Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [28]
The G. D. Neophyte Obligation
It was not Plaster Easter yet—with its early spring procession of clumsy, unlucky skaters—but the casualty ward at the Kane Clinic was teeming with more people that it could reasonably contain. Some had managed to secure a seat among the rows of polished wood benches that recalled a Transaerian Station waiting room; others were standing huddled against the wall under the paintings of Elisha Kent Kane and his bride Margaret Fox, the medium, and some were pacing up and down, expressing the late winter of their discontent more physically than vocally, for the commanding presence of the Gentlemen of the Night discouraged all attempts at free speech.
You could almost, or so thought Gabriel, deduce from all these bodies and faces the drug menu of their evening. The compulsive striders were probably full of stokers, pills for blood pressure, or boilers, for metabolic enhancement, and there were even one or two that were showing the coordination disorders typical of Gibberne’s Accelerator, which made everything around the user appear to be moving in slow motion. Most of the sitting bohemians, meanwhile, seemed rather sedated, by distance drinking or opiates, but you could also spot among them those who had taken psylicates or phantasticas and who were experiencing uncomfortable perceptual distortions: lids twitching from endless déjà-vu loops; cataleptic frowns disclosing a sudden fascination with minute details of the room or patterns on the floor; pupils wide open to the bright, bristling pulsation of furniture and walls; eyeballs rolling relentlessly to follow the course of Lilliputian figures, or inugarullikkat, having a ball on the benches. Some had started to show evident signs of distress, oscillating on their seats or talking nonsense to themselves.
Displacing drugged people from their chosen environment was cruel and made the drugs more dangerous than they already were, ruminated Gabriel, who then concluded that this may well have been the idea after all. He did his best to don the enchanted silver suit of armour that comes from keeping one’s sangfroid, but he found it undersized and bursting at the joints with the pent-up anger he had accumulated.
From time to time, someone was called and taken away along a corridor. The Sun Dogs had been among the first to go (never to reappear), as well as Bob and Budd-Jones, who had both been released earlier on and had saluted him on their way out. Gabriel, thanking God (or Himself, for that matter) that he had been relatively sober, had been waiting like this for an hour or so, his shoulder leaning against the wall, legs casually crossed so they would not twitch too much, when, at last, Sealtiel Wynne appeared at the end of a corridor and summoned him to follow.
“We are truly sorry to have kept you waiting for so long, Mr. d’Allier,” said Sealtiel as he stepped aside to let Gabriel precede him into the examination room. “We were ourselves waiting, for someone to come especially for you.”
Two men were already sitting behind a desk. One was a thin doctor, with a long nose and a white smock, who was introduced by Wynne as Doctor Playfair. The other one, a man with a pockmarked face, dressed in a dinner jacket, top hat, and crimson-lined cape, was simply introduced as “the person I told you about.” He was fidgeting, impatiently, it seemed, as the doctor indicated a chair to Gabriel.
Wynne now stood behind the pair.
“We are well aware that this has not been an easy day for you so far, Mr. d’Allier,” he continued, in a tone that made Gabriel want to spool off the man’s intestines with a spiked wheel at the first opportunity. “But things should go at a steadier pace from now on, especially if you would be so kind as to help us a little.”
Gabriel said nothing, but looked at Wynne with a look that he hoped was unequivocal.
“We will gladly spare you the blood test. We both know what would be found in that precious blue fluid of yours.