Marghe wished Thenike would come back. She needed to feel strong arms around her; she wanted to lay her head against Thenike’s belly and listen to see if she could hear the child that would grow up as soestre to the one living inside her own body. She wanted to talk and think about something other than Aoife’s unforgiving words, something other than change and death.
That night, Marghe found Sara Hiam sitting on the dry, dusty-smelling grass outside the hospital. She joined her.
“It smells good out here,” Hiam said.
Marghe nodded, then realized Hiam would not see that. “Yes.”
They sat quietly. The breeze blew warm, then cool; autumn was coming. In the distance a horse snorted.
“I like the nights,” Hiam said. “After six years on Estrade, the days down here seem too big, too intimidating. All that sky, and air. Sometimes I get nervous when a breeze swirls. I’m so used to air coming from one direction at a time, and always the same temperature.”
“The storms must have been hard for you.”
“Yes.”
Silence.
“Marghe, this world… You seem at home here. But it scares me. The wind scares me, the people. The virus. You scare me.”
“Me?”
“You’ve changed.”
Marghe did not know what to say. “Yes.”
Hiam moved restlessly. “There’s so much I don’t understand. Like your friend, Thenike. I’m sorry I called her a savage. I don’t know what she did, or how, but whatever it was, she saved Letitia’s life. How did she do that? She was right about the adjuvants, too.” A tiny silence. They understood each other: apologies given and accepted on both sides. “And you’re pregnant. And I don’t understand any of it. I want to know. I want you to tell me.”
Marghe wondered where to begin. She picked a long stem of grass and sniffed it, smelling the familiar spice of Jeep. “It’s the virus. It changes everything, It’s… Well, I have a theory about Thenike’s healing. I felt something, when she was running her hands over Letitia. Over the air around Letitia, really. I was trained to be sensitive to my own body; I think I’m more sensitive than most. Then when the virus became part of me, it was like that sensitivity increased a thousandfold. More. So when Thenike did what she did, I could feel it.” She stripped away the brownish outer layer of the stalk of grass. “I wonder if I might not, in time, learn to do it myself.”
“You’re not making much sense.”
Under the outer covering, the stem was green and juicy. Marghe put it in her mouth, chewed awhile. “I’ve been doing some reading lately. It turns out that every cell in the human body—in every other body, too, plant and animal—and every molecule and atom in that cell, is in a constant state of vibration. All this cell-by-cell excitation adds up to produce enough energy to change the electrical and magnetic properties of the space they occupy.”
“That’s nothing new.”
“No. Anyway, we all resonate on a particular, unique frequency, but because all humans radiate within a narrow wave band we all receive and transmit those signals.
All the time. We’re in constant communication with each other and with the outside world. Patterns of these waves explore everything close-by, so all the time we’re with other people we’re unconsciously probing them. And being probed.” She picked a shred of grass from her teeth. “I imagine if a person was sensitive enough, it would just be a matter of training to bring that kind of probing under conscious control.” She stared out at the dark, heaving sky. Thenike could probably explain this better. “Sara, how would you define healing?”
“Making someone better. Or, rather, helping—tricking, persuading—a body to heal itself.”
“Right. Modern medicine does it mechanically, like stitching, and chemically—antibiotics and things. But what about electrically? Magnetically?
Electrochemically?”
“We do that already,” Sara said thoughtfully. “Strap a power pack around a break and it heals anywhere up to six times as fast.”
Marghe nodded. “According to what I’ve been reading, injury, like Letitia’s, produces a disorganization of the normal, healthy electrical pattern. Are you with me?”
“Yes.”
“Now what if, what if a person has enough control over her magnetic field, her transmissions, to affect another’s? What if the healthy person’s patterns could interact with the sick person’s?”
Hiam looked dubious.
“Sara, when Thenike ran her hands around Letitia, my body could feel it! It was like her pattern was talking to mine, to all the eddies and flows of my cells, saying: See? See how you should be? Like this, this is how you’re supposed to go.”
“But how? I don’t understand how she can do it!”
“The virus, that’s how. Oh, Sara, the things I’ve seen! When I woke up after being sick, it was like becoming conscious for the first time, Like a blind person seeing color… No, that’s not right. It was just more. Like I could see better and hear better and smell better, like my kinesthetic sense was more highly developed.
There’s so much out there to notice, to feel. It’s almost as if the virus is part of this world, so that when the virus became part of me, I could see the world and feel it more clearly…”
Sara Hiam sat in obstinate silence.
“It’s the virus,” Marghe repeated more quietly. “It gets all tangled up in the DNA somehow, and changes things. Maybe it intensifies the semiconducting properties of our nervous systems. I don’t know. That’s something you’ll have to find out.
Viruses are what you know. I can only tell you that it’s my belief that the virus allows us greater control—much, much greater control—over the autonomic nervous system, and other things.”
Sara was still silent. Marghe decided to change tactics.
“I’ve been thinking about Letitia Dogias. You’ve heard about her behavior during storms?”
“Yes,” Sara said unwillingly.
“Have you had the opportunity to find out why?”
“I’ve run some tests.”
“And?”
“And I can’t find anything wrong with her. Nothing.”
“I think I know what’s wrong with her: she’s very sensitive to the buildup of energy around storms, but doesn’t know what it is she feels, or how to deal with it.
She’s got no biofeedback training at all. She overloads.”
“It could be a psychiatric condition.”
“It could. But it isn’t.”
The sky lit up in a long, vivid flash, then died back to inky black.
“What was that?” Sara asked.
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
They listened, but there was no noise except the wind in the grass and, from a long way off down the valley, a trail of laughter.
“I’m afraid,” Sara said from the dark. “Everything’s so different. You’re so different. I remember you up on Estrade. You were so… ordinary.”
“I’m different, yes.”
There was no way to explain how it felt. How it was to be able to remember in a way she would have thought impossible a year ago; how it felt to only have three fingers on her left hand, to have nearly died. How it felt to have another life growing inside her, to have a partner. A home.
“Change is just change, Sara. Not all good, not all bad. Just different.” They were quiet a long time, listening to the wind in the grass.
“I’m still afraid. Soon the virus will come for me, for Nyo and Sigrid. And I can do nothing to stop it. Nothing. I’m a doctor and I can’t stop it.”
“You can’t stop the common cold, either.”
“But that won’t kill me.”
“No.”