‘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] 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 CO2 that’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 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] 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.’
‘Are you thinking of robbing him?’
‘Whatever gave you that idea? Kind of guy d’you take me for? No, I was thinking of offering the man my services.’
‘What sort of services?’
Gates pursed his lips and then shrugged. ‘The city can be a frightening place if you’re not used to it. If you’ve spent nearly all your life inside the Zone, enjoying the benefits of a healthy world.’
‘Tell me about it,’ Cavor said bitterly. He remembered only too well the kind of privileged life he had enjoyed before killing Mina. The way he had taken good health for granted. And seeing the new arrival in this light, Cavor almost pitied him.
‘Man like that might need a friend. Someone who knows his way around this poxy world of ours.’
‘Sort of a cohors praetoria, you mean,’ said Cavor. ‘A bodyguard, I mean.’
Gates nodded. ‘I know what it means.’
‘Don’t you think you’re a bit large for a job like that,’ grinned Cavor. ‘A bodyguard should be smaller, less noticeable. If possible he should even be a man with one arm, just to provide an element of surprise.’
‘I think you should check your hemoglobin levels,’ said Gates. ‘Sounds to me like you’re not getting enough oxygen.’
‘Does it?’ Cavor said sickly. It was only now that he was infected with the virus that he was rediscovering a new respect for human biochemistry. That something as small as a blood corpuscle[66] could mean so much seemed nothing short of phenomenal. Truly blood moved in mysterious ways, its wonders to perform.
‘Take it easy,’ laughed Gates, noticing Cavor’s apparent alarm. ‘I was only joking.’
‘Were you?’ He could see little opportunity for humor in his current situation. He had only to repeat the name of the virus to feel sick.
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