“Yes,” said Valid. “And you have that talent. You've developed it. What did Meera say? You have a gift? Perhaps she's right; perhaps you do. Did it ever occur to you that she wants that gift? That the lovely Meera has a use for you?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that Meera Libretain does not act idly. For every word she speaks, every action she undertakes, she puts in hours of thought and planning. Her mind is a web. She loves to spin her thread. She's cunning. Devious sometimes. She learned it from her father, the Senator. A master of manipulation.”
“She's not manipulating me.”
“No?”
“Why would she? For what reason?”
“Who can say? Heal me, then ask her.”
“She didn't arrange to have me brought here. I came freely, of my own accord. I chose to come.”
“Did you? A healer? Choose freely? You're naive, my friend. No one, least of all a healer, is free. We're all slaves to one thing or another. I'm a slave to my passions. A slave to doing good. A slave to progress. And now, it seems, for better or worse, a slave to you. How ironic.”
“I don't have to be the one to heal you. You could choose someone else. There're other healers with equal talent.”
Valid shook his head. “Not for me.”
“Why not?”
“I have my reasons.” Using his cane, he dragged himself across the room, halting at the healing bed, where he tried to hoist himself without success. His weight was but a fraction of what it had been, but along with fat he'd also lost muscle. His arms were too weak to lift his body. His face turned flushed and plethoric.
The woman, still harboring hope that she might be next, had not left, but retreated to the background. Valid's performance brought her forward, and at first Payne thought that she was going to lend a hand and try to help him, despite being in no condition to. The analgesic had worn off, and her movements were slow and obviously painful. But she made her way to Valid nonetheless, halting perhaps a tad too close for his comfort, and proceeded to upbraid him.
“You're sick, yes, but I'm sick, too. There's a waiting room full of sick people. Why should you go first?” She wagged a finger in his face. “You should be ashamed of yourself. I say you should wait your turn.”
Her audacity took Valid by surprise, and for a moment he lost his voice, but the finger in the face revived it. “My turn? My turn? It is my turn. Can't you see, old woman? My time is up. Smell my breath. Listen to it rattle in my chest. I'm dying. I'm rotting from within.” He turned to Payne, pleading. “Help me. I'll be gone before tomorrow. What do you think will happen if they hear you turned me away? If they find me dead?”
“Dead?” The woman's eyes narrowed, and she looked to Payne for confirmation of this dire prognostication.
Valid did look ravaged. Payne had seen few who looked so bad. But as a healer he was unwilling to predict the future, not to so fine a point as death by the morrow. It was a fool's game and doubly so with a man like Valid.
“It's possible,” was all he could bring himself to say.
But possible was enough for the woman. She would not have this man's death on her head.
“Take him then. I'll wait.” Slowly, she made her way to the door, where she paused. “You're a bully,” she told Valid. “You need to learn some manners. Still, I wish you luck.”
She wished the same to Payne, then added, “Don't use it all up, if you please. I may need some too, and I'm next.”
Once she was gone, Payne hurried to Valid's side. He was determined to make this quick and did not even try to conceal his impatience and frustration.
“Easy now,” said Valid, wincing as Payne half helped, half hoisted him onto the bed. “I know where you want to be. I know where I want to be, too. We'll both of us be happy when this is over with, but for now I need you here. Don't rush this, Payne. It requires your full attention.”
Payne replied that he didn't need a lesson in how to heal. Not from Valid.
Valid shot him a look. “Watch yourself.”
But Payne was angry. “There're people who say that death brings peace. That it's better than life. How can you can be sure you wouldn't prefer it?”
This time Valid merely snorted, occasioning another paroxysm of coughing, which left him gasping and in pain.
“Peace is for the peacemakers. I'm not the type. Does that make me any less worth saving?” He paused for breath. “You don't like me, Payne. You never have. I accept that. Sometimes I don't like myself. But that has no bearing on this. You're a healer. Likes and dislikes are irrelevant.”
There was no pleading in his voice now, no condescension. It was simply a reminder, a reiteration of the oldest and perhaps most basic precept of healing. And an indication of how well he knew Payne. It didn't matter how selfish, wicked or cruel a person was. It didn't matter what they had done, or what they might do. Healing had the power to change a person, but that didn't matter either. All that mattered was that this was what Payne did. It was what he was. Healing was more than a canon, more than a creed. It was visceral. It was something that belonged to his spirit if he had a spirit, and to his soul if he had one of those. In a dream he might deny a man in need, he might refuse to heal a person for crimes committed, but in reality, in practice, every fiber of whatever he was made of would rebel against turning that person away.
“Close your eyes,” said Payne. “Stop talking.”
Valid did as he was told while Payne prepared himself. He asked if Valid wanted the epidermal barrier spray, and Valid said no. He was not afraid of contact with a healer. He was not afraid of death, when it came down to it, if only it didn't involve so much agony.
Payne joined him on the bed. He could tell that Valid was nervous, because he couldn't stop talking.
“Is she right?” he asked Payne.
“Is who?”
“Do you have a gift?”
“Be quiet now. Try to relax.”
“I hope you do. I know you have a talent. I wouldn't be here otherwise. I wouldn't put myself in just anybody's hands.”
Praise, like chatter, was a common reaction before a healing; partly, it was meant to inspire a healer's confidence, partly, to bolster the confidence of the person being healed. Valid was uneasy—more, it seemed, than he should have been.
He opened his eyes. “Be careful, Payne.”
“I'm always careful.”
“Yes. But be extra careful….”
He seemed about to say more, but didn't. Instead, he closed his eyes and fell silent. Grateful to get started, Payne wrapped their arms together and did not inquire further. He had a date to keep, and he was in a hurry.
For a man of his stature and position, whose word carried the weight of law and whose pronouncements sent men scurrying, Valid's affliction was prosaic. A cancer of the pulmonic infundibulum that had spread to bone and brain and belly. His body was riddled with it, like a bird with buckshot, like a cheese with mold.
Payne was unimpressed.
He'd seen this particular affliction and worse dozens of times, men and women with double cancers, triple ones, and with inborn errors of metabolism, xenotropic malformations, neuropathic fistulae, bizarre reposit fibrillations, and the like. Valid's Concretion would, as he had predicted, turn out to be Sixth Degree, but it wouldn't be the gravest or the most recalcitrant he'd seen. He was in his element, and human beings, at least their pains and sufferings, had ceased to be a mystery to him. He was fully confident he could handle this one.
Identification, recruitment and enhancement went smoothly, and by the second hour he was into capture and moving right along. But then he hit a snag. The Concretion, which had firmed up, suddenly changed shape. And then it fell apart.
Valid, who lay half-conscious on the healing bed, moaned. Payne, who lay beside him, felt a momentary panic. Not all patients who needed healing recovered, nor were all expected to, but neither were they expected to die during the attempt. He redoubled his efforts, raising the level
of his attack, trying by dint of force and will to capture what he'd lost.
The problem was he couldn't very well capture a Concretion that didn't exist. Valid's life was ebbing out; in a few more hours he could well be dead. Payne had erred, and with a shock it came to him that he was making the same mistake he'd made with Vecque. He was being too casual, too smug, too arrogant. It was a mistake, he feared, that ran in his blood. Would he never be rid of it?
There was nothing to be done but start over. From the beginning. It was grueling and painstaking, but it was the only way.
For neophytes, the first stage, identification, was largely a process of trial and error, trying to match real-life information with what they'd learned in school. The more seasoned healers relied on the subtler signs provided by experience. But experience could backfire. Even the finest, most perceptive minds, when presented with the same condition over and over, could nod off.
It was shocking when he saw it. A single signature he'd missed. A single one of thousands, which in most cases would have made little, if any, difference. But this particular signature was not like other human signatures. It was not, in fact, a human signature at all.
Payne tried to disengage but couldn't. With a struggle Valid opened his eyes.
“Yes,” he whispered hoarsely. “You see it. Good. That's why I came to you. Now do it, Payne. Recruit, enhance and capture. Get rid of this monstrosity. You have the gift. Let's see you use it.”
He was three hours late for his date with Meera. Three interminable hours. It was midafternoon by the time he left the Tower, and the sun was blistering. The sky was white as bone, the air so hot and dry it burned his throat and eyes. He reached the bluff, then found her house, grateful for its shelter.
She was asleep when he arrived and woke to the sound of his knocking. She often napped midday, although this one had not been planned. She had nodded off while waiting for him and now took a moment to collect herself before answering the door.
At first glance she mistook him for a stranger.
He wore an embroidered shirt with polished buttons. A thin, chain-link necklace. Boots with heels that made him as tall as she was. He wore cologne, too; the perfumed scent of Musque was unmistakable. And he'd slicked his hair with grease and combed it off his forehead. His hump of skull stood out as plain as day.
He looked, she thought, like a man trying to be another man. Like a dandy, which was not what he was. It made her uneasy.
“Get lost?” she asked.
He apologized profusely and told her what had happened. With heart in hand he offered to come back another time.
The news of Valid took her by surprise. She wondered what he was up to.
“It's not your fault,” she said. “You had no choice. Come in.”
She led him to the living room, a large, bright space with two floor-to-ceiling picture windows overlooking the sea. The walls of the room were taken up by abstract paintings, save for one that depicted a group of children. Standing in a corner of the room was a chest-high statue made of dark and shiny wood. It seemed to be a tesque, or someone's idea of a tesque. It had a big head, bulging eyes and a wide, almost demonic, grin. Its arms were raised; one hand held a spear, the other a serpent.
Meera saw Payne staring at it. “You like it?”
“Who is it?”
She wasn't sure. Some sort of deity, she thought. “My mother gave it to me. I like to think of him as the guardian of the house.”
She steered him outside to a tiled patio, which was sheltered from the sun by a canvas awning. Below it, a quarter mile from the foot of the bluff, lay the Lac du Lac, slate blue and glassy. Payne had never seen a body of water of any size before. He'd grown up a scant thirty miles away, and he'd never seen this sea.
“Pretty, isn't it?”
Pretty was not was he was thinking. It was awe-inspiring. He was overwhelmed.
“So much water.”
“Yes. But shrinking. When I first came, the shoreline was much higher. Every year I've watched it recede.”
“How many years is that?”
“Six,” she said, and could have told him to the day.
“Why is it receding?”
“You want the story or the truth?”
“What's the story?”
“A very thirsty monster is swallowing the water. The truth is no one knows. Would you like a closer look? We could take a quick walk down.”
The idea frightened him a little. The sea was so huge.
“Maybe later.”
“That's fine.”
They went inside. She offered him food, but he was too nervous to eat. He didn't trust his stomach or, for that matter, his tongue, but fortunately he'd rehearsed some things to say.
He made a comment about the weather, then another about her house, how beautiful it was, thinking that's how they did it, her people, that's how conversations were supposed to be conducted, with compliments and idle observations. He asked her if she lived in the house, then paused. That didn't sound right.
“Permanently, I mean.”
“I'm here often.”
“What do you do?”
It was an opportunity to tell him what she planned to tell him, but the time, she felt, was not quite right. “I work. I take walks. Sometimes I just sit and watch the waves.”
“What kind of work?”
“Now? Now I have a battle on my hands.” She told him briefly about the Oversight Committee and the proposal that was on the table, then questioned him about Valid. “Did he happen to mention it when he saw you? Did he say anything?”
“About that? No. Nothing.”
“Was he very sick?”
“Yes.”
“And you healed him?”
“Yes.” He didn't tell her what he'd found in Valid, nor of the heartrending shriek the Concretion had made when he extruded it. Nor, for that matter, how much the sound had rattled him.
“So he's recuperating now?”
“I expect so.”
She nodded thoughtfully. Maybe now that death was not breathing down his neck, he'd be more reasonable.
“Did he talk to you about his experiments?”
“No. He didn't.”
“Has anyone?”
“One person came by. An Investigator. He wants to study me.”
This was no surprise to her. They wanted to study everyone.
“I told him I wasn't interested. I don't want to be studied.”
“What was his name?”
Payne told her. She knew the man, and in fact supported his particular line of research. It could be useful, she believed, and it wasn't harmful or cruel.
“Useful to whom?” he asked.
“To you. To healers. He's working on a way to lessen the effect of the Drain. Trying to blunt its impact.”
“He won't find one,” said Payne.
“Why's that?”
“How long have they been trying? Fifty years? A hundred?”
“More,” she said, admitting that success had been elusive.
“It's because of how they work,” said Payne. “What they look for and the way that they look. I know about their science. They like to sample things, break them down and cut them up, but I'm not cuttable. If they try, if they take a piece, that's all they'll have. A piece. They won't have me.”
“Maybe a piece is all they need.”
“I don't think so. That's not how a healing works. It's everything together. It's like an intricate design, like a knot. You don't learn anything by studying a single thread. Besides, I don't want to be sampled. I don't want to be cut. It might interfere with what I can do. It might damage me.”
The specter of that was enough to shut her up. She didn't know why she was advocating that he be studied in the first place. It certainly was not in her personal interest. Some sort of reflex, she guessed, born of years of working on behalf of healers, trying to better their lot, years of hanging around too many scientific thinkers.
She off
ered to arrange to have him left alone.
He considered for a moment. “In return for what?”
This stung her, although she had to admire his instincts. He was not the innocent boy he'd been, a sad but inevitable and necessary loss.
“No strings attached. Though you're right to ask. Accepting gifts can be a costly proposition.”
“Turning them down can be costly, too.”
She assumed he was talking about bribery, which was as endemic to the business of healing in Rampart as it was to human commerce everywhere, as it was, indeed, to human nature. Refusing to engage in it could have nasty repercussions for a healer.
She asked point-blank if he'd ever been bribed, and he had an urge to turn the question back on her, to ask if she had ever bribed someone, or more to the point, if she was bribing him. What Valid had said about her using people had unfortunately struck a nerve.
“I've accepted gifts,” he said. “But never before a healing, only after. And only so as not to cause offense.”
“Is that what those are?” Meera asked, gesturing at his clothes. “Gifts?”
“These? No. I bought them. Why? Don't you like them?”
“I do,” she said without missing a beat. “They're very nice. They're distinctive.”
He hesitated, then said, “I bought them for you.”
“For me?”
“You said I shouldn't hide. You said I should be proud of who I am.”
She remembered this. “Yes. That's true. I did.”
Payne glanced at her, then lowered his eyes. An awkward silence followed, too awkward for him. He started playing with his hair, that old habit of his, which he caught and stopped, but a moment later his fingers broke free and started fidgeting with his necklace. He had no idea what to say.
Nor, for the longest time, did Meera. She was not blind to her effect on him; how could she be, faced with such a painfully boyish display? It nearly broke her heart, and she did what she could to comfort him.
“You look very nice. Very handsome. Really. You do.”
She did not mention the Musque he'd slathered on himself to extravagance, a scent she'd recognized immediately. On his budget it had to have been a gift, from a lady, she assumed. Had she known the moral quandary he'd gone through before allowing himself to wear it, she would have told him not to bother.
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