“Come on, Juna,” Toivo said. “It’s not that bad. I’ll bet you get some great offers.”
“Maybe,” Juna said doubtfully.
“Give yourself a few days before you start worrying,” Toivo advised. “You’re starting at the hospital tomorrow, and that’s enough to worry about.”
“I know,” Juna said. “They didn’t seem to be too eager to see us when we stopped in the other day. I don’t think that they know what to do with us.”
Dr. Engle grinned wolfishly. “That’ll change once they understand the Tendu and their capabilities.”
“I hope so,” she said.
“It will be all right,” Ukatonen assured her. “They are healers. It should be easy to achieve harmony.”
“Yes, en, but they are also humans. They don’t understand you.”
“But they will, Eerin,” Ukatonen told her. “Moki and I will teach them, as we have taught others.”
“I hope so, en. I hope so.”
Six
Ukatonen followed Juna and the doctors as they showed him through the hospital. He had expected something like the sickbay on the Homa Darabi Maru: a few beds, mostly empty, with one or two injured people on their way to recovery. Instead they were walking past room after room full of sick and injured people.
The heavy sour scent of sick humans constricted his nostrils and caught in the back of his throat. He had to work to keep from breathing through his mouth. He’d never dreamed that there could be this many sick people in the world. It was the most horrific thing he had ever seen.
The humans could build bubbles of life in the emptiness of space. Their sky rafts could sail across the unimaginable distance between their world and his. And yet, they had places like these, full of illness and pain. How could they let this happen?
The farther they walked, the more horrified Ukatonen became. Finally, they stopped at a room full of beeping, blinking machines. In the midst of these machines lay a man. There were tubes and wires going into his nose, on his chest, and out of his arms, connecting the man to the machines. His hair was very white, and his skin was thin and wrinkled in the manner of old humans.
“He is dying,” one of the doctors told the Tendu. “Can you help him?”
“We will try,” Ukatonen said. The sick man’s skin felt dry and thin as paper. He smelled sour, like rising pika dough, and his hand lay limply in Ukatonen’s. Ukatonen glanced at Moki, who had moved into position on the other side of the bed. They grasped the man’s arms, and linked with him.
The state of the man’s body was even more of a shock than the hospital had been. Ukatonen had never felt a creature so out of harmony with itself. The man’s body was a mass of out-of-control cells, his heartbeat was thready and thin, and his lungs were fillijig with fluid. There were deep internal scars where he had been cut open and organs had been removed.
Only the doctors’ machines and the medicines were keeping this human alive. The man was frightened and in pain; the sour, bitter tang of it pushed his body even further out of balance. It was appalling. Ukatonen enfolded the sick man’s presence, shutting out the pain, and easing the fear. He felt a sweet rush of gratitude and joy; then the man’s presence folded in on itself, and went away into death, leaving the shattered husk of his body behind.
Ukatonen gently eased out of the link, taking Moki with him.
“He is gone. You may shut off your machines now.”
One of the doctors examined the machines. He lifted the dead man’s eyelid and shone a light into his eye.
“His brain function has stopped. He’s dead,” the doctor reported. He reached over and shut off the machines. “Time of death, nine forty-five A.M.,” he reported somberly.
“You killed him!” one of the other doctors protested.
“He is in harmony now. Before— ” Ukatonen paused searching for words, “he did not want to live. Only his pain kept him tied here. I stopped the pain and the fear, and he left. Why did you not do this sooner?” he demanded. He could feel flickers of anger crossing his back.
Eerin touched Ukatonen’s arm to silence him. “Perhaps,” she suggested to the assembled doctors, “the Tendu should work on patients who are not at death’s door. There was nothing Ukatonen could do to heal this patient.”
She seemed angry, and Ukatonen lifted his ears in surprise.
Eerin began lecturing the doctors, telling them about what the Tendu did, and how they did it. Watching her talk to them, Ukatonen was reminded of her father soothing a skittish horse, and a ripple of amusement coursed down his back.
Moki slipped away from the arguing humans. He walked down the hall, and into a room full of sick children. Some of the children were playing listlessly, others were sitting idly in chairs, too sick to do more than watch the others play. The children stopped what they were doing and stared at him when he walked into the room.
“You’re Moki the Tendu!” a fragile little girl exclaimed. “I saw you on the Tri-V!”
She was a small child with pale, almost translucent skin. Her eyes were pale blue and surprisingly large, with dark shadows underneath them.
“Yes, I am,” Moki said. “And who are you?”
“My name is Shelley Richter,” she said. “Are you sick too?”
“No,” Moki answered, “we came here to make people better. Are you sick?”
“We all are,” she told him. “That’s why we’re here.”
“What’s wrong with you?” he asked.
“There’s a hole in my heart, and my lungs don’t get enough oxygen,” she explained.
“If you hold out your hands, like this,” he said, extending his arms for allu-a, “I’ll look and see if I can fix it.”
“Will it hurt?” she asked.
“It will be like pricking your finger on a thorn, but after that it won’t hurt at all.”
The little girl considered this information seriously.
“All right,” she said, holding out her arms. “Fix me, please.”
Moki sat down across from the little girl, and clasped her arms. He linked with her, and found the problem almost immediately. He slowed her heart as much as he could, giving her oxygen through his spurs. Working between beats, he closed the hole by encouraging the growth of overlapping flaps of tissue on either side of the hole, which he then fused together. It was delicate, challenging work. When he was done, Moki paused for a moment, savoring the rich taste of the girl’s newly oxygenated blood, then broke the link.
Shelley woke up. Her pale skin now had a faintly pink bloom. “Am I fixed yet?” she asked.
Moki nodded. “How do youjeel now?”
She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. “I don’t feel tired,” she said, “and I’m hungry.”
“That’s good,” Moki told her. “You should eat a big meal as soon as you can. Your body will need that.”
A little boy came up to him. “Mr. Moki, can you fix me too? I have leukemia.”
“What’s that?”
“Don’t you know?” he asked. “I thought you were a doctor.”
“No,” Moki said. “I’m a Tendu. Sit down and let me look inside you, and I’ll see if I can fix you.”
They linked. This one would be harder, he realized. The cells that ate disease in the boy’s blood had proliferated and thrown his entire body out of balance. Moki went deep inside the child’s bone marrow, searching for the cells that created the problem, killing those that were out of balance. He gently encouraged the proliferation of healthy cells, and filtered out the unbalanced killer cells.
He was undoing the damage from the medicines the doctors had used, when suddenly he was torn out of the link. He cried out in pain, colors flashing across his body. A human woman was standing over him, shouting. He scrambled away from her, and fled.