The Book of Strange New Things(113)

‘You should go see Doc Everett,’ several USIC people had told him since his arrival. They meant: to check that you’re back in shape after the Jump, or, to get treatment for that sunburn. He’d made polite noises and carried on regardless. And now Doctor Everett was dead.

The fatality had come out of the blue and reduced the USIC medical team from six to five: two paramedics, a nurse called Flores, an MD and surgeon called Austin, and Grainger.

‘It’s very bad this has happened,’ said Grainger when Peter met up with her outside the pharmacy. ‘Very bad.’ She wasn’t wearing her shawl this morning, and her hair was slick with water, newly washed. It sharpened her features, accentuated the scar on her forehead. He imagined a younger Alexandra Grainger, dead drunk, pitching forwards, her head splitting open against a metal tap, blood in the sink, blood on the floor, so much blood to be mopped up when she was hauled away. You’ve been there, he thought. I’ve been there too. Beatrice, much as he loved her, had never been there.

‘Were you close?’ he said.

‘He was a nice guy.’ Her frown and preoccupied tone suggested that her personal relationship with Everett was irrelevant to how bad a thing his death was. Without any further conversation she escorted Peter from the pharmacy into a passageway that led to the medical centre.

The medical centre was surprisingly big for the number of personnel it served. It was built on two levels and had many rooms, some of which were only half-furnished and waiting to be kitted out with equipment. Two of the three operating tables in the surgical theatre were shrouded in plastic wrapping. One particularly large space that Peter peeked into as he passed was painted a cheerful yellow and almost blindingly inundated with daylight from bay windows. It was empty apart from some stacked boxes neatly labelled NEO-NATAL.

The morgue had the same seldom-visited, overly spacious feel as most of the centre, even though it was possibly busier than it had ever been: three of the five remaining medical staff were gathered there once Grainger walked in, and Peter was politely introduced – firm handshakes, head-nods – to Dr Austin and Nurse Flores. ‘Glad to meet you,’ said the chimpanzee-like Flores, not sounding glad at all, and sat straight back down in her chair, arms folded over her dowdy uniform. Peter wondered what nationality she was. She was four foot ten, tops, and her head looked shrunken. Whatever genetic code had produced her was very different from the one that had produced him. She was almost as alien-looking as the Oasans.

‘I’m from England,’ he said to her, not caring how gauche he sounded. ‘Where are you from?’

She hesitated. ‘El Salvador.’

‘Isn’t that in Guatemala?’

‘No, but we’re . . . neighbours, you could say.’

‘I heard about the volcano in Guatemala.’ His mind went into overdrive as he attempted to recall enough details from Bea’s letter to support a conversation with Flores. But she held up one wizened hand and said:

‘Spare me.’

‘It’s just so awful to think – ’ he began.

‘No, really: spare me,’ she said, and that was the end of that.

For a few seconds, the mortuary lapsed into silence, apart from a rhythmic groaning sound that was not human in origin. Dr Austin explained that this noise was coming from the freezers, due to their having been only recently switched on.

‘It just didn’t make sense to keep a room full of freezers running with nothing in them, year after year,’ he elaborated. ‘Especially before we got our energy usage properly sorted out.’ Austin was Australian, by the sound of him, or perhaps a New Zealander; athletic, muscular, with movie-star good looks apart from an untidy scar gouged into his jawline. He and Flores had been absent from Severin’s funeral service, as far as Peter could recall.

‘You’ve done very well, lasting all this time,’ said Peter.

‘Lasting?’

‘Not needing to switch the freezers on. Until now.’

Austin shrugged. ‘In the future, as this community grows, we’ll need a morgue for sure. In the future, we’ll probably have murders, poisonings, all the thrills and spills you get when your population passes a certain point. But these are early days. Or were.’

The freezers groaned on.

‘Anyway . . . ’ sighed Austin, and unlatched the drawer containing the deceased, as though Peter had finally requested to see Dr Everett and shouldn’t be kept waiting. Austin pulled at the handles and the plastic crib slid out, exposing the naked body as far as the navel. Matthew Everett’s head was nestled on a wipe-clean pillow and his arms lay supported on banana-shaped cushions. He was a presentable middle-aged man with salt-and-pepper hair, a permanent vertical frown creasing his brow, and dimpled cheeks. His eyes were almost but not quite closed, and his mouth hung open. There was a pale dusting of frost on his tongue, and subtle ice-twinkles on his pale flesh. Other than this, he looked well.

‘Of course we’ve had a few deaths over the years,’ conceded Austin. ‘Not many; well below average for a community this size, but . . . it happens. People have diabetes, heart conditions . . . Their pre-existing pathology catches up with them. But Matt was healthy as a horse.’

‘My horse died,’ said Grainger.

‘Beg pardon?’ said Austin.

‘I used to have a horse, when I was a kid,’ said Grainger. ‘He was wonderful. He died.’