1

Maya's voice draws me from the bottom of the sea. I struggle upward toward the sound, shivering from the cold of the depths.

Finally I pry open my gummy lids and see her face, that wonderful face with the jaguar eyes, shimmering above me. The image wavers and I let my lids drop, ready to sink back into the depths, but the voice hauls me up again like a fish on a gaff.

This time I keep my eyes open and look past Maya. I'm in the hut. Through the doorway I see a crimson sun sitting on the ocean.

Morning?

No. This is the west coast. That sun is setting . . . setting on my right leg, igniting it.

I open my mouth to speak but only a whistling gust of air escapes.

Maya shushes me and says, “Don't speak.”

But I must. This time I form words, and my voice sounds like sand pouring on dry corn husks.

“The shark . . . my leg . . .”

“You have deep cuts,” she says. “I have coated them with another unguent, and wrapped them. They will heal, but . . .”

“But what?”

“I will take you to a hospital if you wish.”

“No!” Propelled by a vision of myself in a hospital bed, flattened between the sheets like a faded, desiccated plant in the pages of a scrapbook, I bolt upright and grab her arms. “No! Please!”

“But I don't know what else to do,” she says.

“The Fifth Harmonic . . . isn't that why we came here?”

“But you are too weak. You cannot climb to the top of the hill.”

She's right. I'm lightheaded just sitting up—the room is tilting and spinning around us, but I hang on. And I'm cold. In all this rabid Mesoamerican heat and humidity, I'm shivering.

I know what's wrong: the recurrent night sweats, plus a steadily diminishing fluid intake have left me severely dehydrated. My mouth is dry, and even if I had a normal amount of saliva I wouldn't be able to swallow it. My blood pressure must be in the basement.

Maybe if I go to a hospital . . . just long enough to get rehydrated . . . a couple of liters via IV . . .

Who am I kidding? Once they get their tubes into me they'll never let me go.

Tubes . . . IVs . . .

“My duffel,” I say. “Get me my duffel.”

Maya gives me a puzzled expression. “Why?”

“The Kevorkian kit.”

Her jade eyes widen. “No, Will! It is not time yet.”

“It will help me.”

“No! I know I promised but—”

“Listen to me, Maya. I don't want the potassium now—just the fluid. The dextrose and water . . . directly into my circulation. It'll give me enough strength to—”

She smiles as her eyes light with understanding. “Of course! Of course!” She turns toward the duffel, then stops and turns back. “This is not a trick, I hope.”

“No. Not a trick. I promise.”

But if this doesn't work, I think it'll be time for the real thing.

I look down at the red-stained bandages on my throbbing right calf and feel the heat there. Ambrosio's words about the shark spitting out the skinny man drift back to me and I shudder. What if I'd been healthier and heavier? Perhaps Captain Carcinoma saved my life.

But if not for Captain Carcinoma I wouldn't have been in the water with the damn shark in the first place. I wouldn't even be in Mesoamerica.

And I wouldn't have met Maya . . . wonderful, wonderful Maya.

Trying to unravel that Gordian knot of chance and circumstance makes me even dizzier.

So strange how things work.

Reflected horizontal light from the sinking sun catches my eye and I see a rolled oilcloth. I uncoil it and there is my green tine. I hold it a moment, than arrange all four tines—red, gold, blue, and green—beside me, just like Maya's collection when I'd first seen them a world away in Katonah.

Maya returns with the kit and I remove one of the dextrose-andwater solution bags. Only 250ccs . . . I wish I'd brought the liter size. I unwrap the tubing and insert an end through the port at the bottom of the bag. I open the wheelcock and let enough run into the tube to chase out the air, but stop the flow before it spills—every drop is precious. I hand the whole assembly to Maya who holds the bag in one hand, the end of the tube in the other.

“Hang onto that for a minute and be ready to plug it in when I tell you.”

Now I tie the tourniquet around my left biceps. I pump my fist to fill the veins. Considering the impoverishment of my body fat, I expect them to pop out like mole burrows in a barren lawn, but they barely rise . . . further evidence of my dehydrated state. I tap and slap at the antecubital veins to tease the blood into their lumens, and finally one begins to rise.

“There,” I say, and reach for a butterfly—a short, high-gauge needle with plastic flaps attached to facilitate taping to the skin.

We have no alcohol, so I do without. My fingers tremble as I uncap the needle and press the beveled end against the flesh. I've got one vein here, and not a very good one. If I cause a blowout, I'll have to try the other arm, which means working with my left hand—not something I want to depend on.

I pump my fist a few more times, take a breath, then poke the needle tip through the skin. An instant's sting; I tighten inside as I see the vein begin to roll laterally; I push harder, chasing it, and am rewarded by a scarlet backflush into its short leader tube.

“Gotcha,” I say to the vein.

I hold up the end of the leader and Maya plugs the IV tube into the receptacle. She raises the bag, I open the wheelcock to max, and the solution begins to flow. Since we don't have tape, I hold the needle in place as the solution bag deflates . . . slowly . . . the small bore of the butterfly restricts the flow, but at least it's flowing.

Maya remains standing and together we watch the bag like two couch potatoes before a television.

Finally the bag is flat.

“Squeeze it,” I tell Maya, and she does.

After I milk the tubing, squeezing the last drop into my veins, I remove the needle and seal the hole with my thumb.

“How do you feel?” Maya says, watching me closely.

“Better.”

No lie. I could do with a liter or two, but I'm amazed at the energizing effect of a mere eight ounces of sugar water infused directly into my circulation.

I glance through the doorway. The sun is gone, leaving only a bloody smear on sky and water to mark its passing.

“We'd better get moving,” I say. “Take me to your leader.”

“You must go alone,” Maya says.

“Up that cliff?”

“The way is marked. I have brought you this far, but I can bring you no farther. What happens next is between you and the AllMother.”

I try to stand and I need Maya's help to get to my feet. A deep aching throb augments the burning in my right lower leg as I make a limping circle about the interior of the hut.

“How am I going to do this?”

“You must.”

The thought of climbing to that plateau is daunting enough, but to tackle it without Maya . . . and then to face whatever it is I'm supposed to face, without my guide . . .

My heart starts to hammer in my chest. I don't want to be alone. Not now.

“Where will you be?”

“Down here, praying to the All-Mother that I have broken down enough of your walls to allow her power to enter you . . . and for you to recognize and accept that energy when it comes.”

“But what do I do when I get up there?”

She begins to explain. . . .

The path is marked—if you call steps carved into the rock marked—but the climb is steep, and more often than not the whereabouts of the next step isn't obvious.

And the energy boost from the IV infusion is fading.

And my right leg is a molten lead weight.

I'm drenched with sweat, leaking the fluids I've so recently absorbed, filled with dread and yet strangely comfortable on this night so laden with expectation, no longer feeling apart from but a part of this place.

I see octets of spider eyes glinting from the shadows, I hear the sensuous rub of anaconda and poisonous fer-de-lance, the scurries and whispers of tiny night things, I sense the foliage around me coming alive and writhing to a primal rhythm beyond my auditory threshold, plucking at my clothing, inviting me to join their dance to the beat of the heart of the world.

Is all this the sum of my disease—fever, delirium, metastatic madness—or am I climbing into some sort of altered reality? I can't tell. Dehydration and its attendant electrolyte imbalances can do strange things to your brain, make you rammy, see things that aren't there, converse with people long dead.

I think I see Kelly sitting on one of the steps above me, but she disappears when I near. I see my parents, both dead now, frowning as they appraise the doomed, wounded, disheveled being their son has become. They fade too, replaced by Terziski holding a picture of the brown-eyed Maya-faced woman. I don't stop. I climb right through him, I leave them all behind, hauling upward, ever upward like an old, old man with a ruined leg, using vines and branches as banisters to take the steps one at a time—raise the good leg, drag up the bad, raise the good . . .

Until the bad leg will no longer support itself and I must crawl, conquering each step on hands and knees.

Light floods from on high. I look up and see the full moon, Gaea's barren daughter as Maya calls her, cresting the hill, and never in my life has she been so clear, so intolerably bright, so frighteningly close that I can trace each mountain and crater on her sad, wounded face.

I'm late. I should be there now, on the plateau, arranging myself and my tines as Maya directed. If I miss the moon's zenith point . . .

Only twenty feet to go. I must double my efforts to reach the top on time, but I can't move. The tines are now leaden weights in my pockets. I have no reserves to call on. Aching with exhaustion and the heartbreaking sense of defeat, I look up and see someone standing on the steps above me, blocking my way.

You idiot, he says. Look at you—risking life and limb to haul your sorry ass and a bunch of metal doodads up a hillside in the middle of nowhere. For what? For nothing. Because you know damn well that's what will happen up there—nothing!

I stare at him and mouth the word, “Who?”

But he ignores my question and laughs.

A “Fifth Harmonic”? A “new level of consciousness”—give me a break, will you? Admit it, Willy boy. In your heart of hearts you know this is an empty exercise, the last act of a puerile symbolic rebellion against the science that failed you. So okay, you've made your point, and now it's time to cut the crap, get real, and find some modicum of comfort in what little time is left to you.

I recognize him now. The old me . . . fuller featured, better hydrated, better nourished. Was that what I was like? I hope not. The old Will doesn't seem to understand what's happened here in Mesoamerica. Maybe he's right that no new level of consciousness will be waiting for me up there. But that's not the point.

What is the point, then, Willie boy?

I'm not exactly sure. I have no double-blind, randomized, statistically significant answer to that. In other words, I don't know what will happen up there.

But I do know that I began this journey a week ago with a stranger named Maya. I know that this stranger has now become the center of my rapidly contracting universe. And I know that my journey will be concluded not with “some modicum of comfort,” but atop this plateau.

Completing the journey I began with Maya—that is the end. If it proves to be a means to something else, wonderful—I am more than ready to be made whole again, to reach a new level of consciousness. But if nothing else happens, I will have no regrets. What I've seen and felt and learned on the path to this point is justification enough.

So, no matter what it takes, I will finish what I began.

And I know even the old Will must appreciate that.

“Get out of my way,” I mouth, and he fades from sight.

Desperation fires my limbs. From somewhere in my wasted system I extract new strength and resume my crawl. The twenty vertical feet seem like twenty stories, but I don't look up. I look no farther than the next step. One step at a time, each its own Everest. Conquer one, and then the next, and the one after that . . .

And then there are no more steps. A flat, barren expanse of volcanic granite stretches before me. Toward the rear I see a tall tree with a slim, straight, branchless trunk, topped by a dome of leaves glowing silver in the moonlight. A ceiba tree, a silk-cotton tree . . . Maya's World Tree.

I'm here. On the plateau. I've made it.

I look over my shoulder at the world below, nearly day-bright under this brilliant moon. I see the roofs of the village, the white stripe of beach, and the glittering ocean beyond it. And on that beach, at the waterline, a lone tiny figure. Somehow I know it's Maya, standing there alone, watching . . . waiting.

I know she can't see me, but I wave. It's all I can do to lift my arm. Then I turn and start to drag myself across the rock. I try to recall Maya's instructions.

Not far from the edge is a large circle carved into the rock. You will find it in the shadow of the leaves of the World Tree.

With my eyes I follow the impossibly long line of the ceiba's trunk shadow across the rock to the splotch of black cast by its leaves.

Not far? Not for a walking man, perhaps. But a continent away for this crawling man.

I aim for the leaf shadow. The rough granite, still warm from the oven of the day, tears at my palms and forearms, and wears the knees of my pants. I struggle to within half a dozen feet of the shadow and stop, just about in. I listen to the harsh rattle of air struggling through my constricting throat and swear I've got no more to give . . . can't move another inch.

I collapse flat on my belly, panting, gulping sobbing breaths as I try to slide myself across the rock. I reach out, clawing ahead, certain that I can't advance another inch . . .

And feel my hand slide down a grooved wall. I lift my head. I'm there. A circular concavity, ten feet or so across, carved out of the living rock, stretches ahead of me. But only partly in shadow—more than half of its circular expanse is moonlit.

Maya's words rush back at me.

You must be positioned before the shadow of the World Tree flees the circle.

From the looks of things, that won't be long—I can almost see the shadow moving away. With a final desperate burst of strength I force myself ahead, roll down the six-inch edge, and crawl to the center of the depression. Along the way I find what feel like peg holes carved into the rock.

Two lines of holes cross at the center of the circle. They point to the four corners of the world. You must reach the center . . .

I do. I find where the lines cross, and slump there. Made it.

. . . and place a tine in a hole at each of the four corners. The fire tine must face the east . . .

I fish the tines out of my pockets and hold them up. The moonlight does strange things to them . . . the colors look odd, subtly altered. I glance around. I know where the Pacific is, so I insert the fire tine in a peg hole of the line heading the opposite way.

. . . the air tine faces north, the earth tine south, and the water tine west. Do not place them too far from the center. They must remain within easy reach.

Done, done, and done. I look and see the World Tree shadow hovering on the edge of the depression. Have to hurry.

Then you must lie naked on your back, touching the fire tine with your left hand, the air tine with your right, the earth and water tines with your feet.

I shrug off my clothes, stretch out on my back, and position myself according to Maya's instructions. I lay there under the moon and stars, spread eagled in the concavity like a plucked chicken in a skillet.

The moon is so bright it blots out the stars. And it's so silent here—the night sounds have faded away.

I turn my head and watch the last traces of the World Tree's shadow slide clear of the circle . . . and as it does, I feel a tingle in my right hand and see the air tine begin to glow.

Or is it just a trick of the moonlight?

I feel a similar tingle in my left hand and see the fire tine pulsing with a red light. I'm too weak to lift my head to check the other tines, but by the tingle in my feet I assume they're glowing as well.

And then I hear a sound . . . no, sounds. High-pitched notes, ringing softly in the night, just this side of my auditory threshold. It's the tines. They're ringing. I close my eyes to better focus on the sounds. I reach for them and find them, draw them closer. And as they near, they blend, harmonizing into a single glorious resonance. I open my eyes—

And cry out!

The moon has moved closer! It hovers over me, moving closer still, taking over the whole of the sky. I feel I could reach out and touch it if only I had the strength.

It draws closer still until I fear it will crush me. I feel the tug of its gravity, pulling me from the depression, but I grip the tines and hang on. And then I feel another force, this one pushing against my back, forcing my body upward until I'm stretched and bowed like some live insect pinned to a board. I can hold on no longer. The force from behind is ripping through my spine, erupting through my chest. I'm dying, I must be dying.

I scream into the vault of the night—

And then . . .

I am elsewhere.

I see nothing now, but have a sense of a huge void yawning around me, and I am falling through it. I feel as if I've left my body, and I wonder if this is death, if I am going to gaze from above at the empty shell of my body and then move off into that fabled tunnel of light.

But this lasts for only a heartbeat or two, then the void collapses and I am in a very crowded place, if I can call whatever this is a place, and I am still falling.

And now I realize that I am still in my body, truly inside my body, falling through it, completely aware of this organism that has housed me since conception.

Completely aware . . . not merely through the ordinary senses that filter through the conscious and subconscious, but in other ways that I never imagined possible.

Is this the new level of awareness Maya mentioned? Is this the Fifth Harmonic?

Whatever this is called, I am aware of every organ, every tissue, every cell in my body.

More than aware, I am here. I see the cells, I hear them, I feel them, and it's too much, too much, too much—the detail, the noise, the incessant activity, like being thrust into the center of an infinite hive of manic adrenalized bees, so much more than I can absorb or comprehend or tolerate. I must cut back the overwhelming input, shut down the feeds, and narrow my focus . . .

I constrict my awareness until I am outside a single cell. I press up against its soft translucent membrane like a street urchin outside a bakery window. I watch the raw nutrients around me slip through to the cytoplasm, I hear the rhythm of the organelles within as they assemble their assigned proteins and package them for export.

I too slip through the membrane, gliding past the mitochondria and endoplasmic reticulum toward the nucleus where I see the switchbacked coils of DNA arranged within, so close, so clear I can count the base pairs on the helixes.

I'm frightened. I don't understand this. What's happening to me? Am I losing my mind? Is this another hallucination, a late aftereffect of Ambrosio's teonancatl juice?

But I seem to be in control here, and that eases my fears somewhat. I loosen the reins—just a little—on my awareness and gradually open myself to more cells and tissues. And as I do I become aware of a sound, growing in volume, ethereal, musical, yet distinctly unlike the tones I heard from the tines. These are sung by voices, tiny yet not high-pitched, hundreds, thousands, millions of voices, growing, swelling, not in my ears but in my consciousness. Myriad tiny voices, yet I feel I can pick out each one and hear its note.

And as I sift through the tones that make up this chorus, I pick out sounds of discord. Some only mildly off key, others harsh and atonal, grating voices that sour the harmony.

I isolate two discordant subchoruses echoing from opposite directions. I home in on one and flow there. As I near the source I sense increased activity, mounting steadily until I find myself in a war zone. My defense mechanisms are out in force: macrophages, the huge voracious cells that gobble up bacteria, viruses, and anything else they come across that doesn't belong, are rushing back and forth, attacking and digesting microbial invaders, protecting my repair mechanisms as they tend to the task of reconstructing landscapes of severely mangled tissue.

I realize I'm in my right calf where my cells are struggling to undo the damage done by the shark's teeth.

Struggling is the word. The defenders and the builders cannot work at full capacity. They're crying out to the rest of my body for the raw materials they need to manufacture the proteins for healing, reconstruction, and defense, but they're not receiving them. I search for a way to help, to increase the flow of nutrients to the war zone. I open the arterioles feeding the area; this increases the blood supply, but that's not the problem. The blood itself is depleted of nutrients. They're being siphoned off somewhere else.

And I know where.

I home in on the other discordant notes. These are louder, and originate at the other end of my body. I move toward the sound, aware of its source, dreading to face it, yet knowing I must.

In my throat I find the tumor. This is not the cartoonish Captain Carcinoma of my teonancatl dream. No lumpish megalomaniacal cyclops with a booming voice, this is the real thing—a megalopolis of cellular chaos where matted sheets of deformed cells with bizarre nuclei wail a mindless atonal cacophony as they grow, swell, divide . . . grow, swell, divide in rapid cycles of mitotic madness—and it is so much more frightening than Captain Carcinoma.

Here it is . . . here is the mass of mutated cells that is slowly choking off my life. But where is the frenzied immune activity I'd seen in my leg? All activity here is the malignancy's. My defenders, my phagocytes and antibodies, hurry past, rushing no doubt to my injured leg, utterly oblivious to the monster that is devouring their world from under them.

Blind hatred explodes within me and I surrender to it. I yearn for a weapon so I can attack the tumor. I see a sudden flash of light and one of the tines—the fire tine—appears before me, alive with tongues of flame. The sight of it startles me. What am I supposed to do with it?

And then I know. I grab it and leap upon the tumor, tearing at the membranes of its cells, ripping them open, spilling their contents, rending cell after cell until I am awash in cytoplasm.

I stop, exhausted, surveying the carnage I have wrought . . . and it is negligible. I've barely scratched the surface.

I watch the surviving cells, the oblivious masses of remaining cells continue their mad, headlong race of division and multiplication as if nothing has happened.

A head-on assault obviously won't work. Nor can I replace the protective Rb and p53 proteins missing from each tumor cell. At one point, months ago perhaps, I could have made a preemptive strike when the malignancy was small and annihilated it. But now . . . now it is huge, its cells numbering in the billions, and it has colonized farflung reaches of my body.

I am doomed unless I find a way to alert my immune system.

Desperate, I flow to one of the lymph nodes in my neck. Here is where the first skirmishes took place. The alarm should have gone out from here to the rest of my body—Mutiny! Mutiny!

But I see no signs of a struggle; instead an insidious fifth-column invasion has taken place. The tumor cells have quietly infiltrated the node and taken up residence, all the while continuing the wild division begun by their parent, and have crowded out most of the original occupants. Though the lymph node fairly bulges at its seams with malignant cells, the few remaining defender cells remain oblivious to them.

As I watch the tumor cells divide, I want to scream at my defenders to wake up and attack. Chew up the bastards and spit them out!

Maybe if I set an example. I still have the fire tine, so I thrust it into the chaotic nucleus of the nearest tumor cell just as it is preparing to divide. I use it to slash at the DNA . . . but the mitosis continues unabated.

I back away, defeated, discouraged. Frustration claws at me as the one cell becomes two. I stand helpless, crying out for a solution. What damn good is this new level of awareness, this vaunted Fifth Harmonic if I can't—?

Sudden movement catches my attention. A formerly idle white blood cell suddenly darts past me and leaps on one of the new tumor cells. It quickly engulfs it, then moves on to the other. I watch, stunned, as it devours the second.

What just happened?

I find another malignant cell preparing to divide and I use the tine again to slash at its nucleus. I watch closely this time as it divides and I notice a mark on the membranes of the new cells . . . an irregularly shaped scarlike defect.

And suddenly another white cell is there, engulfing the pair of new tumor cells.

It must be the scar . . . the defenders see the membrane defect as an alien attribute—a mark of Cain—and attack the cell as an outsider.

And now I see the other white cells stirring, alerted that something is up. Their membranes ripple as they scramble to readiness. They pause, then begin a frontal assault on the other tumor cells in the node—the unmarked cells. Some message has been passed . . . a marginally aberrant protein in the tumor membranes that previously has been allowed to pass is now designated as foreign.

The slaughter begins. The malignant cells have no defenses— they've survived this long only by their ability to pass as normal cells. Now that they've been unmasked, they're sitting ducks.

But even this is not enough. The tumor is too vast and widespread at this point. My immune system is weakened and disorganized, decimated by the months the cancer has had free rein to run wild through my body. Given enough time and a sufficient supply of nutrients, the system might be able to rebuild itself and conquer the tumor, but it has neither. Dehydration and malnutrition favor the greedy malignancy.

Demoralized and disheartened, I move away. If I could destroy the primary tumor mass, I could relieve the pressure against my esophagus. I could drink again. I could eat real food. I could build up my nutritional reserves and buy time for my defense forces. I could give this monster a run for its money.

But how?

I return to the primary site where the cancer was born. I stand on its border, in the teeming, burgeoning suburbs that constrict my esophagus and abut my trachea, and I glare at the blazing heart of its center city.

If only it had a true heart. Or a brain. A life center I could strike at and destroy. But a tumor is the soul of polycentrism—each individual cell is a potential new tumor.

I decide to travel to its malignant center anyway, to see where the end of my life began. The surest path there is along the tangle of new blood vessels the cancer has created to feed itself. I start to follow—

And then stop, my mind suddenly awhirl with possibilities.

New blood vessels . . . angiogenesis. A successful tumor has a knack for stimulating existing blood vessels to form new branches and send them its way to feed its growing cell population. A cancer can break all sorts of rules but it cannot get around the necessity of a steady blood supply to survive. No tissue, normal or malignant, can grow or even exist without that.

This one is no exception.

And here I am, watching my own pulsing arteries pump a continuous stream of blood into the tumor mass, feeding it. Can I do something about that? The tumor is already starving me—a little turnabout would be more than fair play.

But how? Find that tine and slash the arteries?

No . . . I want to kill the tumor, not me.

Block the arteries, maybe?

Again—how?

Can I narrow them? I can sure as hell try.

I start small. I concentrate on a nearby arteriole, willing the smooth muscle cells within its wall—my cells—to contract, constricting the lumen. And as I watch, I see a section of its tubular length shrink, reducing its inner diameter by a third, then a half, then all the way down to ninety percent. With only ten percent of the original flow moving through, the blood cells crowd against each other. I stimulate the sludging platelets to adhere, triggering a clot.

Done! The arteriole is plugged. Nothing flows through it now. Exaltation surges through me like electric fire.

The blood behind the blockage backs up to the nearest proximal branch and shunts away to down that channel. Keeping the first vessel constricted, I move to the next one, constricting and clotting its lumen exactly as I did the first. I keep moving, spreading my influence from vessel to vessel, tackling bigger and bigger arteries, systematically shutting down the tumor's life lines, cutting off its oxygen, strangling the filthy rotten bastard tissue.

The tumor begins screaming for more blood, for new vasculature to replace the suddenly defective infrastructure. But I allow no new vessels to form. I haven't been able to block every arteriole, but I'm throttling large areas of the mass, causing them to change color, turning them a mottled blue gray as those cells choke for oxygen. The tumor cannot move, but I can almost see it writhing in agony, and that only spurs me to clamp down harder on its blood supply. I scream like a madman.

Thought you had the playing field all to yourself, didn't you? Figured you had a lock on this, right? Well listen up, you slimy bastard! I want my life back. I'M in charge now, and you—you're fucking DEAD!!

The rational part of me knows that the tumor is not an entity, that it has no will, and can't hear me, but the rest of me that wants vengeance is in control now, and I'm Ulysses home from Troy, royally pissed and cleaning house. I'm wild, I'm crazed, I've been helpless so long before this monster that I'm out of control.

And then, at last, it begins. The tumor cells begin to lyse. That's a fancy scientific term for explosive cellular death. But I can't be objective here. If I had feet I'd dance. I watch with ecstatic glee as the membranes rupture and spew their contents into the intercellular spaces. Huge matted sheets of malignant cells leak and shrivel and die. The main body of the tumor begins to wither. And still I maintain my murderous stranglehold, clamping down until the bulk of its cells lie in ruin.

My own strength is waning, and finally I release control and let bloodflow resume to the area. White cells flood the region to begin mopping up the necrotic debris.

My vision blurs, the images waver. I see a flash and suddenly I am back on the plateau, bathed in sweat, lying on my side, coughing, retching, gagging. I spit foul-tasting tissue onto the stone. In the growing light it looks red . . . bloody. That couldn't be part of Captain Carcinoma, could it?

I look around. I'm still in the center of the circular depression, but the moon is gone, the stars are fading, and the sky is glowing toward the east.

What just happened? How long have I been here? I know I feel different, transformed, but I am even weaker than before.

My mouth fills with salty fluid. I swallow convulsively and—

Swallow? Did I just swallow?

“Will?”

I turn and see Maya hurrying across the plateau toward me. She's dressed in the long traditional huipil that covers her from neck to ankles, but even in the dim light she looks absolutely wonderful.

I try to sit up but I haven't the strength. I can't even speak.

She carries a container and as she drops to her knees beside me she holds it toward my lips.

“Can you?” she says in a voice thick with emotions—I hear hope and fear at war in those two words.

I open my mouth and she pours in a few drops of the milky mix that has sustained me these past few days. It tastes wonderful and I swallow it.

I swallow it!

I look up at her and nod. “More, please?”

And my voice, though still hoarse, is clearer—the pressure on my laryngeal nerve has eased!

Maya begins to sob as she pours more milk into my mouth. I can barely swallow it, not because of pain or constriction, but because I'm crying too. I get it down, though—I'm too ravenous and thirsty to let anything halt the flow of this marvelous nectar of the goddess—and between sobs she feeds me more, sip after sip until—

“That is enough for now,” Maya says. “Too much will make you sick.”

I nod. I want to upend the jug over my face but I know she's right.

“What happened?” I say.

“You tell me.”

As I tell her about falling into my body, seeing my cells and manipulating my life processes, she begins nodding, then grinning, and her smile widens and widens until finally, when I tell her about strangling the major portion of my tumor at its primary site, she clutches my hands, throws back her head, and laughs.

“Yes! Oh, yes, Will!” she shouts with tears running down her cheeks. “You have done it. You have found the Fifth Harmonic!”

Had I? I'm not sure. Something wonderful and transforming has happened . . . something that finally deserves that misused, beatento-death word, incredible. But what?

“Is it the sound I heard inside of me?”

“No, no,” she says. “The Fifth Harmonic is not a sound, it is a state of being, a state of complete harmony with your body and your self. It is the new level of awareness and consciousness I have been telling you about.”

“But I thought they were just words,” I say. “I never dreamed . . . I mean, I was conscious down to the cellular level. No, even further— to the molecular level.”

“Not was—are.”

“You mean, tonight wasn't just a one-shot deal?”

“Oh, no. Once you achieve the Fifth Harmonic, it is yours forever.”

“I can go back in? Any time I want? Because that tumor's not finished, not by a long shot.”

“Yes, any time you wish. You will have to go back again and again to root out all the metastases, but wait until you are stronger. You have no reserves right now.”

Already I feel stronger. I sit up and experience a rush of vertigo, but the world stops spinning after a few seconds—the world, but not my brain. I close my eyes and try to sort through what has happened, try to make sense of it.

So easy to write off the night's experiences as a dream, that the only altered states of awareness and consciousness I've experienced are a very elaborate set of hallucinations. And yet . . .

I prod my throat with my fingers . . . the knotted masses of the lymph nodes are still there, but they're undeniably smaller.

And then there's the fact that I can swallow now, and my voice is coming back.

I can act like an idiot and say I'm still hallucinating, or I can simply . . .

Accept.

“But why did you have to be so mysterious all along?” I say. “Why didn't you tell me this was what I was after?”

She gives me a wry grin. “And how would Cecil have reacted?”

Good point. Excellent point. Cecil would have run screaming back to Westchester. Even now, parts of me are falling all over themselves trying to find scientific explanations for what has happened.

I catch sight of the tines, still sitting in their notches at the four corners of the world.

“The tines,” I say, reaching out and clutching the fire tine, remembering how it placed the mark of Cain on a couple of the cancer cells. “They did it.”

I see Maya shaking her head.

“What's wrong?”

“You did it,” she says.

“What do you mean?”

She points to the tine lying cool and shiny in my palm.

“Dumbo feather,” she says with a grin.

“You're not going to sit there and tell me that I've had this ability all along are you?”

She's nodding. “All along.”

I gather up the other three tines. “Then why put me through the various hells of getting these things.”

“You had the capacity but not the know-how. You did not know how to tap into your ability, and even if you somehow learned the route, you were too locked away behind too many walls to reach it. You first had to remove the blocks and strip away the layers of insulation that separated you from true harmony with your own body. Usually it takes years to find your way to the Fifth Harmonic, but you did not have those years, so I had to give you a crash course. And to make that work, you had to want to reach it badly enough to make the necessary leap to find it. The tines helped focus you, but the power was there from the start.”

I think of Savanna and now I understand what she meant about “killing” her tumor. But . . .

“Wait a minute. What about Savanna? She didn't have years either. Don't tell me you hauled her down here and made her strap on a kite or play footsy with molten lava.”

Maya's expression grows serious. “Savanna was open. Not closed like you. You had so many walls, Will. Even the other night, when we were together, when you were inside me, I tried to reach inside you. I thought your walls might drop then, but they did not. Even at the height of passion, they kept me from you.”

That explains the way she pounded her fists against the sand. So it wasn't purely sexual frustration.

“Savanna was relatively easy,” Maya says. “She did not have your walls. Nor did she have your level of ability.”

“I don't get it.”

“Haven't you realized yet that you are special? That you are a curandero?”

“A healer.”

“Yes. Like me. There are not many of us. That is why the Mother wanted you saved.”

“Then not everybody can do what I just did?”

“We all have a self-healing power, but to varying degrees—some have very little, some have more. Savanna has an average level, but she couldn't have cured herself. Her tumor was too strong. She needed help.”

“Which you gave her.”

“Yes. Every so often someone comes along who not only can cure the self, but can guide others to a cure as well.”

I reach for the container and sip more of the milk mix as I try to fathom what Maya is saying.

“And I am one of those.”

Her eyes fairly glow. “Yes. You were born to heal. It is a fire within you. That is why you went against your father's wishes and chose medicine over law. That is why your personal life suffered because of your practice, why medicine always seemed to be the most important thing in your life. You are a healer, Will. It is as much a part of you as your fingerprints and the color of your skin. And now you can go on healing, but in a new and different way, a better way.”

“How? By entering a body and adjusting its physiology like I just did to myself?”

The residual Old Will tries to reject this, but I hammer him down.

Accept . . . accept . . .

Maya is nodding. “If the patient will let you. You cannot enter someone who does not want you. They must accept you.”

“That's . . . that's frightening.”

“Yes. Yes, it is. It is terrifying at first. And not always successful. Sometimes they will let you in but their systems will resist you. But when you and the patient are in harmony, you can work cures that seem miraculous. It is an indescribably glorious feeling, Will.”

Wonder fills me as I consider the implications. A vast vista of healing stretches before me. The power to restore bodies and change lives for the better, to give people a second chance like the one I've just received . . .

And suddenly I'm depressed.

“All these years,” I say. “What I could have done if I'd only known. I've wasted so much time. I wish you'd found me sooner.”

“So do I,” she says softly, staring at me. “For many reasons.”

I take her hand. “Yes. Why did I have to wait till middle age to find you . . . to find myself? We've got no time to waste, Maya.” My mind is filling, overflowing with possibilities. “We can do more than cure one person at a time. We can use our abilities to advance the entire field of medicine. We can see the workings of cells, sick and well. Imagine what a research tool this power can be! We can trigger a golden age of medicine!”

She's shaking her head. “Time is not a problem. But advancing the field of medicine . . . that is quite a problem.”

“Why? When they see—”

“But they will not see. The field of medicine, the entire world of science is filled with people like Wilbur Cecil Burleigh. You remember him, don't you?”

The truth of that is a bucket of cold water on the flame that was sputtering to life within me. I remember the man I was a week ago. I can imagine someone coming to him and saying, I have consciousness down to the cellular level.

Yeah, sure, buddy. And I've got a flying saucer parked outside that'll take you back to Alpha Centauri.

But I'm not giving up.

“I'll find a way. But it'll take time and we've none to waste.”

“Don't worry about time,” she says. “You will have as much as you want. But before you go anywhere or do anything you must get to know your power, learn its limits, become comfortable with it, explore every nook and cranny of your body. You must chase down and eliminate the cancer cells to the very last one. Then you must search out other trouble spots in your body, and learn to repair them: find the narrowing arteries and clear them, restore worn cartilage in arthritic joints, replace aging or damaged cells with new ones—”

Wonder fills me. “I can do that?”

“Of course. You are in complete control of your body now.”

“But if I can replace aging cells . . .”

“Yes?” Her voice is heavy with expectation.

“Then I don't have to . . .”

A slow smile is stretching her lips, deepening her dimples. “Did I not tell you that time is not a problem?”

And now all my slowly growing strength seems to desert me in a rush. I have to put out a hand to keep from falling back onto the stone. The nagging questions, the contradictions about the various Maya Quennells in Terziski's reports tumble back to me.

“Maya,” I say, and my voice is hoarse again, but not from the tumor. “The Maya Quennell who graduated from the Sorbonne in 1938 . . . who is she?”

“Me.”

“And the Maya Quennell arrested at the Oregon logging camp in 1972?”

“Also me. I could not sit idly by and let them cut down the Mother's wonderful ancient trees to make wood pulp.”

Overwhelmed, I close my eyes. “Maya . . . how old are you?”

“I will be ninety next March.”

She says it so casually.

“But your eyes . . . they're different from the eyes in the mug shot. Did you . . .?”

“Change them? Yes. When I was arrested and booked, I realized that I was leaving behind a photographic record that might catch up to me later. I thought changing my eye color from dark brown to light green would be enough. I know now that I should have changed my fingerprints as well.”

“You can do that?”

“We can do that. It takes much time and patience, but many changes are possible.”

“But why do you want to keep your power a secret?”

Her lips settled into a tight, grim line. “Do you think you can present your power to the world and be welcomed with open arms? You will learn that the world is filled with individuals and organizations—especially the scientific communities and the world-hating religions—who will see you as a threat. We must tread softly, Will. We must do our work in the interstices and always be on the lookout for others like us.”

I know she is right about the threat we present to certain powerful segments of the world, yet I am not sure that I can keep this new power hidden forever. Maya is wise and she's been at this so much longer. I will follow her lead . . . for now.

She seems to read my mind.

“Do not think you can go back to who you were, what you were, and where you were. If you try, you will regret it.”

Maya rises and holds out her hands to me. I take them and let her pull me to my feet. My muscles are weak and my shaky legs threaten to buckle, but I struggle upright and lock my knees as she wraps me in her arms and whispers in my ear.

“Your new life does not come without a price, Will. The old you is gone. You have emerged from the chrysalis that was Wilbur Cecil Burleigh. A line has been drawn across the course of your life, and you can never cross back. From this moment onward you will see the world—life, existence, everything—in a new light that will keep you one step removed from most of humanity. You will be different, Will, and people will sense that.”

“What do I care about other people if I have you?” I say. “Because I truly love you, Maya.” And I've never meant that as much as I do now. This is more than a beautiful, loving, caring woman, this is a soulmate. If there is a Sixth Harmonic, it is what I feel when I look at Maya. All other women—all other people—I have known in my life seem to have lost substance, faded, dissipated, until there is only Maya. “I loved you yesterday morning, and I love you now, and I will love you as long as I breathe.”

I hear her sob. I try to push back to see her face but she clings to me.

“What's wrong?”

“I have been so lonely.”

And I realize how isolated she must have been all these years. Never aging while everyone she cares about grows old and dies.

“Teach me,” I say. “And together we'll work wonders.”

Maya pulls back a few inches and I see tears on her cheeks.

“Not together, I am afraid.”

Something in her voice stops my breath. “What?”

“We will be as one, always, and we will stay here together for a long time while I teach you all I know, but then we must part.”

My skin goes cold. “No! What are you saying?”

“Only for a time, Will. We cannot be always together.”

“Why not?”

“It is Gaea's way that we separate at times. There are so few of us, and so much to do. Surely you see that. But you will not be losing me, Will. We will always know where the other is, we will always be able to find each other, and when we do it will be as if we were never apart.”

Her assurances ease my pain, but only slightly. I feel I'm losing almost as much as I've gained.

“But what about those in-between times?” I say.

“You will be traveling, honing your powers and healing others. Come.”

She breaks free, takes my hand, and guides me to the edge of the plateau.

We stand together, looking out over the village and the ocean. It's a new day for us, a new world for me.

“We have work to do and a love to share, you and I,” Maya whispers. “And all the time in the world to do it.”