‘Couldn’t we find some way around this? Some of our guests have been here a while. They’re sick people. I’m not sure they’d survive being transferred somewhere else.’
Rimmer looked doubtfully at Ronica, and seeing her apparently thinking about the matter, he turned away in a show of disgust.
‘No way,’ he snarled.
‘Please?’
‘Well,’ said Ronica. ‘I guess we could do the superoxide tests ourselves. Of course, to do that we’d need to take mitochondrial samples from your longest guest and, as a control, your most recent guest.’
‘Hey, no problem,’ said the attendant. ‘That’s easy. Don’t even have to look it up. Last guest came in only an hour or so ago. Name of Dallas. He’s in 1218. And the longest resident? That’s Ingrams, in 1105. Been here so long he’s practically part of the furniture. You could take a sample from him and he probably wouldn’t even know it. Guy’s practically a corpse. He’s been in a Three Moon crisis for must be a couple of years now.’
‘Where’s the harm?’ Ronica asked Rimmer.
‘I dunno,’ he sighed. ‘It’s a fudge and you know it. There ought to be twenty tests, not just two.’
‘We both know two’s quite sufficient if you can accurately identify the two chronological parameters. As it happens we can.’
‘All right,’ said Rimmer. ‘But if anyone finds out, this is your responsibility, okay? I’m done sticking my neck out for people.’
‘Relax, will you? What can go wrong?’ She looked back at the attendant and smiled. ‘Okay. Why don’t you show us the way?’
‘All right,’ he grinned, and collected an electronic pass key off his desktop. ‘Now you’re talking.’
III
At this point, a word of explanation is required. How is it, you may ask, that the author of this book, who regrets the necessity to speak of himself, knows these things? How, for instance, is the author able to describe what someone thought, and, perhaps, why they thought it? But to be quite frank, I can’t imagine why you don’t ask this question more often in connection with a book. And I find it surprising that more authors do not attempt to clear up the small matter of narrative device somewhere during the course of their written endeavors.
Of course, narration is not a science, but an art. Even so, you would still think that some critic had attempted to formulate a few principles about it, or even to create a terminology that might be equal to the task of describing the point of view. In this respect, there is an embarrassing inadequacy of classification, and I am obliged to explain myself and my narrative position in terms that might seem enigmatic, since ‘first person’ and ‘omniscient’ hardly seem to come up to the mark.
Let us say then that this story is told by a narrator who is dramatized in his own right, although it is arguable that even the most retiring of narrators has been dramatized as soon as the personal pronoun has been called into play. Say also that by producing some measurable effect on the course of events (and in time all will be revealed concerning my own role in this story), I can justly claim to be more than a mere observer — I am that particular kind of narrator who is also an agent. Naturally, you will have judged me to be a narrator who is the self-conscious kind, who is aware of himself as a writer, to which I would like to add that I may be relied upon to tell you all you need to know, and more, until the time comes when you know absolutely everything, as I do.
This leads me, neatly, to the question of how the narrator is privileged to know what could not be learned by strictly natural means — what we authors usually call, because we like to play at being God, omniscience. Obviously the most important privilege is the inside view — the characters and their thought processes to which I referred a little earlier. Perhaps it’s a little difficult for you to understand it now, but the fact is, I have the best inside view any author has ever enjoyed. What is more, the means of its learning has indeed been strictly natural. Science has provided me with unlimited omniscience. But what kind of science? I hear you ask. Why the science of hematology, of course. The state or fact of knowing what I do, as much as I do — everything that ever was, is, and shall be — comes from blood. This is the infinite knowledge, the fountain of youth, and the secret of life. Through the communion of the blood of man, everything shall be known and understood. And if I give you notice of this betimes, it is, to paraphrase Antoine Furetière,[75] ‘because I design not to surprise you, as some malicious Authors are wont to do, who aim at nothing else.’ I wish you to be prepared to understand. For ahead lies great understanding and great effort of understanding. You must lift yourself up, by your own bootstraps, so to speak.
There, I hope that’s made things just a little clearer.
IV
Rimmer placed the Pinback in his ear and, unobserved by the black night attendant, selected a piece of Mendelssohn, Elijah, as accompaniment for his imminent act of homicide. Be not afraid, sang the voice. It made a pleasant alternative to the Muzak and the chatter of the attendant leading them along an eleventh-floor corridor to 1105, the chamber of the Clostridium’s longest resident. Part of him wondered why they were still bothering with this little facade. They knew where Dallas was to be found. It was simply a matter of going there and killing him.
‘As a matter of fact, in the morning I was going to have to decompress Ingrams anyway,’ explained the attendant, whose own name, he said, was Taylor. ‘We have to do all the long-term guests once or twice a week, otherwise they get the bends. Y’know? Bubbles in the bloodstream. We’re real careful about that.’
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Ronica, as Taylor stopped outside the door to a chamber and inserted his electronic key into the security lock. She was still trying to think of some way in which she could put on a show of testing the hapless resident of 1105 for superoxides. Perhaps she would get the guy to lick the screen of the matchbook phone she was carrying: It was a new one, a little different from how they normally looked, and she was banking on Taylor not having seen this kind of phone before. That would have to do.
Now that he had the key in the lock, Taylor was able to open a control panel on the wall beside the door and manually override the pressure settings that had been made on the inside of the chamber. He glanced at his watch and said, ‘This’ll take a few minutes. But you can’t hurry it.’ He laughed grimly. ‘Not unless you want to kill the guy.’
Rimmer’s available ear picked up.
‘As a matter of interest, how high can you set the pressure?’
‘High as you like. Two or three hundred atmospheres. These chambers are built to withstand huge amounts of pressure. Much more than the human body can take, anyway. But we don’t let guests set their own pressures as high as all that. Anything really high has to be done from the outside by an attendant with a key like this one. It stops some of the guests from using the pressures to commit suicide, when they get depressed.’ Taylor shook his head. ‘You should see the mess it used to make.’
‘That is fascinating,’ said Rimmer. ‘You learn something useful every day.’
‘Don’t know about useful,’ murmured Taylor. He glanced up as a red light above the door extinguished. ‘Soon as it turns green we can go in.’
Rimmer looked at Ronica and smiled. ‘I think we’ve seen enough, don’t you?’ Be not afraid, saith God the Lord, be not afraid, thy help is near.