The Triple Goddess (121 page)

Although Sister Gloria-Artemis’s coldness was no crime, as the poet Marvell, addressing his own problem in this regard, alluded in his poem
To His Coy Mistress
—one so longed for coyness instead of coldness, and the designation of mistress—it was not what one might expect of a woman whose original model was that of an orgiastic goddess. Nonetheless Bonvilian would continue to hope that one day he and Gloria Mundy might run together through the night forest, followed by strong-armed nymphs holding the hounds on non-extendable chain leads, in a scene suspended in time as if it were glazed on Bonvilian’s hitherto coldly scorned Keatsian Grecian urn:

Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,

Thou foster-child of slowness and slow time.

“Had we but world enough, and time...”; that was Bonvilian’s Marvellous problem: he did not know whether he had all the time in the world, or none at all.

Perhaps, when he was successful in his Project endeavours, as a reward Central might agree to rename the Orion constellation Hugo, so that Bonvilian’s manly outline, pricked out in stars, might on clear nights beckon a willing Cassiopeia, redesignated Gloria, to his bed. On cloudy nights he would whistle.

But that was a ways down the road. For now there was Squiggle to attend to, and Sister Gloria had to nock the fateful arrow, albeit a steel not a silver one, to the string of her more ladylike bow.

At the Director’s nod to her peripheral vision, 2042M opened a drawer on the trolley, and removed a large stainless steel and glass hypodermic syringe with a very long needle. She paused for a moment, then stuck the needle into the inverted vial of blackcurrant-coloured liquid, 4285D’s selection, which was passed to her by Nurse Pipette 5749T, and drew out five cubic centimetres of a concoction of henbane,
Hyoscyamus niger
, Dr Crippen’s poison of choice, and dwale, or deadly nightshade,
Atropa belladonna
.

The formula was based on an ancient recipe for killing Bubonic rats; Bonvilian had happened upon it while browsing through some mediaeval tomes in his collection, whilom the property of the Bodleian Library at Oxford. It was his preferred means of dispatching his victims on the rare occasions when, per Macbeth, in order to trammel up the consequence, ’twere well it were done quickly.

Sister Gloria did not so much reach for Impatient Squiggle’s arm as receive it from him without any sign of willed movement on his part. After she held his gaze for a moment, his already vacant eyes glazed over, and he seemed imperceptibly to pass from catalepsy or catatonia into something more like a trance; whereupon 2042M patted the flaccid skin of the underside of his arm like a phlebotomist until the faint blue-black cord of a vein appeared, pointed the business end of the hypodermic syringe at the dome of the ceiling for a moment, and held it there momentarily as if in prayer. Then the needle homed to its sticking-point and the plunger emptied the cylinder.

2042M’s face registered no emotion as she continued her steady regard of Squiggle, until his eyes rolled upwards. Under the bed’s thin coverlet there was a
frisson
, followed by a double buzz from the flies who were now both in the windows, and 4285D addressed the air where his late Impatient’s shade might be fancied to be lingering.

‘“Cry”, Squiggle,’ intoned the Director, ‘“and upon thy so sore loss |Shall shine the traffic of Jacob’s ladder, |Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.” For Charing Cross substitute Greenwich and the Exeat Institute. Those ironic lines were written, ladies and gentlemen, by Francis Thompson, a man believed by some to have been Jack the Ripper.’

Nurse Clott 1473T removed a pad from her belt and made her own stabbing motions at it with a small pointer to note the literary allusion, in case it was expected of her.

‘Time of death…’ The Director cocked his head at the wall where the clock used to be, then, realizing his mistake, looked away. ‘…today. Now then. I want…’—the nurse prepared to stab fast, and the other nurse, Pipette 5749T, and the rest of the ad hoc and ancillary staff checked to make sure the tiny wide-angle mega-pixel camera devices on their lapels were showing they were recording for sound—‘…a thirteen-day deterioration with twelve-minute subcalcs. Densimeter specific gravity measurements to ten decimal places; resistance, mentals...the usual negatives and positives, but this time extrapolate to the forty-fifth, no, fiftieth, degree. Mitochondrial DNA. Tissues, naturally, and organs with special attention to the spleen. I have a thing for spleens, as you know.

‘Temperatures at thirty-second intervals, and calibrate to pi. Project to parallels, and synchronize with the Martian scale on a Saturnian spin starting at, let me see…two-point-three-five-oh, rising nine-seven. Millimate fifteen in either direction until there’s a fix. As long as it takes, and there’ll be no scheduled shift changes in the labs or staff-on-calls until it’s done. I want the same people on the case throughout up close and personal.

‘Now then, the brain. Make sure we use only the freshest chimps and bonobos as controls, from the batch that came in yesterday. Let’s light this guy up like a Christmas tree, he’s the best specimen we’ve had for a while in his category, and we can’t afford to miss or waste anything. Start with enhanced MRIs and functional computed axial tomographies of the basal dendrites, incoming apicals, and outgoing axons. Then concentrate on the right anterior insula and the orbitofrontal cortex. I’m particularly interested in the spindle cells of the frontinsular cortex and anterior cingulate. Don’t forget the Lamina Ones in the stem to midbrain, and be sure to put the fluids through a full deflocculation, no shortcuts. PVC, back of the thalamus...’

‘Sir? Sorry, sir.’

‘Do come along, 1473T!’, said the Director. 4285D sounded like Mr Edward Fox as Ian Fleming’s M. in the film of
Thunderball
, admonishing James Bond about the excess of free radicals in his bloodstream, before sending him to the Shrublands health farm to purify his system; where instead he finds himself being excessively racked on a traction machine. ‘PVC, as in posterior ventromedial corridor. And don’t let anyone but Aliment 3877P do it, understand?, only Aliment can be trusted not to botch the job. ‘Have…you…got…that, 1473T?’

The flushed nurse nodded fast three times.

4285D picked up Squiggle’s hand and patted it solicitously. ‘There might just be something useful to learn from old Squiggly here. Please, Squig, pretty please!, give us what we need like a good Slave, there’s a dear, and we’ll hang a plaque over your bed. Now then, Nu-u-rse!’

Clott 1473T, who was only a yard away, her hand shaking, thrust the pad at Bonvilian; he scanned it, and imprinted his thumb at the bottom. ‘I’ll want them
statim
, of course, so make sure you stay on top of those morons in the lab. They missed several of the conturbations last week on Splatter; minor ones but still critical. A cautionary tale: I sent two of the techs responsible to donate half their livers, and took the others down a Class; which, given the Exeat’s book ratio of punishment level to crime, was merciful.’

The quiet in the room deepened, as when in the theatre an already attentive audience is confronted by nudity or some sexual enactment.

Surveying the enigma of Squiggle, and spurning the rubber gloves that Nurse 5749T was dangling before him, the Director slapped Squiggle’s grey face a few times to loosen the cheeks, accepted a proffered otoscope, and shone the light in both of Squiggle’s ears and up his nose. Then, opening the jaw, and resisting the urge to yawn in sympathy with his now limitlessly patient Impatient, he peered down Squiggle’s throat, and poked about inside his cheeks with a thumb and forefinger, took a swab, checked for any looseness of the teeth, and pulled out the tongue for inspection. One could learn a lot from a mouth.

The procedure brought to mind the one outdoor experience of his childhood that he had shared with his father, when he had accompanied him on an afternoon’s fishing in North Devon. From the garden of the inn where the family was holidaying, a moorland tributary river flowed under a bridge, passed through water meadows and sessile-oaked woodland and steep scree-covered slopes; narrowed into swift confluence between some rocky crags; and then broadened on its way to the estuary five miles away.

A mile inland from salt water, towards the end of the fly fishing season on a mild autumnal afternoon, young Bonvilian clambered over rocks to where a boulder created a sheltered pool, and removed the hook from the mouth of a small trout. It was the first and only one he ever caught, and he did it by dragging a frayed fly on monofilament nylon threaded through the rings of a five-sectioned greenheart rod of his grandfather’s. The pole was so heavy that he could barely hold it aloft.

Fired with pride, his father pan-fried the fish for tea with a pinch of salt and a handful of wild marjoram, over the small sootless kerosene Primus stove that he had brought in an old rucksack, both of which dated from his own boyhood. Briefly sympathetic, the pair thought the two mouthfuls the most delicious thing that they had ever tasted. The much bigger fish that Bonvilian connected with later, at the foot of the waterfall below the road bridge back at the hotel, on a farewell current-carried sweep with the unweighted line, in a thumping take sent vibrations up the boy’s arm.

The line broke instantly because, in his excitement, the boy failed to comply with the cardinal rule that one should keep the rod tip up and play it, rather than winding in too fast and jamming the hardwood reel; though likely the greenheart, which was for coarse fishing, was too stiff to have made any difference. It was of no solace that, without a net and wading downstream, he could not have landed the fish because it would have involved dragging it across rocks. But the single flashing glimpse that he got of it as it jumped, despite the crushing disappointment as the tenuous link between father and son snapped as surely as the line, never to be re-established, made the experience as lasting as the tiny meal that they had enjoyed together earlier.

5749T, who had only recently qualified as a nurse, one competent enough to serve at the Exeat Institute, was flustered, not by the rejection of the gloves, but by the clinical inspection that followed hard on Squiggle’s demise. Squiggle looked a little like her uncle. Still anxious to be of use, she forgot her training, ‘The relatives, sir…the next of kin…shall I ask that they be informed?’

4285D felt a momentary nausea. ‘That won’t be necessary, Forty-Nine,’ he said as tolerantly as he was able, in recognition of Sister Gloria’s presence. ‘Slaves have no family, none that we recognize, as 2042M ought to have...’ He bit off the inadvertent criticism. ‘I mean, you know this.’

Gloria Mundy said, in a neutral voice, the only one that Bonvilian was aware that she had, ‘I will see that it doesn’t happen again, Director.’ Always with the Sister it was “Director”, never “sir”.

Then the orderlies transferred Squiggle onto a gurney on the count of three, and bore him hence at the centre of the processional exodus from Ward One. Another day, another body.

Chapter Eight

At four-thirty in the morning, as soon as dawn had sketched the outlines of the ward and brushed in a peach pastel of light, Snipcock sounded reveille. Snipcock, pro tem, was the Impatients’ Speaker, and until the Euthacart came for him he had authority over them, to the end of keeping a community spirit alive, and spreading a thin blanket of comfort over each individual’s loneliness and inner turmoil.

To the inmates, the preservation of order and morale mattered greatly. But it was a finely gauged business as to how that might be achieved without elevating the mood to the point of hope; and since the office of Speaker was so influential in the matter, elections were much deliberated. The line of succession had to be established far in advance, owing to Bonvilian’s closely guarded selection process; which, though not random, seemed so to the Slaves.

After Snipcock it had been determined that the next Speaker would be Steerforth; unless Steerforth went first, in which case it would be Squeamish. Before Snipcock it had been Sternum, and although everyone was saddened by his loss a fortnight before—he had been one of the ward’s longest tenants, and kept everyone entertained with his wicked sense of humour—the consensus was that Sternum had not been a good Speaker because, in addition to an annoying habit of pronouncing “us” as “uz”, of his inability to conceal whom he liked and disliked.

Reveille was a ritual on the ward, and nobody was allowed to utter even a “Good morning” until the Speaker had read the honour roll of those departed that week, led the others in a moment of remembrance, and commented on anything that needed to be brought to the general attention. Most patients were already awake when he began, and others, being plagued by nightmares, had had no sleep at all and could only do their best to nap or doze during the day. For every twenty-four hour cycle meant that one of them would not live to hear another reveille, and ninety per cent turnover on the ward occurred approximately every forty-five days; or so a mathematician amongst them had calculated before he too fell victim to the odds.

Snipcock coughed drily. ‘Good day,’ he said, and adjusted the clear plastic coil of his intravenous drip: Snipcock had been a little poorly recently. ‘This morning we remember Scooter, who was taken from us yesterday, Monday. Scooter will be sorely missed. Also, we have two new Impatients on the ward. I would ask both to identify themselves by their S-names only, and, as is our custom, to give no personal details.’