“Uh, maybe. As soon as it leaves the bow, I can tell where it’s going. Can’t you?”
“A little. But I only have a vague idea that it’s going to miss in one direction or another. Even that lets me start pushing it back on target while it’s close enough to influence it strongly, but I can’t make more than a few inches of difference.” Daum pulled four different sized pebbles out of his pocket and set them on top of the tank. “I think you can push harder than I can. Which of these is the biggest you can move?”
None of them were all that big, so Tarc reached out and lifted the biggest one into the air.
Daum’s eyes widened. “That’s amazing!” he breathed as he picked up the small stones and began climbing down. “I can’t lift even the little one, only slide the three smallest around on a smooth surface. No wonder you’re already ‘archer’ class.” He turned to study his son with narrowed eyes, “If you can lift a pebble that large…” he paused, “the Sarge said all your arrows were in the yellow or red. Was that the best you could do?”
Tarc shook his head.
“How close to your mark can you get at target distance?”
Tarc held up his fingers about 2 to 3 inches apart. He thought he actually could shoot within an inch every time, but didn’t want to brag.
Daum stepped to Tarc and clapped arms enthusiastically around him. “You’re gonna make us proud son!”
Embarrassed, but filled with pride, Tarc self-consciously hugged his father back. Embracing him, Tarc noticed with some surprise that he was nearly as tall as his father. When his father pushed him back out to arm’s length, Tarc said, “You know we can do the same thing with thrown knives?”
Daum stared at him with a surprised look for a moment; then barked a laugh. “I suppose we can! Do you want to show me?”
Startled by the request, Tarc pulled out his knife and said, “What should I aim at?”
Daum pointed at the back wall of the brew room, “Can you hit that blotchy spot on the third board?”
Tarc saw a spot where a twist in the wood’s grain had changed the smoothness of the surface. He threw, though rather badly. The knife would have missed several boards to the left, but Tarc’s ghost twisted it back on so that it stuck in the left edge of the splotch.
Daum stared at it a moment. “I could see it curve to the right to hit that spot. You threw that one pretty badly didn’t you?”
Tarc nodded, “If I could throw a little better, I’d be able to hit the center of the target every time.”
Daum nodded, “You’ll need to work on both your knife and archery skills, not just to give your ghost a better start, but also so that you have good technique to match your surprising skill. Otherwise there’ll be a lot of questions about how you shoot so well.”
Tarq nodded.
Daum pulled his big knife out of its sheath and weighed it in his hand. “This damn thing is way too big for me to influence much. Maybe I need to trade it in on a smaller knife?”
“Sgt. Garcia says these work knives we have aren’t balanced very well for throwing.”
Daum grinned at him, “I suppose you think we should both get new knives?” He winked, “Better balanced for throwing, eh?”
Tarc’s eyes dropped, but he nodded. Then he looked back up, “Lighter, better balanced, narrower, but still good for work.”
His father frowned, “Narrower?”
Tarc nodded, “With a narrower blade, they’ll penetrate well even though they don’t weigh as much.”
Daum clapped him on the shoulder, “Maybe we should go shopping for knives.”
Tarc took the water buckets back to the kitchen and the grain buckets outside to wash them. He brought the grain buckets back to the kitchen full of water and poured it into the barrel. Eva looked sad. “What’s the matter Mom?” Tarc asked.
“Mrs. Gates has come back.”
Mrs. Gates was an older woman who’d first come in to see Eva many months ago. She had looked sick then, and every time Tarc had seen her since then she had looked even worse. “What’s wrong with her?”
“Cancer,” Eva said quietly.
“Oh, and that’s a disease you can’t do anything for, correct?”
“Yeah,” Eva said, slumping, “even in the old days they couldn’t do much for a lot of cancers. I guess they could cure some of them by cutting them out and there were a few that responded to medicines.” She shrugged, “Most people died though, even back then.”
“They cut them out!?”
“Yeah, they had ways of making people sleep so deeply that they could cut parts of them off, or out, without even waking them up.”
“That’s awful!”
Eva shrugged and tilted her head, “Not as awful as dying of your cancer.”
Tarc grimaced, “Maybe not, but it still seems like a terrible thing to do. What are you going to do for Mrs. Gates?”
Eva looked grim, “Willow bark tea, poppy seed pod tea, sympathy... I’ve told her over and over again that I can’t actually cure her, but she keeps coming back to ask me to heal her. When I tell her that I can’t, she curses me. I think somehow she believes that I am just refusing to do so, rather than lacking the ability.” She paused for a moment, staring sightlessly out little window in the kitchen, “It breaks my heart, not being able to help her.”
Tarc swallowed, “I thought the teas did help?”
“They help with the pain, that’s all.” Eva turned to look at Tarc again, “Well, you need to meet someone with cancer and see what that feels like. Let’s go out and talk to Mrs. Gates.”
Horrified, Tarc said, “Why?! We can’t do anything!”
“I know,” Eva said in a sad monotone, “but you need to learn about cancer.” She looked him in the eye, “I’ll go talk to her. You sit beside me and use your talent to search through her body. You’ll find lumps of… stuff inside of her that isn’t like the tissue around it. Especially in her lungs, so look there first and you’ll feel what it’s like. I’m not going to tell you where else you’ll find it, you can learn that for yourself.”
Eva turned for the door, but Tarc grabbed her arm. “I, I, don’t want to go out there! If I can’t do any good, why should I have to?”
Eva sighed, “You’re not going to be able to help everyone. You need to learn which people you can help and which ones you can’t. And, the ones you can’t help…” Eva blinked a couple of times, “at least deserve your sympathy and some medicine to ease the pain. Come on!” She waved him ahead of her into the great room.
Mrs. Gates sat at the table where Eva usually saw her patients. She looked even more emaciated than she had the last time Tarc had seen her. Eva sat down and then motioned Tarc onto the bench next to her. Reaching out she took Mrs. Gates’ hands and said, “This is my son, Tarc. I’m teaching him how to help people. I hope you won’t mind him sitting in while we talk?”
Gates didn’t respond to this query. Instead she grumbled, “I don’t know why you’d have him sit in while we’re talking. You won’t do anything to help me. You never do!”
Eva said, “I’m so sorry Mrs. Gates. Like I’ve told you before I don’t know of anything I can do to help you other than giving you some teas for the pain. I don’t think anybody can cure you. Even in the ancient days they weren’t very good at curing cancer and they had much more powerful medicines than we do now.”
“I don’t think I have cancer! I think you don’t even know what’s wrong with me! And even if you did know what was wrong, I don’t think you’d treat me.” Tears started to run down Gates’ cheek and she whispered, “Why do you hate me?”
Eva sighed, “I don’t hate you… Here, let me think a moment,” she said closing her eyes.
Terribly uncomfortable with Mrs. Gates bitter and accusatory tone, Tarc tried to ignore it by sending his ghost into her chest to see what was present there. He found several large lumps of tissue that were solid instead of airy like normal lung. There were other smaller ones too. Exploring her heart, he found it t
o be much like other hearts he had touched with his ghost sense. There weren’t any lumps in it. However, her liver and spleen also had lumps of tissue in them that were different than the rest of the tissue. Her stomach and bowels seemed untouched, but one of her kidneys had a lump in it.
Tarc sat back, surprised. It seemed bizarre that he had been able to find all these lumps so quickly. He had thought that he would have to carefully search through each organ and structure, but there was something about the tissue of the lumps that seem to attract his ghost senses. It seemed a little bit warmer to him and had a kind of bitterness about it. “Bitter,” a word for a taste, seemed weird to be using for something he obviously wasn’t tasting, but he didn’t know how else to describe it.
He thought about it for a moment and realized that people’s stomachs also produced bitter flavors when he touched them with his ghost sense. Not knowing that cancerous tissue is often somewhat acidic, he wondered what this meant.
He focused his mind back on Mrs. Gates, quickly exploring her legs and arms without finding anything. However, when he looked in her head he found another lump of unusual tissue in her brain. As he swept down her neck he suddenly realized that there was something different about the marrow in one of the bones of her spine at the base of her neck. He went on down the spine and found lumps in the marrow of a couple of other bones as well.
Eva sat up and let go of Mrs. Gates hands. “Tarc and I are going to go look through our medicines and talk about what we might be able to do Mrs. Gates. We’ll be back in a few minutes.”
Back in the kitchen Eva turned to Tarc, “Well?”
Tarc stared at her with wide eyes, “It’s everywhere!” He went on to describe all the places he’d found the cancer.
Eva nodded, “Yes, that’s where I found it as well.” She sighed, “We’ll take her a different tea.”
“What will it do?” Tarc asked with anticipation.
Eva quirked a sad smile, “Nothing. But, sometimes hope itself is a powerful medicine. In the old days they called it a ‘placebo.’”
Tarc couldn’t believe his ears, “That’s stupid! Why would we do that? It’s like, it’s like, we’re being dishonest! Giving her something that we know won’t do any good!”
“In the old days, they were able to show that getting a placebo released some of your own pain relievers from your brain. They called the molecules endorphins and they had effects like the strongest of poppy teas.” She shrugged, “So it might actually help her symptoms. Besides, what would you have me do? Do you want me to just go out and say, ‘You’re going to die and there’s absolutely nothing we can do’?”
“But… but, there must be something we can do! Something better than a tea!”
Eva lifted her chin at him, “Okay, what’s your idea?”
Tarc’s eyes widened again, “I don’t know. You’re the healer!”
“I’ve already told you, Tarc, I know of nothing. I’m ready to listen though. Give me some ideas.”
“Maybe we could, I don’t know, burn the lumps. What do you call them?”
“Tumors.”
“So, maybe we could heat a sharp spike and stick that hot tip right into the center of the tumor. It would burn the tumor and kill it.”
Eva snorted, “Maybe we could. I think I remember reading that back in the old days they did heat tumors to kill them. I think sticking a hot spike into someone would hurt though, don’t you?”
Tarc shrugged, “It would be better than dying.”
“Oh I agree. And maybe Mrs. Gates would agree to having a hot spike stuck into her if she was sure it would work. But, I don’t think you can promise her that can you?”
Tarc shook his head disconsolately. “Besides, we’d have to stick spikes into her in lots of places, probably nobody could take that.”
“All right,” Eva said turning back towards the great room. “You don’t have to come with me to talk to her about the tea. Stoke up the stove and get me some more wood. People will be coming in for lunch pretty soon.”
Tarc got several splits of wood and opened the stove. He put the wood in, but then stopped, staring at the glowing coals and sending his ghost into them. Like Mrs. Gates’ cancers they were hot. The coals were much hotter than the tumors of course, but he had the distinct sensation that the heat in the coals and the heat in the cancers were just different degrees of the same thing. He had the sensation of tiny things seething, moving, and vibrating back and forth in the coals. The same thing had been happening in the tumors but to a much lesser degree. He could sense the motion of the tiny things in his arm as well, but in the split of wood he held in his hand they were… Tarc closed the door of the stove and stood staring at the piece of wood. Tiny things were moving in it also, just not moving as much as the tiny things in his arm.
Tarc opened the stove and put in the piece of wood. Picking up his strap he went out to the woodshed, still thinking hard—heat is the motion of tiny things inside whatever is hot? Can that be? He’d read about atoms, could the tiny things be atoms? He realized he couldn’t actually feel one of the atoms, if that’s what they were. He only got the sensation of tiny things, too small to feel, vibrating and seething and moving around.
As Tarc went about his chores, he kept thinking about heat and motion being the same thing at a microparticle level.
He was out in the stable caring for the horses when he had a sudden idea—my ghost can move things, and the smaller they are the easier they are to move! He set down his pitchfork and lifted his index finger. Staring at it he used his ghost to feel the motion of the tiny particles inside of it. They seemed to be vibrating back and forth somehow, all of them vibrating in different directions. The vibrations were tiny, movements so small he knew that he wouldn’t be able to see them. Yet somehow his ghost knew the vibrations were there.
And, as he willed it to happen, he could sense the vibrations increasing.
A moment later, a very different sense told him his finger had become unpleasantly hot. He felt it with his thumb and his thumb could feel the increased heat in the tip of his index finger as well.
Tarc filled the pitchfork with hay and carried it to Shogun. He was wondering whether he could actually kill the tissue in Mrs. Gates’ tumors with the kind of heat he could generate. His finger had been uncomfortable and he knew that he could have heated it more than he did, but didn’t want to actually burn his own finger.
Tarc moved on about his chores, pondering ways to further test this new ability. Then, as he carried a shovelful of manure out of Shogun’s stall he suddenly focused on the green bottle-flies swarming it. He picked one fly out and tried to heat it. It immediately zipped into the air, but flew close to Tarc and Tarc’s ghost easily tracked it. After he’d been warming it for about five seconds, it fell to the floor unmoving. He nudged it with a toe.
It seemed to be dead! Well, he thought, it looks like I can kill small amounts of tissue by heating it. At least fly-sized pieces of tissue!
He wondered whether there was any way for him to try killing a small part of a large animal and know if it worked. How could he offer to try to heat one of the tumors in Mrs. Gates if he had no idea whether or not he could kill the tumor?
When Tarc entered the kitchen Daussie barked at him, “Dad needs your help out at the bar. Hurry!”
Tarc rolled his eyes. His sister always seemed to think that Tarc’s chores were urgent. When Tarc arrived out in the bar his father had a cask of beer standing beside him. He must have rolled it into the bar himself, but now needed help putting it up on the cask stand. With one of them on each side, they heaved it up and slid it on to the tilted rack that held it. It would sit for a day or two to allow the sediment to fall down into the front corner before Daum tapped it.
Daum’s eyes flicked to the water barrel and he said, “Need a couple of buckets Tarc.”
When Tarc came back through the kitchen with the two buckets of water, Daussie was out in the great room. Tarc stopped a moment and said, “Mom
?”
Eva turned to him with a questioning look.
“I can heat things with my talent.”
She blinked, “You can?”
Tarc nodded.
Eva tugged on her lower lip with her upper teeth as she looked at him consideringly. “And… what?”
He set down the buckets and focused on the skin at the side of his mother’s elbow.
A moment later she grabbed at her elbow, “Ow!” she blinked down at her elbow and rubbed at it gingerly with her fingers. She looked up at Tarc, “You heated that with your… your talent?”
Tarc nodded.
“Well,” she said still rubbing her elbow, “I hope you’re not planning to torture poor Daussie with that?”
Tarc blinked at her. Suddenly he realized that she didn’t see the possible utility of his being able to heat something. “What if… what if I could heat Mrs. Gates’ tumors? I… I killed a fly by heating it.”
Eva’s eyes flashed wide in surprise. She put out a hand to steady herself against the counter. “Oh! Tarc! That might… that might…” Her eyes slipped aside; then returned to his, “Maybe you wouldn’t have to heat it to burning hot to kill the tumor. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt horribly. But, what if… what if the dead tissue somehow makes her sick? Well… sicker.”
Tarc shrugged. He certainly didn’t know if Eva didn’t.
Eva stared at him musingly for another few moments; then said, “Maybe if Mrs. Gates comes back again we’ll ask her if she wants to try something… different. Experimental.”
Daussie came back in the kitchen, so Tarc picked up his pails of water. He headed out to the bar.
Chapter Four
The door to Tarc’s tiny bedroom swung open and his father leaned in. “Tarc. You want to get up a little early and head over to the blacksmith’s place to look at knives?”
Suddenly wide awake, Tarc said, “Yeah!” He rolled out of bed.
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