The Triple Goddess (111 page)

She would be as familiar as any with his lonely routine, and must recognize that the exigencies of his job precluded him from stepping off his pedestal of authority. She would know that the metaphorical candle burned late in his flat on the top floor of the Exeat building, overlooking the main quadrangle—in addition to the green glass-shaded banker’s lamp in the study, there was a Mickey Mouse night-light in the bedroom because he was afraid of the dark—as he wrote up his notes and filed his reports; and surely she must conceive that, however much the deathly decisions that he had to make might rack his soul, and however much his exalted position require he not betray the workings of his inner self, fire might smoulder within him that was the hotter for not being allowed to burst forth.

Bonvilian was always alert for some indication from Gloria that, were he gently to communicate his desire for her and press his suit, he would not be rebuffed. If not in deference to his status, then out of consideration for his situation or predicament, the signal must come from her. If it came and when, it would be subtle, perhaps no more than a shading of expression or the momentary closeness of her body. She was far too intelligent a woman...really, despite her M-Class seniority she was not much more than a girl...not to understand the need to preserve a professional distance on the ward. This made the suppressed intimacy, the electricity between them, as strong as if they were dancing cheek to cheek.

In place of God and Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, 4285D saw Gloria and Hugo. Every night when he went to bed, his thoughts were of her coming to him and kissing him, just once, close to the mouth. As she moved away, her fingers lightly dragging along his arm to the fingertips, her gaze caressed his tired visage and willed upon him sleep’s sweet restorative. There was a vision he had, in which Gloria led him into a darkened room where numinous dancing figures wreathed to a discordant music, a zithery sound that he thought might be Algerian.

Amidst the whirl and swirl, she drew him onto the floor, where her closeness enfolded him within her love and understanding. Enshrined in the bell-tent of her hair, he dipped to sip her slightly parted lips, which were of spun sugar, and felt the porcelain shell of her cheek, which was slightly cool, slightly warm. She whispered something inaudible, and he fancied that her eyes were no longer grey, but the blue-black lacquered pools that one encountered on bareback rides through moonlit forests.

Every night from imaginary moonbeams, that celestial crop, in his mind Bonvilian wove a bag and filled it with the aery part of his being that was devoted to Gloria, i.e. all of it that was not weighted with the pebbles of professionalism. And then he hurled the bag back into the sky, to be cradled and lullabied for eternity by the constellations and the music of the spheres.

Love, see, said Bonvilian to himself, signifies more than “symbiosis”; more than just, quote, “an interaction between two dissimilar organisms living in close physical association, especially one in which each benefits the other.” Unquote. And it meant less than Helotism, quote: “A form of symbiosis in which one organism is held to make use of another as if it were a slave”. Unquote. As aphids milk ants.

Picturing Gloria, and jazzed by endorphins—those endogenous opioid peptides, functioning as neurotransmitters, which are produced by the pituitary gland and the hypothalamus in vertebrates during exercise, pain, consumption of spicy food, and orgasm; and which are similar to opiates in their abilities to produce analgesia and a feeling of well-being—Bonvilian spread his wings and flew, wheeling on thermals of ecstasy high in the sky. Such was his joyance that carols of birdsong, which normally he could not abide, burst upon his astonied ear, and spineless cactus flowers,
Opuntia fragilis
“Alberta Sunset”, bloomed in his head.

In contemplation of Gloria, Bonvilian resolved to convince himself, according to some scientific hypothesis of his own that he had yet to devise, that she was no Cervantean Dulcinea figure; one of whom it might be said, as Marcela does in
Don Quixote
, although “it is essential that every knight-errant be a lover...I cannot conceive that the object beloved for its beauty is obliged to return love for love.”

Gloria was Bonvilian’s Dantean Beatrice. She was his Alph, his sacred river running, as it did in Coleridge’s poem
Kubla Khan
, through caverns measureless to man. Her gaze was that of the Sphinx with green eyes; or would have been had her eyes been green. Her mouth and lips were full and velvetine, her tongue of quicksilver, and her teeth of mother of pearl. Her body curved like Saharan dunes on a windless night, and her legs stretched to eternity. The sarsenet she wore for skin, a silk so fine as to draw the envy of a Saracen, was tauter than a ship’s topgallant sail as it rounded Cape Horn at the tip of the Terra del Fuego archipelago, in the days before that common Panama Canal was opened. If Bonvilian closed his eyes he could configure with Euclidian precision the thought-delaying gravidity of the eurythmic peninsulas of her breasts; her tigress loins; her Venusian vulva; everything except the Daedalian labyrinth of her mind, in which any man would be glad to be lost without a guide, until he got the hang of it for himself.

Hugo Bonvilian sang a Song of Solomon unto himself. He expressed the intention of spending the next four years in Gloria Mundy’s bosom. He contemplated telling his beloved that she was unto him like the filly among Pharaoh’s chariots; that she was as a cluster of camphire in the vineyards of Engedi, and that his spikenard sent forth the smell thereof; that at the sound of her name he leaped upon the mountains and skipped upon the hills like a roe deer or a young hart; that to him it was as if she had come out of the wilderness like a pillar of smoke, perfumed with myrrh and frankincense; that her lips dropped honeycomb, and that honey and milk were under her tongue; that her navel was like a round goblet, her belly a heap of wheat set about with lilies; that her neck was a tower of ivory, and that her eyes were like the fish pools in Heshbon. And there were plenty more “thats” where those came from.

“Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.” Bonvilian could not have put it better himself, he told himself.

‘Go on, darlin’,’ growled Squamous to those around him, for he shared 4285D’s appreciation of 2042M’s finer points, up to a point; ‘stick him with a rusty scalpel and twist. Grind him to de bone. Hold him down, girls, smother him with pillows till de black tongue loll. Not too quick, now, not too quick: let’s hear his moans, let’s see him kick.’ There were fractional nods of approval in the
arrondissement Squamous
; and Snot, awoken by a pressure in his bladder, raised the drawbridge of an eyelid, followed by his corpus into as much of a sitting position as it was capable of.

Reaching for the urine bottle, Snot expressed himself therein, and looked blearily around. ‘“And for bonnie Annie Laurie,”’ he said, noticing 2042M, ‘“I’d lay me doun and dee.”’ He subsided and began snoring again.

Sister Gloria couched the lance of her gaze from the roof, lowered her visor, and aventred her weapon, whereupon it pierced Bonvilian through shield and armour as keenly as if she had been walloping towards him at full tilt.

Coming to a halt and fewtering her spear, dismounting, and removing her helm, she bent over his prostrate body.

‘Yes, Director. We are ready.’ There was a slight emphasis on the “are”.

A thick medicinal bandage of 4285D’s senior assistants entered, stage left from the wings, to wrap his person, as they always did at this precise moment after his opening soliloquy. Encircled, Bonvilian’s figure disappeared from the Impatients’ view; for not only was he of middling height, but the medics were all tall, like the Ancient Roman soldiers of a praetorian guard, rather than the dagger-wielding senators surrounding Julius Caesar that Squamous would have preferred, as they committed the murder that prompted the first autopsy and post-mortem report in history.

In addition to Sister 2042M and the two nurses, Bridget Clott 1473T and Ivana Pipette 5749T, there were now a registrar, a consultant surgeon, five doctors and housemen, a perfusionist, two scrub nurses armed with needles, and a couple of orderlies. There was no anaesthesiologist amongst these myrmidons, nor was there one to be found anywhere in the nineteenth-century former Greenwich Hospital building. Impatients were never sedated before being cut into. Instead they were tied down with leather straps and had a wooden block or rubber mould inserted between their teeth, also as in the good old days. This was typical of Bonvilian’s deliberately outdated methods; he also used old-fashioned instruments from the Victorian era: lancets, blunt scalpels, bleeding hammers, saws, and tourniquets, and used to joke that a carving knife and fork would have sufficed if nothing else were to hand.

While it was the greatest paradox that the old Greenwich Hospital, which had been one of the world’s most Hippocratically-dedicated medical and teaching institutions, had been resurrected as the Exeat, the deadliest institution on the planet, as indifferent as Director 4285D was to the pain and suffering of others, he derived no pleasure from inflicting them; only insisted that such measures were necessary because even the mildest pre-surgical palliative would skew the results of his experiments, and this was the only way that the body’s natural reactions to whatever pharmacological treatments it was being subjected to could be accurately tested.

For decades now, free-ranging diseases had been eradicated, leaving only those bacilli and viruses that Bonvilian kept freeze-dried and under controlled conditions in the Exeat Institute’s underground storage facilities, for the purpose of infecting Impatients with.

In every person’s home there was a unit like a shower cubicle, called a Jiffy-Fix machine, which, as one sat on the folding bench seat and read a magazine, diagnosed pathogens, administered stem cell treatments, and cured everything from influenza—there had been only three small outbreaks of freakish strains in the last twenty years—to shingles, from erysipelas to toe fungus.

Cancer was rare, thanks to preventative medication and physical and dietary care. The built-in defences and antibodies of the immune system had been stimulated to breed like yeast. When cancer was detected by the Jiffy-Fix’s machine’s latest version of the old X-ray and CAT-scan technology, one hooked oneself up to the Jiffy-Fix’s computer and ran an analysis, then followed diagrammatic instructions to receive a non-invasive cellular fix. For those who had trouble following the simple instructions, there was an audio-video Helpline.

Paraplegics walked, arteries were unclogged in seconds, and a single inhalation from a nasal jet spray dealt with diphtheria, meningitis...everything except the common cold. Faulty or worn-out organs could be repaired at clinics, or regrown by downloading cloning software using a mobile phone
Subscriber Identity Module card and reader
, available at news-stands and supermarket checkout counters, or via a home cable router connection.

At the Exeat Institute there was no such equipment and not so much as an aspirin. For the Director was not concerned with eliminating physiological affliction, but, in a nutshell and simply put, distilling from the body the formulaic composition of the pre-Ptolemaic Primum Mobile...or “First Mover”, from the Arabic
al-muharrik al-awwal
. Having isolated this force, by tracking Mankind’s evolutionary and developmental steps from the beginning of the world, and harnessed it, 4285D would deconstruct Genesis, and the DNA of the universe, and gain possession of the key to the Garden of Eden; following which it would be bulldozed, re-landscaped as a private park for Central officers to a design by a descendant of Capability Brown, Larry Z. Cordwainer 6542I, and replaced with a new botanical garden planted with transgenic species developed and cultivated by the successor to the Royal Horticultural Society, the Triffidary, administered by Superintendent Q. “Garden” Spohr 7091C, whose scientific consulting Board of Directors would include one Hugo Bonvilian 4285…well, by then he would have been promoted again, moved to Central, and be rubbing shoulders with the As, Bs, and Cs.

The task had been rendered unnecessarily difficult, before Bonvilian came on the scene, by what he disparaged as Mumbo Jumbo medicine. A cure for the future was what was needed, not the last ruddy virus. Everything about humankind’s vain and relentless Internet-fuelled tinkering and tampering with itself in the quest for perfection using suck-it-and-see pills, topical creams, potions, diets, and homeopathic treatments, was alien to 4285’s pristine ideological goals. The Jiffy-Fixes, of course, though he would never say so, were the ultimate nonsense. Decades of obsession with elective surgical reconstruction, restoration, enhancements, modifications, tweakings, and cosmetic applications had drastically reduced his ungenetically modified sources and choice of supply. Worldwide, corpses that were not certified Grade B+ Organic or higher could not be cremated because of their high plastic content. Instead they were sent to North America to be smelted,
thermally depolymerized, or monomer recycled,
at former Mafia waste disposal sites in New Jersey and Detroit, run by a released on his own recognizance Basso Profundo 6201K and his daughter Carmela Panicotta 2578O, and turned into domestic appliances, containers and bottles, and cheap tables and chairs, for worldwide distribution from warehouses in Boston, New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, and New Orleans, under a pacific bi-partisan agreement with representatives of former Irish Mob families headed by Johnny Ikea 9652K and Patty O’Pherniture 1179K.

As a result, 4285D’s entire stable of human laboratory specimens, selected from those who had neither inherited nor ever suffered from or been treated or operated on for any illness, disease, or ailment; nor received organic transplants; nor undergone cosmetic surgery; and who had never taken any drugs or medicines, was composed of the S-Class Impatients and alumni of Ward One of the Exeat Institute: Slave males whose essential health and unadulterated physical condition made them suitable candidates to donate their living bodies to science, Hugo Bonvilian’s science.