Bones and Blighted Roses

by La Guera

When the Enterprise discovers a cryotube adrift in space, it reignites restless fears of Khan and his colony of genetically-enhanced superhumans, but what's inside turns out to be anything but, and Dr. McCoy finds himself face to face with living medical history. Sometimes it takes the deft hands of a surgeon to make things whole again.

3. Negotiations and Cultural Exchange

She was up and alert when he swept into sickbay the next morning, propped in the narrow bed and shoveling oatmeal into her mouth with the grim, stolid resignation of the dray horse in harness. Someone-one of the nurses, like as not-had gotten her cleaned up, because her hair had been washed and combed and sat on her shoulders like a golden shawl. It was such a marked contrast to the limp, tangled hanks he'd seen yesterday that he blinked in surprise.

"Got your appetite, I see," he said as he approached her bed.

"I figured this wouldn't taste so bad if it had to come back up," she explained, and took another bite.

Spoken like a veteran of several hospital wars, and he eyed her as he plucked her chart from the foot of the bed. "Are you still having nausea, then?"

She waggles her head. "Sort of, but not really. My stomach rolls now and then, but it might just be this oatmeal. It tastes like wallpaper pastes lightly dusted with cinnamon and spackle."

His lips twitched as he scrolled through the records of her vitals throughout the night. "Well, you'll have to make your peace with it, because the rest of the food isn't much better." He pursed his lips as he studied her numbers. No spikes in blood pressure, no signs of sleep apnea. Her blood sugar was low, but that might pick up now that she had some food in her.

"You mean these aren't the hospital dregs?"

He answered without looking up. "Well, they are, yes, but it's the same swill as everyone else."

She considered that. "Huh. I figured the captain and the command crew would get the choice bits."

"The replicators on this ship don't discriminate. They're all bad."

"Replicators?" she said blankly.

"They shape molecules into whatever form the user desires. It creates anything from books to clothing to food."

"So, I'm essentially eating air." She eyed the contents of her bowl with newfound trepidation.

"More like a liquid polymer shaped into oatmeal."

She put down her spoon. "Yum."

He rolled his eyes. "It might not be gourmet, but it won't kill you, either. In fact, it's better for you than the poison you were probably stuffing yourself with before you became a human sardine."

"Touche."

"Anyway, I'm not here to discuss replicators."

"No, I suppose not." She picked up her spoon and dug a raisin from the congealing muck in the bowl.

"Are you having any pain?"

"None that's unusual for me."

"What hurts?"

"What doesn't? The miracle you gave me yesterday wore off, and I'm back to being stiff and tense. My ass is asleep from sitting in the same position for the last hour or so, and my fine motor skills have abandoned their posts for a job with better benefits."

He could see the truth of it in her halting, clumsy movements. Her arms twitched frequently and of their own volition, and when they did move of her accord, they did so inelegantly, with fits and starts and spasmodic jerks. Her fingers jutted stiffly from the ends of her hands and splayed wide when she reached for things, thin and arachnid and oddly mesmerizing. The spoon wobbled precariously in her grip, and she was scrupulously careful not to overload it, let it spill its payload down her front. Her other hand moved restively atop the coverlet, and beneath it, her toes jutted like bamboo pikes in black, jungle soil. As he watched, they curled and fanned.

He had spent most of the night researching Cerebral Palsy at his desk and watching her sleep. He had expected her to thrash in the grip of nightmares or call out in the muted, never-quite-dark of the sickbay, but she had been still and quiet, her breathing interrupted only by the occasional snuffle as she rolled onto her side or burrowed beneath the sheet. He had thought she was looking at him once, gaze heavy-lidded and glassy with sleep, but when he had called her name, her only reply had been a soft snore. He had stayed until his vision began to swim and his bones began to creak and groan and speak of the still, small hours. He had been absurdly grateful when Doctor Pennicott had come in for the morning shift. He had put Miss Walker and her charts and her slice of medical history in his hands and shuffled three doors down to his quarters, where he had fallen into bed and a sleep so deep that he could not recall his dreams.

But his mind was as cantankerous as the bones his spiteful ex-wife had so grudgingly left him, and he had found himself awake a few hours later, sporting a ferocious sleep hangover and reading his padd on the toilet while he pulled his pants on one-handed.

There was surprisingly little information on the subject in the available literature. There were a handful of ancient journal articles by novitiate doctors looking to specialize in neurological or orthopedic medicine, most of which focused on therapies and symptom management in children; there were also an alarming number of references to it in two century-old bioethics treatises that had slanted largely toward the practicality and morality of euthanasia and selective abortion. He had found a pair of grainy videos in the archives, wavering footage that showed a young man struggling through the parallel bars, hands white-knuckled on the finger-smudged metal and lips pulled from his teeth as he floundered across on legs shod in braces better suited to the Iron Maiden than to supporting the atrophied legs they encased. The same boy trapped in a standing box like a prisoner in the stocks, tears streaming down his face as spastic muscles were stretched and straightened, forced to conform to a shape they never intended to take. The boy had cried and begged to be released, the therapists and nurses had cajoled and commanded and ignored, and through it all, a bored servant of Hippocrates had narrated the entire spectacle in a grating, clinical, nasal drone that had made him want to hurl his padd across the room. Sheer barbarism, and he had shut the second video off in disgust.

He had seen his share of neurological and orthopedic impairments in med school, had done rotations in both areas of specialty, but most of them had been acquired after birth, usually later in life, after some enterprising fool had gone out three sheets to the wind and wrapped two of them and his car around a cement pylon. There had been a handful of congenital cases, but those were either easily treatable with neonatal microsurgery or inevitably fatal and therefore skewed toward palliative care rather than improvement or long-term treatment.

He had even been assigned a few cases as a resident, but he had never had the opportunity to see the treatments brought to conclusion. He had conducted evaluations and planned tentative courses of treatment, only to be rotated out or overruled by the supervising physician. He had seldom seen his strategies bear fruit or wither on the healing vine, and he had often wondered what had become of them, those hapless patients passed from hand to hand and mind to mind like convenient tools for the honing of bright but inexperienced minds. They had survived, he supposed, most of them, anyway, and if they were lucky, they had thrived and been granted the luxury of distance and allowed to forget him, or to recall him but dimly as that nice young doctor in white scrubs who made their misfortune a little easier to bear.

And now, propped in a bed in his sickbay was a miracle, a once-in-a-lifetime chance to explore a disability eradicated by modern medicine and long lost to history. She was a living, breathing piece of medical history, a pristine specimen, to put it coldly, and if he could study her... Well, there were untold laurels in her misaligned bones and unruly limbs, a place in the Hippocratic pantheon to be coaxed and teased from her recalcitrant, rigid muscles. There were papers to be written and studies to be proposed and possibly funded, and the results could not only rewrite medical history but revolutionize the fields of anthropology, history, and psychology.

She's also a human being, he reminded the breathless voice inside his head. And my patient.

"That miracle is called Loxtan," he said, and set her chart on the foot of the bed, inches from her restless, grubbing toes. He strode to the med cabinet to retrieve a dose.

"It's amazing, is what it is. Is it addictive?"

"No." He opened the cabinet, grabbed an ampoule from the bin labeled in his precise hand, and loaded the hypo. "Why? You have a history of addiction?" He closed the hypo with a snap of his wrist.

"I don't think so. I've never tested myself. Too many alcoholics who weren't spoken of in polite company in the family tree. My dad and aunt got me drunk when I was five," she said cheerfully when he turned around with the hypo in hand. "I don't know if that tells you anything."

It tells me that your father probably wasn't a Father of the Year candidate, he thought darkly, but he merely snagged a wheeled stool on his two-step trek back to the bed. He rolled it to her bedside and plopped onto it, feet pressed to the floor and knees spread in an acute angle.

"I've been researching you," he said as he leaned forward and pressed the hypo to the side of her neck.

She huffed soundless laughter and bared her throat to the cool kiss of the injector. "Really? What's my favorite color?"

He blinked, stymied and chagrined. "Fair enough," he conceded quietly as he depressed the hypo with a soft hiss. "I was researching your condition," he amended.

"And?"

"There's not much to go on. The last known case was before my time." He dropped the hypo on a nearby tray.

"So you've cured it, then? So why am I still like this?" She raised her bony arms to indicate her equally frail legs and let them drop to her lap again.

He shifted on the stool. "It can be treated, yes, but only in infancy or very early childhood. After five or so, the set of the bones and muscles starts to become fixed. Spasticity increases and gets harder to treat without extensive physical therapy and orthotics, and secondary conditions can complicate matters."

"Like arthritis and adolescent osteoporosis," she offered drily.

He nodded.

"So you can't fix me."

The bluntness of the statement stirred his compassion. "No, I can't. I'm sorry. Theoretically, I could attempt several surgeries. I could implant a neurosynaptic transmitter inside your brain to compensate for the dead tissue, but that wouldn't change the fact that your body wouldn't have the slightest idea how to interpret the new signals it received, and even if it could, your bones and muscles are in no shape to handle them. The transmitter would tell your foot to take a step, and your muscles would either spasm wildly or twitch to no effect, and your heel would disintegrate under the weight. The bones of your feet are so thin that they're translucent on the scans I took. Judging by their condition, I'm guessing you've never stood on them."

She shook her head. "Just long enough to pivot onto the toilet or transfer from my bed to my chair or vice versa. I had aides for the heavy lifting." She smiled humorlessly at the pun.

"I could insert the implant, and I could perform surgery to release the muscles, but they don't like change any more than people do. They would fight the correction. It would be very painful, and there's no guarantee you wouldn't be right back where you started inside a year. The same goes for the bones. I could break them and shave them done to force them into a more natural alignment, but it would be an extremely invasive procedure with a prolonged and excruciating recovery for very little gain. Even if I were to do all that, the outcome would likely be that you needed extensive orthotics to achieve a minimal gait for short distances."

"In other words, I'd look like Frankenstein lurching through the halls?"

"Essentially, yes."

"I'm guessing learning to use those monstrosities would be exhausting."

"Probably."

"Not to mention that I'm broke and don't have a way to pay for any of this."

"Money isn't a problem. Medicine was recognized as a universal human right after the Great War."

"Then...why are you a doctor?"

He stared at her in mute incredulity. "What do mean, why am I a doctor?" he demanded. "To help people."

She snorted. "That'd be a first. Maybe most doctors start out that way, but by the time I got to them, they were dour and jaded and looking to make a buck."

"Well, I've got news for you, Miss Walker. You're not exactly a model patient. Doctors generally take a dim view of people who accuse them of ethics violations," he retorted.

It was her turn to boggle. "Wh- I've never done any such thing," she countered.

"Oh, no?" He straightened on the stool and folded his arms across his chest. "Then I suppose I was imagining it yesterday when you got all bent out of shape over me taking necessary samples?"

Her dumbfounded silence and blank expression surprised him. She doesn't remember, he realized. She must've still been foggy from the long-term anesthesia. Either that, or there's a problem with her short-term memory. He made a mental note to conduct a brain scan after the assessment and consultation.

"Sorry about that, Dr. McCoy," she said, and surprised him for the second time in as many minutes. "I was disoriented and scared, and all I saw was a bunch of strangers in funny outfits crowded around my bed like aliens in some trippy abduction experience. Plus, I don't like needles. Spasticity and sharp objects don't mesh."

She sat against the pillows, the bowl of oatmeal forgotten and hardening to cement on the tray in front of her. The spun gold of her hair shimmered in the light, but the rest of her was dull and weary and swaddled in an air of melancholy, as though she were a widow of long standing who had learned to wear the crushing weight of her grief with somber poise. Her shoulders were thin and rounded and slumped, and her face was far too pallid and strained for one so young. She looked perpetually harried, pursued by worries she could neither name nor forsake, and her eyes were remote and watchful inside her face.

She's too damn young to be this used up he thought. Either life in the twenty-first century was more hardscrabble and unforgiving than the history books thought, or CP and its barbaric treatments wore her out and down to the hard, bitter pith. She's thirty going on ninety. Her bones are, anyway, and while the scans say her heart is fit for a person her age, I think it would just as soon stop as go on beating.

Well, you've certainly seen that before, haven't you, Lenny, my boy? Been there and done that, as that golden oldie goes, said a thoughtful, perversely jocular voice inside his head. And we both know what you did about it. You and your brother, George in that dark, airless room that stank of piss and rot and festering rage.

"It's fine," he said brusquely.

"It's safe to assume the hucksters at the cryogenics lab scammed my parents?"

"I can't say," he grunted, relieved to be tugged onto the firmer ground of the present. "But probably."

She sighed. "Walking looked exhausting anyway," she said, but there was a faint tremor in her voice, and that remote gaze drifted over his shoulder to fix on the row of empty beds that stretched to the door.

He opened his mouth to speak, then shut it again. What the hell could he say to someone whose faint, ferocious hope had been shattered with ruthless efficiency? Someone plucked out of time by the curious fingers of fate and unceremoniously deposited onto a bed in futuristic hospital. He could think of nothing that was not trite or empty, so he kept his useless platitudes to himself and waited for her to break the uncomfortable silence.

"It was my mother's idea anyway," she said softly. Her eyes were dry, but so very flat, windows shuttered in the face of an approaching storm.

Maybe it was, he agreed. But some part of you wanted it, too, wanted to believe in the dream those charlatans were selling. Maybe it was as simple as curiosity, a desire to see how the rest of the world lived, to know if the sun was warmer on their skin for being nearer. Maybe you wanted to know what it felt like to pull down your damn pants in five seconds instead of holding a referendum on the subject with people who would rather be watching TV. Maybe you wanted to know what it felt like to dance. Or maybe you just wanted the means to run away.

"There are things I can do," he said, determined to give her what little hope and comfort he could. "I can't undo a lifetime of damage, but I can alleviate some of your secondary conditions and make you more comfortable."

Her lips curved in a weary, sardonic smile, skeptical and bloodless, but her gaze sharpened with idle curiosity and dour amusement.

"I can start you on a daily regimen of calcium supplements and medications to increase bone density. As I said earlier, the bones in your legs and feet are dangerously thin and at risk for fracture. Frankly, I'm surprised you didn't break an ankle getting into the shower. We can keep you on a low daily dose of Loxtan to combat spasticity, and I can prescribe a course of Certaxalin-12 to clear the sediment from your kidneys and improve their function."

"I have poor kidney function?"

"Not poor, no, but it could be better. There's some evidence of chronic dehydration."

"Drinking makes you pee, and peeing takes forever when you need help to do it," she explained matter-of-factly. "I don't want my memories to be dominated by the scintillating hours I spent on the toilet."

"Kidney disease is a lot more inconvenient than taking a pee," he admonished reprovingly. "The Certaxalin should clear the sediment, which would prevent kidney stones and improve circulation and overall function."

"I don't suppose these wondrous miracles of modern pharmacology come in pill form?"

"They do, but the Loxtan is less effective that way. Takes longer to work and doesn't control the spasticity as well, so I'd like keep you on the injectable form. You can insist on the pills if you want, but if you want to stay this relaxed, the hypos are your only option. The Certaxalin comes in a capsule. It tastes like hell if you let it linger, so I'd advise you to swallow them as quick as you can."

He pulled the stool closer to her bed with his heels. "There are a few therapies I'd like to start."

"Ah. Now comes the price."

"Like I've told you, money is no longer a consideration."

"I'm not talking about money, Doctor. I'm talking about time and energy and the chance for peace and privacy. Tell me, Doctor, are these therapies going to eat up my days, drown them in the endless monotony of repetition and the slow burn of attrition? Am I going to have to tell you when I go to the bathroom, and how often, and ask your permission to stay up for five more minutes before I have to turn off my brain and do as I'm told so as to make my imperfection easier for polite company to bear?" Her voice was even, but there was a well of bitterness underneath, one deep and dark and bitter as gall. "Because a life like that isn't life at all. It's survival, and that isn't as glamorous as your uncivilized hindbrain would have you believe when the world goes dark and the water seeps into your nose and mouth and closes over your head like the zipping of a bodybag."

He thought of those tapes, so dispassionate in their wavering gaze as they recorded the struggles of that boy as he clumped doggedly through the parallel bars with his bared teeth and white-knuckled grip. No encouraging parents to cheer him on, no arms poised to catch him should he tire or stumble. Just a blind imperative to succeed and make the pain stop and a wan therapist with a complexion to match her whites who hovered behind him like obligation made manifest to ensure that the deed was done. He thought of that same boy trapped in the standing box with tears streaming down his face. There had been pain there, and fear, and a wretched, yawning loneliness, but no joy, no sense of security and a life bettered by determination and the sweat of his brow. He had not been a patient, but a specimen to be observed and catalogued and dissected. There had been no parents then, either, no friendly faces in which to take comfort. Just the falsely-cheerful voices of the therapists exhorting him to endure in the name of a promised good that never quite came.

Because a life like that isn't a life at all. It's survival.

He thought of that dark, airless room that stank of piss and festering anger and inexorable loss, and of the thin, quavering voice that called from the shadows, broken and imploring and crushing as a pressing stone. Please, son. Please. Before it's too late. Please, son. Please.

He pulled the stool forward until his knees were wedged painfully against the base of the bed and his face was scant inches from hers. "Now you listen to me," he growled. "I don't know what kind of medicine you were subjected to back in the good old days. Maybe it was barbarism and snake oil, and if it was, I'm sorry, I truly am, but that was a long time ago, and I'm a doctor, not a shyster or a sadist looking to get his sick kicks on a helpless victim."

"I'm not going to ask you to climb Kilamanjaro, for Christ's sake. Among the many things I am not, I am also not an idiot. If you did anything more strenuous than some stretching and hydrotherapy, the bones in your lower legs would probably fracture, and while your heart is healthy, your stamina is probably a joke. As to your bathroom habits, I don't care what you do as long it's not green and trying to talk on its own. When you're not in therapy, you can do as you please. I am also not a warden."

"Medicine is a risk. I can't tell you for absolute certain what will work and what won't. All I can do is try. Medicine isn't always kind, and it's not always fair, and sometimes it might hurt. Maybe even a lot of the time. I'm sorry for that, too, but there isn't a damn thing I can do about it."

He straightened with a huff. "Now you have some choices to make," he said, and tugged on the hem of his tunic. "I've told you what I can do and what I can't. You can decide to do something, or you can lie there and stew and hate me for the sins of my predecessors if that's what makes you feel better. I'll abide by whatever you choose, but bear in mind that we're a year from our first return to Earth and three weeks at least from the nearest starbase. If you think I'm an incompetent bastard, then I'll stabilize you, and we'll drop you off on the next supply run. The doctors there can deal with your conditions and your attitude, and they'll get you where you want to go. Whatever your choice is, for God's sake, make it soon so I can stop wasting my time and my breath on someone who doesn't want my help."

With that, he pushed away from her bedside so forcefully that he rolled into the empty opposite bed, and then he spun and rose. He snatched her chart from the foot of the bed and hung it on the footboard with a rattling clack. He made to seat himself at his desk but changed his mind at the last moment and veered down the long, wide corridor that led to the door and the deck beyond.

He passed through the doors and into the purposeful hubbub of the corridor. He murmured greetings to the passing ensigns and security officers and strode the short distance to his quarters. He stalked inside, plopped onto his couch, and promptly got up again. He paced to and fro in front of the couch, fingers interlaced behind his head.

Her behavior is not abnormal given the circumstances, noted a flat, clinical voice inside his head that sounded suspiciously like Spock. Indeed, all things considered, her response has been rather measured. Were most people to be informed that they had been revived two hundred years in the future and were expected to live with an impairment they had been told would be cured, most would have succumbed to either catatonia or raving hysterics.

It's not her equanimity that chaps my ass, he retorted.

Then why have you abandoned your post in favor of a fruitless tantrum?

I haven't abandoned anything, you pointy-eared hobgoblin, he snapped irascibly. I was just-

Running from a ghost that's slipped its shroud? another, far less clinical voice supplied helpfully. You'd need awfully long legs to run that far.

He swore under his breath and left his quarters behind, retracing his steps to sickbay, which was quiet and empty save for the orderlies and the duty nurse who lingered in the corners, counting bottles and vials and ampoules and smoothing sheets beneath which no one slept.

And Miss Walker, of course, small and pale and unmoving in her bed. She tracked his approach as he drew near, small, golden head turning on the delicate stem of her neck. She regarded him with dispassionate blue eyes. They were not cold, precisely, not dead like Khan's, which had surveyed him with ruthless, analytical curiosity, as though he were an interesting specimen to be examined and discarded, but watchful, as though he were an animal she did not yet trust. He waited for her to speak, but she said nothing, so he left her to her baleful silence and seated himself at his desk.

Khan would have killed her, he thought as he studied the latest round of test results, skimming the neat rows of numbers with the tip of his stylus. He would have taken one look at her and deemed her unworthy of existence. Maybe curiosity would have compelled him to study her for a few hours, to poke and prod and uncover the reason for her fatal, aberrant weakness, but it was more likely that he would have begrudged her the time and effort and snapped her neck as effortlessly as he had broken Carol Marcus' hip and crushed her father's skull.

Maybe they all would have, suggested the blackly gleeful voice that had so helpfully resurrected memories of airless rooms and beseeching voices out of the dark, and in his mind's eye, he saw a boy trapped in a box with tears on his face and his mouth stretched in a howl of anguish that had gone unanswered by his coaxing, white-frocked overseers. Maybe they were just harder then, tempered by the chaos of the times and twisted by the remorseless race for survival. You can hardly waste tears on others when you can't spare any for yourselves. Jim and Spock thought Khan's cruelty and bloodlessness sprang from his genetic modification. So did you, since we're being so frank, but now you wonder. Walker, Rosalie is how she came to the world, misaligned bones and all, as flawed as Khan was perfect, and yet there's a passing resemblance, the face of a distant relative glimpsed in an old family photograph.

He studied her from the corner of his eye. She had not made a peep since his uneasy return, not to complain or accuse or question. She simply lay beneath the red sheet and stared at the opposite wall, an unappealing expanse of drab grey that hardly merited such intense scrutiny. Now and then, a bony leg shifted or she let her head loll to one side or the other. Sometimes her gaze fell on him, but she never interrupted his feigned perusal of her records or prevailed upon his attention, nor did she call for a nurse. She simply was, silent and grave as a fetch.

It's not her pissiness that bothers me, he admitted as he ordered three dozen more vials of Loxtan. It's the stoicism and the resignation. She should be yelling and screaming or crying or throwing everything within reach at the walls. She should be asking a hundred questions a goddamn minute or demanding to know just who's running this freakshow carnival or insisting that we're all out of our lunatic minds. She should be trying to hide the fork under the mattress and plotting her escape.

Only you would complain that things are going too well, Bones, the portable version of one James T. Kirk noted, and Bones could see his boyish aw-shucks grin and the amused gleam in his eye. Why look a gift horse in the mouth?

Because I'm not sure it is a gift. It's convenient, sure, but it's wrong, too, off-kilter, like a picture blurred to soft focus or a narrow hallway after one too many shots. I'm glad she's not screaming down the walls or trying to open a vein on the corner of her tray, but dammit, Jim, there should be some reaction. She shouldn't just sit there like some little golem. Even caged animals will batter themselves against the doors of their cage in search of escape and bare their fangs to defend themselves against the approaching hand before it grabs them by the scruff and drags them to perdition. They don't just lie down and die.

They do when they've been well and truly broken, the morbid voice pointed out. People like to say that spirits are resilient, and that might be so; God knows you've endured more than you ever thought you would or could. But resilient isn't a synonym for indestructible, and even elastic bands will snap when pulled too far for too long. Spirits and wills break just like bones. All you have to do is exert the proper pressure.

You've seen it for yourself on the family farm, when you, your brother and your old man would collect the castoffs from neighboring farms. He still could in those days, before he got down one day and never got up again. The three of you used to trundle around in his old truck, your old man at the wheel and your brother in the passenger seat, all gangly limbs and untidy cowlick that he could never tame and you hunkered down in the bed with a padd on your knees. You told your old man you rode in the bed because it was easier to hitch and unhitch the livestock trailer, and there was a kernel of truth in that because your mother raised no liars, but you really rode in there because you liked the smell of sweet hay in your nostrils and warm metal at your back. And you could read back there, hunkered in the bed with your padd on your knees and the sun on your nape and the rattle and hum of the truck vibrating against your ass.

He was no fool, your old man. He knew you were stretching the truth, pliant and forgiving as putty in your young hands, but he never made no never mind of it, let you hoard your harmless white lies the same way you hoarded your collection of replica pennies and your marbles. It was a shared secret, a wink and a nudge and a twinkle in his eye as he grunted and ruffled your hair and collected the warmth of the sun in the laugh lines in the corners of his mouth.

That's all right, then, son, he'd say in that growling baritone so like your own. Just settle in back there, and mind you see to your chores when we stop. The reassuring weight of his leathery hand atop your head or pressed briefly between your shoulder blades, and then he'd clamber into the truck and crank the engine, and you'd glide down the road with the wind in your hair. They were good, those years, when the farm and your old man were hale and hearty and the nature of time seemed as boundless as your energy. They are some of your sweetest memories, the ones you hold closest to your heart. Maybe that's why you gave in, in the end, when that beseeching voice drifted out of the dark of that godforsaken airless room. Your old man always said that a man repaid his debts.

You were as good as your word, too, never kept him waiting with your nose to the screen. You always hopped out of the bed and followed him to the stable or the pasture or the paddock to inspect the livestock. The air was fresh and clean in your lungs and heavy with the scent of horseflesh and sweet grass and hay rolled into bales and left to dot the landscape like pieces of a monument yet to be erected.

You learned kindness at his hand and mercy, and how to judge the quality of animals and the men who tended them, valuable lessons all that have served you well through the years, but you also learned of broken spirits.

Most of the men to whom your father took his trailer were good men looking to do a final kindness to an animal that had served them well. They rendered unto him dairy cows gone dry and once-prized thoroughbreds and quarterhorses that old age and use had fettered at last. They had foundered or gone swaybacked beneath the weight of daily toil, and now the farmer would see his reliable old friend to a life of ease and leisure in a foreign field. There were last scratches and final apples and sugar cubes pressed to velvety, nuzzling muzzles, and then George would lead them into the trailer with a lazy tug on the halter and soft whicks of encouragement while your father exchanged gossip and pleasantries with his brother in earth and soil and green, growing things. Sometimes you lingered on the periphery of the conversation, delighting in the laconic rumble of your old man's voice, the rough nap of it against your ears, but you usually wound up leaning on the fence, feet braced on the bottom slat and arms dangling over the top, and watching the other animals as they grazed, tails flicking indolently at the flies that buzzed around their flanks. If the paddock was empty, you followed George to the trailer and climbed onto the sideboard to peer through the small window at the horse or cow that had suddenly become yours. Sweet as the summer day unfolding above your head.

But there were some-far more than there should have been in a just world-who had more wish than sense. They were city boys who fancied themselves men of salt and earth, and who persisted in the illusion to the detriment of everything around them. They set down sickly, tentative roots and raised a house and barn among the green, rolling hills. They bought a shovel and a plow and a tractor that never left the barn designed to looked weathered despite its newness, and then they gabbed and glad-handed their way into animals about which they had only read and for which they had no idea how to properly care. Then they styled themselves gentlemen farmers and blundered headlong into disaster.

Times like that, you'd rattle into the barnyard in a cloud of dust, and your old man would spring from the cab of the truck with a nimbleness that belied his stocky frame. George would dart from the passenger side like a loyal hound, and you'd drop from the bed in a flurry of dust and hayseeds and chicken feed that danced in the air like misplaced fairy dust. The self-proclaimed farmer would shuffle forward in overalls that had scarcely seen the dust in which you stood, much less a hard day's toil of dirt and seed and mud and the fecund richness of shit smeared across the denim like woad. They were almost always young, these pretenders to a farmer's life, spot-faced and pale and too thin, plucked turkeys all eyes and fear and miserable embarrassment.

It got so you could recognize the bad ones. Not always right off-sometimes it took a word or an uneasy sidle or downcast eyes-but certainly by the time you got to the barn. The bad ones never looked you in the eye, and their handshakes were limp and clammy and too quick. They talked too much and too loudly, and they avoided the topic of the animal you'd come to collect for as long as they could, until your father pushed the issue with sunny politeness and suggested they see the critter in question.

If the farmer stalled further or moved like he'd filled his brogans with concrete, you knew. Your old man did, too, and though he never missed a beat, never dropped his air of chummy conviviality, his spine would stiffen beneath the fabric of his chambray shirt and a hint of steel would creep into his eyes.

Georgie, you bring the equipment now, he'd say, and George would wheel a neat about face and go back to the truck. His head and torso would disappear into the truck, and when they reappeared a few moments later, his hands would be full of tack. And somewhere in the jumble of bridles and bits and ropes would be a small, black case. This he passed to your father, who took it as though it were the most natural thing in the world. As though every farmer carried a phaser when he went to inspect livestock.

The sight of that case made your stomach roll and your heart thud dully inside a chest that had not yet begun to broaden with testosterone and impending manhood. It signified the end, a mercy of last resort. It made you feel sick and sad and hollow, and your throat and nose burned as though the swirling barnyard dust had found its way inside. Sometimes you stayed with the truck and scuffed lines in the dirt with the creased toes of your sneakers, keenly aware of the humidity on your skin and the prickling of the downy hairs on your forearms and the remote murmur of voices from the barn, but most of the time, you followed the others to the barn, driven by a compulsion to see the matter through.

And oh, how you damned your relentless curiosity.

You've never figured out why he let you follow him into those godforsaken places. Or George, either. There was nothing in them fit for a child's eyes, and your father wasn't a fool. He was firm but fair, and hardly oblivious to the lives of the children he'd brought into the world for the love of their mother. Indeed, he was doting in his fashion, quick with praise and compliments for a job well done and free with his counsel when your heart was troubled. You never wanted for a friend when you needed one, and when you graduated from med school with honors, there was no one prouder than him. He whooped when they called your name, and the hug he gave you after the ceremony lingered in your bones for days. The only thing he asked in return was the tassel from your mortarboard. It took pride of place in the living room until he grew too sick to hold court in his favorite chair, when it followed him into that airless room from which he never emerged. Your mother hung it from the mirror above the bureau opposite the four-poster bed into which he sank further every day, and there it remained until the day he died.

Such a sentimental man should never have let his children see what they did in the backs of dirty barns and inside neglected, shit-heaped stables, but he did. It was a farmer's pragmatism, maybe, the realization that life was often hard and capricious, and dirty, and that to shield his sons from it would be to whisper an unconscionable lie into their trusting ears, and if that's so, then it's served its purpose. Those experiences prepared you for the grim years ahead, when you delivered a stillborn baby or raced to some remote farmhouse to oversee the last bloody, screaming moments of a farmer who'd gotten the hem of his pants caught in the gnashing teeth of his thresher. They held you together while everyone else came apart and let you make it to the damn car before the shakes set in and the nausea threatened to turn your guts inside out. Those barns and their terrible, pitiful contents were his perverse, unstinting gifts to the son who would be a doctor, and they have served you as faithfully as your dermal regenerators and your plasma scalpels and your legendary steady hands.

They stank. God almighty, how they stank. You were too young then to recognize the stench, the high, sweet, oily stink of suppuration and disease-raddled fat, but you knew it wasn't a good smell. Nothing healthy smelled like that, like rot and damp hide and open cesspits fermenting in the sun. You would become intimately familiar with it as young doctor who carried his medkit into the homes of tough old saws too stubborn to call for help until the wife came screaming down the comlink with tales of fever and pus and skin gone green. It was gangrene and sepsis and wounds gone black to the bone. There was nothing you could do for then then but kill the pain and call for a med flight and keep the potential widow calm while she fluttered and wept and plied you with tea with hysterical civility. Occasionally, they survived, retrieved from the brink by a swift amputation and the miracle of modern medicine. Most times, they didn't, and more than a few of them rattled their last on kitchen floors and in marital beds that would never know the warmth of another embrace, while you watched the life bleed from their eyes and offered what feeble consolation you could to the newly-minted widow at your shoulder.

But that was later. Then, you were just a skinny kid breathing through his mouth as he followed his father and older brother into a barn. It was yellow, that stink, old pork fat and boiled tallow, and your skin crawled even as your feet propelled you doggedly forward through drifts of dry, dead hay and beneath tools and tack that had never been touched. It was vicious and alive, and it clung to you with greasy tenacity. It seeped into your hair and pores and into the fabric of your clothes, and it followed you home, an unwanted hitchhiker in the bed of the truck. When you got home, you shed your clothes on the front porch and made a beeline for the tub and the strong borax soap your mother favored. She would save your clothes if she could, but sometimes no amount of scrubbing and maternal determination could conquer the evil reek, and your clothes vanished into the ether of the replicator. Most times, she just sighed and plucked another from that same replicator a few minutes later, a desultory magician pulling a lost rabbit from her hat, but every now and then, she sat down in her favorite rocker and sewed one herself, the needle flashing silver in the rosy light of dusk while katydids trilled in the grass and fireflies hovered in the tall rushes beside the creek and the moon rose in the sky. Those were as special as the rides you took in the back of your old man's truck, and you never wore them on any of these visits, lest the stink of corruption infect them, too.

It was the bare-assed stupidity of it that galled you, the sheer fucking laziness. An ounce of prevention was worth a pound of cure, as the old saying went, and the idiots who led your old man into their barns at the eleventh hour and expected consolation and absolution for their folly hadn't invested in either. They had simply watched while an animal languished, rotting from the inside out for want of an ointment applied when the bite or cut was fresh. Cows contracted udder rot because carefully-manicured hands couldn't abide the slick of an antiseptic balm, and sheep were devoured alive by ticks and lice and parasites because the gentleman farmer knew nothing of shearing or worming or sheep dip. Dairy cows suffered agonizing mastitis from over-milking or the inexpert fumbling and tugging of unskilled hands or the poorly-calibrated, incessant suckling of machines, and breeding heifers struggled to calve until they collapsed and died and took the calf with them, or until the calf died in utero and poisoned her with its decomposition. Horses developed saddle sores that went untreated until the infection ate down to the bone. Sometimes, they developed colic and died in agony, foaming at the muzzle and pawing at the dirt in their filthy stalls while the cramps wracked their insides and they slowly suffocated beneath their own weight. They succumbed to lameness wrought by hoof rot that could have been avoided by routine visits from a decent farrier. They died simply because their minder was too lazy to give a damn about the creatures in his care, and the petty, dumb cruelty of it enraged you.

Those barns were your first and best education in the ways of the world, and their lessons were harsher and clearer than those in your med-school textbooks, where the cold, ugly reality of death was sanitized and reduced to a handful of glossy photographs accompanied by didactic captions and a few dozen holographs of corpses and cadavers drained of all humanity as they lay on antiseptic steel slabs. Those photos and holographs and their dispassionate starkness were stories half-told, fairy tales made safe for naive, wide-eyed children, and they couldn't hold a candle to the truths laid out on beds of dirty hay. They said nothing of the sounds or the smells of death, the flailing, pawing, grasping futility of it. They also kept mum on the subject of dead, glassy eyes, and distended bellies and tongues gone blue and swollen from anoxia. And they most certainly said absolutely nothing about how long and hard life fought to survive from one breath to the next. Death was seldom peaceful. It was a knock-down drag-out fight badly and grudgingly lost. For most, it came too soon, but for some, it came too late.

That was the hardest, truest lesson those barns had to teach. That sometimes death came long after it was called. Sometimes the spirit died long before the heart quit beating, and breathing was so much wind soughing through an empty conch shell. Horses with dead eyes would lie on the floor of their stalls, foam oozing from one end and shit from the other, and paw blindly at the dirt and the grimy wood of their hotbox tombs, their minds lost to the memory of rolling hills beneath their cracked hooves, and emaciated, flyblown heifers would lie in the dirt and chew imaginary cud while their eyes rolled wildly in their sockets and maggots crawled over weeping sores. They lacked the strength to rise from the matted mire of straw and blood and pus, and so they lay in it, too stunned and weak to cry out. The only sounds were their ragged, labored breathing as they drowned in their own fluids and the delirious, heat-haze buzzing of the fat-bellied flies as they circled their prey.

And the shifting, dust-and-bone crunch of the straw beneath your feet as you stood with three men and watched the sorry spectacle.

You didn't stay that first time. You turned so fast and hard that you damn near sprained your ankle, and the straw's breathless, contemptuous laughter followed you out as you lurched away from the smell and the blood and the shit-matted straw. You expected to hear your father's voice at your fleeing back, its disappointed reproof as stinging as a hickory lash, but it never came. Neither did your brother's mocking laughter. There was just the pained shuffle of feet and the quick, chirping burst of the phaser and a silence so still and complete that you wondered if you'd gone deaf, if the surge of bilious adrenaline had ruptured your eardrums.

You made it to the truck before you surrendered the breakfast you'd gobbled so greedily that morning, with your mother humming at the skillet and your brother sneaking the dog a rasher of bacon beneath the table. You bent at the waist, hand braced on the side of the truck, and sent it all up in a wet, clotted splatter between your feet.

That's planter's work, there, you thought with nonsensical pride as you blinked tears from your eyes and clutched feebly at your knee. Then your nostrils burned with the rich, fecund stink of shit and old blood, and your stomach revolted again.

You were still spitting bile and strings of sour bile into the the dirt when you heard approaching footsteps, the heavy clop of your old man's work boots, and you braced for the rebuke you expected, but all that came was the warm weight of your father's hand on the back of your neck. It was as familiar and comforting as the brush of Jack's fur against your hip as he loped into the kitchen to lap from his water dish, and you burst into tears, startled and ashamed.

It's all right, son. It's all right. Your father's voice drifted over your head like a quilt, and his fingers brushed your trembling shoulder. There was dirt in the cuticles, just like always, and that bit of rightness in a world gone so rudely topsy-turvy was a relief. You spun and buried your face in the belly of his overalls and cried so hard it dizzied you. Your father only hummed, a stablehand soothing a spooked horse. All right now, he murmured and carded his broad, blunt fingers through your hair. It had to be done, he said softly, mistaking the reason for your tears, and you were too sick and grief-stricken to set him straight.

He was right, but that didn't ease the metastatic ache of it as you climbed into the truck bed. There was no joy in the ride home that afternoon, just the dull, absent emptiness of an extracted tooth, and as the empty trailer rattled along the road like a funeral cortege, you swore you'd never come on one of these runs again. You slumped against the cab of the truck, knees drawn to your chest and padd forgotten at your hip. You were out of the truck the minute your old man tapped the brakes in the front yard, and you made a silent, drawn beeline for the screen door and the sanctuary of home.

You waited for George to needle you for being a big old crybaby and barfing in a neighbor's yard, but he never did. Not that day, and not any other day. In fact, he was as peaked as you, and as quiet for once. Neither of you talked much the rest of that day; even your old man was uncharacteristically subdued, and your mother was so worried about her downcast menfolk that she bustled about feeling foreheads and inspecting gums and interrogating you about the state of your stomachs. She wasn't satisfied until she broke out her father's first-gen bioscanner, a hulking monstrosity that looked like a pepper mill and sounded like an asthmatic canary, and took everyone's vitals. She let you be once she figured out that she couldn't fix what ailed you with a motherly caress and a bowl of hot grits, but she kept a watchful eye on you and your brother until you both slipped off to bed, and you heard her hushed voice talking to your father long after night had settled over the house. You and George took turns petting Jack in the darkness of your shared room, and you fell asleep with a handful of German Shepherd scruff.

You avoided the next few trips just like you'd intended when you'd come scissoring out of that barn with breakfast clogging your spasming gullet, but it wasn't long before you were scrabbling into the back of the truck again. You missed the sun on your skin and the wind in your hair and the hum and vibration of the engine beneath your ass, and you had your pride. You were damned if some miserable jackass with little sense and an even greater lack of conscience was going to rob you of time with your old man. Besides, you'd caught doctor fever by then, thanks to that bioscanner and the stories you heard at your maternal grandfather's knee, and you figured you had to toughen up if you were ever going to set bones and stitch wounds and treat weeping infections.

So you went back. The first few times, you stopped in the dooryard, eyes closed and forehead resting against the sliding door and breathing slowly through your mouth to avoid the stench of blood and shit and spoiling sickness, but eventually, you bested your roiling stomach and rejoined the morose circle gathered around a creature sacrificed to some fool's ignorance. You were disgusted and filled with contempt for the wannabe farmers who bumbled and mumbled and sought to excuse their complicity in the sorry state of affairs that had brought your father there with his tack and his small, black holster, but you were curious, too, make no mistake. You were fascinated by the pink gleam of tendon and the dusty, porcelain whiteness of bone and the foggy milkiness of cataracted eyes. You wanted to know what eased pain, and why, and for how long, and you wanted to know why blood clotted and coagulated or separated into serum and plasma. You were captivated by the whys and wherefores of death even as you raged against the gracelessness and rank brutality of it, and you realized that to know these secrets, you must bear witness to the merciless mechanism of death.

So you watched, and you learned from a teacher you despised and would gladly betray if you could. You never vomited again, never wept and clung to your father like a terrified foundling, but the miserable ache of loss and mute sympathy never faded. It remained, lodged behind your breastbone, hot and perpetually tender, and it drove you to excel in your studies and your early residency and your fledgling practice, when you worked until you lost fine motor control and lingered over every case late into the night, hunched over the desk crammed into your tiny bedroom while Pamela tossed fitfully in the bed behind you. Your obsession with thwarting death and its companions of misery and decrepitude and protracted illness consumed you and took your marriage with it.

Pamela loved you when she said she would and did. You know that just as you know that doctoring is in your blood, but you also know it wasn't enough to counteract the resentment she held against your job and the voices that bubbled and crackled out of the com and summoned you from family reunions and cozy dinners for two. It was the child you never quite got around to having, and by the end, when she'd thrown you out of the house and you were sleeping on a table in one of your exam rooms because you were embarrassed to tell your mother that your marriage had collapsed, she loved it more than she loved you, and she nurtured it with a mother's single-minded ferocity. The only reason she isn't after you now is because she got everything worth taking when that Atlanta judge signed off on your divorce decree.

Sometimes you wonder if she would have understood had she seen you all those years ago, when you were still becoming, still Len to your mother and Lenny to your brother and son to your father. If she had seen what you saw and heard the crackling of dead straw beneath her shuffling feet. You'd like to think so, like to believe that she was as good and sweet as your heart found her, but you doubt it. She might have felt that same righteous, impotent anger as she watched a young mare thrashing and snorting in the final, excruciating throes of colic, but she would have fled from it, ashen and stricken and shrilly defiant in her refusal to acknowledge the horror.

You had no choice but to bear witness. You saw for the first time at eight and for the last time at twenty-two, the summer between college and med school, when you went home to help your old man on the farm. You saw dozens of creatures die on the floors of filthy barns, and as they passed from the world, they passed to you the recognition of surrender.

You've seen it since. Only a few times, thank God for small, miserable favors, in the eyes of Gorn women who died in childbirth with their snapping, snarling offspring still struggling in the womb, and in the eyes of shuttle crash victims with compression injuries beyond the skill of even the most experienced surgeon and the most advanced technology.

And in the eyes of a ravaged man in an airless room that stank of piss and despair and terror.

And there was a trail of breadcrumbs he most certainly would not be following.

Fair enough, the voice conceded amiably. I suppose I was getting a bit afield of where I wanted to go, and I'm sure we'll get there anyway in the end. All roads may lead to Rome, as the old saying goes, but all yours lead back to that farmhouse in Decatur, Georgia, and that airless, stinking room that could never seem to catch and hold the light.

What I started to say so many words ago was that you've seen this before, and you know what it means and where it will lead if you don't cut it off at the pass. She's not past the point of no return yet, pawing at the dirt and waiting for that final breath with foam and blood on her lips and diseased hope in her eyes, but she's undeniably broken, bruised and battered and nursing wounds your bioscanners can't see. She's not seeking death with open arms, pursuing it in some twisted game of olly olly oxen free, but if it came for her in the night, she'd go with it without a whimper of protest or a pang of regret. Life isn't an adventure for her; it's a goddamned endurance contest, and her will is flagging.

Yeah, well, I can't help her if she doesn't want it, he thought wearily, and massaged his eyes with his fingertips in a bid to thwart the headache that was blooming in a slow welter behind them. Then, Dammit, it's treatment, not torture.

To her, it's one and the same. You saw those tapes, saw what they did. Those weren't patients. They were captive specimens.

That was two hundred and fifty years ago, he protested. I'm not some mad scientist poking and prodding her on some wild goose chase and getting my jollies by seeing how much I can make her scream, for God's sake. I'm a highly-trained professional who knows what the hell he's doing.

I'm sure the doctors on those tapes told themselves the same thing, the voice said, and there was no malice in it now, only cold pragmatism. You'd be surprised what people tell themselves in order to justify their depravities and ease the sting of their grumbling consciences. Those idiot farmers did it often enough, when they left those hapless animals to a slow death on a grotty barn floor and called your father to clean up their unholy messes, and you've done it a time or two yourself in the name of science when you've injected some unsuspecting Tribble or rabbit with an experimental vaccine or a heretofore undocumented neurotoxin and recorded the results. Hell, you can be downright Vulcan when your precious profession calls for it. Just because Tribbles have no mouths doesn't mean they aren't screaming, and just because you're not stirring your patient's brains with a slim, metal rod doesn't mean it isn't torture.

Besides, it's only been two hundred and fifty years for you. For her, it was yesterday afternoon.

One hour, then two, then three. Her charts were replaced by duty rosters and inventory calculations and requisition forms, and still she uttered not a word. She simply yawned and blinked and scissored her legs beneath the sheets. Lunch came courtesy of Nurse Ogawa, who set the plate on the rolling tray beside her bed.

"Thank you, ma'am," was her response. No more and no less.

Ma'am. Haven't heard that one in a while. "Eat," he ordered gruffly. "And I want all of that water gone. You need to keep hydrated, ease the burden on your kidneys."

"The eating I can do," she replied, though she eyed the tray in front of her with no discernible enthusiasm. "But if I try to pick up that glass of water, I'm going to end up wearing it. It's too full. Do you have a straw?"

He grunted in acknowledgment and rose from his desk with a stifled groan at the knot of tension in the small of his back. He had been sitting for too long, and he stretched his calves and flexed his toes inside his shoes as he shuffled to the replicator and keyed in his request for a straw. "Rigid or flexible?" he called over his shoulder.

"Flexible, please. The rigid ones poke the roof of my mouth."

He finished the order, retrieved the straw the machine dutifully produced, and carried it to her bed, where he set it on the tray beside her plate. "Here. I mean it about that food, too. After all the upset yesterday, you need to eat, get your sugars up and your electrolytes in balance."

"Yes, Doctor."

Her arm snaked from beneath the coverlet, and her thin-fingered hand closed around the straw, which she handled as though it were fine bone china. Even with the aid of the Loxtan, her fingers trembled and twitched and threatened to close around the plastic stem like a throttling fist. His hands itched to pluck it from her unsteady grip and plop it into the water, but the analytical ruthlessness of the doctor whispered that it was a chance to assess her fine motor skills, so he quashed the charitable impulse by folding his arms and tucking his hands into his armpits.

Might need to up the dosage a bit, he mused as he watched her hover the straw over the cup at a haphazard angle and release it from her crabbed fist like a steam shovel releasing its payload. The straw dropped into the water with a dainty plip. The spasticity ramps up when she focuses on a task.

She planted her palms on either side of her hips and lifted her buttocks off the bed. She scooted backward a few inches and plopped into place, and then she leaned forward and pulled the cup toward her mouth. Her head bobbled drunkenly, and her neck stretched as she fought to bridge the gap between lips and straw, a tortoise emerging from its shell to reach for a tender shoot. Small, pink lips finally closed around the straw, and she took a long, convulsive swallow, one hand clamped around the edge of the tray to anchor her.

Just getting out of bed must be the equivalent of a marathon, he thought incredulously as he watched her throat work and her abdominal muscles tighten with the effort of holding her upright and her knuckles whiten as she clung to the tray. It might explain why she's so thin if she's burning so much energy just to take a swig. I might have to increase her caloric intake, at least for a while.

"Do you get hungry a lot?" he asked when she finally let go of the straw to take a breath.

She shrugged. "I used to when I was younger, but my doctors were always worried about me getting fat because of my 'sedentary lifestyle', so they kept me on a strict diet. Once I hit my calorie limit for the day, that was it. I went hungry a lot, but you get used to it after a while."

"Those doctors were idiots," he declared.

For a moment, the surprise on her face was so complete that he would have guffawed if he were not so appalled at such gross incompetence, but then the wariness returned. "My grandmother thought so, too. Every couple of weeks, she'd pick me up for a girls' day out and take me to the movies and dinner. I'd get to eat fried chicken and blackberry cobbler with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top, and I'd get to have a Coke or a root beer once in a while. It was our little secret." She was quiet for a moment, and then she added, "It sure beat the hell out of my little secret."

Her voice cracked and wavered, and he braced himself convinced that the breakdown for which he had been waiting had come at last, but she only took a deep, shuddering breath and loosened her death grip on the side of the rolling tray. "Sorry. I'm just..." She shrugged and offered him a bleak smile.

She's a tough nut to crack, he thought as she squared her shoulders and took another greedy sip of water. Good. She'll have to be.

"You're overwhelmed. It's to be expected under the circumstances," he answered.

Satisfied that she was following his order to drink her water, he made another trip to the replicator, this time for a bowl of grits with sawmill gravy and a glass of tea, unsweetened. While he wholeheartedly embraced his home state's love of grits, he despised its championed drink, a break from tradition that had earned him the labels of philistine and heretic, at least according to his brother, who loudly declared his distaste for liquid diabetes unnatural.

Well, George could keep his sweet tea. As far as he was concerned, it was saddle leather dipped in bee piss.

He carried his lunch to his desk and settled himself behind it. His spoon was halfway to his mouth when he realized that his sole patient was watching him again. Not with wariness and studied indifference, but with guarded curiosity and wistful longing. Something's grabbed her attention.

"What?" His spoon hovered uncertainly below his chin, and grits crawled over its side and plopped into the bowl.

God help him, she blushed to the roots of her hair. "I'm-it's-are those grits?" she stammered, and the blush deepened. She seized the sheets and wrung them nervously in her restless hands.

"As a matter of fact, they are," he answered, nonplussed, by the sudden shift in her demeanor.

Stay quiet, whispered the voice of instinct inside his head. If you stay quiet, you might learn something.

So he waited. He swallowed the spoonful of grits and gathered another, skimming the surface with the side of the spoon until grits oozed into the center.

"I thought so," she said, so young and vulnerable that his heart dropped. "My Memaw Lavinia makes the best grits I've ever had. Smothered and covered. Thick, with sawmill gravy and sausage drippings and grated cheese. I could eat them by the bowlful." Nostalgic and fond. Then, like a stone dropped at the foot of a mountain. "Made. She made the best grits I've ever had."

What he saw then was homesickness, pure and simple, the crushing realization that she was a long way from where she wanted to be and might never get there again. There was no memaw here, no bowl of grits with all the fixings. No family to fill the silence of a house. Just a med bed little better than a cot and a nurse who brought her bland food at regular, monotonous intervals and a doctor who kept watch like a joyless warden and bid her pick her from unfamiliar poison.

I'm sorry, he wanted to say, and he was. There was neither kindness or fairness in the hand she had been dealt. But there was no salve or nostrum he could give her to fix it, no balm to ease the angry throb of it. Sorry was so much empty air between clacking teeth, as useless as a butterfly bandaid on a catastrophic avulsion. So he did not say it. Instead, he said, "I grew up on a dairy farm in Decatur. Grits were a breakfast staple all the time and an after-dinner belly warmer in the winter. No sawmill or cheese or sausage drippings. Just butter and black pepper."

A watery laugh. "The proper preparation of grits could be fighting words."

She was crying, tears streaming down her face, and the sight of them brought a welcome relief. Tears meant grief, and a sorrow beyond the help of a physician's practical hands, but they were also a sign of acceptance, however reluctant and bitter on the tongue.

"Around my table, that went to tea."

A garbled squawk as amusement wrangled with loss and fathomless sadness. "Don't tell me you hate sweet tea?"

"All right, I won't."

"Philistine," came the reply, and it was so like George that he guffawed around a mouthful of grits.

She did not speak again for two spoonfuls and a sip of tea, and when she did, her voice was steady. "Earlier, you mentioned ideas for treatment."

"I did." Neutral and careful not to betray his excitement. A measured bite of grits.

"You said I could either leave in three weeks or a year."

"Yes," he agreed.

"Suppose I gave you six months. I don't know what you want to do, and I don't know if it will work. It could be just more quacking bullshit, but the way I figure it, I have nothing to lose. There's no money for you to bilk me out of, and my family is two hundred years in the ground. I'll give you six months."

"Why six?"

"Because sometimes the gains aren't worth the cost. If I get stronger or less spastic only to be too tired to do more than go to therapy and drool on myself in bed, then I want the right to stop. Life's more than doing. It's being, too, and if the only way to be who I am is to be this, then that's the way it is, and I'd like the chance to find my feet before you dump me off in some brave new world without so much as my wheelchair."

He considered. "Eight months."

She narrowed her eyes, and he feared that he had pressed too hard, traded too eagerly on their new and tenuous connection. "Fair enough."

He inhaled a celebratory bite of grits and narrowly resisted the impulse to leap from his chair.

"Now what?" she asked, lost and stunned by the conclusion of negotiations.

"Now we fill out paperwork."

She snorted. "Some things never change."

"No, they don't," he agreed, and pulled up the requisite consent and patient history forms on his padd, but before they embarked on a tedious afternoon of recording her every physical fault and foible, he ordered a second bowl of grits from the replicator, with sawmill gravy and sausage drippings and grated cheese, and set it on the edge of her tray.