Florence stayed silent as Raft finished applying the tourniquet.
‘I’ll fetch those RHH units,’ said Berger, as she left the emergency room.
‘At least this way, he’ll get to live,’ Raft shrugged. ‘Who knows how much longer? Ten. Maybe even twenty years. Me, I’ve had it for the best part of ten years, with very few ill effects.’
Pushing an infusion computer in front of her, Berger came back through the door in a swirl of gritty moondust. The nurse enjoyed her work. You earned fewer credits than you did crushing rocks all day, but medical work was more interesting, and certainly more satisfying. She set up the machine next to the flatbed scanner, drew out the cannulae assembly, and let it attach itself automatically to Cavor’s good arm. The computer croaked like a large frog as it made its own tourniquet, swabbed Cavor’s skin, and then inserted the infusion needle.
‘I wonder how he escaped getting it for so long?’ mused Raft.
‘Maybe he comes from a rich family,’ suggested Berger.
‘RHH warming to thirty-seven degrees,’ reported the infusion computer. ‘Filtration removing synthetic debris. I’m ready when you are.’
Berger flicked a switch to initiate the infusion process, and the RHH began to snake around the transparent plastic tube entering Cavor’s arm. To look at, the dark red liquid was indistinguishable from healthy human blood.[5] It could keep you alive, but it could also kill you. She stroked Cavor’s forehead for a moment and, adding a note of weary resignation to her smoky voice, said, ‘Sorry, friend.’
‘Sorry my ass,’ said Raft. ‘You can’t feel sorry for a statistical freak. In this place, he was bound to get it. Sooner or later.’
He could feel no sympathy for his patient’s immune system while the more pressing problem of completing the amputation successfully was still before him, and with his scalpel, he divided Cavor’s upper-arm muscles with a raking incision that went right down to the bone. More blood spurted from the incision, spilling onto the floor, and Raft shook his head at the waste of such a precious resource. With a fluid ounce of quality-assured whole blood costing around half as much as gold,[6] he reckoned he was stepping into and out of a pool that was worth several thousand dollars. Probably more.
For the next thirty minutes, Raft carefully followed Florence’s gently worded prompts, severing the narrowest part of Cavor’s humerus with a laser saw that simultaneously ligated all the major blood vessels. When the amputation was complete, he wiped the sweat from his brow and stepped back.
‘With all that healthy blood in him, I’m amazed he’s managed not to get himself killed. There are plenty of bastards in this place who would cheerfully have cut his throat for a complete change of blood.’
Berger removed the severed limb from the flatbed scanner.
‘Me included,’ she said. ‘Only the blood’s no good without the right drugs. And so long as they’re banned from all Moon colonies, what would be the point of killing him?’
Raft nodded. ‘I guess you’re right. But back on Earth I’d have been sorely tempted to drain off a couple of healthy liters before giving him the RHH.’ He shrugged off the thought. ‘I wonder what he did to end up here? Instead of a private jail like the rest of his RES class.’
It was Florence, the computer, who answered him.
‘Prisoner-patient Cavor. Sentenced to ten years’ hard labor on Artemis Seven without benefit of parole for the brutal murder of his wife. She just happened to be the daughter of an important city official. He has already served four years of his sentence.’
‘Well I guess this should help him work his passage back home,’ reflected Raft. ‘There’s not much hard labor you can do with a prosthetic arm. Even the ones they can fit these days take time to build strength.’
‘Are you going to fit it yourself?’ asked Berger.
Raft pulled down the nerves on the stump of Cavor’s arm gently and then shortened them by a couple of centimeters so that they could retract more easily into the depths of the severed flesh.
‘Tried it before and it didn’t take. Good hemostasis is almost impossible with all this lousy dust around. Any hematoma in the stump predisposes to infection, which will only delay prosthetic fitting. No, he’ll have to go to the PD hospital[7] in an open prison back on Earth, and as soon as possible too. The earlier a false limb is applied, the more likely it is that the prosthetic computer will take to the nerve ends.’
‘Prepare to release tourniquet,’ said Florence.
Only when he was satisfied that the stump was adequately supplied with blood did Raft attempt to control the bleeding again; and having doubly ligated the major vessels and applied synthetic flesh foam to the smaller oozing areas, he inserted a suction drain and closed the skin flaps over the bone using synthetic HFM.[8] Finally, Raft smeared the stump with recombinant centrosome to begin the process of helping attract the wound’s protoplasmic granules to the prosthetic, when eventually it was fitted, and then he applied a compression dressing. When the job was complete he surveyed his work with some satisfaction.
‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘A neat job, even though I say so myself. Thanks for your help, Berger.’
Berger laughed dismissively.
‘What about me?’ said Florence.
‘You too, Florence. Goes without saying.’
‘It was a pleasure, Peter,’ Florence said in its cool, quiet voice. Although Raft had never said so, the computer’s honey-sweet voice reminded him of his mother’s.
‘Okay, how about giving me some suggestions for chemical aftercare?’ he inquired.
‘Give me a second to think this over.’
‘Make it snappy, Florence. My back is aching. I’ve been on my feet since two-ninety hours.’
‘Okay, here’s my suggestion. I suggest that you intravenously implant a medical nanomachine[9] containing a combination of prophylactic antibiotic and painkilling actions. For you, I prescribe that you ingest some glucosamine sulfate.’
‘Sounds good to me.’
‘Would you like me to prepare the MN for you, Peter?’
‘Yes, please, Florence.’
Berger was busy washing the remains of Cavor’s arm, prior to preserving it in a sterile polyethylene bag cooled with liquid nitrogen. Despite the badly crushed state of the limb there were areas of skin and flesh that might later be used as a safe biological dressing. Nothing on the Moon is ever wasted, least of all in a prison colony like Artemis Seven. While the Moon has a strong industrial economy worth many billions of dollars, there are no indigenous materials except rock and ice, and so everything is recycled.
Florence prepared the nano-sized machine in a saline solution, which Raft drew up into a hypodermic syringe, and then injected into Cavor’s jugular vein. Raft had hardly looked at Cavor’s face: Now, he saw that Cavor was small and thin, and it seemed almost impossible that he could have survived four years of hard labor. If you had informed Artemis Seven’s medical officer that the one-armed man lying on the flatbed scanner would turn out to play a key role in the commission of the crime of the century,[10] he would almost certainly have assumed that you were suffering from the sensory abnormalities brought about by some small changes in the colony’s artificial atmosphere.[11]
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