronous components, time switch.’ Lately, he’d been giving some thought as to how someone might defeat such a door, and he’d had what he thought was a brilliant idea. He wondered if he should tell King, but the CEO’s remark about deterrence had given him pause. So he just shrugged and added: ‘I’d invite you to take a look, only the labyrinth is a little complicated, even for me.’
36