‘Name’s Gates. Rameses Gates. And I’ll leave you alone just as soon as you’ve heard my proposition.’
‘I’m not interested in any proposition.’
‘Well you ought to be,’ said Gates, still holding Dallas by the arm. ‘You’re lucky you’ve made it this far without some bastard cutting your throat and stealing your red stuff, mister. The darkness probably saved your ass. But I wouldn’t try moving around in daylight. I’d kill you myself if you weren’t so full of shit. Look, I don’t know what you’ve done and I don’t much care. Been in trouble with the law myself on more than one occasion. Matter of fact I’ve just finished doing a stretch on the Moon.’
‘You were on the Moon?’ Suddenly Dallas found himself a little more interested in this character.
‘I did hard time on Artemis Seven. That’s a helium-extraction facility in the Carpathian Mountains. Guy like me could be very useful to you. Look after your ass, stop you getting vamped, like I said.’
‘The Moon, huh? That’s very interesting.’ Dallas thought for a moment and then nodded. ‘You’d better come in.’
III
The steel door hissed shut behind them like a sharp intake of breath. For many of the people in the Clostridium, this small suite of rooms must have seemed like a place of refuge from the ravages of the virus, but for Dallas, it felt more like a tomb.
He sat down heavily on the bed. It was just as well that he didn’t suffer from claustrophobia.
Gates began pointing out the chamber’s key features. ‘That’s your compression control,’ he explained. ‘And that hole’s where the oxygen is pumped in. Usually it’s oilless medical-grade stuff. Won’t do you any harm if you decide to breathe it. But it does give you a taste in your mouth if you’re here for very long. The rest of it is just monitoring equipment, ventilator, and blood-pressure and red-cell counter. Man as healthy as you won’t need any of it.’
Dallas was regarding Rameses Gates with the objective detachment of one person sizing up another, asking himself if Gates might be the kind of man to help him carry out what was still only a nascent plan. Alone in the street, Dallas, overcome by a need for revenge, had realized that the best way of getting back at the company would be to rob the biggest blood bank of them all, the First National Blood Bank — a blood bank so big it commanded a location that was the last word in security: the Moon. Dallas didn’t believe in fate, but sometimes there was no getting away from the persuasive aspect of coincidence. He wondered if science would ever discover that this kind of striking concurrence of events, seemingly so lacking in any causal connection, was an actual electroneurological phenomenon — in the same way that telepathy and telekinesis were now beginning to be understood as something that could be developed with the right combination of drugs. Perhaps meeting Gates was just such a phenomenon. Who better than a convict with hard time on the Moon to help him recruit the team of people he’d need to pull off something like this?
‘What were you sentenced for?’ Dallas asked, abruptly cutting across what Gates was saying.
‘Robbery. Bunch of us took down a palladium[67] shipment.’
‘Any special skills?’
‘I’m a pilot. I used to fly an astroliner to the Moon. Sometimes cargo, but mostly just folks visiting love hotels. You ever been to one of those places?’
Dallas nodded. ‘Yes, but it’s been a little while since my last visit.’ Fie remembered that Aria had wanted to go for the Moon-landing centennial, but somehow they’d never gotten around to making the arrangements.
‘They let people with the virus fly those things?’
‘I faked my medical.’ Noting Dallas’s surprise, Gates added, ‘That kind of thing’s not exactly unheard of, y’know.’
‘No, I guess not,’ admitted Dallas. ‘Just suppose I could use someone like you. What do you want from me?’
‘Earn a few credits? Like I say, I’m just down from the Moon. I need to find some kind of a job. My credit here’s not going to last much longer.’
Dallas nodded, trying to look sympathetic. Maybe not just his credit, he reflected. There was no way for Gates to be sure how long he would live before the virus killed him. He could go at any time. And what better incentive could a man have to help him rob the First National Blood Bank than the urgent need for a complete change of blood? It suddenly occurred to Dallas that all the men and women he recruited for this job had to be P% That way he wouldn’t just be offering them a chance to make a lot of money, he would also be offering them a new lease on life. That was something guaranteed to get the best out of anyone. With his unique knowledge and the physical dilemma of people like Rameses Gates, how could they not succeed?
‘A few credits, huh?’ Dallas laughed. ‘I think we can do better than that. I think we can do a lot better.’
IV
Even as Rameses Gates heard Dallas describe the rough outlines of his plan, he felt his skin start to prickle. On the face of it, Dallas’s plan was crazy — the security of blood banks everywhere was a given, and the penalty for blood felony, brutal — but, in spite of everything that reason and experience told him, Gates’s first instinct was to put himself under Dallas’s command.
‘I think you’re crazy,’ he said. ‘But what the hell, I’ve always been a risk taker. I get that from my father. Not that I really knew him. My mother chose him in a sperm bank on the strength of his genomic imprint. But I did get to read his biochemical file that they gave to her. My mother always wanted me to achieve something. That’s why she chose a donor, instead of meeting some guy she was attracted to and trusting to luck. She wanted to make sure I had the best start in life: a good imprint. My high IQ, I get from her. She was a clever woman. Physically I’m like him. A real mesomorph, y’know? And emotionally too, since I’m somatotonic with it. Turns out he was a bit of a gambler too. Professionally, I mean. A few years ago, before I got sent to Artemis Seven, I did a DNA trace on him. Cost me quite a bit, only I was curious to see if he was still alive. That’s the best way of finding out your own life expectancy with the virus. See what your genes are capable of. Anyway, he was a probability guy. What people used to call an insurance broker before the institutional market got wiped out. He used to bet against all sorts of things happening. Pretty good at it too.’ Gates shrugged. ‘So like I say I’m a risk taker, same as him. It’s a roundabout way of saying I’m willing to bet that you could maybe pull this thing off, Mister Dallas. I’m your man.’
‘Dallas. Just Dallas. Is he still alive? Your father?’
Gates shook his head. ‘Nah. He was forty-four when he died. Good age for someone with bad blood. He was one of the longer lived ones.’
‘And you? How old are you?’ asked Dallas.
‘Thirty-nine. I figure I’ve got maybe another four or five years. But who knows? That’s the thing about P2. The way it stays dormant in your bone marrow for all that time, it’s like the creature in the story about Theseus. The one in the labyrinth?’
‘The Minotaur.’
‘You feel like one of those young men and women that were sent as a tribute from Athens to King Minos as a peace offering. It’s like you’re standing outside the labyrinth, about to be shut in there, with the monster, and you know it’s waiting for you somewhere in the dark, waiting to get you, but you don’t know where and you don’t know when.’
Dallas nodded sympathetically. He had never before had a conversation with someone who had the virus — not to his knowledge, anyway. And it interested him that Gates should have chosen the labyrinth and the Minotaur as a metaphor for P2 and its characteristic hidden, dormant aspect — the so-called Sleeping Dog, or latent, phase of the disease.[68]
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