The Healer (23 page)

Shay lit the final candle, the one that stood for strength. The goblet was returned to him, still half-full, and he raised it. His face danced in the candlelight. His voice was confident and strong.

“One heart, one mind, one will. The future is in our hands. Loyalty connects us. Unity of purpose binds us. Tonight we take back our lives and gain our freedom. Tonight we rise from the ashes. Tonight a new day dawns.”

He tipped the goblet back and filled his mouth a second time, then passed it around the circle until it was fully drained. Then he handed out a hooded robe to each of them, similar to the one he was wearing. Payne found his heavy and a little stiff, and it gave off a pungent, almost oily, smell. He felt uneasy and decided it was time to speak up.

But before he could, the circle reconvened, the cadre joining hands and breathing, simply breathing, to ground themselves and cement their purpose and resolve. Payne had always enjoyed this part of the meetings, and despite his misgivings, he enjoyed it now. The energy in the group was very strong. He could feel it moving around the circle, gathering power and momentum, rising. Something told him that he should resist it; another voice, that he shouldn't. Soon he had no choice, because he was literally swept away.

It was an extraordinary feeling. Never had he felt so much in common with his friends and comrades. Never so interconnected, unified and intertwined. One heart, yes, they did possess a single heart as Shay had said, a single circulation, and yes, yes, a single body, too. He imagined that he was hearing with his comrades' ears and seeing with their eyes, and then, miraculously, he was. And thinking their thoughts, too. And feeling their feelings. They were not connected—no, connection implied separation, and they were not separated; they were one. One cell of many parts. One people of many strengths. One single, blissful, inviolate organism.

Shay uttered a word, and they raised their hoods, gathered by the door, then followed him out single-file. Like monks they passed through the tunnel. Payne felt that he was floating on air. The vast pylons and concrete pillars on which the building rested seemed made
of liquid. All around him the air crackled with energy and life. Soon, he discovered that he could discern individual molecules, which pulsed and gave off waves of greenish light. The surfaces of objects, of his hands, of the hooded figures in front of him, of the soaring columns, throbbed and melted. The resonating hum of the generators was a hymn that glowed.

Everything had meaning, and meaning was in everything. Their footsteps on the metal staircase were a fanfare and a promise. Shay was a prophet, his wide-set, burning eyes beacons in the night. The other cadre were products of Payne's love and desire. Their ascent from the depths was oracular, ecstatic and preordained.

They reached the surface and assembled in the alley. Then Shay led them around the corner and down the block to the entrance of the Easytime. There they formed a circle, linking arms.

Humans continued to enter and exit the gaming house, but their way was now obstructed, and soon there was an angry crowd. They jeered and hurled insults. Before long, the insults turned to threats.

For Payne, who favored almost anything to confrontation, this ugly turn had a negative effect. The ecstasy that had so bedazzled and enthralled him began to wane. The crowd's rage was disorienting. His fingers, which had been quivering with the blissful force of life, began to quiver with apprehension. His heart pounded in alarm.

He felt assaulted. These were beasts, not human beings. Their snarling, raging faces were a mockery of humanity. And the buildings that they swarmed from, that towered over him and his friends and blotted out the sky, were equally menacing. He felt their weight and their desire to crush him. Like the beasts they were full of malice, and they were alive.

His circle, which only moments before had been a source of strength and power, now seemed on the verge of being overwhelmed. Whatever it was they had hoped to achieve was clearly hopeless. While they still had the chance, they should break ranks and run.

Into this tremor of fear and doubt stepped Shay. From underneath his robe he produced a torch, which he lit and held aloft. The crowd edged back, and in a booming voice he declared the party's creed.

“Justice! Democracy! Steadfastness and Strength!”

In response to his words, the circle tightened. Drawing courage from him, the cadre repeated his cry.

“No more slavery! No more subjugation! We reclaim our bodies! Freedom now and forever. The world is ours! From the ashes a new day dawns!”

All this Shay proclaimed to the now five-deep throng of humans. To his own people he dropped his voice and looked them each in the eye. Eyes, to a one, that were fixed and dilated, as fat as moons and as black as olives. Longing, trusting eyes.

“Strength now, comrades. Who heals us? we ask. Now we answer. We heal ourselves. Our bodies are our own. That is our message, and it will never be forgotten. Never. Be at peace.”

Then one by one, true to the principles of the party, he went around the circle, asking each of them a final time if they consented, and one by one they answered, “Yes, I do.” All save Payne, who asked what he was consenting to. But his voice was drowned out by the crowd; either that, or he was misunderstood. For Shay proceeded with the ceremony, handing each of them in turn the torch, and one by one they lit themselves; and their robes, which had been soaked beforehand, ignited instantly into blue and yellow flame.

The mob erupted, shouting, screaming, but no one stopped the healers; no one intervened. Payne was stricken with his own paralysis, watching in horror as his friends went up in flame.

He was the last one to be offered the torch. Shay faced him, holding it out. “Quickly now. We have little time.”

Payne stared at him, eyes wide, lips frozen. The comrade closest to him had started tottering, and without thinking, he reached out to steady him, a senseless reflex, then quickly drew his hand back but too
late, for a tongue of flame leapt out and licked his sleeve. His robe guttered for a second, then burst aflame.

With a cry he broke ranks, stumbling backward and tearing at his garment until he got it off. Shay, who had already ignited himself, seemed to mistake his horror for a loss of nerve and went after him.

“Be strong, my friend. Don't fear. Come, lean on me.”

Grabbing Payne under the arm, he tried to help him back into the fold. Payne resisted, but Shay's grip was like a vice. Payne begged him to stop the conflagration.

“Stop? We cannot stop. Be with us now. Be brave.”

“No,” cried Payne. “No. This is wrong. Let me go.”

Shay looked at him strangely, and for a second his face clouded. He was in his own world, deep into it, and it took a monumental effort to tear himself free.

“Go? You wish to go?”

“Yes,” Payne pleaded.

By now the other cadre were losing consciousness but fighting to hold onto one another, to keep what remained of their circle intact. Shay looked at them, then looked at Payne, then, relaxing his grip, released him. Quickly, he rejoined his comrades, completing and then closing the circle just as he became engulfed in flame. For a moment, then, they were united. In spirit and in flesh A New Day, as Payne would ever think of them, burned. It was almost glorious. Their ring of fire, like a flaming crown, like a promise, lit the sky.

Payne was charged with sedition, endangering human lives directly, endangering human lives indirectly, destruction of property (principally, chattel property), unlawful assembly, felonious use of fire, and other crimes too numerous to mention. He was thrown in jail, in a dark and solitary cell, which is where he sat, hungry, alone and nibbled on by vermin, for days and days on end. He was allowed no visitors and had no contact with the outside world. His human guards kept their distance from him, avoiding conversation beyond assuring him that he would never leave that place, never in a thousand years. His fate was sealed by the cruel, self-serving, heinous nature of his crime. Outside, people were clamoring for his death, and the only thing standing in their way were the bars of his cell. That, and the fact that he was valuable as a living lesson.

Deprived of tesque or human contact, and any semblance of a normal life, Payne filled his time with thought, and when thought
became too tiresome or painful, with delusion. He imagined he was back at the Pannus mine, huddled in a tunnel, lost but not abandoned, the object of a furious, round-the-clock search. Any moment they would break through the walls, and someone, Vecque maybe, rejuvenated, reborn, would rescue him.

He imagined he was sleeping and any moment would wake up to the world he knew before.

He imagined a plate of food to fill his empty belly.

He imagined sunlight, warmth, a bed that wasn't made of stone.

He imagined he was innocent, and not just that but a hero, that he had saved his friends, not watched them blacken and die.

He imagined that his brother Wyn was alive and would rescue him, and he imagined, too, that Wyn, in fact, did visit, cherished and exalted brother Wyn who could do no wrong. But far from helping him, his brother ridiculed him for making one bad choice after another, for being hopelessly naive, a disgrace to the family, a burden.

He imagined he was not a disgrace. And his tears were not wet. And his fate was not sealed.

He imagined he could walk away and start over.

Strictly speaking, he was not entirely alone. Sharing his body and his cell was an assortment of fleas and lice and spiders. He spoke to them on occasion but found little in the way of common ground. Their thoughts and desires, compared to the labyrinthine twists and turns of his fevered brain, were of a primitive nature. More promising was a rat that scurried out from time to time in search of food. He fed it crumbs, and soon it was eating out of his hand. His burns had mostly healed, and he liked the feel of its tiny feet on his fresh new skin. He liked the tickle of its whiskers and the way its cold nose nuzzled up against his palm.

By placing bits of food in the hollow of his clavicle, he trained it to trot up and down his arm. This he liked most of all. Without realizing
it, he had taught his newfound friend to simulate the first stage of a healing.

One day the animal did not appear. When it returned the next day, Payne asked it where it had been.

The rat seemed sullen and did not answer. Payne fed it a crumb and asked again.

Still, the rat offered no explanation, and fearing it had sustained some sort of injury, he examined it. Its beady eyes seemed clear enough, its arms and legs intact. Its tail had not been bitten off, and its coat of fur looked fine. Suspecting trouble of a deeper sort, Payne stroked its back and tried to coax out information. He reminded it that friends did not hold out on friends. He promised to be discreet.

The rat remained close-lipped. Clearly, it wasn't happy to be the object of such intense scrutiny and attention. It seemed about to bolt.

On impulse, Payne lifted it by the scruff of its neck and pressed its belly against his healing arm. Immediately, his neuroepidermal buds began to tingle. The rat nipped at him and tried to claw its way free, but Payne would not let go. When eventually it accepted its fate and stilled, he proceeded with the healing.

After that the rat did not resist him. Every day it came and promptly planted itself belly-down on his arm. Sometimes it rubbed against him as if to copulate. Sometimes it nibbled on his skin and nuzzled him.

There was, in fact, no illness in its body, but Payne had cured it anyway, cured it of its wanderlust and absenteeism. In the guise of freedom he had given it a maze of choices, each of which ended up with him. The rat seemed quite content with this, much as humans were with false appearances. It seemed, in fact, quite human in its motives and its needs.

This was the first time Payne had ever used his talents on his own behalf, selfishly, without regard for what was right or best for the one
he healed. That the one in this case was a rat did not relieve him of the pangs of guilt at overstepping his mandate and authority. But in the face of such intense and numbing isolation, he could not help himself. He needed contact with the living. Had there been no rat (and at times he thought there wasn't, imagining that this being was something else; a pixie, a fairy princess, a messenger cloaked in a ball of fur, a superior intelligence in disguise), he would have turned to the lice and fleas and spiders for comfort. How they would have responded to a healing was anybody's guess, but he would have found out, because he would have tried.

The days wore on, one after another, monotonous despite the richness of his inner life, dead and dreary despite his hallucinations. He lost track of time and on occasion would get the nerve up to speak to the guards and brave their scorn. What day was it? he'd ask. What week? What month? What of the world outside? What was going on? Did anyone remember him?

Their answers were the same, regardless of the question, and delivered with the same impenetrability. It made no difference what day it was. It made no difference what was happening in the world. He was living in his world. Prison would always be his world. Now and forever. He might as well get used to it.

Then one day, suddenly, he was free. Without comment or explanation the guards unlocked the door to his cell, hauled him out, threw him under a shower, then gave him a fresh set of clothes and transported him under cover of darkness to the basement of the Crimson Crag. From there, by elevator, they took him to a suite of rooms.

The senior guard knocked on the door, then disappeared inside. A minute later he reappeared and warned Payne not to try anything funny. Then he pushed him in.

She was standing beside an upholstered sofa, one hand resting on its quilted arm, the other dangling loosely at her side, a casual, inviting,
homey, and possibly prearranged pose. Her name, he'd learned, was Meera. Her father was a Senator, her mother a distinguished social scientist. The family name of Libretain was widely known.

“Hello,” she said. “We meet again.”

Payne swallowed. “Hello.”

She smiled, he managed to smile back, and after that they lapsed into a silence that she seemed more than happy to inhabit, taking time to look at him and wait to see what he would say or do. He felt horribly self-conscious and was glad at least to have showered and be wearing clean clothes. He would have scrubbed himself a good deal more if he had known his destination, though no amount of scrubbing or fine clothes would have ever made him feel on a level with her.

He tried to think of something to say, something smart, at least not dumb. The room was warm and seemed to dull his senses. The floor was carpeted. He wasn't used to carpets. The room was bright, and he wasn't used to light. After months of isolation he wasn't used to speech. And there was a smell—a dry, sweet smell—a perfumed, human smell that made him woozy. He felt light-headed and worried that he might faint. How embarrassing, he thought, to faint in front of her.

“Please,” she said, gesturing to a chair. “Sit down.”

He did, gratefully.

“Something to drink?”

There was a tray with bottles of different colors, shapes and sizes. There was a bowl with twists of fruit, a long glass swizzling stick, a bucket.

He felt illiterate. “Whatever you are.”

“I'm not,” she said.

“That's fine.”

“You're not in jail anymore. Feel free.”

He didn't, which is to say he felt about as free as he'd felt before, except that now everything was magnificently plush and beautiful.

“How about a glass of water?” she said.

“Water's fine.”

She wore silk trousers and a short-sleeved blouse, stud earrings and a thin gold chain necklace. She poured the water from a pitcher into a long, tall glass. After serving him, she settled on the sofa and folded her hands in her lap. She sat as if suspended from a string, straight-backed, elegant and poised.

“You've been busy since I last saw you.”

Had he? Was rotting away in prison being busy? “Are you the one who got me out?”

“Yes. I helped arrange it.”

“Why?”

“It wasn't right. You were there unjustly.” Spoken as if justice were an expectation, not a pipe dream.

“No one else seemed to mind,” he said.

“That's not exactly true. But it's immaterial. The point is you're out.”

Yes. He had to agree. If this wasn't another of his hallucinations. “I'm grateful.”

“There's a string attached,” she said.

“What sort of string?”

“I vouched for you. I promised you wouldn't do anything to land yourself in jail again.”

“I didn't do anything this time.”

She gave him a look. “Really. What an interesting thing to say.”

“I wasn't responsible for what happened.”

“The immolation? No, I don't believe you were. The rest? I'd say that's using the term ‘responsible' rather loosely. At any rate, I managed to convince some people, the right people, you weren't the ringleader. A pawn, I said, although I suspect that you were more. Not innocent…who could believe that? But misled and certainly naive.”

He had accused himself of this very thing, and would continue to, but he hated hearing it from her.

“Your release is provisional on your future conduct,” she said.

“I'm on probation?”

“Yes. Absolutely. They'll be watching every move you make. My advice is, don't make any wrong ones. Do your job. Keep out of trouble. Don't join any crazy groups. Any groups, period.”

“They weren't crazy,” he said.

She raised an eyebrow. “That, I'd have to say, is a bad start.”

“Not in what they wanted. Maybe in how they went about it.”

“And which do you think people will remember?”

“I know what humans will,” he said. Then fearing that he'd said too much, he said more. “They were desperate. People do extreme things out of desperation. They think differently. They see things differently. They act in ways that might look crazy but to them make sense. To them it might be the only thing that does make sense. It's another world.”

He had thought long and hard on this in prison. How events had taken such a turn. What his role had been, what he did and didn't do, what he could have done differently. Loyalty was an admirable quality, perhaps the most admirable, but to cling to it dogmatically was to turn a virtue to a vice. Somewhere, somehow, something had gone wrong. He felt guilty to be the sole survivor and guilty now to distance himself, talking about “them,” not “us.”

“I'm all for change,” she said, “but it's irresponsible to take an action when there's not a chance of its succeeding. You didn't have the numbers or the slightest notion of how to follow through. The fires and then that horrible burning were shock tactics, and shock wears off. It's childish. Brutally childish. It accomplishes nothing.”

From the angry way she spoke one might have thought that she, not he, had been the one to lose her friends. “What you did just frightens people. It makes them turn away. Or worse, it makes them retaliate. The world needs messengers, not martyrs. Less violence, not more.”

“Retaliation?” He almost laughed. “What worse can you do than drain us?”

“Oh,” she said. “Much worse. Much much worse. We humans have a remarkable capacity for cruelty and revenge.”

“We're not responsible for that,” said Payne.

“We? We? There is no we.” Her voice rose in frustration. “Your group is gone, Payne. Get it through your head. No one talks about it anymore. I'd be surprised if anyone remembers. That squalid little room you met in? It's bricked up. The sidewalk where you made your mark? It was scrubbed clean the next day. The only thing that matters from here on out is you. How you act. What you do and, more importantly, what you don't.”

“I don't intend to set myself on fire, if that's what you want to know.”

Her eyes flashed. “Is that supposed to be a joke?”

He wasn't sure what it was, or why they seemed to be arguing. He much preferred it when she smiled.

“I'm not looking to make trouble,” he assured her, “but I don't understand, why take the chance? Why not leave me where I was as a lesson? Why set me free?”

“Six healers went up in smoke. The city can't absorb that loss. The ones who are left are working round the clock—that's their reward for having better sense than you. And they're suffering: you know what it does to a healer to work so hard. No one should have to pay that price.”