The Healer (2 page)

Payne's mother promised to produce him. First, though, might she have a word in private with them? With all due respect, for it was certainly not her place to judge, they were the authorities, she a mere mother, but her son was a clumsy, slow, dull-witted child. And prone to illness and bouts of deep depression. He was difficult to manage. A trying, taxing boy to be around. To be quite blunt, and here she dropped her voice in strictest confidence, he'd be a waste of their time and effort. She truly wished that it were otherwise, but he wouldn't last a week away from home.

Some examiners were amateurs, some frankly doltish, but Dr.
Valid was neither of these. While he much preferred to speak, listening was a part of his job, and he did what was required of him, hearing her out. When she was done, he replied that at least in one respect he agreed with her. It was not her place to judge.

“You are his mother. Mothers are made to love their children, not judge them. That's why we are here. So if you please, leave that task to us.”

She started to reply, but he halted her. “Madam, I've heard every manner of excuse you could imagine. Every entreaty, every flight of fancy, every plea. So please, spare yourself the trouble. Spare all of us.” He paused, holding up a finger to keep her from interrupting.

“I understand how difficult it is to stand by and not interfere. To hold your peace when all you want to do is speak out. What parent would not want to stand up for their beloved child?” He paused again, this time, it seemed, more for the effect.

“I'll answer that myself: none that I would care to know. Which is why we suggest you leave the room during the examination. It makes it so much easier and less burdensome. For all concerned.”

She had no intention of leaving and told him so, taking care to thank him for his thoughtfulness.

He studied her, as if deciding whether to force the issue. After a moment he shrugged.

“Suit yourself. Now please, the boy.”

Instead, she reached into her dress and drew out the purse of coins. It was warm from contact with her skin. She offered it to Dr. Valid, who made no move to take it.

“You don't believe me,” he said wearily. “They never do.”

It was Crisp, eventually, who took it from her. He loosened its strings, peered inside, then passed it on to Valid for his inspection.

“Quite light,” the doctor observed, juggling it in his palm. “But I'm sure you don't mean to measure your son's worth in money. Nor do we.” He returned the purse to Crisp, who pocketed it. “No more delays now, or I'll get cross. If you please, the boy.”

“Take me instead,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“I'll be a subject for your experiments.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Mine?”

“The ones they do in Rampart.”

He considered for a moment. “Come here. Let me look at you.”

Steeling herself, she went to him, and he perused her. He had her lift her arms, turn, bend at the waist, straighten. At his command she took down her hair, exposing the raised hump of her skull. He eyed this without comment, then questioned her.

“Do you know how unlikely it is your son will pass the test? How minimal the chances are he has the gift?”

“He doesn't,” she told him bluntly.

“Then you have nothing to worry about.”

“You took my first.”

“Even less likely then.”

This wasn't true, but even if it were, any likelihood at all was too much of one. “Did I pass your test? That's all I need to know. Can I assume we have a deal?”

“It makes no sense. Why leave him without his mother? Why abandon him when you yourself say there's no need?”

“Do you have children, Doctor?”

That, he said, was immaterial.

She thought not. “I don't want him subjected to this procedure. This test. I don't want him humiliated in any way.”

He frowned, then shook his head, looking disappointed. “You people baffle me. Do you have any idea of a healer's worth? How much good they do? How essential they are? In Gode the gift means nothing and never will, but in the world outside it's one of the most precious things there is.”

“And the Drain?”

“Enough,” said Valid. “Bring the boy to me.”

She eyed him and then the Enforcer, who in turn was eying her, ready, she was sure, to intervene at a moment's notice. She could beg them but sensed that that would only make things worse. Other, more extreme measures crossed her mind, but wisely, she rejected them. She hated these people but had no choice. She would have to trust the odds, along with what she and her husband had done to influence them.

She called her son. Almost instantly he appeared, followed by his father, who towered over him. To his mother's eye Payne seemed not quite there. His father bent down and whispered something in his ear, then straightened up and with a hand planted on his shoulder, guided him across the room.

Valid watched impassively, observing the boy. When he halted an arm's length away, he bid him come nearer. But before Payne could obey, his father stepped in front of him. Reaching in a pocket, he announced he had a business proposition.

Instantly, Lieutenant Crisp was on him. He grabbed his hand and twisted it behind his back. Then he patted him down for a weapon. What he found instead was a pouch of precious and semiprecious stones.

Valid was impressed. “Such largesse. And they say Grotesques do not know how to treat their guests. Stand back, Lieutenant. Give the man room to breathe.”

Crisp did as he was told, allowing Payne's father to empty out the pouch. The stones, for which he'd pawned his wedding ring and everything else remotely of value to him, filled the broad cup of his hand. He offered them to Valid in exchange for the life of his son.

Valid scowled. “His life? I don't traffic in life. Human, tesque or otherwise. You offend me.”

“His freedom then.”

“Now that's different. Freedom, sadly, can be bought and sold. Bribery, however, is unlawful.” He made a motion with his hand. “Put away your jewels. Buy something for your wife. And take heart. As I explained to her, the odds are with you. Decidedly.”

So saying, he returned his attention to Payne. “Now, young man. You see how much your parents love you. I'm sure you're worth every ounce. Come closer so that I may judge for myself.”

Payne did as he was told, maintaining his composure as best he could. The thorns that his father had collected and methodically pricked him with that morning helped. In addition to further muting whatever incipient healing power he might possess, they had a distancing effect on his mind. Everything that was happening to him seemed faraway, as if it were happening to someone else.

Valid looked into his face, noting that his pupils, despite the room's dimness, were constricted, then felt his pulse and scowled. To Payne's father he said, “Why do this thing? Did you think I wouldn't notice? Do I look like a novice to you?”

From a pocket he produced a small dark vial, stoppered with a bulb-topped dropper. Unscrewing it, he sucked up a dropper full of the vial's amber liquid, which he squirted beneath Payne's tongue.

A minute later, the drug began to take effect, counteracting the one his father had administered. Payne felt his heart speed up. The room brightened, as his pupils ballooned. The sense that he was elsewhere, in a muffled and protected world, disappeared. The skin of his back began to tingle where his father had pricked him with the thorns. He felt warm, then cold, and broke into a sweat.

Valid seemed to take his reaction for fear, which was a common, if not universal, response to the examination, and he had ready words of reassurance. They were not there to hurt him or anyone. If he'd heard that, then what he'd heard was wrong. The test was quick and it was painless. Many, in fact, found it pleasurable.

Payne glanced at his father, whose face was stony and controlled, then back at Valid. He was frightened, but truth be told, a little curious about this test. He didn't want to pass, of course, but he also didn't want to fail.

“Anything else?” Valid asked impatiently, addressing Payne's parents. “No? Then with your permission we'll proceed.”

Rising from his chair, he extended a hand to Unerrant Sorly and helped her to her feet. She was very old, and once she pushed back her cowl to reveal her face, it was clear that she was also very ill. Her eyes were dull and sunken. Her skin was gray and her lips were cracked. Her tired hair lay like pale threads across the mottled cap of her scalp.

Using Valid's arm for support, she slowly shuffled forward, until she stood in front of Payne. She touched his face, felt the sheen of sweat across his protuberant forehead, peered into his eyes.

“Don't be afraid,” she whispered, her voice as dry as leaves, her breath sour. “It's just a test. A little probe. Nothing deep or harmful. We would never hurt a child.”

She smiled a toothless smile, which did little to allay Payne's apprehension. He'd been told by his parents what to expect, but nothing had quite prepared him for this woman.

She was an Unerrant, and she looked to be dying because, in fact, she was. Perennially dying, poised forever on the brink. All her systems were in a state of failure, which made her the perfect tool for the examiners, the supreme diagnostician. She was a magnet for healing energy, drawn to it like north to south, like full to empty, like yes to no. It was said that Unerrants recognized immediately when someone had the power to heal, overt or covert or incipient, for they were attracted to its merest whisper, awake to its most subtle, hidden nuance, often long before the one who was gifted knew.

Hunched at the waist, she stood arm to arm beside Payne and laced her fingers into his, pressing their palms together with surprising tenacity and strength. Valid then wrapped a broad cloth around their forearms. Payne felt a little tingle in his skin but nothing more. His os melior, notably, felt as lifeless and inert as stone.

He threw a glance at his father, then his mother. Their faces were drawn and tense, and to their palpable relief he shook his head.

Valid saw the exchange and shrugged. He was a philosophic man. The world needed healers, but he did not relish tearing children from
their families. It was grim work, and he looked forward to the day when their research bore fruit, for then there would be a far greater supply of what was now a rare and precious commodity. There would be no need to steal an apple when the trees were everywhere, and every tree was ripe with fruit.

He unwrapped the cloth, folded it and put it away. He helped himself to one last piece of cake, then made his way to the door.

Where he paused. Unerrant Sorly had not followed him. Unerrant Sorly, in fact, had not let go of Payne.

Her eyes were gleaming. Her face had taken on a blissful, rapturous look.

Valid chided himself for being hasty. Normally, she was quicker to let him know. Then again, normally she did not get quite so swept away as, clearly, she was now.

He had trouble unpeeling her fingers. She swatted at him with her free hand, which was also unusual behavior, and in sympathy he gave her a few minutes more. At length, though, it was time to end the liaison, and he was forced to separate her from the boy. He handed her to Crisp, who, against her wishes, escorted her to the door.

Payne was confused and frightened. He had felt something he had never felt before. From a distance he heard the doctor tell him to pack his things and hug his parents and say good-bye. His father's face was ashen. His mother had crumpled into tears. He was going on a journey, the doctor said, a lifelong journey, full of deeds of healing and service.

Five years later, long on lessons but short on experience, he received his first assignment, the Pannus Mining Company, which shipped him immediately to its Great North Mine. Remote and isolated, the mine had been in continuous operation for more than a hundred years. It was legendary for its wealth of ore, having yielded trainload upon trainload of high-grade copper and of late, other, more exotic minerals. Legendary, too, for the breed of miner it attracted: hard-bitten, self-sufficient, able to withstand the long, harsh winters, the lack of amenities, the isolation. Taciturn men who favored the company of other men or no one. Payne's job was to keep them healthy enough to work. In its wisdom the Pannus Corporation kept the healer tours of duty brief. His was slated for three years.

The trip to the mine took a week by rail. He was the sole tesque in a four-car passenger train filled with miners. It was summer, and traffic to and from the mine was at its peak. The rails were clear, the
days were long, and miners, being miners, were on the move. There was not a lot of talk among the men; it was a point of pride to look and act reserved. But beneath the surface there was an undercurrent of excitement. A new mine, whatever its record or reputation, always conjured the hope of being better than the last.

For the first few days they traveled through a prairie with tall grass as thick as fur, bleached pale yellow by the sun and swept by gusts of wind. Payne had never seen such grass before, nor such a plain. There seemed no end to it, no limit; it stretched as far as the eye could see in all directions. Overhead, the summer sun seemed suspended in an equally vast sky. It hovered up above like a kiting bird, and when it neared the horizon, it hovered there as well, as though afraid to set and put an end to the day. And it rarely did set, and rarely rose: as they drew farther and farther north, the days grew longer and longer. Nights were brief and never fully dark. Payne found it hard to sleep in the insubstantial, gauzy light.

One day passed, and then another, and another. The landscape didn't vary, mile after mile of the same pan-flat prairie and cloudless sky. Before long, he lost track of time and distance. In dreams and half-dreams he imagined that he would never reach his destination, that the longer he traveled, the longer he would have to travel. When he searched the faces of his fellow passengers for someone who might share this peculiar and troubling thought, all he saw is what he usually saw when their eyes happened to meet: indifference.

They weren't interested in him and kept their distance, which was a human habit when it came to tesques. It was a pity, he thought, and a wasted opportunity, for humans were notoriously ignorant of his kind. They were also, it was said (and he was taught), notoriously fragile creatures, at heart soft but on the surface guarded and hard to get to know. Which was also a pity, because he was interested in learning more about them. And he could have used the company, for it was a long journey to endure alone.

Then one day there was a break in the monotony. Something new on the horizon, a line of darker color set off against the flaxen pallor of the grass. It stretched north to south a great distance, and steadily widened, like ink spreading through cotton, broadening from a narrow stripe into a band and then a sheet. The color of the plain seemed to change before he saw what caused the change, before he even could discern movement. Ort, someone said, and then the train's brakes squealed, and everyone in the car lurched forward, then back against their seats. The herd was still a quarter mile away when the train ground to a halt. Payne pressed his face against the glass in great excitement as the tide of near-legendary animals approached.

Ochre-colored and glossy-skinned, with shaggy hair, blunt noses and rounded heads, ort walked on two stout legs, with a third, thinner and more agile limb behind them. They were only slightly taller than the tallest grass, and like a flock of birds or school of fish seemed to travel as a single entity, veering one way then the next for no discernible reason but always in the same general direction. They reached the train, engulfed it, and with no more sound than that of bodies brushing grass, moved on. There were thousands of them, hundreds of thousands; Payne tried to keep his eye on one, any one, to study it, but couldn't. They were so similar to one another and so numerous, his eye kept flicking from one to the next, and it occurred to him that this might be a survival mechanism, that a predator, if there were such a thing for ort, might have the same difficulty singling one out. Indeed, there was no word in the language for a single ort, no distinction made between one and many. As far as anyone had observed, the animals did everything together, moved and ate and bathed and slept and mated in large, often enormous, throngs. They lived together and they also died together, a fact that the Pannus Corporation had been quick to notice but slow to absorb, slow to assimilate and fully comprehend. The early trains, on encountering a herd, plowed right through it, the soft, pliant creatures no match for the impatient wheels and hard, pointed prows of the locomotives. The conductors
might have stopped had there not been a timetable to keep and ore to deliver. Besides, an animal with any brain at all should have known the meaning of danger or at least known enough to learn from its mistakes. It was a pity, but not to be helped, for industry required a wide berth, and progress, as everybody agreed, had a mind of its own.

Thing was, when one ort died, others came forward. If blood happened to be spilled, and blood was, much blood, many ort came to investigate. More of them died, which in turn drew still more, until the tracks were covered with the creatures, sometimes for a mile ahead, milling, cooing, lowing, and doing that strange thing that ort did with their third appendage.

Blocked and surrounded, the trains could not proceed. Victims of their very speed and doggedness, they foundered.

It was a scary business, for conductors, engineers and passengers alike. Here they were, awash in a sea of animals with globelike, rather human-looking faces, that had every reason to be peeved and out of sorts, every reason, if so inclined, to seek revenge. But ort were not vengeful creatures, or if they were, it took a form beyond what humans understood. All they wanted, it seemed, was to stand with their dead, mingle with them and perhaps prevent further killing. At any rate, the trains could not move until they dispersed. Later trains carried bounty hunters to shoot the animals, which they did by the hundreds, by the thousands. But this did nothing to diminish the herds; in fact it seemed to have the opposite effect of increasing them, exponentially, until the plains—and, more to the point, the railroad cutting through them—were literally overrun with ort. It seemed that the death of even a modest number of animals had a profound effect on the entire herd, far and near, transforming all save a tiny portion into breeding females. Simultaneously, it shortened the gestation period and dramatically increased the number of offspring, sending the birth rate soaring. The hunters could not keep up. The hunters, it turned out, were their own worst enemies.

So now there were no hunters. There was no killing, no carnage,
no barreling of train through flesh. The conductors, upon sight of a herd of ort, would instantly cut back the throttle and apply the brakes, giving the animals room to breathe and time to pass. If it took hours (and it never took less), then it took hours. An entire day, then it took a day. Going faster only slowed things down.

The last ort crossed the tracks at dawn, and the train resumed its run. Later that day Payne caught sight of a line of hills in the distance, blue and hazy, and beyond them, higher hills. They wavered and bent in the waves of heat radiating off the grass, and when the train tracks took a lazy turn and he lost sight of them, he thought that maybe he'd been dreaming. But then he noticed a subtle change in the cadence of the wheels as they ticked along the rails—a slowing, as if they'd begun to climb a gentle grade. Trees appeared, scattered broadbeams with enormous horizontal branches, bronze-skinned arbitis, fat-trunked puzzlewoods with jigsaw bark. The land began to rise, inconspicuously at first, but soon audaciously. Hills swept up on either side of them, rolling into one another like waves of water, like muscles. Some were cut by dried-up, jagged creek beds, some were smooth, some topped by rocks that looked like fists. Payne had never seen such land before. Desert born and bred, schooled like a monk, he had rarely seen a tree.

All day long they climbed, and all through the brief and ersatz night, and for once Payne was happy with the partial darkness, the ever-present twilight glow. Too excited to sleep, and too enchanted, he stared out the window, watching the land soar up around him and the trees multiply.

By dawn they were encased in a forest, stands of fir and pine so dense they kept the ground perennially in shade. Paralleling the tracks was a river, another miracle that Payne had never seen. Such an extravagance of water. In Gode the only riverbeds were dry ones and the only water at the bottom of deep wells.

After a while, the train began to labor as the grade steepened. The
river dropped away into a slotted canyon, and the trees all at once seemed to be leaning forward, as if into a stiff wind.

Without warning the car was plunged into a thick and total darkness. It was a shock, and at first Payne thought that something dreadful had gone wrong. He was frightened, and apparently some of the other men were, too. But then he heard the word “tunnel,” and shortly after that, they emerged to light and level ground.

Now the train seemed bent on reaching its destination without delay. It surged forward, and the stout trees that lined the tracks whipped past. Some of the miners began to gather their belongings. Payne had only one small bag, and he took it down from the overhead rack and held it in his lap.

An hour later the train slowed and with a long, tired squeal of its brakes, accompanied by the shifting creak of heavy metal, came to a grinding halt. On one side of them stood a weathered wooden platform, and beyond it, a wide expanse of flat, cleared land. Here, enormous trucks were busy digging, scooping, pushing, scraping and loading. Some had big buckets in their fronts; some, thick steel plates; some, massive jaws; some, interlocking tusklike pincers. They moved on gigantic spiked metal wheels or on equally gigantic treads. Mounds of rock, some the size of small hills, were being bullied into shape. A pair of cranes, looming over these hills hungrily, like their namesakes, were simultaneously disassembling them, bucketful by huge bucketful, transferring the rock to empty hopper cars. Other, fully laden cars were being coupled to an engine. The yard was the source of a symphony of blaring, belching, rasping, thunderous noise. The air above it was smeared with smoke and dust. For a hundred yards in every direction the ground trembled.

One by one the miners exited, congregating loosely on the platform. A man appeared and led them down a broad dirt road that gradually climbed and circled above the yard, then disappeared behind a hill. Payne followed, keeping to the rear of the group. After a week of
travel he was happy to be outside, and he slowed, enjoying the freshness of the air. The sun beat down on him, and he enjoyed this, too. It was a whole new world here, and despite his lowly position, he considered himself a lucky man.

The road wound around the hill, then forked, the right branch leading northward through a copse of fir and spruce, the left leveling off to become the main street of the camp proper. At the fork Payne got his first glimpse of Pannus Mountain. It took his breath away.

It was immense, shoulder after shoulder of bare-knuckled rock sweeping upward to a dome-shaped summit capped with snow. The rock was mostly gray, and it was fissured into enormous slabs and faces, which were separated by vertical chutes and chimneys, some of which looked to be hundreds of feet tall. Cliffs gave way to ledges, which gave way to new and higher cliffs. It seemed, in fact, that this one mountain was made of many mountains. He had never seen a thing so massive or so big.

Or so oddly shaped. One whole face of it looked all wrong—scooped out and craterous and deformed, as though some mythic bird as mighty as the mountain itself had come and taken an enormous bite of it. Or as if the mountain had been eviscerated and then imploded on itself, which, in a sense, is what had happened. It had been mined since ancient times, but in the century since Pannus had lain claim to it, the mining had accelerated: millions upon millions of tons of rock had been excavated from the mountain. Beneath the surface it was honeycombed with tunnels, riddled with them, in some places riddled rotten. In parts of its upper reaches it had been almost entirely hollowed out and allowed to cave in upon itself. Which is why it looked so lopsided and so strange. It was an awesome sight, this vast, transfigured monolith. Payne had never felt so tiny. Or so in the presence of something beyond his powers of expression. He'd seen a forest, he'd seen a river, and now he'd seen a mountain. Life would never be the same.

By the time he started up again, the men were out of sight, and he
made his way into the camp alone. The first building that he came to was some kind of storage shed, the next, what appeared to be a bunkhouse. Across from it a man was sitting on a porch, feet resting on a rail, watching him. Payne smiled and crossed the road to introduce himself and ask directions. The man regarded him for quite a while before eventually pointing the way.