The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction - August 1980

by Various

  In his despair he knew he must leave. He could not face the village any longer. He entered the hotel through the back entrance, and when he reached his corridor and came in sight of his room, he froze.

  A small crowd was at his door. Children as well as adults. A large family. Boys in shorts, the girls in smocks, the men and women tall and bony.

  His door was open.

  They were in his room, too.

  He started to turn, to flee, but one of the figures saw him, alerted the others, and their eyes were on him in an instant.

  He began toward them. Their eyes pulled him, and he obeyed.

  When he reached them, they parted like a sea of grass, and he stepped inside. Each step was like a slow dream, like a step through gem-blue water.

  Inside, the family was avoiding the bed, and he could not see why.

  When the men, women and children finally parted before him, he noticed the two figures on his bed. A woman of about forty, thin and pale, and a younger woman—no, a spindly girl.

  There was one man who was not avoiding the bed. He too was thin, and the spindly girl had his nose and deep-set eyes.

  The man was looking at him, smiling painfully, and waving two small photographs. "Mi moglie e mi filgia," he was saying, "non ce la fanno...." He said it once and only once. He continued to wave the photographs, closer now, in the foreigner's face.

  He stared at the two figures on the bed and did not understand the man's concern. He could see an ulcer on the mother's ankle—the sign of some peripheral vascular disease... perhaps diabetes. She was tired enough, her life hard enough, that the ulcer didn't surprise him. But was this what they wanted of him? That he heal an ulcer—nothing more? A doctor wouldn't do? For this they needed a man of miracles?

  It angered him that they should want a miracle for something like this.

  Then he took another look and saw how ill both of them were. Both were pale, stuporous, and both were breathing rapidly and shallowly. And they were twisting ever so slowly on the bed, as those in constant pain do.

  He noticed the woman's neck then. The sides were distended and red, and the distension, he could see, was from two nasty red bumps, like great boils. He looked at the girl. Her neck had no boils, but she was scratching at her armpits, now at her groin. She was scratching—

  The woman coughed. Long and hard—paroxysmally. It racked her body.

  Dear God.

  He was certain now. The boils were buboes—the lymph glands poisoned by the bacilli, full of the bacilli, suppurating.

  He remembered suddenly the grandmother in Pozzuoli.

  Dear God.

  He understood the cause of her edema now. A primary pneumonic case infected by a bubonic with respiratory complications— by this woman on his bed. The old woman in Pozzuoli would never have the luxury of buboes: The pneumonic variety was quick.

  These were the Cicchinellis of Lerici.

  Dear God.

  But how? In this day and age?

  The answer rose with the ease of schooling, though he had never been schooled in it, had never even read a book about it. La Spezia, a port. A port, rats. Rats: fleas, with proboscises engorged with bacteria. The traditional Eurasian maritime spread, so different from the feral vectors of the North American reservoirs.

  Aerial droplets, warm and teeming with Pasteurella pestis, incubating for two to five days. From her sickbed in their apartment, this woman had coughed on the old woman who had come to see her. Even had the old woman washed her hands, it wouldn't have made any difference.

  Dear God.

  Where were the doctors? Where were the medical personnel and therapies that La Spezia and the health organizations could provide—tetracycline, streptomycin, heat-killed vaccines, face masks with eighteen-gauze layers, the other prophylactica against its spread.

  He knew where the doctors were. They were still in La Spezia, and Genoa, Florence, Milan, Turin and Rome. They had not been called. He was the "healer," so he was the first to know. He could heal them, the Cicchinellis believed. Why bring in others? Why risk offending this "healer" with the hautingly familiar face?

  He could do nothing for these people. He must get away. He must leave these plague-teeming bodies on his bed, this town of insects and lungs swarming with the horror.

  He started to turn, but the man stopped him. He waved the photographs hard in his face.

  He looked at the photographs at last.

  One was of a man's arm, whole. The other was of an arm—the same, it appeared—with a thick stump where the hand had once been.

  But what was the significance? An arm before amputation, and the same arm with the scars of amputation? Two photographs taken with the same camera apparently. Apparently at the

  same—

  The husband was pointing at the photographs with wild fingers, jabbing first at the amputated arm, then at the whole arm. The amputated arm, then the whole—

  He understood it at last.

  These were photographs of a miracle. They were proof of a miracle. They showed how a man, years without a hand, had been given back that hand.

  And he was the one who had done it. He was the one who had performed this miracle for them.

  Dear God.

  He turned and struck out at the nearest bodies, which stepped bock as though electrocuted. No one tried to stop him, but the sudden tide of anger—of rage, of sudden hysteria behind him—made his legs move faster.

  It was a handgun that stopped him. Blue and oiled, it waved in his face, the barrel unable to sight itself.

  At the other end of the arm was a uniformed carabiniere, a member of the family, a uniform he had somehow overlooked in the crowd. The man was a little drunk.

  Again he understood it. Again he somehow understood what no one could tell. He understood all of them, the entire family—even Carlo. This was Carlo, the only carabiniere in the Cicchinelli family, the man to whom his sister had said that morning, "Carlo, it is up to you to do something if he tries to leave. You are the one who can." And Carlo had had a few drinks just in case—in case he might have to do something. He had, after all, heard the rumors of what had happened that morning in Pozzuoli....

  The man's finger was flexing stupidly on the trigger. Carlo did not want to be doing this, but he had to.

  The foreigner struck out then at the gun—as hard as he could—as fast as he could.

  The gun jerked and went off. A man screamed, a woman moaned, and the foreigner was pushing through them again, brushing against the coarse carabiniere uniform, clawing his way through the door.

  The gun did not fire again.

  It took him a while to find the bus he needed. He was staring straight ahead and stumbling, and it took him a long time.

  The bus he wanted would carry him to the end of Via Santa Teresa, the road that wound past the castle, rimmed the cliffs outside the town, and ended in a cul-de-sac above the next cove, the inhospitable "Maralunga"...the place he wanted.

  As the bus trembled through Lerici and made its way up the hill, he kept his eyes on his knees. Although he could feel their stares, none of the passengers tried to approach him. For this he was grateful.

  He left the bus awkwardly, stumbling on the pavement when he reached it, and barely noticed that he was the only one to get off.

  As he began to walk through the shrubbery, toward the cliffs, he could hear the bus struggling to turn around behind him. Abruptly the sound ended, and no sound other than the wind replaced it.

  He was alone.

  It was important that he be alone.

  The hope was only a glimmer. And if it proved false, the action would still be the proper one.

  He had healed others before. That was clear. The photographs proved it; the pleading of the villagers proved it.

  Now, for whatever reason, he was unable to.

  Why the amnesia? Why the loss of his "power"? The two were related—that was clear. The answers, he knew, flickered in the nightmare, in the shrieking voices, in
his own familiar face. He had, he felt sure, been on the verge of remembering, of seeing the block dissolve two or three times. In fact, he suspected that the block had even crumbled those times, but that—for some ungodly reason—he had chosen to erect it again each time.

  Why should he choose to do this?

  He knew....

  It was the fear. He was afraid of remembering.

  The hope stirred again.

  If he'd once been able to heal, he should be able to heal again. It was only logical. Only the block was preventing it.

  But he needed the proper circumstances.

  He stepped to the edge of the cliff, looked down, and before his eyes could focus, was hit by vertigo.

  But no voices came.

  He surveyed the cove below. As he'd prayed, it was empty of people, inaccessible with its sheer cliffs and rocky shore. Whatever the outcome, he did not wish to do this in front of others. He was tired of their eyes.

  The sand was incredibly white even under ten meters of gem-blue water, and for a moment the vision calmed him.

  The cliff wasn't really sheer, he noted. It sloped a little. He would strike the base of it, not the dark basaltic rocks of the shore. Unless he rolled to them. Certainly he would not reach the—

  It was then that he jumped. It surprised him a little that he did it, but he'd known he would have to surprise himself.

  He jumped long and far, and as he did, as his momentum faded and the earth began to pull at him, his head filled with memories of high school, of the salmon-pink buildings, the hard-packed track, and the year he'd been a decent broadjumper, decent enough to impress two girls.

  But the high school was hazy. It wasn't his. He had never been a broad- jumper.

  The air tore by him and for an instant he could feel sharp pains in his arms, as though feathers were being pulled from his flesh. Avis Dei, he heard a voice say calmly, as the air whistled by the fear of death chilled his chest with adrenalin and the hysterical will to live rose in him like a bird.

  He wanted to live. He wanted to stop falling. He must save himself.

  But he did not do so.

  Perhaps, he found himself thinking stupidly, this is too much—too much of a miracle to ask for.

  You're a fool, then.

  He hit but did not stop falling. He had hit the bottom? A bottom? The cliff's base? An outcropping?

  It was horrible. He remained conscious; he remained surprisingly aware.

  His left arm snapped from its socket, and the rocks stripped the flesh from tendons and bones. His clavicle fractured, the periosteum shrieking. His spine bent, dissolving discs, grinding, fracturing vertebrae, the thick bones screaming like a single white-hot rod inserted in him.

  Then shock.... The larger vessels of his body dilated. The blood began to pool. His heart would soon starve.

  He hit again, fully this time, right tibia fracturing transversely, bone tearing through flesh, fibula bowing but holding, foot and ankle waving free. Then his chest—ribs caving in, the pleural sac penetrated, lungs collapsing instantly and completely in a perfect twin pneumothorax.

  And then his skull—like jaws tearing the back of it off—a craniocerebral invasion that felt as though light were being let in, and with it voices, a voice of light and pain and eternal hell.

  When his body finally came to rest, the location did not matter. He was struggling to remain conscious. His body was five or six bodies, five or six different islands of pain.

  He remained aware. The diagnoses floated in his head with clairvoyant ease. The damage was only beginning.

  His eyes were staring—though at what he couldn't have said. His pupils were dilated. His pulse was fast and weak. He was as pale as the sand, and small parts of him were as blue as the cove. His lips, earlobes, fingernails and fingertips had turned cyanotic long ago, but the blue was covered with red blood. His circulatory system was collapsing. The blood was standing in his vessels; the heart did not have enough—not enough blood, not enough oxygen—but his deflated lungs had no oxygen to send it anyway. He was bleeding from the mouth and ears, and he could feel his heart fibrillating, near congestive failure.

  Through the tide that called him toward death, he felt something move at one end of his body.

  It was, he realized, only his foot and ankle flipping over, the tendons pulling them free of the rock, back into place, into alignment with the knee. Not a miracle.

  He was going to die.

  He was going to let himself die.

  He couldn't even keep himself from dying.

  He gave up. It didn't matter. None of it did. Sleepily, and deafer now to the shrieks of pain and light in his skull, he found himself wondering why he's ever bothered to struggle, ever bothered trying to remember....

  He gave up. He allowed himself to die.

  And as he did—because he did—the block began to dissolve away.

  Dead, he could not hold it in place.

  Dead, he could no longer escape the pain of knowing—

  —the remembering who he was—

  —of remembering for eternity.

  He remembered it all, and it was more than he could have imagined, more than doctors or priests or zealots or clairvoyants, more than anything mortal.

  He understood why he'd tried to forget, why anyone—mortal or other—would have tried to forget. He did not blame himself for trying, or for failing. Had he been able to heal the villagers, and at the same time been able to forget who he was, he'd have succeeded—for years, for decades, perhaps centuries...a respite, albeit brief, from the horror.

  But it had not worked: He could not forget, and still heal.

  And the irony was too great. It had not been mere accident; he could sense another's hand in this. He watches forever. World without end.

  Dead now, he was again who he was, again what he was.

  Dead, he could heal that which needed healing.

  It was simple and there was no question that he should do it. The work was not yet over. The body was a tool. It needed healing.

  He aligned the tibia. He repaired the muscle sheaths, tendons and skin, and sent an electrical current no stronger than a salamander's brain outward from the medullary canal, out through the periostea, the minerals and honeycomb of living cells. Slowly the bone fused.

  He stood up on the leg. It held. He took a step. It worked perfectly.

  The arm still dangled, dripping clots of blood.

  He gave it new flesh, molding it like clay, and with one smooth motion returned it to its socket.

  Light still entered the back of his skull. He took calcium and phosphorus from the murexes, turitellas and pelecypods of the cove's sandy bottom and filled in the missing bone. He restored the inches of cortex removed by the rocks now lying among the skull fragments twenty feet away, and recast the membrane, added skin, follicles, and made his oily hair grow again, slowly, steadily until it had reached the shoulders.

  When he was finished, he looked down at his shredded suit, at the blood splattered like red paint over the rocks. His eyes moved oddly, slowly, unblinkingly.

  They were not human eyes now.

  They glowed, burning with a fire that flickered like tongues, burning with the light of a Voice, an understanding, pain, guilt.

  He took a step toward the water. The legs worked. The spine worked. He took more steps, entered the water, felt its coolness pull at the shreds of his suit, and began to move his arms, to swim through the congested waves.

  It took him an hour to round the jetty and reach the bay. He left the water on the quiet side of the jetty—unobserved and not at all tired.

  No one would see the burning of his eyes. He could make sure of this. Just as no one would hear the shrieking that filled him now. World without end, amen.

  They would notice only his face—the face that was hauntingly familiar.

  He began to walk toward the village called Pozzuoli.

  Even without looking at it, he knew it was the correct door. Within
a week a red hammer-and-sickle would appear over it, and it would at last resemble all the others. For now, it did not. This held no significance. It was a coincidence, nothing more.

  He went in, into the damp darkness where two old women in black were weeping by the bedside of the old woman he had come for.

  He healed her. He healed her from the center. He took the organs that had suffered last and healed them first, the ancient brain, the arrythmic heart, the wine-tired liver. He made them stronger than they had ever been, because they had been so weak.

  When he was finished, he looked down at her. She was breathing freely now though her eyes were still closed. She was not even aware that he had entered the room.

  Should he make the air of the room, or her own blood pressure, wake her? It would help the stories, would it not? Were the old woman to look up at him now and see his shredded suit glowing like the feathers of an angel in her dark room, her story would be a moving one, the source of legends.

  But he did not wake her. She should not shape it too much. He must beware of vanity, impatience, of greed.

  The story told by the two other women in the room would be strong enough, the blood of legends. They would agree that the face was familiar, that they'd seen it in a painting.

  Four doorways away he stepped in and healed a boy's arm shrunken by polio he had contracted from a restroom in the Scuola Civica. He healed as well, the boy's lungs, which held the fibrous tissue of tuberculosis, the tubercule microbes imprisoned in scar tissue and lime salts, but fated to break free and kill him before he reached thirty.

  When the boy's uncle saw the healed arm—and truly believed what he saw—his own heart failed him, a myocardial infarction over the scars of other infarctions; and he had to heal the uncle too, helping him to his feet again so that he might see the foreigner in his strange blood-dappled suit, and remember him very clearly.

  The uncle was a creative man. He would describe how an amber light and a soft chorus of voices surrounded the man with the sad eyes when he came to heal his nephew, and how, in his torn and bloody suit, this humble man looked as though he had just risen from a grave.