The couple nodded and arose. A few pleasantries were exchanged as Teah gathered up and handed over the papers, and then the couple took their leave, brushing quietly past Matthew and retrieving their shoes by the door before heading back down the path.
“Good afternoon, Rhyena’v’rae,” Matthew said a bit stiffly. “I am sorry if I was intruding.”
“No, no, we were just finishing up. My door is always open, Hev’rae Mateo,” she replied pleasantly, and Matthew wondered how she had known his name. “I am happy to see you. Would you care to join me for a walk along the beach?”
“Yes, I would.”
They walked down toward the water in silence. The path twisted and turned between large gray rocks, widening out at the line where the long, blowing beach grasses began. The sharp blades cut against their ankles, and the white sands shifted under their feet. At the bottom of the slope, they turned and began walking away from the wharves, keeping near the shore. Teah seemed content to let him speak first, and finally he did.
“Rhyena’v’rae, maybe you knew that I’m in the Peace Corps.”
“Yes, I did.”
“Before I came out here,” he continued, groping for words, “they told me in training that I would run into situations where I’d have to think twice about my assumptions—about what I think is right. At first I assumed they were just talking about medicine, but I know now it’s more than that. I talked with Hev’rae Gremekke and took the opportunity to learn something about what you do, and, well—I didn’t understand.”
She nodded. “And I regret the treatment you received from the others who were there. Let us agree to make a fresh start and think no more of what happened, Hev’rae. I think it speaks well of your dedication, that you don’t yield to Death without a fight.” She smiled up at him. “But sometimes a hev’rae must stop and remind himself that Death may also come as a friend.”
Matthew thought of Jokko, pleading to know the fate of his family. “Sometimes, maybe. But not always, I think,” he said.
“Not always.”
“Look, I thought I should come and talk—”
A shout behind them interrupted him. “Teah! Amo Teah!”
Teah turned around. A small boy was running toward them, holding something out. “Look what I have!”
She clapped her hands together, beaming like a little girl, and squatted down to examine the treasure as the boy ran up to join them. “What is it? Why, it’s a turtle! Where ever did you find it, Rano?”
“In the tide pool.” He was a fair, curly-headed child, with a generous sprinkling of freckles across his nose. He grinned up at Matthew and eagerly held out his prize for examination. “See, it’s a red-spotted turtle! Can I keep it, Amo Teah?”
“I know that you could take good care of it, Rano…”
The boy stuck out his chest, swelling with responsibility. “Of course I can!”
“Of course you can. But don’t you think that it should be released again?”
“But I found it! How could I let it go?” he asked plaintively.
“I know it’s very hard. Maybe it would help if you think that you’re letting it go back to the open sea because that’s where it’s happiest, out there with its family.”
“Well—” the boy pondered the question seriously. “If I put it back now, it could swim out with the next tide.”
She gave him a hug, unmindful of the wet turtle between them. He squirmed free, flashed another grin to show her that there were no hard feelings, and then ran back to the rocks where the tidal basins formed. Teah stood and called after him, “I’ll see you tonight.”
He stopped and turned toward her. “Don’t be late like last night!”
Teah laughed. “I promise you won’t have to wait for your supper this time.” She watched him go, a fond smile still on her face.
“A fine boy,” Matthew commented. “Your son?”
Her smile faded. “No. I regret to say I have no children.” Squinting against the setting sun, Matthew turned to watch the boy clamber up the huge boulders. Teah looked at Matthew and smiled again. “I suppose I am his second mother, in a way—that’s why he calls me Amo. Actually, I’m his aunt. His mother is my sister Briena, and she has to scrape a bit to make ends meet—she’s a widow. I’m afraid that sometimes she finds it difficult to find time for him.”
They walked slowly and talked some more. He told her a little about his assignment. “I never expected to leave Earth at all. I had just signed on with the Peace Corps when the news came that the Corps was going to be joining the Re-Contact project, helping with the reassimilation between Earth and Calypso. That changed everyone’s priorities in a hurry, so I was sent here instead of to my original assignment. The Corps named Gremekke as my sponsor mostly because he’s the senior hev’rae in the city, and they figured he’d have plenty of experience for me to draw upon. I’m expected to relieve him of some of his caseload, too. He never complains, but he’s getting up in years, and it’s too wearing for him to run the clinic by himself now.”
She listened politely, but he wondered how much of what he told her she already knew. He got the impression that she had known Gremekke for a long time. She probably knew all the healers in the city well. How did they feel about working with her?
“One thing,” he said, and stopped. She looked at him inquiringly. He rubbed his chin. “I don’t know if I can say this right. I’m still not exactly comfortable with the language, but, well, how can you possibly justify this? What you do, I mean?”
She cocked her head. “Justify?” Thoughtfully, she watched the sea-birds dip and mew in the distance. “You have an oath that you take when you become a hev’rae, don’t you?”
He nodded. “It’s called the Hippocratic Oath.”
“My profession has something similar, which also gives me ethical constraints. I never reveal when anyone’s time is, for example, even to the client. And I don’t allow myself to profit from any confidential information about estates or family matters. My first responsibility is to my clients and to their bereaved.”
Matthew sighed. “I guess I didn’t make myself clear. I meant when somebody sees you coming, don’t they just, uh, give up? How can that be right?”
“It’s not something I cause. It’s what I see.” She pointed to a promontory ahead of them, jutting out into the sea. “Look, do you see that tree there, overhanging the shore?”
“Yes.”
“Do you see how the sand is eroding away from the roots, trickling down the hill into the water little by little? If you notice that, and if you know how much sand is lost every day, and how big the tree is and how much support it needs, you would have a good idea about when the tree will topple into the water. That’s not the same as taking an axe and cutting the tree down.”
He thought about it for a moment. “What if I hold the sea back with stones?”
“You could, I suppose. But the waves would eventually work them free.”
“Then I’d transplant the tree.”
She laughed. “Ah, you are stubborn, I see. But the promontory isn’t infinitely wide. And the tree, after all, must remain rooted in the sand. We are all mortal, Hev’rae.” She turned to face him again. “And the tree will fall, you see. You might perhaps delay the inevitable, but you can’t do anything to stop the sea.”
They walked along in silence for a few more moments. Finally, Matthew said, “Look, I don’t think I can accept what you’re saying.”
“No?”
“I mean, it would ruin me as a hev’rae if I believed that. I have a duty to my profession, and this—it’s as if you’re telling me I should just throw up my hands and let the sea wash in. I couldn’t live with myself if I did that.”
She looked surprised. “Truly, I don’t ask that of you. There are other hev’raien in the city who feel as you do, you know. And yet I can still work with them, because each of us knows that we all want the same thing.”
“Oh?” he said, his tone politely doubting
.
“Yes,” she said firmly. “We want to help our patients, our clients.”
“I suppose so. I mean, I can see how the legal arrangements you make and the counseling you do would be helpful.”
“But I should concern myself with only those affairs, perhaps, and stay out of your way?” she replied shrewdly. Matthew glanced at her, but her face looked amused, not angry. “I’m afraid that my duties to my profession will not allow you to have the one without the other, Hev’rae.” She made an enigmatic gesture. “We must simply agree that we disagree. It is sometimes so.”
Eventually, they arrived back at her home. “Well, thank you for talking with me anyway, Rhyena’v’rae,” Matthew said. “You’ve given me some things to think about.” It was the truth, he realized with some surprise.
“You have done that for me, also.” She plucked aside a strand of hair that the breeze was blowing in her eyes and turned to face him.
At her cool appraisal, he felt a faint chill. He noticed that her eyes had dilated, as if something had made her flinch.
“You’re seeing my death, aren’t you?”
She blinked, as if surprised by his bluntness, but her answer was equally frank. “Yes, I always do. Or I see my own.”
“I’m a hev’rae, so I’ve seen my share of dying.”
“This is different,” she said evenly.
“Of course.” He flushed. “Forgive me, I just meant to say that I don’t know how you can do it. I mean, how can you talk to people, knowing the exact second that they will cease to be?”
“It can be a difficult thing.” She gazed away, out over the water.
He thought about what it would be like to care about someone, maybe even love someone, knowing that. He suddenly found himself wondering what rhyena’v’raien did about that. Did they have lovers? Families?
Another thought occurred to him. “Tell me,” he asked, “Can you act as rhyena’v’rae for a Terran?”
“Perhaps. Are you asking for yourself, Hev’rae?”
He hesitated. “No. Not at this time.” He watched her face carefully; he didn’t want to offend her.
But she only nodded. “There is a time for everything, Hev’rae. Now is not always the right one.”
* * * *
“Leave the autoclave to its own devices for one night, Mateo, m’boy. You and I are going out tonight to celebrate.”
Matthew straightened up from the pile of instruments he was sterilizing and peered at Gremekke through clouds of steam. “Celebrate? Celebrate what?”
“Why, your anniversary, you dolt. Tonight marks the start of your third year on Calypso!”
Matthew glanced at the wall calender, made of strips of cloth with colored beads attached representing the days and months, and he did some mental calculations. “I’m still thinking in terms of Earth time; I didn’t even realize it.” He banged down the lid of the autoclave and stripped off his greens. “You’re on.”
They closed up the dispensary and headed up the street which led over a hill to the public houses on Tanners Row. Gremekke stumped along, wheezing, with Matthew’s tactful hand on his arm to guide him around the puddles he normally would have splashed right through. “Fine night!” he exclaimed. “Wonderful night! Smell that sea breeze! That’s why I’d never move to one of the inland cities.”
Matthew could smell little but the fumes of the leatherworkers’ lye, mixed with the smell of dung, but he allowed that the air certainly cleared one’s head quickly.
“Absolutely. You certainly picked the right place to come to be a healer. Now, I’ll admit that I’ve wanted to visit Earth sometimes, but I wouldn’t trade my practice on Calypso for anything—plenty of opportunity for roll-up-the-sleeves hands-on experience.”
“I did do my residency in the ER at Los Angeles County General,” Matthew said wryly.
Gremekke abruptly came to a stop at the crest of the hill, panting, and Matthew almost plowed right into him.
“This is where I wanted to take you.” Gremekke indicated a nondescript door with an expansive wave of his arm. A wooden placard swinging above it read The River’s Edge. From the bottom of the placard hung a copper bell, the symbol of drinking establishments. “A good place for carousing. Let’s go in and buy a barrel of ale and two straws.”
Despite this recommendation, The River’s Edge proved to be no more than a friendly, somewhat sleepy neighborhood public house, with a few customers talking quietly among themselves. The room looked big enough to seat thirty people or so, although it held only about half that number at the moment. Bluish smoke from a few pipes drifted, coiling, below the low ceiling, dimming the light. The sweetish smell of the smokeweed mingled pleasantly with the odor of hops, frying onions, and fresh-cut reeds.
Gremekke led the way to a rush mat by the fireplace where they seated themselves on flat floor cushions and ordered the first pitcher of ale. “It’s your third year here, now,” he said, “and how long did you say you had practiced on Earth before signing on with the Peace Corps?”
“Five years, in Earth reckoning. I got a late start in the Corps.”
“Me, now, I’ve been practicing for forty-two years. Forty-two years! Think of it!” He took a deep swallow. “It’s downright terrifying.”
Matthew laughed.
“That’s better,” said Gremekke judiciously. “That’s the ticket! Tonight’s a night for loosening up.”
“And you think I need that?” asked Matthew, amused.
Gremekke snorted and shifted on his pillow, making the reeds crackle underneath him. “When you stepped off that ship, I don’t mind telling you that for the first day or two, I wondered if it would work out between you and me. Now, you may have been a hev’rae for a while at the time, but I thought you were as bad as the green ones fresh out of training.” He shook his head in mock consternation. “You were positively grim!”
Matthew grinned into his cup.
“Maybe it was just being in a new place and all. You seem to have gotten over it. Mind you, like I say, all hev’raien start out that way. I started out that way! I tell you, I was—” He broke off and looked over Matthew’s shoulder. “Look, there’s Teah.”
Matthew glanced over toward the doorway. Teah stood there, her eyes searching the room. Some of the patrons seated near the door saw her and stirred uneasily. The house owner saw her and scowled before disappearing again into the back kitchen.
“Teah!” Gremekke gestured her over with his cup, slopping a little over his fingers. “Come and join us, won’t you?”
She wove her way toward them through the mats, and Gremekke shifted his pillow over to make room for her. As she seated herself, Matthew reached for the ale pitcher, accidentally brushing her arm with his fingers. She recoiled, looking at him with such surprise that he mumbled, “Sorry,” wondering what social taboo he had unwittingly violated this time.
“Oh no, Mateo, I’m not offended,” she hastened to assure him. “I was only, well, startled. Most people avoid touching rhyena’v’raien.”
“Everybody sweats when a rhyena’v’rae walks through the door,” Gremekke observed, grinning.
“Except for you, old friend,” she smiled. “You’ve never been afraid of me.”
Gremekke chuckled and signaled for another pitcher of ale. “I usually see you walking everywhere around the city at all kinds of hours, lass, but I haven’t seen much of you lately.”
“A hev’rae is usually thankful for that,” she replied drily.
Gremekke, caught in the middle of a swallow, choked on his ale and then laughed again. “Too true. But Mateo and I are glad to see a friend tonight. We’re toasting the start of his third year on Calypso.”
“Congratulations, Mateo.” She filled the ale mug the server brought and took one swallow, then left it untouched. “You’ve been lucky to have a sponsor like Gremekke. He’s the best hev’rae in the city.”
Gremekke coughed and rumbled, “Well, now…” but Matthew could see that he was pleased.
>
“Haven’t I always told the truth?” Teah asked. “I should know. I haven’t been practicing as long as you, Gremekke, but I’ve been around awhile.”
“Gremekke was just telling me about when he started out,” Matthew said.
“Did he tell you about the time he delivered twins upside down?”
Matthew frowned, unsure that he had understood her syntax. “You mean a double breech delivery?”
“No.” A smile curled at the corner of her mouth. “I mean Gremekke was upside down, while doing the delivery.
Full Spectrum 3 - [Anthology] Page 18