Communion of Dreams, page 32
“Good enough.” Jon let his hand and concentration drop. “Duc, you know you’ve been . . . changed . . . by contact with the artifact.”
The artist nodded, said nothing.
“Well, there’s more to it than just the loss of your cyberware and your senses having to readjust. What you just noticed seems to be some kind of ‘healing energy’.”
Duc chuckled. “Good, I can go into the miracle business.”
“Exactly.”
Duc stopped chuckling. “You mean that, don’t you?”
“Um, yeah. We’ve uh . . . we’ve got a problem. A big one. Something like the fire-flu is on the station.”
“The flu?”
“Worse, something just different enough to get around our defenses, it seems.”
“Good lord. How far has it spread?”
Jon shook his head. “Tops isn’t sure. But the betting is that everyone’s been exposed.”
Duc closed his eyes for a moment, swallowed. But then his eyes opened again, and there was a hardness to the set of his jaw. “How long?”
“People will probably start dying in a matter of days.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah.” Jon looked the man full in the face. “But we’re immune. You, me, and Jackie.”
There was a long pause as this sank in.
“Because of the artifact,” said Duc, understanding. Then his face blanched again as another thought crossed his mind. “My god, we didn’t . . . ”
“No. We didn’t have anything to do with the new virus, at least to the best of Tops’ determination. Looks like it’s the work of the Edenist who is trying to sabotage the mission.” Jon saw an odd kind of relief sweep across Duc’s entire body. “Nonetheless, we have to do something about it. I think that we might be able to.”
“Go on.”
“Well, back during the fire-flu, there was a brief period during which some people claimed to have been able to psychically or spiritually heal people . . . ”
“The cults,” said Duc.
“Yeah, the cults,” said Jon. “Darnell was in one. And he says that he recognizes the same energy now.”
“But what happened last time . . . ”
Jon nodded. “It’s a risk.”
“Can’t we just shuttle everyone who is infected down to touch the artifact?”
“Yeah, but that has logistical problems. Not just getting people down there, but you know what it does to you.”
“Beats being dead.”
“Agreed. But I’m not sure we have the time to pull that off. Still, it’s an option. But I want to try this other path, first.”
Duc looked down into his own hands, as though seeing them entirely anew. “I always wanted to perform miracles with these, but of a more creative sort.”
Jon smiled. “OK. Let me take care of one more thing, then we’ll meet down at the infirmary and give it a try. I’ll send someone for you.”
* * *
“How’d it go?” asked Tops.
“Pretty well. They’re both willing to try, at least.” He glanced at the doorway into the infirmary. “How’re they?”
“I think Gish is sleeping. He’s discovered that the auggies take a toll. But he’s doing pretty well. Ling is still in the induced coma. I planned on leaving her in that state until tomorrow. It’ll cut in half the time needed to knit her collarbone back together.”
Jon chewed his lip. “Is there . . . anything else wrong with her?”
“No. Why?”
“Well, would it hurt her to come out of the coma now?”
Tops frowned slightly. “Well, I’d rather not wake her if I can avoid it. A collarbone is a painful break, and tough for a kid to keep immobile for the first crucial period of healing. Did you want to talk with her? Can it wait?”
“Well, I didn’t exactly want to talk with her.”
Tops looked at him, slightly confused. Then understanding came. “Ah. You want to see if your ‘healing energy’ can work on more than just the virus.”
“It’d be good to have some idea of what’s possible. And if she’s in the coma, it shouldn’t present any problems for her.”
Tops considered, then nodded. “OK, but I’m going to come and keep an eye on it. Maybe we’ll be able to see how it works.”
“If it works,” corrected Jon. “OK, let’s go.”
He led the way into the other room, past the sleeping Gish and over to the partitioned area where Chu Ling was. Jon stopped at the foot of the bed and looked at her. She was peaceful, asleep, her left arm immobile against her chest. Tops came around to the side of the bed, started adjusting things so her equipment was ready. She nodded to Jon.
He moved around to the right side of the bed, next to the girl’s restrained arm. Unsure what to do, he closed his eyes, tried to concentrate the way he had before, when showing the light to the others. He took a deep breath, opened his eyes slowly, and looked down with a relaxed, almost unfocused gaze at the palms of his hand. There it was, pooling in the palms, starting the odd sort of flowing motion. He reached over the side rail and put one hand close to the girl’s arm. Tentatively, he touched her, and there was a slight rush at the tips of his fingers, but he knew there was something wrong.
He looked again at his hands, and could see the light growing deeper, like it was bubbling up from a deep and potent well. Yet the fabric of the gloves he wore seemed to hold it back, so that it could only find escape around the edges and through his fingers. Instinctively, he peeled off his gloves and let them drop to the floor.
Now the light surged forth. He felt a warm tingle start at the base of his skull and flow down his arms, and saw that the blue light seemed to want to reach out to the girl. He moved his hands out to her shoulder and her torso, feeling like he needed to complete some kind of electrical circuit.
The moment his second hand touched her, he lost sight of the room around him. He was back in the cave, but this time there was no Sidwell and no artifact, just the figure of the girl, hovering before him, still asleep. Here, in this place, he could look through her flesh, to see the bone under the skin, pale blue with a dark line across it midway. Again he reached out with his hands to touch her, wanting to reach inside and smooth the broken line, make it whole.
But before he could, her eyes opened, and she blinked slowly, trying to look at him, trying to focus. Her mouth tried to move, to form a word.
He paused. “Ling?”
Her eyes rolled, found him and came into focus.
“It’s OK, Ling. I just want to help you, to make you feel better.” He smiled, and his right hand touched her shoulder. Again there was a shift, but this time the scene in the cave did not change. The girl did.
Now, standing before him was a young woman. Jon knew that this is who Ling would grow to become. It was the image of the woman from whom she was cloned. And she seemed familiar to Jon, like a distant relative seen in an aging photograph.
Still with his hands on her torso and shoulder, the woman looked at him. Her own arms now rose, one touching his arm, the other reaching up to the side of his face.
Now the circuit really was complete. Jon felt his own energy surge, felt it move through the woman and echo back to him, as though it had been amplified, made cleaner and somehow older.
“Jon?” He heard a voice call his name. The connection, and the vision, broke.
“Jon?” It was Tops.
He realized that he had been holding his breath too long, and felt a little woozy. The world of the infirmary fell into place around him, and he realized that he was looking at Chu Ling, now sitting up in bed, her hands touching him just as the young woman had.
“Mr. Jon OK?” asked the girl, sitting up in bed beside him.
Jon was on a chair there, feeling better now that he was sitting. He looked at the girl and gave her a smile. “I’m fine. Just a little tired.”
She returned his smile. “Ling knows, feels same.”
“Well, from what I can tell, you’re both OK,” said Tops, fingers dancing in front of her, checking equipment reports. She looked at Jon. “Her collarbone is . . . is fine. Like it had never been broken, from what I can tell. And all trace of the drugs I gave her to induce coma have disappeared.”
Jon nodded. He looked at Ling. Now he saw the girl, but he also felt the presence of the young woman. “What do you see now, Ling?”
The girl looked at him quizzically, like it was a foolish question. “Ling see Mr. Jon.”
“But before, you saw something else. Remember?”
“Oh. You mean the deva light.”
“Yes, like you saw with Mr. Darnell. Remember that?”
She nodded. “Oh yes. Mr. Darnell, he had light, too. Was brighter than your light. But now Ling thinks yours is brighter. Do you now have Mr. Darnell light?”
“I don’t think so, Ling.”
She studied him a long time, hands still touching him. “Ling thinks maybe you do, just not know it.”
* * *
“It worked.” Jon nodded, looked around the room. “Yeah, it worked.”
“But what’s interesting is that it was only the broken collarbone that was healed,” said Tops. “Other than the drugs I gave her being swept from her system, nothing else changed. All of her other injuries sustained in the explosion, all minor, are still there.”
“That implies that there is some volition either necessary or possible in the healing effort,” said Gish.
“Well, yeah, because that is just what I intended. Once in the trance state, I was able to see the break in her bone, and reach in to meld the ends back whole. I guess her waking up was just part of the process.”
“No,” said Gish. “What I mean is that there wasn’t just a systemic ‘healing’ which took place, such as when any of you touched the artifact. That is my understanding of what happened to you previously, correct?”
Tops nodded. “According to my equipment, anyway.”
“Yeah, and it felt like hell,” said Jackie Gates.
Duc considered her a long time. “Perhaps more like purgatory. Our bodies were purified of all previous injury and disease. Cleansed by fire.”
“I didn’t know you were religious.”
Duc shrugged. “Never was, particularly. But you can’t deny that we’ve been . . . changed.”
“My point is that there seems to be some effect of will on the healing energy. Whether it is to focus it, or restrict it, cannot be determined from just this one experiment,” said Gish. “In either case, it is significant. Chu Ling, how does your shoulder feel?”
“OK. Mr. Jon touched it.”
“Any soreness where he touched it, or any hurt?”
She shook her head. “No.”
The scientist looked at Jon. There was a hardness to the look, and in a slightly demanding voice he said, “Heal me.”
“What?”
“I said heal me. I was injured in the same explosion as the girl.”
“But you’re already OK, just need a little rest.” Jon glanced at Tops. “Right?”
“Probably not completely. But he’ll be OK in time,” said the doctor.
“So, heal me,” repeated Gish. “I want to be healed, now. You did it for her, you can do it for me.”
A little embarrassed, and not sure what else to do, Jon stepped over to the side of Gish’s bed. He closed his eyes, and once again concentrated in the relaxed way he had previously. Feeling the energy well up in his palms, he reached out his still bare hands to the sides of Gish’s head, and went to touch him.
Something did happen on contact, but it was just a flash, just a slight tingle. There was no clean flow of energy, no snap of connection, and no sidestep into the cave. He opened his eyes and looked at Gish, then around to the others. “Um, it doesn’t seem to be working. Maybe I’ve used it all up on Chu Ling.”
“It’s OK. That tells us a lot,” said Gish, his tone much softer. He reached up and lightly patted Jon’s arm. “I suspect that either the damage is too minor to trouble with now, or there was something about my demanding attitude.”
“It must come freely offered,” said Duc.
“Right. Sorry, Jon, I wanted to put you on the spot,” said Gish.
“No, that’s OK,” said Jon. “I imagine that we’ll have to get used to it.”
“Let me try,” said Duc. He got up and went over to the other side of the bed. Head down for a moment, he rubbed his hands together, as Jon had seen him do prior to manipulating one of his sculptural creations. Then his head came up and his hand reached out, cupping the sides of Gish’s head gently. There was a depth, a calmness, to his eyes that Jon had never seen before. He seemed transfixed by something, concentrating very hard. In an almost whisper Duc spoke. “Slight darkness there, like a smudge on a screen. But the area all around it is brighter, healing and rerouting. Soon, you’ll never be able to tell it was damaged.”
Gish nodded slightly as he reached up and lightly touched the hands holding him. Gently, and sincerely, he said, “Thank you.”
Duc shook his head as though to clear it, then looked around the room. “That was odd. For a moment it was like I was back in my studio, working. But I knew the whole time where I was, and who was around me, what I was doing.”
“Robert, what did you feel?” asked Tops.
“Just the slightest hint of a tingle where his hands touched me. Almost nothing.”
“He has deva light, too,” said Chu Ling, pointing at Duc. Then she looked at Jackie. “You, too. Like Ling say before, you glow.”
“Ling, you said before that some of the other girls where you came from could heal people. Did they have this deva light? Did they glow?”
Ling frowned as she thought. “Something like. But not so bright.”
“Wait a second . . . you didn’t tell us about this . . . ” said Jackie.
“It actually makes some kind of sense,” said Tops. “I mean, it fits with the genetic manipulation for virus resistance, and the structural changes we’ve seen.”
“It explains a great deal.” Gish, eyes narrowed, considered the girl. “For how many centuries have we had the legend of those who could heal with a touch? Of miracles? Above and beyond the rare occasions when the artifacts align just right, these healers are part of our folklore, even part of our cultural beliefs. There must always be a few combinations of our DNA that allow us to access this healing energy, in spite of the embargo caused by the artifacts. Someone has just found the combination, reinforced it, and brought it to the fore in the expression of the genes of these girls.”
“Almost like it was planned,” said Jackie, absently, almost to herself.
“Not necessarily. They may have just been looking for genes that would make the clones resistant to the virus, and stumbled across this. Or they may have been looking for something else entirely.” Gish looked at Tops, who nodded in agreement. “Given that we’ve seen this healing energy manifest on a wide scale before, there must be some latent ability to access it in at least a significant portion of the population.”
“Which would explain us,” said Duc, with a slight hand gesture to Jon and Jackie. “Why we’re able to do this.”
“Perhaps,” said Gish. “Or perhaps there’s something else going on.”
“Either way, it’s something that we can use.” Jon looked around the room.
“You don’t know yet that you can do anything for Diabolus,” said Tops. “Healing a broken bone is one thing, clearing out a systemic viral infection is something else.”
“Well, about time we found out.” He looked at her. “You have it?”
She nodded. “Yeah, undoubtably picked it up from one of the first cases. Of course, I’ve been taking a full course of antivirals to delay onset of any symptoms . . .”
But Jon could now see a slight flush to her face. There was a touch of sweat on the temples he hadn’t noticed before, and a pallor to her skin. For a second this seemed familiar, but he couldn’t place it. “Yeah, I can see it now that I’m thinking about it.”
She raised an eyebrow, but said only, “So?”
“So, have a seat.” He gestured to a nearby chair.
Tops looked around at the others, took the chair. “Right. I didn’t detect anything when you worked on Ling, but maybe my pc will pick up something this time. Give me a moment to get it ready.”
Jon nodded, let her do what she needed to do as he closed his eyes and prepared himself. Stepping over behind the chair, he took a deep breath and let it out slowly, felt his awareness start to shift, a now-familiar tingling cross his palms. Taking another breath, he closed his eyes and lifted his hands slightly, so they were just about to the level of her shoulders. Now the warm flow started again at the base of his skull, smoothly moving down and through his arms to his hands, ready.
“OK,” said Tops, speaking just above a whisper.
His hands settled gently on her shoulders. There was a deep flash of blue even though his eyes were still closed, and he felt the connection. Now the energy flowed, into her and then back. There was a sensual, almost sexual, quality to it in the way it wrapped up his entire awareness, made him feel like he was soaring. The deep blue field in his vision now resolved and something came into focus, like he was looking into an old-fashioned microscope. It wasn’t a virus he saw, at least not the kind he was familiar with from scanning images. It was more like a misshapen toy or piece of a three dimensional puzzle, an abstract image of the real thing. Concentrating, he could feel his energy move toward it, touch it, turn it around and over, until he found the weak spot, the place where it was ready to break, the flaw in the crystal. And with a touch, it shattered and melted away.
* * *
“Now you’ve found it.”
“Yeah.”
“The first part is done.”
Jon opened his eyes, saw the dreamtime Sidwell sitting on the edge of the pit, looking down at the artifact. “The first part?”
“Yes. You have much yet to do, but the first part is done.”
“What’s the second part?”
