The Healer (4 page)

“What's your problem?”

“I was just thinking that maybe we can keep this from happening again.”

It was a tactless comment. Human or not, the man had cause for offense.

“You afraid of blood, tesque?”

Payne stiffened. “No,” he answered softly, registering the threat.

“Good. So how ‘bout you shut your mouth and do your job.”

Even stones can learn to hear, and obediently, Payne bent to the task at hand. The sight of blood and damaged tissue, and the prospect of healing it, helped to quiet the self-reproval at mishandling his first patient, along with the humiliation of being put in his place. There was beauty in the way the clot had formed, beauty in the scarlet crust and the blush of erythema. The surrounding tissue was already warm
with all the fluid flowing in to heal the wound. There was beauty in this too, beauty in each and every aspect of the healing process. Even the most obnoxious human had a beauty when he stood before his healer naked and exposed.

Payne never got the tour that he was promised, but over time and by necessity he found his own way around the camp. It was more a small town, really, with named streets and numbered houses, a sewage system, a recreation hall, a modest house of worship, two saloons, a playing field, and a basic grocery store. Some of the men liked to cook, and a few hunted. Most, though, ate together in the large, company-sponsored mess hall. On the north side of the mountain, across a broad saddle and reached by rail, was the Two Prime operation, a secondary mine nearly as extensive as the primary one, with its own adit, its own dry, and its own healing center. The miners were split between the two operations and worked around the clock. At any given time there were close to a thousand of them underground. Hoistmen, boilermen, mechanics, skip operators and sorters worked the surface. With more or less proficiency (more, when everything was running smoothly; less, when the inevitable equipment breakdowns and cave-ins interfered) the ore kept moving day and night, a point of pride with the Pannus Corporation. All told, the mine and its ancillary operations fed the mouths of some three thousand men.

In the early days there had been animals in the mine as well as humans. Before the advent of skips and conveyors to transport the rock, donkeys and mules did the job. Initially, they were kept corralled and stabled on the surface, but as the haulage drifts got longer and the mine got deeper, it became more efficient to house some of them underground. Typically, to save time, the animals were trussed and bundled in a canvas sack, then lowered directly down a ventilation
shaft to where they were needed. Because it was so much easier lowering them than lifting them, once an animal was down, it was usually down for good. The legendary Bust Your Chops, a sturdy, placid mule known to all as Bustem, had been lowered at the tender age of two, and had spent the remainder of her thirty-odd years beneath the earth, eventually dying as she had lived, hauling ore. She was a much-loved animal and at the time of her death as blind as a bat, which didn't interfere one iota with her abilities because her eyes were in her feet. She knew every inch of every drift, and her body was interred where she had fallen, in a little cul-de-sac that bore her name.

But the mine no longer needed beasts of burden. As far as Payne could tell, the only animals left in the vicinity, not counting birds, which came and went at their own discretion, and head and body lice, which were epidemic, were dogs and rats. The former, except for a few wild escapees, were pets; the latter, to a one, vermin. An occasional bear or moose wandered into camp, and the men who hunted spoke of a variety of smaller game. On many a winter night Payne heard the howling of wolves, but as a rule they kept to the forest. Ort were rarely seen so far north.

On his first day of work Payne saw no one. On his second he saw a man with an ankle sprain; on his third, one with a twisted knee. Mashed finger, puncture wound, rash—little by little the patients began to trickle in. But it was slow going, especially to someone so eager to get started. Hours and sometimes days went by when he sat in the healing room bored and alone.

And it wasn't as if there was a lack of illness. Respiratory disease was rampant, and there were other maladies less obvious and more poorly defined. But the men didn't like to ask for help. That ran contrary to their nature. And they didn't trust him, or so he imagined,
which he felt was unwarranted. True, he was young and lacked experience, but he didn't lack skill, and as for youth, this simply meant he had more energy and passion for his work. Healers aged so quickly that by the time they gained experience, they frequently couldn't use it. It was an ugly and depressing paradox that a seasoned healer was in all likelihood a finished one.

Which made Payne all the more anxious to get going. Still, it was weeks before he got to use his meli. This, the pinnacle of his craft, in a real way its essence. He'd been desperate to do a meli healing since the day that he'd arrived, had thought of it and dreamt of it and had even gone so far as to map it out beforehand in his mind.

At long last, he got the chance. It was a simple problem, a pulmonary illness, First Degree. Not surprisingly, his nervousness and inexperience added layers of complexity to what otherwise would have been straightforward, making it more difficult and challenging to him. He miscalculated several basic steps, misjudged others, and on the whole, made a number of mistakes. Even so it was a thrill beyond compare. Lying down beside the miner on the healing bed, wrapping their arms together, touching skin to skin. It was strange and awkward and incredibly, impossibly, intimate. The miner almost bolted, and Payne himself was as jittery as a jump bug. But somehow he managed to get through it, systematically running through the stages, extracting and extruding and then disposing of what he'd made. Sublime it wasn't, not that first time. But it hinted of sublime. It tasted of it. And afterward he couldn't wait to do another.

The miners felt a little differently. They had an aversion to meli healing that bordered on the pathologic, beginning with the simple fact of having a problem, any problem, that needed such deep, invasive care. Having to appear before a tesque and ask for help was humiliating enough, but then actually having to touch this tesque, be bound arm to arm and skin to skin with him, and further, to then lie back and surrender up control—this was almost too much to bear. Better to
suffer and grow strong from suffering than to be put in a compromising position like that.

But sometimes there was nothing to be done for it; there were problems that would not respond to any other treatment. After Payne's first success he had another, and then another. He gained a modest following, not that the miners had much choice. But bit by bit they started coming in.

Nearly every one of them had a cough, and most found a way to tolerate it, but some could not. And some went on to develop trouble deeper in their lungs. These constituted the majority of his patients; there were days when all he saw were pulmonary problems. Before long, he became something of an expert in them.

Coughs, for example. Like shades of the same color, like variations on a song, there was a wide and nuanced variety of them. Some were intermittent and spasmodic; some continuous, around the clock. Some of the coughs were productive of phlegm, which ranged from clear to murky yellow to green, from thin and watery to thick and tinged with blood. Some were moist but nonproductive, some were dry and hacking, some musical, some barking, some booming like a drum. Some men, with great effort, could control their coughs. Others could not stop for anything and would hack away until they literally spit out lung.

Many of the men were short of breath, most with exertion but a few poor souls at rest. The worst ones wheezed and panted day and night. It was hard to listen to this: one person's lack of breath seemed to make everybody breathless. To Payne it served as a reminder that no body part or system could be taken for granted. The simple act of breathing was a miracle; it was perfect, but only until it failed.

Before long, he had his wish: his days were filled with work. And now, sometimes, he questioned the wisdom of that wish. For if sickness was hard to witness, it was worse to bear. It was a curse the way the men struggled to breathe, a plague the way an illness—any illness—sapped one's strength, a scourge the way it hurt and disabled.
He hated to see people suffer and wished they didn't have to. He felt sympathy and compassion for those who did.

And yet he couldn't deny that he was grateful to be working. Nor could he deny the cold, hard fact that while health was ever the goal, illness was more interesting. It was more stimulating and challenging to the mind. It demanded the full use of all the senses. How the body fell apart was a window into how it worked, and for Payne it was also an antidote to boredom.

But antidotes are not panaceas. To the curious and restless mind they only work their magic for so long. After months of dealing with the same patients, the same coughs, the same complaints, Payne began to pray for something different, something new and unexpected, to walk through his door.

His prayer was answered in the person of a man named Covert. The night before he appeared at the healing center, the camp had been dusted with its first snow. Payne, who had never experienced snow before, was outside admiring it. The way it sparkled in the sunlight and crunched then melted into little footprint puddles beneath his feet seemed quite wonderful and magical to him. It put him in a whimsical, childlike frame of mind, which the miner's arrival quickly banished.

A jackleg driller with the arms and shoulders to prove it, Covert did not look well. He coughed like all the men, but there was something else wrong with him, too. His skin was yellow and pasty. His breath had a fishy, slightly fetid scent. And he had a funny way of walking, climbing the stairs to the healing center with a sort of prancing gait, lifting up his knees much higher than necessary, as if he couldn't trust his feet.

Payne knew enough by now to keep his questions to a minimum. Covert was more polite than most, possibly because he was also sicker. But he didn't mince words, bluntly stating that he had to get back to work as soon as possible. He needed the money. When Payne reminded him that wages lost to sickness were recoverable, and, furthermore, that he might want and even need a day or two to recuperate from the healing, he remained adamant (and to Payne's mind, unreasonable) in his determination to return at once. If he could walk, then he could work. His buddies who were in the same boat as he was did. He had one and only one question for Payne: Did he know what he was doing?

There was a time for modesty and a time for candor. At the risk of sounding boastful, Payne assured him that he did. Then he led him to the healing bed.

The smell of the man's sickness, up close, was quite strong, along with the unmistakable sense that something was seriously wrong. Part of the problem was in his lungs, but the bulk of it turned out to be in his kidneys. Payne had no trouble identifying it, and he proceeded through the subsequent stages of the healing methodically. Every healing had its differences—large or small—from every other, but this one, rooted as it was in an entirely different and more advanced disease than he had yet encountered, was more complex. But not, it turned out, more difficult to cure, not for Payne, who ended up enjoying the experience immensely. As he extruded the Concretion, a waxy chunk of darkly stippled matter, he felt proud of what he'd done. It changed shape briefly as he carried it to the disposal shaft, and he imagined that it would probably change shape again as it fell. None of them ever reappeared; they only lived, if lived was the proper word for it, a few seconds. And the shaft was nearly bottomless and its walls were polished smooth to prevent the Concretions from catching on something and lodging there.

When he returned, he helped Covert into a sitting position. The miner seemed a little dazed. Gradually, he recovered his senses.

“All done?”

Payne nodded.

Covert surprised him by thanking him. “That didn't take long.”

“No. Everything went smoothly.”

“You sure you did what you were supposed to?”

It was an odd thing to ask. He was a healer. No one had ever questioned him before.

“Yes. I got rid of it. You should be fine.”

Covert nodded, then stretched. “I feel pretty good.” Suddenly, his eyes narrowed. “You sure you did it right?”

“Yes. Everything's fine. You needn't worry.”

Payne had a notion to lead him to the disposal shaft to prove it to him. Some of the Concretions took their time to fall; there was still a chance that he could get a glimpse of it. On the other hand, he hadn't met a miner yet who wanted to.

There was another healer at the Pannus mine, a tesque named Vecque. She had been originally assigned to care for female miners when, for a brief time, there were such things. Never more than a handful, the women had always been utterly outnumbered by their male counterparts. Shortly after Vecque arrived, there'd been an incident that led to a walkout by the female workers, followed by a week of tense negotiations. On paper they won concessions, but in practice nothing changed. When another incident occurred two months later, they lodged a protest, then departed en masse, leaving the mine in the capable, but forever after bereaved, hands of the men.

Work was never slow for Vecque. She was always busy. She'd been brought to care for women, but it was the men who seemed to most prefer a female's touch. This, despite the fact that Vecque's touch was nothing to write home about. Like her nature it was far from gentle,
intentionally so, for she hated her job with a passion. She was brusque and heavy-handed with her patients; much the same, she observed, as they were with her. If she'd had the choice, she would have been anywhere but where she was. And anything but what she was, a healer.

She and Payne were as different as the sun and moon, but they were tesques, which meant they had their similarities. They were also healers, despite Vecque's wishes to the contrary, which was another thing they shared. Under other circumstances they probably never would have been together, but under the present ones they had little choice. Among the miners they would always be outsiders, and if they were to have any companionship at all, it would have to be with one another.

In point of fact, Payne liked Vecque well enough, which, given his nature, was no surprise. He liked most people. He looked up to her, although he also found her difficult. Vecque suffered Payne as she suffered most things. She had little patience with his interest in his job and his desire to do more. She had little patience in general.

“You're an idiot,” she told him, not for the first time. They were in the mess hall, a vast rectangular building heated by two enormous cast-iron boilers at either end. They met when their work allowed it, usually over a meal. Vecque always chose a side or corner table if one was available, as far from the men as possible. When the hall was filled, as it was now, she had no choice. Wherever she sat, she felt surrounded.

“Why am I an idiot?” he asked.

“One, for wanting more to do. Two, for telling me.”

“There's no one else to talk to.”

“Make that no one, period.”

Vecque was big around the middle and narrow at the head, as though the contents of her skull had been subjected to a lateral force and squeezed downward. She looked a little like a tick, and when she got in the mood that she was in, she was just as ornery.

“You've got ambition,” she said. “Fine. Find something to do with it. Don't tell me. I don't want to hear about it. Frankly, it's insulting.”

“How? How is it insulting?”

She went back to her food. “You figure it out.”

He was afraid to make things worse, which usually didn't take much, but more afraid to have her finish her meal then walk away, leaving him alone. He was alone enough during the day. So he took a chance.

“Because I should pay more attention to you?”

This stopped her in her tracks. She raised her eyes. “Are you trying to offend me?”

He shook his head. The situation was not improving.

“Well, maybe you should try not to then.”

He did. He tried. “I'm sorry for liking what I do. If it'll make a difference, I'll try to feel more like you.” More disgruntled, he almost said.

And then it hit him. He felt incredibly dumb.

“The Drain? Is that it?”

She gave a shrug.

He leaned forward, alarmed. “Has it started, Vecque?”

“If it hasn't, it will soon enough.”

Most healers had a good ten years, some more. Vecque had completed barely two full years of work. “Soon” seemed unnecessarily pessimistic and bleak.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because it's true.”

“But not soon,” he argued.

Again she shrugged, and when he asked if she had any of the symptoms, she refused to talk about it any more.

After that they ate in silence, which Payne didn't like, particularly when he felt responsible for it. He searched for something neutral to talk about, something that wouldn't set Vecque off. Sometimes he talked about his cases, and sometimes she would listen. She rarely cared enough to talk about her own.

“I saw a guy the other day. He was coughing so much he couldn't sleep.”

Vecque said nothing. She seemed indifferent, but he pressed on.

“It turned out it was his bunk mate who couldn't sleep. How many times have you heard that? He's the one who made him come.”

“So?”

“He wanted medicine.”

“They all want medicine.”

“I told him medicine would hide the cough, but I could heal it.”

“I bet he loved that.”

“I doubt it, but he let me do it. I convinced him.”

He was proud of himself, but she was unimpressed. “You're wasting your time. They all have coughs. You heal them, they'll just get them back again.”

“It's the mine,” he said. “It makes them sick.”

“Of course it does. But it's their choice. They could get a different job.”

He conceded this. “But someone has to work the mines. And the conditions could be improved. They could be a lot better than they are.”

“Could be. But that's their choice, too.”

“How do you mean?”

“You been underground?”

“No. Not yet. But I want to.”

“Don't bother. It's a pit. A hole. It's loud and cold and wet, and the air's so thick with dust you can barely see, much less breathe.”

“How is that their choice?”

“It doesn't have to be like that. The noise, yes, but not the dust. You know those jackleg drills they use?”

He recalled Covert's massive chest and arms, and how, when he'd wrapped their forearms together on the healing bed, he'd felt puny, like a boy beside a man.

“I haven't seen one, but I know you have to be strong to use them.”

“You bet you do,” she said. “They're monsters. The drill operators are supposed to drill wet, which keeps the dust and dirt down by their
feet where it belongs. But they do it dry. Not everybody, but all it takes is a few.”

“Why do they do that?”

“Because they're trying to make themselves sick. They want to breathe that lousy air.”

“I doubt that's true.”

“It's true all right,” said Vecque. “It's money to them. They're as abusive to themselves as they are to us. You'd think they'd be smarter than that, but you'd think wrong. That's a human for you.”

“What do you mean ‘it's money to them‘?”

“I mean they trade their health for cash. It's the free enterprise system, that's what I mean. At our expense.”

Payne still didn't understand what she was talking about, but he didn't get the chance to find out. They were interrupted by a commotion at a nearby table, where a fight was breaking out. One of the miners shoved another, the other one shoved back, and suddenly the two of them were squaring off, fists drawn.

Vecque glanced over, then back again, a smug and vindicated expression on her face. At the same time she warned Payne not to stare. If things got out of hand, if the boys actually started throwing punches, the two of them would quickly and quietly leave.

A minute later, it was over, the tension, or at least the threat of physical violence, gone. A peacemaker had emerged, separating the men, both of whose egos and reputations were thus allowed to survive intact. That's the way it usually went, said Vecque, sounding a little disappointed. Lots of posturing but never any blood.

Payne recognized one of the two fighters as his very first patient, the one he'd treated for the leg gash. He'd seen him more recently for a different reason, which he thought Vecque might find amusing. Briefly, he gave her the backstory, explaining how he'd copiously washed the wound but how little bits of rock had gotten stuck inside. Stained the man's skin all up and down the scar, tattooing him.

“Happens all the time,” she said.

“He came back a few days ago.”

“Sure. Wanting you to get rid of it.”

“No. Actually he liked the way it looked. What he wanted was for me to touch it up and do the other leg the same. Said it reminded him of a snake. Wanted me to add a pair of fangs.”