THIRTY-THREE

 
 

They gave him a cane, and after he had learned to walk with it, he kept it for effect. An unseasonable heat had descended on Shaverton. The windows of the glass masts glinted like mirrors. The bugs were swarming, and everyone smelled like they had been embalmed with Insect-Aside.

  The sky was a spoiled cream shade of yellow when the car brought him to the veterans' hospital on the Cape Highway. The place was pleasant-looking, a sun-baked compound of white Early Settlement style buildings on a plot planted with snowgums. He showed his papers at the front desk, and then again at a guardpost outside the trauma ward. The SOMD staffers went through his press accreditation, and the embossed permits with the Human Services hologram tags.

  "This way," said the nurse who came to meet him inside the ward. "It's just down here."

  She looked flushed, but the place was quite cool. He thought it was probably a byproduct of her pink tunic and the beige walls.

  "How is he?" he asked.

  "Stable," she said. "Not out of the woods. I'm sorry, I meant to ask, are you family?"

  "No."

  "A colleague?"

  "Something like that."

  She led him into a small waiting area. A glass wall looked into a private room. Through the glass, he could see the figure in the bed, pale, still, linked to full life support. He could just hear the rhythmic ping of the monitors, the pump of the ventilator.

  He saw the dressing covering the cheek. The memory was physical, like a bruise. He raised his hand involuntarily and touched his own cheek.

  There was no hole, or trace of a scar.

  Having come all that way, he felt he ought to go in. Say something. Anything. The reminder on his celf had pinged just before he arrived at the hospital. Diary update. His driver was scheduled to leave in four days and he was due to report to the Terminal in two hours. He didn't have long, and he was pretty sure he was never coming back. He could surely manage some platitude about how everything had changed, and they'd been part of it?

  "Can I go in and sit with him?" he asked.

  "I suppose so, Mr Falk," replied the nurse. She opened the door, then lowered her voice. "Please don't expect too much," she said. "Private Bloom has very limited periods of consciousness. He drifts in and out. He probably won't recognise you."

  "I understand," he replied, smiling.

  "To be honest," she added, leaning forward to confide, "I don't think he knows who he is most of the time."

  Falk nodded.

  "I know how he feels," he said.