The Seed

"Sure. So now what?"

"Well, what do you want to know?"

Gillian smiled. "I'm a scientist at heart, Uncle Frank. How do you use it to collect data?"

"You could say it's like radar." He held his right hand out in front of him with the fingers spread, and slowly moved it left and right. "Decide what you want to detect, and how you want to be made aware of it, and then trust your intuition."

She laughed. "That doesn't sound too rigorous to me. How can you know if you've imagined it? How can it be validated or reproduced? For that matter, how can you even quantify it? What can you write down?"

"All good questions, too. And that's what the training is all about. It's also why Healers have to be licensed and to take an oath. Not like the one your parents took; a different kind of oath. The Healer's Oath has more to do with respecting your patients than with not harming them. How am I doing?"

Gillian looked puzzled.

"What does your sense tell you? Am I holding back? Disguising the truth?"

She smiled. "No."

"Next question, then?"

She thought for a moment. "Okay. Say you've collected your data. Diagnosed the patient. How do you do something about it?"

"Truth is," he said, "sometimes you can't. The first thing a Healer has to decide is whether to send the patient to a MedCenter. That's not something they do where your folks work. And that's my personal fight. Getting them to start."

Gillian stood up and stretched. "I'm getting stiff sitting in one place. Can we do this while we walk?"

Pegwin, who had been quietly staying out of their field of view, came skipping around from the left. "It's about time you thawed out, rock hound. I was beginning to think you were going to fossilize on that rock. Which way?"

Frank held his hand up to stop the action. "Here's your first lesson, Gil. We can go upstream or down. Tell yourself that you'll know the answer when your palm tickles, then hold it each direction and ask yourself which way will be more interesting."

She hesitated at first, but then Gillian did as he'd suggested. She repeated the process several times before saying anything. "Upstream? I think?"

Her uncle laughed. "Say it as a statement, rather than as a question. That way you'll start gaining confidence in your psychic decisions."

"Upstream, then. Definitely."

The three set off on a rambling exploration of the canyon floor. Gillian and her uncle pointed out signs of the area's history to one another from the geological and biological perspectives. Their chatter was punctuated by wild flights of imagination as Pegwin latched onto odd bits of the discussion. The afternoon was starting to cast shadows over their adventure when Frank slipped on a loose rock and landed on his butt. Peg's laughter was cut short by an unfamiliar warbling coming from her father's backpack.

"What's that, daddy?" she said.

He frowned, and opened the pack. "Nothing good."

The girls waited while Frank pulled out his handheld and pressed a few buttons. "I think I'm going to need your help, Gillian."

They breathed in frightened silence as they drew closer.

"I have a neural implant that manages pain for me. It was installed when Peg was a toddler." He scooped up his daughter and looked into her eyes. "My body sends spurious pain signals, Gillian. Enough to have laid me up shortly after your aunt and I first met. Learned biocontrol techniques are the usual solution, but not for Healers. They're fine for people in other fields, and we tried to use them initially, but they made it impossible for me to focus on my patients properly. We tried targeted gentech meds for a while, but they so affected my psychic acuity that I couldn't work. Finally, we agreed to the implant." He glanced at the handheld. "Unfortunately, it just reported that it's failing. And we're out of range, so this thing can't call for help."

Gillian took a deep breath. "How can I help, Uncle Frank?"

"Well, we have two problems to deal with. First, there's the pain. I'm okay for the moment, but I'll be having increasing waves of uncoordinated pain signals shortly. When it works, the implant monitors the pattern of neural pain signals headed up my spine, turns down the volume, and chooses which ones to pass based on its assessment of where that pattern is in my normal neural attractor. Then-."

Gillian's expression was not promising.

"I've lost you, haven't I," he said.

She nodded vigorously.