Evensong

“They’ll be doing deepscan procedures. Projecting holograms of Anwar’s internal structure. They can’t risk anyone seeing it. I’m sorry.” When Olivia said nothing, Arden added, “Depending on what they find, it should take about three hours. After that, you’re welcome to return.”

“You’re on my ground here. You don’t tell me when to come or go.”

“Consultants don’t get medical treatment in front of outsiders. There are no exceptions. Don’t you want him treated here, as quickly as possible?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. If he survived that, in the Signing Room...”

“Archbishop, they will not treat him in front of you. If you won’t leave they’ll just take him back to Kuala Lumpur and treat him there, or inflight.” She paused, and knew instinctively what to say. Don’t persist with No, offer something Olivia couldn’t get unless she said Yes. “Don’t make them take him away. Let them treat him here. Then you can say goodbye to him properly.”

They made eye contact, and Olivia nodded. On her way out, she said, “Please let me know when the treatment is finished. I want to come back straightaway.”

“Of course.”

They worked on him. They’d done this before. They were entirely dispassionate, like technicians.

Within a few minutes they’d completed the preliminaries and started the deepscanning. A life-sized hologram of his entire structure, his bones and muscles and internal organs, was projected onto the air at the foot of his bed. They studied it at different depths and from different angles. It stood there like his soul, recently gone from his body. The doctors gave it their full attention and ignored his real body.

They projected local magnifications from the hologram of those major bones that had been broken by Levin: ribs, clavicle, radius, ulna, tibia, fibula, metacarpals, phalanges. And his sternum, which together with his upper ribs had been shattered by Levin’s mighty kick on the way to its main target, his heart.

The texture of the bones, in such high close-up, was granular and fibrous, particularly at the open edges where they’d sheared. The breaks, on images so big they looked like pieces of furniture, were spectacular. But they were resetting and regenerating as expected, and surgery wouldn’t be needed on them; just time.

The magnifications of bones retracted back into the hologram, and it turned itself inside out and projected another magnification, this time so enlarged it filled most of the room. It was Anwar’s heart, where they expected to find more serious damage; they’d magnified it so much it almost made the room into an immersion hologram whose workmanship Anwar, if he’d been conscious, would have admired.

It wasn’t a human heart. It was denser and heavier and had much larger muscles, formed in a much more intricate pattern over its surface. But it was organic: no mechanical or electronic components.

They studied the damage done by Levin’s mighty Circumnavigator kick, and decided it needed closer examination. They ramped up the magnification, as Anwar might have ramped up his senses, and the perspective changed. The image enlarged until it assumed the dimensions of the room’s floor and walls and ceiling. The doctors walked through it and around it, conversing quietly.

The muscles were torn by the pressure waves of the kick, as the doctors expected, but they needed to know the extent of the damage. The transverse dark and light striations on the muscles, normally regular, were turned almost into graffiti by the concussion. The surface of Anwar’s heart was damaged structurally like the white and silver wall Levin had burst out of, but this damage was done by Levin bursting in, not out. Eventually they concluded that it wouldn’t heal as quickly as the bones; regeneration of all that torn muscle tissue would be much slower and more complicated. It might take all of another day.

This was how they made Consultants. A few seconds more in the Signing Room and Anwar would have died like Asika. But a few seconds after Levin had died Anwar’s molecular defences, always first to the scene of any trauma, had begun working. By the time the doctors reached him, resetting and regeneration and healing were proceeding as expected.

The UNEX doctors concluded their deepscan, and Anwar’s hologram disappeared. They’d been told en route that a Consultant had been seriously injured, so they’d come prepared for extensive surgery, and they were lazily relieved that it wouldn’t be necessary. They formally handed him back to the hospital with instructions about mild sedation and food and drink intake. They departed at 2:45 p.m. on October 20, taking Levin’s body with them in the VSTOL.

Arden had decided to stay for the two to three days it would take for Anwar to reach something like full recovery. She called Olivia, and left the room as she entered.