“You look like hell, son. I don’t mind tellin’ ya.”
“Doctor Fisher,” I said, “should I ever need a refresher course in candor, I trust you will be available to teach it.”
As the chief medical officer was leaning in so close that I thought our foreheads would touch, I more felt him laugh than heard him. When I had arrived, he happened to be milling about the reception area of Vanguard’s medical center cradling a mug of coffee in his large hands—practically in the same place that I had left him after my attempt to see T’Prynn. As soon as he spotted me, he ushered me back into an exam room personally rather than have me wait on an available medic.
I sat on an edge of the room’s only biobed as Fisher tended to my wounds while demonstrating his apparent habit of talking his way through procedures. I had to wonder whether he did this to steady himself as much as to soothe me; regardless, it seemed to work. I humored myself by trying to predict where he would choose to pause in a given sentence.
“This autosuture I’m . . . using here . . . runs a little slower than a dermal regenerator,” he said as he passed the device over my right eyebrow. The ice-blue glow of its emitter shone through my eyelid, and I could feel my skin tingle in response. “But I . . . use it on places like this because . . . it’s more precise. Newer isn’t always . . . better.”
“Not always,” I echoed.
He clicked off the autosuture. “You can open your eyes now. I know your lip is still pretty sore, but hold it down a minute while I recheck the root of that tooth I replaced.”
I complied despite the jolt of pain my action delivered, then I looked down my nose into his eyes as he peered into my mouth.
“Mm-hmm. Now, how did you lose this again?”
“I’m not able to tell you. I woke up this morning and it was gone.”
“Woke up or regained consciousness?”
“Little of both?”
Fisher raised the tip of a bone-knitting laser to my gumline, and I watched a hair-thin beam lance from the device and onto me. The sensation was different from the autosuture, but equally soothing.
“Got someone you can talk to about . . . all this?”
“Not really,” I said, still holding my lip down so he could work.
“Not really.”
“Okay, then. You can let go now.” I saw the beam snap off. “I can give you something that will take the edge off your pain. This may not be what you want to hear, but for facial wounds such as yours, sometimes it’s best to let the swelling subside naturally before we rush right in and fix anything.”
“That makes sense,” I said.
“I’m glad you concur.” Fisher did not look up from putting away his surgical instruments, but that did not silence him. “Did you ever track down Doctor M’Benga?”
“Actually, no, I didn’t. I’m certainly still interested in T’Prynn’s condition. It’s just that, well, I’ve had a few matters to attend to.”
“Kind of figured,” the physician said. “Typically, I would not circumvent Doctor M’Benga in matters of his patients. But being that you are here and all, I can make an exception in this instance, if you would like to see her.”
“You would do that?” I was genuinely surprised by the offer and had not even considered asking Fisher, given our last conversation. But I was not about to turn him down now, regardless of the fact that, physically and emotionally, I was as close to being a candidate for the biobed next to T’Prynn’s as I had ever been. “Please, I’m happy to go.”
Fisher led the way out of the exam room and down a corridor to an area marked with a simple sign: Isolation Ward 4. He pushed open the door and we entered silently. Fisher did not break stride as he approached T’Prynn lying on the diagnostic bed, whereas I found myself unconsciously slowing my pace. “Come ahead, Mister Pennington,” Fisher said, “I assure you that you’re not going to wake her.”
The Vulcan’s features were stoic yet soft as she reclined motionless, while tones from the biobed indicating her heart rate, respiration, and brainwave activity combined to create a rhythmic accompaniment to her apparent restfulness. On occasion, a nurse would come by to read a monitor or check a connection or even just to pause and place a hand on T’Prynn’s. There was no way of knowing whether such gestures made a difference in her treatment or whether the unconscious woman even noticed them, but the routine seemed to comfort everyone involved in her care.
After a few moments of being in T’Prynn’s presence— moments during which my thoughts did not wander outside what was happening right there—Doctor Fisher motioned me out of the ward. I followed him, noticing as we went back into the corridor that a breeze somehow had brought a chill to my cheeks. Then the physician reached over to pass me a disposable handkerchief.
I raised it to my cheeks and wiped away rivulets of tears. Evidently, without even realizing it, I had wept while standing with T’Prynn.
I felt a hand on my shoulder, and it was Doctor Fisher’s. “Tim, let’s take a walk.”
I followed him to a small staff lounge with a door that he closed for privacy’s sake. I sat in an armless upholstered chair and he took a seat in an identical one opposite mine. “I apologize, Doctor,” I said. “I’m not really sure what came over me in there.”
“You’re not the first to have that experience, and you won’t be the last.”
“Experience? I’m not sure what you mean.”
“It’s not easy to see someone in her condition, and an emotional response isn’t uncommon. Your reaction could stem from a number of things. It’s pretty obvious you have a lot of things going on in your world. I’m certainly aware of the history you share with T’Prynn, of the personal pain and loss she brought about for you. Doctor M’Benga even has this theory that T’Prynn or any other Vulcan in severe psychotic distress might be able to project a shadow of what they are feeling while in a comatose state. Think of it as a distress beacon from one psychic to another. And he suggests that in rare instances, the signal from the beacon is strong enough to be picked up by anyone around it.”
“Is that possible?”
“With those people, who the hell knows,” Fisher said. “But M’Benga hasn’t offered that theory yet to anyone but me, so treat that one as off the record.”
I laughed a little. “Right.”
“So, am I close?”
I mulled my words a bit before speaking. “My mind keeps returning to her breakdown. The pain I saw on her face. I thought seeing her in a state of calm and peace would help me rationalize that her pain is over, and push that image out of my mind.”
“Maybe you can push that image out of your mind by helping in some way,” he said, “if not her then definitely yourself. If you have been hanging on to your anger at her, if you have been feeling spiteful or hoping for retribution, what might be anchoring her pain in your mind is a good dose of guilt.”
“Oh, there’s plenty of that to go around, believe me,” I said. “With Reyes in the brig, T’Prynn in a coma, Quinn caught in the crossfire of an Orion mad as hell at me, and an entire Federation frightened about the return of ancient, wrathful aliens, hell, I’m the life of every party in the whole damn quadrant.”
“Oh, so you did all that by yourself.”
“Didn’t I? I got in this job—hell, I stay in this job—because I want to help put things right, not to be the architect of doom for everyone I know. But I’m not putting many things right these days.”
“Then consider this, Tim,” Fisher said. “Maybe you don’t try to engineer positive change one quadrant at a time or one planet at a time or one station at a time. Consider doing what’s right by one individual at a time. When you change one life for the better, you can get to feeling pretty damn good about the world. Why the hell else do I stay in medicine?”
“It’s not for the free coffee?”
Fisher smiled and nodded at me, then gave me a clap on the shoulder while rising from his seat. As we walked back toward the reception area, I could not help but look back toward Isolation Ward 4, where I knew staff members were checking readouts, holding hands, and changing the world one life at a time.
But the only life I wanted to change in that moment was my own.