The Healer (11 page)

“I'm twenty,” she said.

He shook his head. “Too young. Far too young.” He being barely nineteen. “I can stop this. With your help I can heal you.”

She was frightened; she believed him; her head spun like a top. If only the future weren't opaque. If only the present weren't so awful. She was weary to the point of collapse.

“I have a wish, too,” she said, then hesitated, knowing it was a mistake in her condition—in any condition she could presently conceive of—to make wishes. “I want to see the sky again. The one above Gode.”

Her voice was so low Payne had to lean in to hear it. Up close her breath had the fruity smell that came of starvation. Her tongue was coated with a sticky paste.

“And the wind. I want to hear it. How it blows and blows in summer. You know. Like someone singing.”

He hadn't thought of Gode in a long time, but the wind, and especially the fearsome summer wind, was not a thing he could easily forget. As a child he had lain in bed at night, terrified by the sound of it, imagining that his house had been uprooted and set down in a den of hissing snakes. He had a fear of snakes. And Wyn sometimes had seized on this, hissing at him in the dark, though other times he had been kinder and more comforting.

Boldly, he vowed that she would hear the sound of singing wind again. He promised this to her, feeling whipped by winds himself, winds of recklessness and passion and conviction.

“But I need your help. We need to work together.”

He stood, then bent and tried to lift her, but she was heavy and unwieldy, and enfeebled by her days in bed. There was a moment when he thought that she might fall; then all at once she lifted herself, startling both of them. Immediately, she felt light-headed and gripped his arm. Her legs were wobbly and weak.

“Promise that you'll stop at any sign of trouble. For either of us.”

“There won't be any trouble,” he said, steadying her.

She had barely strength enough to stand, much less argue with him.

“Oh, Payne. Please. Just promise.”

The night before the healing, he had a dream that filled him with a sense of dread. His brother was in the dream, and was besieged by someone or something; then all at once there was a reversal, and it was Payne who was under attack. He woke up in a sweat, but eventually calmed down enough to get back to sleep, and in the morning he felt better.

And better still after healing a miner of a nasty little pleural ailment, extracting and then extruding the Level Two Concretion with ease. Holding life in the balance and then tipping that balance toward life was a feeling unlike all others. It was visceral and it was thrilling, and it gave him confidence. By the time he met with Vecque, the nightmare was forgotten. He was ready, and he was able. The racing of his heart was excitement, not foreboding.

He prepared a little differently than he did for other healings, removing his shirt entirely instead of simply rolling up his sleeve. Like every healer, his dermal recognition follicles ran from wrist to shoulder, but for what he'd had to deal with so far, he'd never had to use more than his forearm. With Vecque he wanted every bit of contact he could get.

He helped her onto the healing bed then joined her, wrapping and binding their arms with care. Her skin was dry, but he was sweating enough for the two of them. Sweat was needed to create an effective neural bridge. She took several deep breaths while staring open-eyed at the ceiling. Then like gates, her eyelids closed.

“Good luck,” she whispered.

Payne said nothing. Half-naked, he felt a stirring in his groin.

This sometimes happened, that he became aroused. There was a kinship that he had yet to understand between healing and sexuality, or, virgin that he was, what he imagined sexuality to be. The way his senses came alive. The way his meli throbbed. And the waves of force and energy that ran back and forth between him and the person he was healing.

It was such an intimate connection. It gave rise to such a sense of power and release. Sometimes he wondered if it was normal to feel the way he did. If it was common. If it was somehow wrong. He would have liked to ask Vecque, who lay so unaware and trusting beside him, what her own experiences had been.

Stage One went well enough. It wasn't hard to identify what was everywhere, in every system, every organ, every cellular conglomerate, every cell. The Drain was ubiquitous, a sump of energy with the tenacity of a parasite. It was bland, bottomless, and unyielding. While not contagious per se, it had a quality of contagion. A kind of infectious magnetism. Payne felt attracted to it, or perhaps it was the reverse, it felt attracted to him.

Cautiously, he recruited more neurofibratory bundles up his arm, enhancing the signal, defining it. Oddly, he encountered no resistance. The source of Vecque's deterioration seemed almost cheered by his attention, surrendering to it without opposition.

Stage Three required more effort. The epitopic signature was polymorphic, a fusion of Vecque's native identity with the Drain's wild, multicentric form. In no living creature was health an absolute, but rather a constantly shifting balance between function and dysfunction, efficiency and breakdown. In all bodies, from the simplest to the most complex, there was some degree of illness, some structure that did not perform as optimally as it might, some system in need of repair. In most cases, these would right themselves naturally, in the normal course of a body's self-healing. In a few cases, however, they would not.

These trouble spots were the seeds of future maladies, true illnesses in the making. Distinguishing between the two—between what required intervention and what did not—took time and patience, and the Drain's pervasiveness made this extremely hard. Over and over Payne followed strands of dysfunction that led to knots that led to nowhere. He felt benumbed by choices. Time and again he had to start from scratch.

Finally, though, he had the thing identified in all its manifold dimensions. It was something like a cloud and something like a heavy blanket, and it had a gagging smell and a choking taste, and infiltrated Vecque with a dense, restrictive weight. He surrounded it as he had learned to do, joining with his patient, completing the stage of capture. But when he tried to extract it, it wouldn't budge. This had never happened to him, and he bore down harder, then harder still.

And now it did resist, with a force and tenacity that was new to him. His efforts to dislodge it seemed only to accomplish the reverse. It was like trying to pry a clinging child from its mother; the more he pulled, the more its hold tightened. He wasn't sure that he could, or even should, muster the energy to yank it free.

At length he paused to consider the situation. Healing had always been so easy for him, and this was something new. He had never been pushed to such a limit, never felt so put-upon and opposed. In his mind he returned to the beginning, reexamining the initial stages, looking for flaws in observation and technique. It was tiring work, and puzzling when he could find no errors in anything he'd done. Yet still the thing resisted his extraction. There seemed no choice but to use more force.

Reaching down inside himself for all the strength he had, he tore at it and with a last-ditch effort finally wrenched it free.

But now, as he prepared to shape and then expel it, he found that he had made a few miscalculations. It was larger and more deeply rooted than he had first perceived. And its boundaries were not fixed but shifting, as though it were unstable, and more, still an active, growing thing. He had captured it, but now he couldn't identify it. And without identity, upon which all else depended, he could not extrude it, and it was dangerous to try.

But try he did; he worked his meli feverishly, laboring to turn the thing into something material and substantial, something concrete. It took every bit of skill and talent and resourcefulness he had, and in the end he could not do it. It was like breathing in a vacuum. The strength bled out of him. His mind ebbed, then emptied, and after wavering briefly at the edge of consciousness, he passed out on the bed.

And like an outgoing tide the Drain returned to Vecque. And having passed through Payne, it was transmuted. No longer would it suck the life from its victim, which in other circumstances might have been a victory. But in this case it was the opposite; a chilling, horrific defeat. For now it would neither kill nor be killed. It would live on in Vecque, extending her life, but a life she could never have imagined, much less wished for. A life whose sole intent, she would soon come to believe, was to cause her pain.

Payne's punishment was swift. He was given twenty years at the Pannus mine, twenty more than the year he'd already served to do what he had long since mastered. Twenty years to hear the same complaints and treat the same old problems, to see the same tired faces day in and out. Twenty years to be excluded by the miners. Twenty years to doubt himself and hate himself, twenty years to take the blame for his mistake.

But healers did not last for twenty years. Most survived for less than ten. For all intents and purposes, then, Payne's sentence was for life.

A harsh punishment, but worse by far was what they meted out to Vecque, which was nothing. They left her as Payne had left her, at the mercy of a thing that gnawed and scraped and clawed inside her, as if it, too, were under sentence and none too happy about it. Vecque was now the bearer of a new condition in the annals of the healing craft, a
novelty born of her and Payne's joint and ill-considered effort, an amalgam of their foolishness, a curse.

In a cruel bit of irony, the symptoms of the Drain relented. Vecque's body was no longer ravaged by it, her brain no longer addled, her senses no longer dulled. But beware the treatment that is worse than the disease, for what took its place was far more terrible. She had known one extreme, and now she became acquainted with the other.

Suddenly, she was aware of everything. Sensitive to the faintest whisper, the subtlest smell, the dimmest light. Voices made her cringe. A candle and she recoiled. The smell of food, which had once been her joy, was especially painful, and when the pangs of hunger forced her to eat, the touch of it on her tongue, the taste of it and then, unbearably, the swallowing, were excruciating. It was as if her body had been stripped of its protective coating. As if every nerve were exposed and raw.

She took to her quarters to escape the sensory bombardment, and yet she could not bear to be alone. Nor could she tolerate standing still. She was possessed by an unrelenting restlessness, her arms and especially legs in constant need of motion, as though these nerves, the ones controlling her muscles and her joints, her posture, balance, and position, were firing nonstop, too. So while her room was dark and relatively quiet, she was driven from it to pace the streets and the upper tunnels of the mine, seeking and yet avoiding contact, caught between a desperate longing to connect and a mordant fear of anything that might cause further stimulus and pain.

Payne tried desperately to help her, but what was there for him to do? She could not bear to be touched, even for comfort's sake, and the words he murmured in an effort to soothe her sounded hollow, even to him. Medication sometimes seemed to dull her pain but just as often didn't, and he was left to sit with her, when he had the time, as anyone would sit with someone who was suffering, listening if she chose to speak, which was rare, consoling her in whatever way he could think
of, mostly just attending her in the vague and unrequited hope that his being there was better than his not.

A year went by and then another. For reasons Payne could only guess at, Vecque had not been replaced, leaving him as the sole healer for the thousands of workers at the mine. As she had foretold, he had all the work he wanted, but it had ceased to satisfy him. It was so predictable by now, so monotonous, he could do it in his sleep. It was busy work, and it bored and frustrated him. He knew that he had more to offer and to give.

Though maybe not for long, which was another worry, that his skills would atrophy. He feared they already had. Which was the only possible explanation and defense for the idea that kept popping into his head of trying to heal Vecque again. It was pure insanity, he knew, to dare to even think it. But such was his pity for her and his own crying need to fight the tedium and stagnation that he did.

Winters were the worst. They seemed to last forever, cold and dark and dreary, mirroring his own sorry fate and state of mind. The days seemed hardly days at all, but hints of days, terse, foreshortened preambles to the long and cheerless speech of night. Life in camp went on, but it was a pallid life, subdued, attenuated and limited. Outside of work, the men withdrew into themselves. They hunkered down. Or else they turned to drink. It was a time of isolation, a time, for those inclined, to sink into depression. Payne was not the type, but the winters wore him down. They did something similar to Vecque. He hadn't thought it possible, but they seemed to make her even more miserable and anguished than she was.

In winter everyone spent more time sleeping, Payne included, just as in summer he spent less. He had more dreams in winter, too. One night he was dreaming of being asleep in a cave of rock and snow. It was a peaceful dream and a peaceful sleep, but then it became disturbed, and he woke with the sense of something wrong. At first he
thought there'd been an accident in the mine, but there was no warning siren. Instead, he heard the howling of wolves, not so rare an occurrence, only this time they sounded close at hand. Curious, he threw on his clothes and went outside to investigate.

The moon was full and low in the sky, half-hidden by the trees. It lit the night with a ghostly, bluish glow and cast pale shadows on the snow. He could hear the pack distinctly, close enough that he could make out different and distinguishing sounds. Some of the wolves were howling, some were barking, while others were growling low in their throats. It sounded almost like a conversation, as if they were discussing something. Maybe, he thought, they had an animal surrounded and were debating how best to bring it down. If so, this was something he wanted to see.

Leaving the relative safety of the main camp, he headed downhill toward the playing field, which seemed the source of the sounds. The streets were empty, and he met no other men. All who were awake, save him, were underground.

As he came in sight of the field, the moon slid behind a cloud. When it reemerged, he was halfway down the slope and got his first glimpse of the pack. There were six or seven of them in a ring, light gray bodies against the pearly opalescence of the snow. In the middle of the ring, gaunt and motionless, stood a person. His heart sank, then started pounding, because he knew at once who it was.

The wolves were circling her, growling, snarling, yipping, all the while closing in. Payne shouted and ran at them, hoping to drive them away, but the snow was deep, and he lost his balance and fell, sprawling. Struggling to his feet and wiping the snow from his face, he yelled at the top of his lungs, then rushed to make a snowball, which he hurled at the pack. It was a futile gesture, for the wolves were a good fifty yards away, well beyond the reach of his arm. Besides, they were not concerned with him. To a one, their eyes were on their prey.

They moved in closer, their teeth gleaming in the moonlight, their
circle tightening. One of them, the largest, leapt forward and nipped Vecque's arm.

Payne screamed at them, and as he drew a breath to scream again, he heard another sound, a new one, soft and whispering, like the sigh of wind through leaves, though there was no wind to speak of. Then, from the corner of his eye he detected motion.

From the forest that edged the field, shapes appeared: two-legged, upright shapes, scores of them, moving quickly forward, coalescing. At first Payne thought that they were humans, small humans, a tribe perhaps, but then he saw the third limb at their backs and realized that they were ort. They didn't sink into the snow but somehow glided over it, moving toward the pack as effortlessly as they had moved across the grassy plain. When they reached the wolves, they didn't stop but streamed between and past them until they had Vecque surrounded, with the wolves on the outside of a now much wider circle.

And then the strangest thing occurred. All together, as if on cue, the ort raised their hind limbs, first pointing them as straight as arrows toward the sky then curving them downward and looping them around one another, until, within seconds, the entire drove was linked and intertwined. From a distance it looked like they had formed a knot and been transformed from many separate bodies into a single, indivisible one.

At first the wolves looked baffled and confused. Then they started howling. But they didn't attack the ort. Didn't bite or even nip them. They yipped and growled and stalked about the perimeter of the circle, but the ort just stood their ground until eventually the wolves gave up and padded uneasily away.

Payne watched all this from where he stood above the field, too stunned and mesmerized to move. When at last he roused himself, the ort had started drifting off, and by the time he reached Vecque, they had vanished. All around her the snow was trampled, and here and there he made out tracks. But neither ort not wolf remained. Vecque stood alone in the middle of the field, hugging herself and moaning.

“Why did they do that?” she cried.

“It was a miracle,” said Payne. “The wolves were trying to kill you.”

“Yes. Why didn't they let them?” Haggard and shivering, she seemed to have lost her mind. Strings of tears had frozen to her cheeks. She looked ravaged. “Kill me, Payne. Please. I beg you. Put me out of this misery.”

Instead, he threw his coat around her shoulders and led her back to his quarters. Repeatedly, she pleaded with him to end the torment, until her pleas turned to sobs and then, at length, her sobs to a woeful, haunted silence. Payne put her in his bed and sat up the rest of the night, unable to sleep. Many thoughts went through his head. What was he to do? He couldn't take her life, and he thanked the ort, for, truly, they had saved her. His thanks were followed by another thought, and he hung his head and prayed to be forgiven, because he wished they hadn't.

This happened in the winter of his fourth year at the mine. It was his worst winter yet, one he feared would never end. But eventually it did, and even though his future was the same regardless of the season, he rejoiced to see the days begin to lengthen and the weather thaw. He had not a single reason to be hopeful and every reason not to be, and yet, like every living thing, with spring his spirits rose.

Everybody's did. The camp itself seemed to breathe a sigh of relief when spring arrived. Like an old dog dreaming of its youth, it woke with a sense of purpose, wagging its tail and shaking free of the winter doldrums.

There was plenty of work to do outside the mine, and the men set to it, if not with eagerness then at least with energy. Buildings damaged by the winter storms had to be repaired. Broken windows replaced, roofs and stairs that had buckled under the weight of snow shored up and mended. Iron rails that hard fingers of ice had loosened and in some cases popped free of their ties had to be reattached, and
muck heaps impossible to deal with because of snow and freezing temperatures had to be sorted and attended to.

It was a busy time of year. Rail traffic picked up dramatically. Long and fully laden trains left camp once and sometimes twice a week on their way to processing plants in the south. Empty trains returned, some carrying passengers. One of the first that year was an officer of the Pannus Corporation. He was accompanied by an engineer and a team of surveyors. They stayed a week, analyzing rock samples and scouting out a site for a new decline. Along with them came a variety of peddlers and tradesmen, drawn by the scent of unspent winter money. One natty gentleman arrived with money of his own and left with a suitcase full of musk.

There was other traffic, too. The prospect of a better job elsewhere was a constant topic of conversation and source of speculation among the miners, and in spring and summer they had a habit of getting happy feet. Miners were a restless breed to begin with, tempted by dreams of greener pastures, prone to migratory bursts. Early that summer, fed by a rumor of a hot new mine on the jungle island of Sopor, a record number of men tramped out. The camp looked half-deserted. A week later, a record number tramped in to take their place, and the bunkhouses and mess hall were once more filled to overflowing.

When he had the time, Payne liked to watch the trains come in. He played a game with himself, a seemingly harmless game, imagining that one of the passengers carried news for him. Part of the game involved trying to guess which one it might be. That man, with the look of a mine official? That one, with the lined and weathered face? Or was it that one, with the deliberate, premeditated movements of a courier—was he the messenger boy, the bearer of the happy news?

For, of course, the news was happy: he'd been given a reprieve. Here's the letter, the man would say, and here's your ticket out. You've been here long enough; it's time to move on.

Every year he played this game, and every year it backfired. No one
ever had a letter for him. No one even knew his name. It was not a harmless game at all, but depressing and self-defeating. If he played it a hundred years, he would have a hundred years of disappointments. Better not to get his hopes up, which is why every year, after a few weeks, he stopped watching incoming trains.

He was not on hand, then, the late summer day a passenger train arrived with but a single car, carrying a mere three passengers. Two of them were human, one male and one female. The male was large and portly. The female, tall and more finely built. The third passenger, a male, was tesque, and he reported immediately to the site boss. The humans went in search of Vecque.