Healer, page 11
part #3 of LaNague Federation Series
Oh.
A long pause, then an audible sigh. All things must pass, eh? (“Except us.”) Yeah. Except us.
YEAR 271
The Healer’s advent coincided with a period of political turmoil within the Federation. The Restructurist movement was agitating with steadily increasing influence for a more active role by the Federation in planetary and interplanetary affairs. This attitude directly contradicted the laissez-faire orientation of the organization’s charter.
His departure from human affairs occurred as political friction was reaching its peak and was as abrupt as his arrival. Certain scholars claim that he was killed in a liner crash off Tarvodet, and there is some evidence to support this.
His more fanatical followers, however, insist that he is immortal and was driven from his calling by political forces. Their former premise is obviously ridiculous, but the latter may well have some basis in fact.
from The Healer: Man & Myth by Emmerz Fent
X
The Healer, the most recognizable figure in the human galaxy, stood gloved, cloaked, cowled, and unrecognized amid the small group of mourners as the woman’s body was tenderly placed within the machine that would reduce it to its component elements. He felt no need for tears. She had lived her life to the fullest, the latter half of it at his side. And when the youth treatments had finally become ineffective and she’d begun to notice a certain blurring on the perimeters of her intellectual function, she ended her life, calmly and quietly, to insure that she’d be remembered by her lover as the proud woman she had always been, not the lesser person she might become. And only The Healer, her lover, knew how she had died.
The wrinkled little man next to him suspected, of course. And approved. They and the others watched in silence as the machine swallowed her body, and all drank deeply of the air about them as it became filled with her molecules, each witness trying to incorporate into himself a tiny part of a cherished friend.
The old man looked at his companion, who had never deigned to show a year’s worth of aging in all the time he had known him—at least not on the surface. But there had been strain and fatigue growing behind the eyes during the past few years. A half century of sickness and deformity of mind and body, outstretched hands and blank eyes lay behind him and possibly endless years of the same awaited him.
“You look weary, my friend.”
“I am.” The others began to drift away. “It all seems so futile. For every mind I open, two more are reported newly closed. The pressure continually mounts—’come to us’—’no, come to us, we need you more!’ Everywhere I go I’m preceded by arguments, threats, and bribes between vying clinics and planets. I seem to have become a commodity.”
The old man nodded with understanding. “Where to now?”
“Into private practice of some sort, I suppose. I’ve stayed with IMC this long only because of you … and her. As a matter of fact, a certain sector representative is waiting for me now. DeBloise is the name.”
“A Restructurist. Be careful.”
“I will.” The Healer smiled. “But I’ll hear what he has to say. Stay well, friend,” he said and walked away.
The wrinkled man gazed wistfully after him. “Ah, if only I had your talent for that.”
Sector Representative DeBloise had for some time considered himself quite an important man, yet it took him a few minutes to adjust to the presence of the individual seated calmly across the desk from him, a man of unmistakable appearance who had gained almost mythical stature in the past few decades: The Healer.
“In brief, sir,” DeBloise said with the very best of his public smiles, “we of the Restructurist movement wish to encourage you to come to our worlds. You seem to have made a habit of avoiding us in the past.”
“That’s because I worked through the IMC network in which the Restructurist worlds refuse to participate … something to do with the corps’ support of the LaNague charter, I’m told.”
“That’s part of it.” The smile became more ingratiating as he said, “Politics seems to work its way into everything, doesn’t it. But that’s irrelevant now, since it was the news that you’d no longer be with IMC that brought me here to Tolive. I want you to come to Jebinose; our Bureau of Medicine and Research will pay all your fees.”
“I’m sorry,” The Healer said slowly, “but I deal only with patients, not with governments.”
“Well, if you mean to come to Jebinose and practice independently of the Bureau, I’m afraid we couldn’t allow that. You see, we’ve set very high and very rigid standards for the practice of medicine on our planet and I’m afraid allowing you such license, despite your reputation, would set a bad precedent.”
“If a patient wishes my services, he or his guardian should be free to engage them. Why should some bureau have anything to say in the matter?”
“What you ask is impossible,” DeBloise said with a shake of his head. “Our people must be protected from being duped by frauds.”
The Healer’s smile was rueful as he rose to his feet. “That is quite evident. And thus Jebinose is not for me.”
DeBloise’s face suddenly hardened, the smile forgotten. “It’s quite evident to me, Healer”—he spat the word—”that you’ve spent too much time among these barbaric Tolivians. All right, play your game: but I think you should know that a change is in the wind and that we shall soon be running the entire Federation our way. And when we do, we’ll see to it mat every planet gets its fair share of your services!”
“Perhaps there will be no Healer, then,” came the quiet reply.
“Don’t try to bluff me!” DeBloise laughed. “I know your type. You glory in the adulation that greets you everywhere you go. It’s more addicting than Zemmelar.” There was a trace of envy in his voice. “But Restructurists are not so easily awed. You are a man—a uniquely talented one, yes, but still just one man—and when the tide turns for us, you will join in the current or be swept under.”
The Healer’s eyes blazed but his voice was calm.
“Thank you, Mr. DeBloise. You have just clarified a problem and prompted a decision that has been growing increasingly troublesome over the past decade or so.” He turned and strode from the room.
Nearly two and a half centuries passed before The Healer was seen again.
YEAR 505
Not long after the disappearance of The Healer, the so-called DeBloise scandal came to the fore. The subsequent Restructurist walk-out led to the Federation-Restructurist civil war (“war” is hardly a fitting term for those sporadic skirmishes) which was eventually transformed into a full-scale interracial war when the Tarks decided to interfere. It was during the height of the Terro-Tarkan conflict that the immortality myth of The Healer was born.
Oblivious to the wars, the horrors continued to appear at a steady rate and the psychosciences had gained little ground against the malady. For that reason, perhaps, a man with a stunning resemblance to The Healer appeared and began to cure the horrors with an efficacy that rivaled that of the original. Thus an historical figure became a legend.
Who he was and why he chose to appear at that particular moment remins a mystery.
from The Healer: Man & Myth by Emmerz Fent
XI
Dalt locked the flitter into the roof cradle, released the controls, and slumped into the seat.
(“There. Don’t you feel better now?”) Pard asked.
“No,” Dalt replied aloud. “I feel tired. I just want to go to bed.”
(“You’ll thank me in the morning. Your mental outlook will be better, and you won’t even be stiff because I’ve been putting you through isometrics in your sleep every night.”
“No wonder I wake up tired in the morning!”
(“Mental fatigue, Steve. Mental. We’ve both gotten too involved in this project and the strain is starting to tell.”)
“Thanks a lot,” he muttered as he slid from the cab and shuffled to the door. “The centuries have not dulled your talent for stating the obvious.”
And it was obvious. After The Healer episode, Dalt and Pard had shifted interests from the life sciences to the physical sciences and pursued their studies amid the Federation-Restructurist war without ever noticing it. That muddled conflict had been about ready to die out after a century or so, due to lack of interest, when a new force injected itself into the picture. The Tarks, in an attempt at subterfuge as clumsy as their previous attempts at diplomacy, declared a unilateral alliance with the Restructurist coalition and promptly attacked a number of Federation bases along a disputed stretch of expansion border. Divide and conquer is a time-tested ploy, but the Tarks neglected to consider the racial variable. Humans have little compunction about killing each other over real or imagined differences, but there is an archetypical repugnance at the thought of an alien race taking such a liberty. And so the Feds and Restructurists promptly united and declared jihad on the Tarkan Empire.
Naturally, weapons research blossomed and physicists became very popular. Dalt’s papers on field theory engendered numerous research offers from companies anxious to enter the weapons market. The Tarkan force shield was allowing their ships to penetrate deep into Terran territory with few losses, and thus became a prime target for big companies like Star Ways, whose offer Dalt accepted.
The grind of high-pressure research, however, was beginning to take its toll on Dalt; and Pard, ever the physiopsychological watchdog, had finally prevailed in convincing Dalt to shorten his workday and spend a few hours on the exercise courts.
Wearily, Dalt tapped out the proper code on the entry plate and the door slid open. Even now, drained as he was in body and mind, he realized that his thoughts were starting to drift toward the field-negation problem back at Star Ways labs. He was about to try to shift his train of thought when a baritone voice did it for him.
“Do you often talk to yourself, Mr. Cheserak? Or should I call you Mr. Dalt? Or would you prefer Mr. Storgen?” The voice came from a dark, muscular man who had made himself comfortable in one of the living-room chairs; he was pointing a blaster at the center of Dalt’s chest. “Or how about Mr. Quet?” he continued with a self-assured smile, and Dalt noticed two other men, partly in shadow, standing behind him. “Come now! Don’t just stand there. Come in and sit down. After all, this is your home.”
Eyeing the weapon that followed his every move, Dalt chose a chair opposite the intruders. “What do you want?”
“Why, your secret, of course. We thought you’d be out longer and had hardly begun our search of the premises when we heard your flitter hit the dock. Very rude of you to interrupt us.”
Dalt shook his head grimly at the thought of humans conspiring against their own race. “Tell your Tark friends that we’re no closer to piercing their force shields than we were when the war started.”
The dark man laughed with genuine amusement. “No, my friend, I assure you that our sympathies concerning the Terro-Tarkan war are totally orthodox. Your work at Star Ways is of no interest to us.”
“Then what do you want?” he repeated, his eyes darting to the other two figures, one a huge, steadfast hulk, the other slight and fidgety. All three, like Dalt, wore the baggy coversuits with matching peaked skullcaps currently in fashion in this end of the human part of the galaxy. “I keep my money in a bank, so—”
“Yes, I know,” the seated man interrupted. “I know which bank and I know exactly how much. And I also have a list of all the other accounts you have spread among the planets of this sector.”
“How in the name of—”
The stranger held up his free hand and smiled. “None of us has been properly introduced. What shall we call you, sir? Which of your many aliases do you prefer?”
Dalt hesitated, then said, “Dalt,” grudgingly.
“Excellent! Now, Mr. Dalt, allow me to introduce Mr. Hinter”—indicating the hulk—”and Mr. Giff”— the fidget. “I am Aaron Kanlos and up until two standard years ago I was a mere president of an Interstellar Brotherhood of Computer Technicians local on Ragna. Then one of our troubleshooters working for the Telialung Banking Combine came to me with an interesting anomaly and my life changed. I became a man with a mission: to find you.”
As Dalt sat in silence, denying Kanlos the satisfaction of being told to go on, Pard said, (“I don’t like the way he said that.”)
“I was told,” Kanlos finally went on, “that a man named Marten Quet had deposited a check from Interstellar Business Advisers in an account he had just opened. The IBA check cleared but the man didn’t.” Again he looked to Dalt for a reaction. Finding a blank stare, he continued:
“The computer, it seems, was insisting that this Mr. Quet was really a certain Mr. Galdemar and duly filed an anomaly slip which one of our technicians picked up. These matters are routine on a planet such as Ragna, which is a center for intrigue in the interstellar business community; keeping a number of accounts under different names is the rule rather than the exception in those circles. So, the usual override code was fed in, but the machine still would not accept the anomaly. After running a negative check for malfunction, the technician ordered a full printout on the two accounts.” Kanlos smiled at this. “That’s illegal, of course, but his curiosity was piqued. The pique became astonishment when he read the listings, and so naturally he brought the problem to his superior.”
(“I’m sure he did!”) Pard interjected, (“Some of those computer-union bosses have a tidy little blackmail business on the side.”)
Be quiet! Dalt hissed mentally.
“There were amazing similarities,” Kanlos was saying. “Even in the handwriting, although one was right-handed and the other obviously left-handed. Secondly, their fingerprints were very much alike, one being merely a distortion of the other. Both were very crude methods of deception. Nothing unusual there. The retinal prints were, of course, identical; that was why the computer had filed an anomaly. So why was the technician so excited? And why had the computer ignored the override code? As I said, multiple accounts are hardly unusual.” Kanlos paused for dramatic effect, then: “The answer was to be found in the opening dates of the accounts. Mr. Quet’s account was only a few days old … Mr. Galdemar’s had been opened two hundred years ago!
“I was skeptical at first, at least until I did some research on retinal prints and found that two identical sets cannot exist. Even clones have variations in the vessels of the eyegrounds. So, I was faced with two possibilities: either two men generations apart possessed identical retinal patterns, or one man has been alive much longer than any man should be. The former would be a mere scientific curiosity; the latter would be of monumental importance.”
Dalt shrugged. “The former possibility is certainly more likely than the latter.”
“Playing coy, eh?” Kanlos smiled. “Well, let me finish my tale so you’ll fully appreciate the efforts that brought me to your home. Oh, it wasn’t easy, my friend, but I knew there was a man roaming this galaxy who was well over two hundred years old and I was determined to find him. I sent out copies of the Quet/Galdemar retinal prints to all the other locals in our union, asking them to sec if they could find accounts with matching patterns. It took time, but then the reports began to trickle back—different accounts on different planets with different names and fingerprints, but always the same retinal pattern. There was also a huge trust fund—a truly staggering amount of credits— on the planet Myrna in the name of Cilo Storgen, who also happens to have the Ouet/Galdemar pattern.
“You may be interested to know that the earliest record found was that of a man known simply as ‘Dalt,’ who had funds transferred from an account on Tolive to a bank on Neeka about two and a quarter centuries ago. Unfortunately, we have no local on Tolive, so we couldn’t backtrack from there. The most recent record was, of course, the one on Ragna belonging to Mr. Galdemar. He left the planet and disappeared, it seems. However, shortly after his disappearance, a Mr. Cheserak—who had the same retinal prints as Mr. Galdemar and all of the others, I might add—opened an account here on Meltrin. According to the bank, Mr. Cheserak lives here … alone.” Kanlos’s smile took on a malicious twist. “Care to comment on this, Mr. Dalt?”
Dalt was outwardly silent but an internal dispute was rapidly coming to a boil.
Congratulations, mastermind!
(“Don’t go putting the blame on me!”) Pard countered. (“If you’ll just think back, you’ll remember that I told you—”)
You told me—guaranteed me, in fact—that nobody’d ever connect all those accounts. As it turns out, you might as well have left a trail of interstellar beacons!
(“Well, I just didn’t think it was necessary to go to the trouble of changing our retinal print. Not that it would have been difficult—neovascularization of the retina is no problem—but I thought changing names and fingerprints would be enough. Multiple accounts are necessary due to shifting economic situations, and I contend that no one would have caught on if you hadn’t insisted on opening that account on Ragna. I warned you that we already had an account there, but you ignored me.”)
Dalt gave a mental snort. I ignored you only because you’re usually so overcautious. I was under the mistaken impression that you could handle a simple little deception, but—
The sound of Kanlos’s voice brought the argument to a halt. “I’m waiting for a reply, Mr. Dalt. My research shows that you’ve been around for two and a half centuries. Any comment?”
“Yes.” Dalt sighed. “Your research is inaccurate.”
“Oh, really?” Kanlos’s eyebrows lifted. “Please point out my error, if you can.”
Dalt spat out the words with reluctant regret. “I’m twice that age.”
Kanlos half started out of his chair. “Then it’s true!” His voice was hoarse. “Five centuries … incredible!”
Dalt shrugged with annoyance. “So what?”
