Pepsa professionally dressed Valentine's wound without saying a word. By the time she was done the doctor had a light down close to Ahn-Kha's stomach, injecting him just above the wound.
"You've got a lot of muscle in the midsection, my friend," Dr. Boothe said. She probed a little farther and Ahn-Kha sucked wind. "Uh-huh. I think we can forget about peritonitis. I don't want to dig around without an X-ray."
Xanadu had no shortage of medical equipment.
"Is Pepsa a nickname?" Valentine asked as the nurse gave him his hand back. She nodded.
"Pepsa's mute, Tar. You done there, girl? Get him the forms. Put down whatever bullshit you want, Bulletproof, then we'll talk."
Valentine liked the doctor. Her careful handling of Ahn-Kha impressed him. That, and the fact that apparantly she gave a mute a valuable job in a land where disabilities usually meant a trip to the Reapers.
Pepsa led Valentine to a lunchroom. A quarter pot of coffee- real coffee according to Valentine's nose-steamed on a counter in a brewer. Above the poster a placard read "FALL BLOOD DRIVE! They bleed for you-now you can bleed for them! Liter donors are entered in a drawing for an all-expense-paid trip to Niagara Falls." Valentine filled out the forms, leaving most of the blocks empty-like the eleven-digit Ordnance Security ID, which occupied a bigger area on the form than name.
The vet dropped in and sat down, rubbing her eyes. "Calving last night, now your Grog. He'll be fine, but I will have to operate."
"Will it be a hard operation?"
"Toughest part will be opening up those layers of muscle. But no. Kentucky, since you're not Ordnance you'll have to pay for these services, cheap though they are. What do you have on you?"
"Not much."
She stared at him. "I know there are a lot of rumors about this place. That it's some kind of Babylon for high Ordnance officials. Or that strings of happy pills get passed out like Mardi Gras beads. I've heard the stories. I'm not saying you two jokers tried to get in here by doing something as stupid as putting some small-caliber bullets into each other. But Xanadu's no place you want to be.
"What it is, in fact, is a hospital for treating cases with dangerous infectious conditions. Anti-Kurian terrorists got it in their heads to try a few designer diseases lethal to the Guardians, and there's been some weird and very dangerous mutations as a result. That's why we've got all this ground and livestock, the less that passes in and out of those gates, the better. Just in case. Do you know how diseases work, microorganisms?"
"Yes, little creatures that can fit in a drop of water. They make you sick."
"Uh-huh. So every breath you take behind these walls is a risk, and the closer you get to the main buildings, the more danger. So you should thank your lucky stars you were treated out here."
Valentine nodded. Interesting. Is it all a cover? Or is there a project I don't know about?
"After I operate we're going to keep your friend here for three days of observation. Don't worry, you'll have a bed, but you'll work for it. Consider it paying off your debt for your partner's medical treatment. Once you're out of here, go back to Kentucky and tell your buddies. This isn't a drugstore, it's not a brothel, and it's not a place to come get cured of the clap with the Ordnance picking up the tab. It's a scary lab full of death you can't even see coming. You understand, or should we start writing it on the sides of the legworms you sell us?"
"I understand," Valentine said. "Thank you."
Xanadu, October: Summer lingered that year between the Great hakes and the Appalachians. In eastern Russia and Mongolia the bitter winter of '72 came hard and fast, leading to starvation in the Permafrost Freehold. In the Aztlan Southwest El Nino blew hot, making a certain group of aerial daredevils licking their wounds in the desert outside Phoenix ration water. Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas drowned under torrential tropical storms hurtling out of the mid-Atlantic one after another, ushering in what came to be known as the mud fall.
Ohio could not have been more idyllic, with cloudless days reaching into the midseventies and cool nights in the high fifties, perfect weather for sleeping under a light blanket. There was plenty of time for apple picking and blueberry gathering, and the turkeys had grown extra large in that year of plenty.
David Valentine always remembered that first fall of his exile as a grim, disturbing business under a kindly sky. Perhaps if he'd been lazier, or argumentative, or a thief, he and Ahn-Kha would have been thrown out of Xanadu with the Golden One's sutures still weeping. But after his first day in the fields he found the bio warfare scare story implausible, and became determined to find out what lay behind the neatly tuck-pointed facade of those reddish bricks.
* * * *
The job offer didn't come as much of a surprise. It happened over dinner in the "field house"-a small apartment building that reminded Valentine of Price's motel, essentially a line of tiny rooms, two sharing one bath, that housed the lowest of the low of Xanadu's laborers: the "hands."
Up one step from the hands were the service workers, who mixed with the hands at their shared recreation center just behind the hospital. The fixtures made Valentine think it had originally been built to be a large-vehicle garage, but now it held Ping-Pong tables, a video screen and library (full of dull-as-distilled-water New Universal Church productions), and a jukebox ("Authentic Vintage MCDs").
The service workers performed cafeteria and janitorial duties inside the main buildings. Valentine learned his first night there that they expected the hands to do the same for them. He learned how to cook "factory food,"-washtub-sized trays of pastas, vegetables, and sweet puddings. Every other night there was meat from the Xanadu livestock. Beef predominated, which Valentine found remarkable. Even during his hitch as a Coastal Marine he'd only been fed chicken; beef was saved for feasts before and after a cruise.
A step above the service workers was the security. There weren't many of them, considering the evident importance of the facility. Enough to man the two gates (there was a smaller one to the east) and the towers, and to keep guard at all the main building doors. Valentine could have stormed the place with a single company of Wolves, had he been able to get the company that deep into the Kurian Zone.
And made it past the cordon of Reapers.
The security forces lived and worked from the long building almost connecting the hospital with the salmon-colored apartment blocks.
That was all Valentine could learn about the self-contained community in his off hours. During the day he worked on the plumbing for a fourth barn, stripped to the waist and digging the ditch for the piping. He recognized make-work when he saw it; a backhoe could have completed the digging in a day.
"You ever think of joining the Ordnance, Tar?" Michiver, the chief hand, asked him over his plate of stew at one of the long cafeteria tables in the rec center. Michiver had a nose that looked like an overgrown wart and ate slowly and stiffly and with a bit of a wince, like an old dog.