by Molly Gloss
Without hesitation, but also without looking toward him, she shook her head, one hard, hostile denial. “No,” she said. “I cannot heal.”
“There’s a scar on the inside of Jin’s wrist.” He had thought that would make her look round again. But she picked up a dish, scraped a bit of flat cake—shellfish, he thought, or seaweed—and the rind of a tiwit fruit into the garbage before she looked in his direction. She’d had time, he thought, to discover that look of weary impatience.
“A banguii ripped him with a pincer.” That was all she said.
“The scar is very clean. Did you take him to Bedyn, to one of the meds there?”
“It closed up well,” she said, and then for the second time looked straight at Neye with that sort of daring stare. “I gave him an antibiotic and a pressure bandage. That was the only magic.”
Deliberately she looked around the room. But she made no move toward the two or three dirty plates or the cherar, gelled and cold in a dish on the table. Instead, in a moment, she kicked a pallet out flat and dimmed the light and then stood a moment above her bed, looking toward him in the near darkness. “I don’t suppose you plan to walk back in the dark. But don’t try to sleep in any of my buildings. I’m up before dawn and I expect you to be gone by then.”
“I’ll stay a little longer than that,” Neye said. He tried to say it gently, without much defiance.
She straightened but for a while said nothing. Then: “You have a permit to trespass.”
“Yes.”
“I want to see it.”
“It’s not case-specific. It’s inclusive.”
“I want to see it.”
He did not argue. He said, “You’ll have to show me to a comp.”
She went past him out into the yard, and he followed her to another dobe, an office, where she waited behind him while he sat and wrote his request into the desk. His number and his name came silently on the screen, and then the permit codes one after the other, blinking on in rows. In a moment she said, “There is evidently little that you have not permission to do.” She said it with no surprise, just a kind of sourness that was not directed at him.
He did not turn toward her.
“I want a hard copy of the permit to trespass,” she said. She made it sound simple, straightforward, without the whine of its barren gesture. He touched a key and a thin leaf of paper pushed out of the slot below the screen. She reached to take it, folded it once, and then, without interest, laid it on the desktop.
He was watching her now, sitting in the office chair but half-turned from the comp and leaning back on one elbow.
She said, “I don’t know what you intend. To catch me in the act? You could wait years here and not see a medical emergency, we both know that, and I don’t think Registry has that kind of perseverance. You could make your own emergency, but I don’t think they’d let you cut somebody’s throat just to test me.” She waited, as if the last part had been a question.
He said, “I’ll just try to persuade you to stop hiding a scarce gift.”
She seemed careful not to frown, to speak without even much curiosity. “You are so certain, then, that I’m lying.”
He dipped his chin a little and in a moment raised it so he was looking at her squarely. “Pretty certain,” he said, but again gently, without malice.
She stared at him. Finally she said, “I won’t feed you. I won’t let you sleep in any of my buildings. I have that right.”
“Yes.”
She looked at him a little longer and then turned and went out ahead of him, back to her house. When he reached the doorway, she already lay on her side on the pallet with her back to him. He waited several minutes. He could hear her breathing and he was certain she was not sleeping, but when he spoke to her, when he said, “Lisel,” there was no reply. So finally he left.
In the late dusk, now that Lisel had put out hers, there was only one light showing. He went to it. The boy, Jin, made his quarters there in a toolshed behind a stack of plastic shipping crates. Unlike Lisel’s, this space was bare and clean and the light was clear. If he had eaten, the dishes were already picked up, because now he sat on his pallet leaning back to the dobe wall with a sheaf of hard copy pressed against his updrawn thighs. He raised his face to Neye as he came round the edge of the crates, then rather pointedly turned his attention back to the papers.
“I’d like to talk to you.”
The boy didn’t look up. But in a moment he said, “You need to talk to Lisel, I think. I’m only an apprentice.”
“I want to talk to you, too. Can I sit down?”
He kept reading. After quite a while he said, “Suit yourself.”
Neye put his duffel on the floor and sat beside it. For a while he watched the boy read from the bundle of thin pages. It was a slow way to take in information, but there was no sign of an auvid here, and he hadn’t seen one in Lisel’s place either. All their money was tied up in good farm equipment—the big computerized raft, the late-model bylander, the rearing tanks humming inside that largest dobe. It was a fairly common set of priorities among the ruralists. If there was money left over, they bought food—seaweed cakes and tewit maybe—certainly not auvids.
“How long have you worked for Lisel?”
The boy kept his eyes on the print. “Four years.”
“You were pretty young, then.”
“I was twelve.”
“How far did you get with the EDT?”
He glanced up at Neye. “I didn’t drop out. I finished early.”
“At twelve?”
“Yes.”
“Marine husbandry?”
“Invertebrate biology.”
Neye let his eyebrow slide up a little, let the boy see he was surprised, impressed. Hell, he was impressed.
“So how come you’re here? There’s a lot more money in research. And less risk.”
“There are risks in the lab, they’re just different. The wages are good out here too, just a different currency.” It ought to have been a cliché. But the boy spoke quietly, matter-of-factly, so that it sounded only true. And it was at that point Neye began to take him more seriously. He may have been young and psy-blind, but apparently he wasn’t simple.
In a moment Neye said, “You’ll Master within the year, then. By that time Teath should be opened up to homesteaders. There’s some good coastline there, I’ve seen the prospectus.”
Jin smiled, holding up the pages in his hand, shaking them as they spread and fluttered winglike over his grip. “I’ve seen it too,” he said. “Lisel got me the hard copy.” And in a moment, with a slight lifting of his chin, “It doesn’t look that good to me.”
Neye thought, before he said, “You seem to work well together. You and Lisel. Will you just stay here? Partner?”
Jin made a wordless grunting sound that was not yes or no. He pretended again to read the papers.
“You must be pliant. Working with her even this long. She strikes me as pretty rock-ribbed.”
“You don’t know anything about it.” Jin didn’t look up and there was no anger in his voice, just a faint raspy impatience.
Neye waited briefly. “She’s a healer,” he said then, without making it quite a question.
Now Jin’s head came all the way up. There was a horizontal crease at the bridge of his nose, joining his brows in a single line. “Those people in Bedyn are harassing her again.” His wasn’t a question either.
Neye was neutral, patient, persistent. “Registry says they get eight or ten complaints every year. They’re not all from Bedyn.”
The boy’s face had reddened. “They’re all from hypochondriacs and neurotics.”
There was a weighted silence. Neye could feel the boy grappling with his agitation. It wasn’t quite anger, or at least that wasn’t all of it.
“The rumors started somewhere,” Neye said.
“Sure. Her grandmother was a healer.” Jin gave him that shying sideward look of his. “You’d know that,” he said,
so there was no place to fit a denial. “It’s supposed to skip generations, right? And Lisel is”—his eyes jumped down, then up again—“a private person. So every time some kid sticks a hand in a reaper and bleeds to death before the ambulance can get there, somebody says that damn reclusive bitch, Lisel, could have saved him.”
No blood had been spilled when Cirant died. But something in what Jin had said, maybe just “kid” and “death” together in the same line, made Neye see suddenly, fleetingly, the face of his son. And raised in him an obscure irritability.
He let Jin sit silently for quite a while. Then finally he said, “There’s only one clinic in Bedyn. You must know that. Two medics and one apprentice and one ambulance with an outdated robomed. Over a hundred thousand square kilometers of farmshore and inland ranches. Eight thousand people—”
“I know what you’re getting at,” Jin said, shifting his weight on the pallet, looking impatiently at Neye and then away again.
Neye stiffened his tone of voice slightly. He said, “Just a minute. I want to finish this,” and then he was silent while he waited for the boy’s eyes to come around to him. “If Lisel has a healing gift, she’s required by law to register it with the local Med team. Maybe someplace else, or under other circumstances, it wouldn’t be very important. Probably Registry wouldn’t have sent anybody out the first time, let alone the third. But here, yes, it’s important. And there’s something more at stake than just compliance with the law. That is what I’m getting at.”
He fell silent again, briefly, but he was still looking at Jin. Then he said, “Did she heal your wrist?”
The boy put both hands in his lap so the rise of his knees hid them from Neye. Maybe he was rubbing the white scar along the inside of his wrist. He was steady now, not restless anymore, but there was, again, a deep crosswise crease at the bridge of his nose, a frown. “She dressed it, yes,” he said. “There was no laying on of hands, if that’s what you mean. I’m sorry for it, but those people won’t find any help for their problem here.” And then with only a little shift of tension to betray him, the earnest lie: “Because Lisel isn’t gifted. She’s not a healer.”
• • •
She came silently and alone from her house into the thin darkness before sunrise. The sky hung down in shaggy ribbons, low and lead-colored and damp. She pulled her arms inside the sleeves of her shirt and padded soundlessly to the nursery building with her breath pluming out white in front of her and then scattering around her shoulders as she walked through it. Neye watched her from the rise of dune behind the house, sitting hunched on the grass where it had been beaten down under his little khirtz tent. There was no light yet in the shed, no sign of Jin, and it occurred to him that Lisel had reserved the cottony quiet, the grayness, the solitude of these dawns for herself.
When she came out again from the nursery, the sky had lightened but the opaque fog filled all the distances. There was no seeing the rocky headlands of the cove nor even the bylander anchored between those fleshless arms. She stood a moment looking out toward the smoky water and then went over the rise toward the tide pond. She went in bare feet, bare calves, through the grass that was bent over heavy with wet and chill. The tide was out, the pond a dark smudge, muddy, crosshatched with posts and rails, maybe waiting for a new batch of young mollusks to graduate from the settling tank in the nursery.
Neye watched her take tools from a little cachebox near the ingress pipe and squat on her heels in the mud in front of the orifice. She was retiling around the opening. He watched her quite a while. She worked slowly, with care, chipping out the broken pieces round the mouth and then fitting the new ones, mortaring them in carefully so there was a smooth, clean lip at the opening. When she finished, she stepped back to the edge of the wet sand and looked across at her work. In some places there had been no tiles broken at all, at others one or two or three deep into the conduit. The older tiles were dark, the new ones stark white, so even from his distance Neye could see the abstract pattern, the notching line going around the circle of the opening. Lisel stepped back across the mud, squatted again, and felt all around the aperture with the tips of her fingers. Watching her, Neye could almost feel with his own hands the utter smoothness. The only irregularity would be the one presented to the eye, light butting against dark. Under her fingertips the tiles would make a seamless whole, a ring.
She stood again and stowed away the tools and then wiped her damp palms on her trousers. He would like to have seen her face, to know if the tiling—both doing it and seeing it done—had softened the lines around her mouth.
She walked out along the sunken mark of the conduit between the crouching dunes to the shoreline of the cove. With the tide out, the cobb racks stood above the water, algae-dark, crusted and knobby with adult mollusks. Jin was there on the dark mud flats beside the piers. He had come down, with his shoulders hunched and his face bleary with sleep, while Lisel worked at the pond ingress. Now he had the mop lying on its face with the back off, was tightening or untightening something in the motor.
Lisel said a couple of words. From a distance they were only blurred sounds, indistinct, but they had not the inflection of a greeting. Perhaps a question. Jin spoke a wordless grunting sound in reply. He didn’t lift his head. Lisel went past him to the cobb racks, began to stride up and down between the vertical rows of lattice. They ranged parallel to the shore so the first row had its footings in the mud, the last knee-deep in the sea. She went between them, one after the other, wading finally to her hips in the water along the far rack. Probably, while the tide was low, she looked for the little infectious shell lesions that could bring a cobb crop to ruin.
She began to wade back along the ends of the racks, pushing long-legged through the water so it raised a white surf against her thighs. Jin was standing now, watching the mop move up the first row to scour the bottom sand for predators and parasites, but she did not look toward him or the machine. She lifted her face so that she seemed to look up straight and sudden to Neye. He was too far from her to see her eyes. In a moment she looked away.
• • •
He spent a good part of the morning working his way along the rocks on the southern headland to its point, and from there he could see the bubblefence that closed the mouth of the cove. Evidently that was what they were inspecting or repairing, diving as before, alternately, from the raft just inside the fence line.
The wind was cold and wet and there was no seeing the north end of the breakwater through the rags of low fog. Cautiously, he went a little way out on the jetty, stepping with care along the top of the narrow wall and then finally sitting on it with his feet hanging on the inland side and his back to the open ocean. The raft crept steadily from the north end of the fence toward the southern, and if he stayed where he was they would eventually work within a few meters of him. For now, from where he sat, he could see the first stroke or two of their arms, the scissoring of their legs, when they went into the water.
The two of them seemed not to notice that the weather had changed. They wore again only their knee pants and lay alternately on the raft as though the sun warmed its plastic decking. The water would be temperate, but Neye found little solace in that: he sat uncomfortably on the breakwater, hunching his back against the chill overspray of surf breaking high and white on the seawall behind him.
Neither Jin nor Lisel looked toward him. But if there was annoyance or furtiveness in the woman, he could not see it. They simply, steadily worked south along the fence line as if he were not there above them, watching. Infrequently they spoke, but only to one another. There would have been no hearing it anyway, over the noise of the surf, but sometimes from the shape of their mouths he knew a word or two, knew they spoke of the perforated pipe strung below them on the seafloor, the red keefish, one tool or another. He did not see his own name spoken. Once, maybe, Jin asked if she was hungry and she shook her head, spraying beads of water from the bristly ends of her hair.
Probably it was close to
the way they worked when they were alone. But they did not smile, never touched except to clasp hands hauling one another up onto the raft. And he had a sense of that much being false, a closed face they were turning to him. They were not lovers, but there was comfortableness between them, a familiarity that was love, or at least affection, and he thought Lisel was trying to protect that from him. As if it were a frailty he would exploit. Maybe it was Jin’s throat she thought he would cut.
There was no shadow of the sun this time to end their day. In a smoky dusk they worked until they finished, following the fence line all the way to the rocky headland. When the raft bumped its nose against the crags, they quit and lay together as they had the day before, stretched on their backs, while the flatboat rocked under them in a wet wind.
Neye climbed back along the seawall to the point of the cape and stood just above the raft awhile, watching them. But he was cold and stiff and finally he started back, picking a way along the stony foreland to the beach. He was careful. In the wet darkening, among the broken rocks, he found a place for each step before he let his weight down on it.
Once, he stood a moment and looked back at Lisel, while he waited for some of the tautness to go out of his shoulders. She and the boy were stowing gear in the skiff now. From this distance, in the vague light, they both seemed frail and young, their movements thickened by weariness. He imagined he saw a little of Cirant, again, in the boy’s thin shape silhouetted against the water.
He began again to climb down and in toward the beach, toward the dark curve of sand where the tide, withdrawing, had left an erratic line of spume and seaweed. He steadied himself with his hands. The stones under his palms were cold and slick.
He didn’t fall until he was at the edge of the beach. He jumped the last little way from the rock, and his heel came down flat and then skewed sideways off some turtleback stone there under the skin of sand. There was a blur of darkened shapes and the sky sliding high up, tinted red through the lens of his pain, and then the grit of sand in his mouth. He held his knee with both hands, curling around it on his side with his cheek against the ground. He lay staring out at the sea, breathing carefully and holding his body very still and staring out at the low sky and the water under it, leaden in the darkness. He held his knee tightly with both hands.