“Are you ready?”
Ekatya stifled her first answer, which was Of course, you idiot, and merely said yes. Who wouldn’t be ready to get out of this leg case?
“Very good. This will not hurt.”
She watched intently as Healer Wellernal cracked open the case and lifted off the top half. He held up a hand and spoke.
“Please do not move your leg yet,” the translator said. “It will be another tick or two.”
Ekatya nodded, once again feeling unsettled by the contrast between the healer’s voice and the feminine tones of the translator. With male speakers she preferred Lhyn’s non-simultaneous translation, which was less jarring. But she was grateful to have the device at all, which was newly returned from its trip to the bottom of the continent and currently her only translation option. Lhyn was napping in her own room, having barely managed to stay awake through their dinner—or evenmeal, as the Alseans called it. Ekatya had never seen her so tired before, not even after an all-nighter working on one of her articles. She suspected that everything was crashing down on her all at once. Until the battle, Lhyn’s intellectual excitement had both fueled her and kept her distracted. She hadn’t really let herself feel. But seeing the footage of the burned village and watching the Alseans fight so courageously against an enemy they hadn’t even heard of until today—that had hit Lhyn in a place nothing else could. It had jarred her so far out of her comfort zone that she’d gone to the other extreme, feeling too much all at once. Ekatya had seen it before, in young officers getting their first taste of failure that bore real-life consequences. But Lhyn wasn’t an officer, and she wasn’t trained for battle.
She was also stubborn as a mule, insisting that she be woken for her own case removal. Ekatya was more than tempted to let her sleep the rest of the night and deal with her ire in the morning.
Healer Wellernal finished scanning her leg with a small, cylindrical device and put it back in his coat pocket. Then he rested his hand on her calf and closed his eyes.
Ekatya held back her question, managing with some effort to stay quiet until he opened his eyes again and smiled at her.
“Your leg has healed perfectly. You may lift it from the case.”
She hesitated, not ready to believe it could be that easy. But the healer was waiting, and with no effort at all she pulled up her leg and held it straight.
“Stars and Shippers,” she whispered as she turned it this way and that.
His smile broadened. “I must admit, it’s a rare treat to have a patient so appreciative of my work. Usually I hear complaints about how long it takes.”
“You won’t hear any such complaint from me.” Ekatya couldn’t have stopped the grin on her face if she’d tried. “This is phenomenal. There is no such medtech in all the Protectorate. Can I walk on it?”
“Please do.”
She slid off the bed, landing on her good leg and only gradually taking the weight on the other. Not even a twinge. She took a careful step, then another, and then walked around the room in delight. “I feel like I could run!”
“Do refrain from that. At least for another nineday. Walking is fine, climbing stairs is fine, but running would be too much right now.”
She pulled out the chair next to him and sank into it with a sigh of bliss. “I’m not a runner anyway. Can I climb a ladder?”
“Yes, within bounds of reason.”
“I’m guessing twenty decks is not inside those bounds?”
He shook his head. “Had I not known you were a warrior before, that question would have told me. I suppose you could climb twenty decks if you were to take it very slowly. But my preference would be that you limit yourself to four or five decks.”
“All right. I can make that work.”
He made a note on his reader card and tucked it back into its pouch. “Do you have any other questions?”
“Yes. What were you doing when you touched my leg after scanning it?”
“I was listening to it.”
Ekatya glanced at the translator, wondering if it had erred. “I’m afraid I don’t understand. You can listen to a body?”
The question seemed to amuse him. “I suppose it would seem odd to a sonsales race. Our healing is not all science and technology, Captain Serrado. Part of it involves using our empathic senses. We listen to what the body tells us, and the more powerful healers can use projection to aid the body in repairing itself. I listened to your leg, and it told me that it was whole and stable. The scanner said the same thing, but we never put all of our trust in scanners if we can help it. A second, more organic opinion is always best.”
Lhyn was going to burst a blood vessel when she heard about this.
“Just to clarify,” she said, “when you say projection, you mean projecting emotions?”
He nodded.
“So emotions can heal?”
“Of course. Do you mean to say that your healers don’t know this?”
She thought about the times her doctors had told her that attitude mattered. “I suppose they do, but not like this. It’s more of a general belief that a positive mental outlook can speed healing. We do know that the brain and body are capable of much more than we understand, but we can’t force them to do what we want. It only seems to happen subconsciously. And even then, it never takes the form of such accelerated healing.”
“If you don’t know how to direct and focus it, then naturally it would not work well, if at all. It would be like…” He paused. “Like starting the engine of a transport but never giving it the command to fly. The energy is there, but without direction it doesn’t accomplish anything.”
She smiled at him. “I appreciate your effort in coming up with an analogy I can understand.”
“When one is a healer, one must learn to communicate with warriors. We see you more than any other caste.”
“I can well imagine.” She still hadn’t gotten over Lancer Tal’s casual mention of nearly losing her leg in a sword fight. “Which are the other castes you see more often?”
“The builders and producers tend to get themselves in trouble more than the rest. Mind you, they’re not nearly so bad as the warriors. At the other end, the crafter caste hardly ever darkens our doors.”
“I’ll bet you love crafters, then.”
“I’m bonded to one,” he said, his expression warming.
“What does she do? Or he?” She added the last a beat late, remembering Lhyn saying that gender distribution in Alsean bondings was quite different from Protectorate norms.
“She’s a musician. She plays the long bells in the Blacksun Symphony.” When Ekatya looked blank, he said, “Here, let me show you.” Opening his reader card again, he tapped it a few times and held it out. “This is my bondmate and her long bells.”
She took it and stared in surprise. A slender, light-haired woman stood in front of a row of gigantic hanging tubular bells, the smallest of which was nearly as tall as she was. “Ah. We would call these chimes, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen any so large. They must have a beautiful tone.”
“Yes, you don’t play the long bells if you ever hope to have a portable instrument.” He chuckled at his joke and took the reader card back. “We had to build a separate room just for her to practice in. Fortunately, the Blacksun Symphony has its own set, so she doesn’t need to move them very often.”
“I would enjoy hearing her play.”
He grew somber at that. “You may get your wish. I understand that your three fallen warriors are being given a state memorial. Chrysaltin is often asked to play at such events.”
They sat in silence for a moment. Then he cleared his throat and said, “I am sorry to have brought up a disturbing topic. Perhaps we should move on to the next procedure.”
“There’s no need to apologize. But yes, please tell me your thoughts on the language chip.”
Kameha and Xi had been picked up at the Caphenon and returned to the base in time to join them for evenmeal, and Kameha had thought to include a few pads with their supplies. Among the files he’d collected were the schematics for the lingual implant, which the healers had pounced on with great interest. After an hour with the translator and Kameha’s help reading the schematics, Wellernal had come to Ekatya’s room to set her free from the leg case and discuss his findings.
“It’s a fascinating technology,” he said. “I would enjoy exploring it in greater detail with one of your healers. But based on the schematic, the only real need for a healer’s services is in the installation of the implant itself. Once it has been installed, and the neural connections and skull tissues have regrown, changing out the language chips is more of a mechanical operation than a medical one. I could do it for you right now.”
“If it’s that easy, why does it require general anesthesia? And we always have a headache for two or three days afterward.”
“I can only assume your healers use general anesthesia to keep you from moving during the procedure. Given the size of the chips and their connectors, and the sensitive neural connections to the implant itself, any movement during a critical time would have significant ramifications. However, we would use a temporary paralytic instead. It would serve the same function, but your recovery would be faster. As for the headaches, I can’t see any reason for the procedure itself to cause them. My guess is that they’re a physical manifestation of the effort your brain must make to adapt to a different set of neural instructions. And while I can make no guarantees, I believe we can alleviate that with a little empathic guidance.”
Ekatya could almost laugh. It just figured that these Alsean doctors could add “headache-free chip swap” to their list of miracles. After healing her broken leg in less than one day, what was a little headache?
“In that case,” she said, “I’d like to schedule a few procedures with you.” It looked as if she’d be waking Lhyn after all.