The Healer (19 page)

“They have to die. We need them to. Humans need them to. They depend on it.”

“Humans hate to look at them,” she said.

“Yes. They do.”

“They hate to even acknowledge that they're connected. If they didn't die, they'd find a way to kill them on their own.”

Payne suspected she was right, and it gave him insight into what was troubling her, or so he thought. “Would you feel better if you killed them yourself? If you didn't have to wait for them to die? If you were less of a bystander, if you didn't have to be so passive?”

“I don't think that's the problem.”

“No?”

She shook her head, then stood and wandered to the window, pressing her forehead against the glass and absentmindedly rubbing her meli. Payne felt that he was seeing something private and was about to say good night when she turned and, apropos of nothing, said, “They're different ones.”

“Different?”

“Different levels.”

He listened to her count them out, the six distinct levels of Concretions. It was elementary knowledge.

“That's right,” he said.

“Fives and Sixes don't die.”

“Yes, they do. Eventually.”

“Not all of them.”

He frowned and asked her if she'd ever seen a Five or Six. Had she ever made one?

“I've heard,” she said. “They have a pen for them in Rampart. They live for weeks and weeks. Some of them for months.”

“Maybe so,” said Payne, who'd never seen or made one either. “But they're there and we're here. It's unlikely that we'll ever meet.”

But Nome had heard something else. Something more unsettling.

“They say that some aren't snuffing out the way they're supposed to. Even after months and months. They say there's been some kind of change.”

“What change?”

“That they're surviving. On their own. Outside their hosts. That they're really truly alive.”

“That's nonsense.”

“Why is it nonsense?”

“Because they can't survive on their own. They need a body to live in. You know that. They need a host to feed on.”

“They could feed the way we do.”

“On what? Fruits and vegetables?”

“You're making fun.”

“No, really. What do you think they'd eat?”

“I don't know. Meat?”

He cocked an eye.

The next word was an effort for her. “Us?”

At this he could not contain himself, but stood and placed himself in front of her, hands on her shoulders, forcing her to look him in the face.

“This is a story you're making up. It's a fantasy. It's not real. It's not true.”

“It could be true,” she said.

“No. It's not.”

“You don't think they want revenge?”

“Not revenge, not food, not anything. In whatever sense they are alive, it's only long enough to die. They don't think. They don't have motive or intent. That's you. That's your mind working. It's not theirs.”

“But they're a part of me.”

“Were,” he said. “When you were making them. Once they're out, they're not. They're gone.”

“It's hard to separate
myself.”

“Don't look at them,” he said, knowing how tempting it was to pore over one's creations, how hard to turn away. “The beauty is a trick. It's their last defense. Leave the room as soon as you've extruded. Let it go.”

“I should,” she said.

“You can.”

“You think?”

“Yes. I do. Absolutely.”

She raised her eyes to meet his, drawing strength from his confidence in her, his self-assurance. Ever so slowly she nodded.

“All right,” she said. “I'll try.”

The meetings of A New Day were held in secret, in a hot bunker of a room buried in the subbasement of the Easytime, the city's largest and most popular gaming establishment. The room sat at the bottom of four steep flights of heavy metal stairs, then through a tunnel and behind a pair of hulking concrete pillars. It was the type of room that in a different age would have served a different purpose: a bombardment shelter, a torture chamber, a banishment cell. In this one it was a storage room. There was a coil of cable in a corner and a stack of rusted transvex brackets in another. Some prismatic quarter panels, a moebic dowel, and a random pile of flanges, nuts and bolts, inverse clamps and beveled harlequin screws. The air inside the room was dank and stale, the walls were stained, the concrete floor hard and cold. There was a pool of standing water in a shallow depression. It was not by any stretch of the imagination a comfortable room, but then revolution was not a comfortable idea. If it could take root
here, it could take root anywhere, and in fact, it seemed only fitting that this should be its birthplace.

At Payne's first meeting there were seven cadre present; at his second, twice that number, and at his third, a tidy dozen. They sat on pillows and carpet remnants and sometimes burned a bustion stick to drive away the subterranean smell. The group—or party, as he came to know it—was composed entirely of healers, which was a welcome change for him, although it took some getting used to. At the Church For Giveness he'd been the token tesque, and his opinions had therefore carried a certain weight with the Reverend Meeks and a few others, at least for a certain while. Here what he thought was no more or less important than what anybody else thought. Equality was one of the central tenets of A New Day. In point of fact, he was both less informed and less experienced about politics and related matters than any of the others, so while in theory his ideas were of equal value to theirs, in practice he kept his mouth shut, listening and observing and only rarely speaking up.

A New Day, he learned, was a vanguard party. It was revolutionary, and its decisions, unlike other revolutionary parties before it, were by consensus only. Which meant not only that everybody had a voice but that all voices, eventually, had to be united. Which, in turn, could make decision-making a painfully slow and laborious affair.

The main objectives of A New Day were justice and democracy for healers. As for tesques as a whole (the so-called tesque nation) and other ancillary questions, there was less consensus and more debate. Careful study and analysis of the issue—all issues—was another principle of the group. This was embodied in the maxim “Thought before action” and its offshoot “The present matters, but the future matters more.”

A New Day, he further learned, was an egalitarian organization. Everyone received equal treatment and respect. That said, some received more than others. Cadre were well aware of their position in the group, of who sat with whom, who spoke more or less, and more or less eloquently, and who garnered more or less attention. A New
Day had many virtues, not the least its noble purpose and high ideals, but it was a group, and groups by nature were hierarchical, starting with groups of two, and, for certain troubled individuals, groups of one alone. So while in theory everyone stood on equal footing and commanded equal respect, in practice, some commanded more.

The one who regularly commanded the most was the founder of the group, a healer named Brand. Chisel-faced and compactly built, he had a keen and moral intellect, along with a passion for the cause that was balanced by a kindly manner and an even temperament. When he cleared his throat, which he did rarely, for he was more inclined to listen than to speak, the room fell silent. Heads turned and ears were bent to what he had to say.

Over the course of a number of meetings Payne pieced together something of Brand's history. While little more than a child, he had lost his parents. Both had perished on the final day of the Gode uprising of ‘09 (the Abortive Gode Uprising, as it had come to be known). He was raised by an aunt and grew up on the fringe of other boys and girls, who weren't that attracted to a boy who disguised his wounds by acting angry and aloof. He had radical ideas, even as a child, which didn't help his having friends, and he remained an outsider into the early years of his healer training, when he had something of an epiphany. If he wanted people to listen to him, which he did, or if he simply wanted to be with them sometimes, just hang around and mingle, which he thought he did, he realized that he had to be more appealing than he was. He had to improve his people skills. So this became his plan.

First he learned to listen to other people, at least enough to hear what they wanted. The world ran on fear and desire—this he knew—and what people wanted was to be rid of the one and to realize the other, and so he learned to make promises. He formed a highly secretive radical healer cell, Rising Tide, dedicated to the overthrow of the system. The Tide struck once, and the system did not flinch. It struck a second time, and then a third, each action more provocative than the
last. Growing ever bolder, it struck a fourth and, as it turned out, final time, for the cadre of the Tide were captured and jailed. If it had been only one of them, one subversive unit, one radical, he would have been left to rot in jail, to suffer what they called “the living death,” a lesson and a reminder to others who might think of trying something similar. But with five healers, five dedicated extremists (which, in terms of membership, was the high-water mark of the group), there could be no thought of prolonged incarceration. The city where they lived was not large, and they would be sorely missed. The humans of that city, humans everywhere, needed their healers.

Consequently, these misguided few were hurried through the penal system. To expedite their release and reentry into the workforce, various reconditioning programs were employed. For the first time Brand experienced what it was like to have his body violated. He was shot up with drugs. Sensory-deprived, then subjected to the Grimlatch Simulator. For the coup de grace, he received a dozen sessions of Accelerated Counseling, known widely—and notoriously—as the “Deep Probe.”

He was the last of the group to be released from prison. After three months of treatment he was deemed cured of his rebelliousness and insurrectionist ideas, enough, at any rate, to be reentrusted with his job. Unfortunately, along the way he had developed an appetite for one of the many drugs that were used on him. Contrary to some of the other drugs, which set his nerves on edge and made him rave and rant and tremble, this one brought him peace and tranquility. It was the first time in his life he had ever felt those things.

He got hooked on the drug, but eventually kicked it in favor of a natural approach to serenity. Six months later he relapsed. He started using mist, also known as miss, or, in its most lethal form, muck, a nasty, illicit and highly addictive derivative of musk. Humans put it in their bloodstream; Brand rubbed it in his meli. A year into the habit and he was blissed out to the point of inanition, one day praying for more drug, the next for the Drain to take him first.

But the Drain didn't take him. He reached thirty, then thirty-five, which was getting on in years for a healer, and, despite his habit, or maybe because of it, he was still going strong. Then one day the muck supply bottomed out. Something about the men who made it, the miners, inexplicably not producing like they had before. That was the rumor, but whatever the reason, the drug stopped flowing. Initially, this was Brand's excuse to kick the habit. When flow resumed, he lost that excuse, and hadn't been a user since.

It was seven years now. He was forty-two, which for a healer was positively ancient. He'd founded A New Day in an effort to change the lives of healers. He knew the kind of changes he wanted but wasn't sure of the best method to achieve them. That was one of the main purposes of the group, to arrive at a consensus. The other major purpose was to attract—and gain—a critical mass of members.

Personally, he believed that effective change, by which he meant deep-rooted, lasting change, could only come through nonviolence. This was the lesson he had learned from his life. It was also the lesson he had learned from his study of history. There were other healers before him who had preached a similar message. Mobestis, of course. Emm after him. Jewl the Epicene. Ract, whom they called the Two-Headed.

In the meetings Brand stumped for this position, though he was open and even eager to entertain different points of view. This combination of outspokenness and respect for others was one of the qualities that made him popular. The “people” skills he had taught himself so many years before as a way to manipulate others had undergone a long and sometimes painful transformation into something kinder and more humane.

Brand had a narrow ribbon of bone that extended upward from the dome of his skull and encircled his head. With his hair shorn, which is how he wore it, and with the light just so, it looked like he was wearing a crown. He was a genial man. Many of the things that had once made him angry now made him smile or laugh.

There was another healer in the group opposite to Brand in temperament. His name was Shay, and he had a restless energy, along with a streak of militancy and defiance. He believed in action—confrontational, if necessary—and often grew impatient with the lengthy political discussions and consensus-building. He, too, had a following, smaller than Brand's, and reminded Payne a little of his brother Wyn. There were times he was wholly likable and times he was not. Certainly, he was not a man to be overlooked. A burly healer with a hyperteloric face, his eyes were widely spaced, to the point that they were almost on opposite sides of his head. It was the feature that marked him Grotesque. No matter where a person looked and how he fixed his gaze, he could only meet one of Shay's eyes at a time. The other, like a hawk's, was always aimed elsewhere.

One evening, after a particularly spirited meeting, Brand invited Payne to join him for a walk. In the month or two that Payne had been attending, they had never spoken privately, and he was flattered. They left their hiding place and climbed to street level, exiting the Easytime into the alley around the corner from the building's main entrance. Brand went first, and after a suitable interval Payne followed him, standard procedure to avoid cadre being seen together and inadvertently linked. They reunited several blocks away.

It was a warm night, and Brand was talkative, parsing what had happened in the meeting, soliciting Payne's opinions, reexamining the various issues and points of view. He seemed concerned whether his message was getting across. Payne, who had become something of a devotee, assured him that it was.

“I hope you're right,” said Brand. “In the long run it's our only chance.”

“Do you think we really have a chance?” It was a credit to the kind of man Brand was that Payne would even think of asking such a question.

“Oh yes. And not just a chance. Change, I would say, is inevitable.”

“But we're so small. So secretive. No one even knows what we stand for.”

“Growth will come in time. Maybe not in our lives. But eventually. All things start small. What's important is that they start properly. That even in the smallest form—especially the smallest form—we create and practice the qualities we would want in the largest. That's why it's so critical for us to listen to each other. To talk things out. To show respect. To feel that we've given voice to what we truly believe and want.

“And not just that, but to study too. We need to understand the present—certainly the present—but also the past. Economics, demographics, geography, philosophy, religion, science—we need to study all these things. We need to learn what constitutes change. And what doesn't, what masquerades as change but is false.

“All this takes time. And effort. And trust. And patience. If we try to run before we walk, we'll fall, I promise you. I've fallen enough that I should know.”

“I've fallen, too,” said Payne.

“Yes,” said Brand. “I've heard. With that healer at the Pannus mine. Trying to make your own little revolution.”

“I'd hardly call it that.”

“No, I'm sure you wouldn't. Mobestis probably didn't think that he was doing anything unusual by curing Emm. And he wouldn't be who he is if he'd failed. I offer it merely as another way of looking at things. A slightly different and perhaps more benevolent interpretation of what happened.”

Payne was not surprised that Brand knew about his debacle with Vecque. Many healers seemed to know. What did surprise him—and again he felt flattered—was that Brand had taken time to give it thought.

“I wasn't trying to change the world. The idea never occurred to me.”

“Of course not. And to me it did, when I made my own little
attempt. The lesson being what? There are limits to a person's powers of perception? One cannot swim in the river and simultaneously see where the river is going? Certainly, I think we'd have to say that from different starting points we achieved more or less the same result. Mine will be at most a footnote in history. Yours: who can say? I doubt Mobestis or Jewl ever thought of themselves as revolutionaries. Or Ract, who failed. Or Soo, who failed miserably. Now they're legends.”