Night of the Animals(14)
Dr. Bonhomme never wasted time. He drew blood, listened to Baj’s chest with a mediscope, and gave him a cloudy plastic cup for urinalysis.
“Right,” he said, with a characteristic firmness. “So how are you doing otherwise?” he asked.
“All is well,” Baj said. He felt anxious to talk, but he couldn’t bring himself to say much. An old indisposition to show weakness held him back. He almost would have felt more comfortable sharing with a social lesser—even Cuthbert.
“I’m all right,” he added. “You know, ‘getting on with it.’ Are you well?”
“I’m glad to be working still.”
“You call this work, on Harley Street?” Dr. Bajwa teased. At one time, such a quip between professionals would have seemed more amusing, he realized. “Sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t resist.”
“No worries, Baj!” said Dr. Bonhomme, grinning, and looking at his mediscope’s floating holographic readout, which plotted a colored ball—in this case red—onto a shoe box–size three-dimensional quadrangle that the doctor analyzed. “We’re lucky to be working at all these days,” he said.
“Yes,” said Baj. Were he to say any more, he knew, the conversation would be edging toward treason. He left it there.
Dr. Bonhomme slid a white ultrasonic camera out of a small plastic case and dimmed the lights. The older doctor smiled gently at Baj for a moment, but then seemed lost in trying to work the camera.
“Hold still now,” he said, “and raise your arms up.” Baj complied. Four faint hums ensued—and it was over.
The aged Dr. Bonhomme could barely hold the heavy camera steady as he guided it onto a wet-titanium gooseneck base. Two lurid blue-white biometric eyes awakened above the lens. He rubbed the top of the camera for a moment, as if petting a baby white shark, and the camera instantaneously projected four-dimensional pathological extrapolations of Baj’s insides on the wall.
Baj looked at white petals of a neoplasm, unfolding on the wall. There it was—a pale flower of death in the right lobe of his lung.
Dr. Bonhomme’s face had fallen. He glanced nervously at Baj.
“But I don’t smoke,” said Baj. “This can’t be.”
There was a pause. Dr. Bonhomme said hoarsely, “We can do a lot these days—even with lungs.” He appeared to collect himself for a moment. He stood up a little taller, then spoke confidently: “Right now. These are but ‘shadows of things to come,’ as they say. But you’re going to need an oncologist. And you might consider a day or two of Nexar—just to destress, right?”
“I don’t use the hoods,” said Baj, in a tone of subdued annoyance, and Dr. Bonhomme nodded.
There was another pause. Dr. Bonhomme nodded and put his hand on his peer’s shoulder.
“Look, I won’t claim to understand how you feel,” he said. “I’d react the same way, honestly.” He switched off the ultrasonic camera, and the screen popped off with a tiny shriek. “But it’s not like the twentieth century, is it? I’m sorry, Baj. But it’s not a death sentence. And just thank bloody god you’re in Legacy.”
“God couldn’t give a f*ck about me,” said Baj.
Dr. Bajwa had an incipient lung tumor. Treated, it wasn’t necessarily terminal, he knew, but the five-year survival rate was still only 50 percent. Whole new metastasizing cancers and newly aggressive viral syndromes remained significant medical foes, even in this era of 120-year-plus life spans. The problem was, for the rich, the development of a variety of new, improved, salable BodyMods—especially CoreMods (through which most major organs, apart from brains, could be easily refurbished), and EverConnectors (synthetic, fibrous connective tissue-sleeves)—as well as new cartilage chemotherapies—had long supplanted the search for cures in terms of much research. For everyone else, and especially Indigents, Nexar hoods as well as ordinary intoxicants—even Flōt—made cancer less menacing.
As Baj left Dr. Bonhomme’s office and headed toward his parking spot, he found himself silently running through part of a prayer from his childhood. Gaavai, kotaan. Havai kisai taan, he remembered. Some sing of his power. Who has that power?
An advert for Lucozade suddenly appeared on his corneas—the usual unwanted Opticalls you got walking through central London. There were dozens of grades of freedom from daytime Optispam bursts (after dark, the burst-rates fell considerably). You had to pay a huge monthly fee to keep all the adverts off your eyes, and even with his comparatively good income, he couldn’t afford the top service (although in recent years, many brains had adapted to Optispam and begun, partially, to block it out—a neurological “anomaly” the authority’s tech teams remained unable to defeat). A nude, dark-haired woman with absurdly large breasts and a startled look was shaking a Lucozade bottle in an obviously raunchy manner. “Great performance is easy to get into your hands,” she cooed. The images broke Baj’s attention, of course, and with that came a ferocious urge to bite out his own eyes.
And the king wonders why the suicide cults grow? he thought to himself.
He did not feel sad about the cancer—not yet. He felt unholy rage, and this, in turn, drove him to tamp down the full range of his emotions, as if intense feelings and the confusing thoughts accompanying them were cellular mutations to be understood, controlled, and dissolved. He felt a sudden, fierce urge to get to the Philip K heliport in Kent where he took, as time permitted, Saturday solarcopter lessons. If he could get above the earth, he imagined, and get strapped into a copter’s fleshy bio-seats, he would shoot through Britain’s raw blue air, working his thoughts and his hands at the solarcopter controls, and maybe, just maybe, he would begin to rule this new foe.