The Fifth Harmonic Read online

  Thought you had the playing field all to yourself, didn't you? Figured you had a lock on this, right? Well listen up, you slimy bastard! I want my life back. I'M in charge now, and you—you're fucking DEAD!!

  The rational part of me knows that the tumor is not an entity, that it has no will, and can't hear me, but the rest of me that wants vengeance is in control now, and I'm Ulysses home from Troy, royally pissed and cleaning house. I'm wild, I'm crazed, I've been helpless so long before this monster that I'm out of control.

  And then, at last, it begins. The tumor cells begin to lyse. That's a fancy scientific term for explosive cellular death. But I can't be objective here. If I had feet I'd dance. I watch with ecstatic glee as the membranes rupture and spew their contents into the intercellular spaces. Huge matted sheets of malignant cells leak and shrivel and die. The main body of the tumor begins to wither. And still I maintain my murderous stranglehold, clamping down until the bulk of its cells lie in ruin.

  My own strength is waning, and finally I release control and let bloodflow resume to the area. White cells flood the region to begin mopping up the necrotic debris.

  My vision blurs, the images waver. I see a flash and suddenly I am back on the plateau, bathed in sweat, lying on my side, coughing, retching, gagging. I spit foul-tasting tissue onto the stone. In the growing light it looks red . . . bloody. That couldn't be part of Captain Carcinoma, could it?

  I look around. I'm still in the center of the circular depression, but the moon is gone, the stars are fading, and the sky is glowing toward the east.

  What just happened? How long have I been here? I know I feel different, transformed, but I am even weaker than before.

  My mouth fills with salty fluid. I swallow convulsively and—

  Swallow? Did I just swallow?

  “Will?”

  I turn and see Maya hurrying across the plateau toward me. She's dressed in the long traditional huipil that covers her from neck to ankles, but even in the dim light she looks absolutely wonderful.

  I try to sit up but I haven't the strength. I can't even speak.

  She carries a container and as she drops to her knees beside me she holds it toward my lips.

  “Can you?” she says in a voice thick with emotions—I hear hope and fear at war in those two words.

  I open my mouth and she pours in a few drops of the milky mix that has sustained me these past few days. It tastes wonderful and I swallow it.

  I swallow it!

  I look up at her and nod. “More, please?”

  And my voice, though still hoarse, is clearer—the pressure on my laryngeal nerve has eased!

  Maya begins to sob as she pours more milk into my mouth. I can barely swallow it, not because of pain or constriction, but because I'm crying too. I get it down, though—I'm too ravenous and thirsty to let anything halt the flow of this marvelous nectar of the goddess—and between sobs she feeds me more, sip after sip until—

  “That is enough for now,” Maya says. “Too much will make you sick.”

  I nod. I want to upend the jug over my face but I know she's right.

  “What happened?” I say.

  “You tell me.”

  As I tell her about falling into my body, seeing my cells and manipulating my life processes, she begins nodding, then grinning, and her smile widens and widens until finally, when I tell her about strangling the major portion of my tumor at its primary site, she clutches my hands, throws back her head, and laughs.

  “Yes! Oh, yes, Will!” she shouts with tears running down her cheeks. “You have done it. You have found the Fifth Harmonic!”

  Had I? I'm not sure. Something wonderful and transforming has happened . . . something that finally deserves that misused, beatento-death word, incredible. But what?

  “Is it the sound I heard inside of me?”

  “No, no,” she says. “The Fifth Harmonic is not a sound, it is a state of being, a state of complete harmony with your body and your self. It is the new level of awareness and consciousness I have been telling you about.”

  “But I thought they were just words,” I say. “I never dreamed . . . I mean, I was conscious down to the cellular level. No, even further— to the molecular level.”

  “Not was—are.”

  “You mean, tonight wasn't just a one-shot deal?”

  “Oh, no. Once you achieve the Fifth Harmonic, it is yours forever.”

  “I can go back in? Any time I want? Because that tumor's not finished, not by a long shot.”

  “Yes, any time you wish. You will have to go back again and again to root out all the metastases, but wait until you are stronger. You have no reserves right now.”

  Already I feel stronger. I sit up and experience a rush of vertigo, but the world stops spinning after a few seconds—the world, but not my brain. I close my eyes and try to sort through what has happened, try to make sense of it.

  So easy to write off the night's experiences as a dream, that the only altered states of awareness and consciousness I've experienced are a very elaborate set of hallucinations. And yet . . .

  I prod my throat with my fingers . . . the knotted masses of the lymph nodes are still there, but they're undeniably smaller.

  And then there's the fact that I can swallow now, and my voice is coming back.

  I can act like an idiot and say I'm still hallucinating, or I can simply . . .

  Accept.

  “But why did you have to be so mysterious all along?” I say. “Why didn't you tell me this was what I was after?”

  She gives me a wry grin. “And how would Cecil have reacted?”

  Good point. Excellent point. Cecil would have run screaming back to Westchester. Even now, parts of me are falling all over themselves trying to find scientific explanations for what has happened.

  I catch sight of the tines, still sitting in their notches at the four corners of the world.

  “The tines,” I say, reaching out and clutching the fire tine, remembering how it placed the mark of Cain on a couple of the cancer cells. “They did it.”

  I see Maya shaking her head.

  “What's wrong?”

  “You did it,” she says.

  “What do you mean?”

  She points to the tine lying cool and shiny in my palm.

  “Dumbo feather,” she says with a grin.

  “You're not going to sit there and tell me that I've had this ability all along are you?”

  She's nodding. “All along.”

  I gather up the other three tines. “Then why put me through the various hells of getting these things.”

  “You had the capacity but not the know-how. You did not know how to tap into your ability, and even if you somehow learned the route, you were too locked away behind too many walls to reach it. You first had to remove the blocks and strip away the layers of insulation that separated you from true harmony with your own body. Usually it takes years to find your way to the Fifth Harmonic, but you did not have those years, so I had to give you a crash course. And to make that work, you had to want to reach it badly enough to make the necessary leap to find it. The tines helped focus you, but the power was there from the start.”

  I think of Savanna and now I understand what she meant about “killing” her tumor. But . . .

  “Wait a minute. What about Savanna? She didn't have years either. Don't tell me you hauled her down here and made her strap on a kite or play footsy with molten lava.”

  Maya's expression grows serious. “Savanna was open. Not closed like you. You had so many walls, Will. Even the other night, when we were together, when you were inside me, I tried to reach inside you. I thought your walls might drop then, but they did not. Even at the height of passion, they kept me from you.”

  That explains the way she pounded her fists against the sand. So it wasn't purely sexual frustration.

  “Savanna was relatively easy,” Maya says. “She did not have your walls. Nor did she have your level of ability.”

&
nbsp; “I don't get it.”

  “Haven't you realized yet that you are special? That you are a curandero?”

  “A healer.”

  “Yes. Like me. There are not many of us. That is why the Mother wanted you saved.”

  “Then not everybody can do what I just did?”

  “We all have a self-healing power, but to varying degrees—some have very little, some have more. Savanna has an average level, but she couldn't have cured herself. Her tumor was too strong. She needed help.”

  “Which you gave her.”

  “Yes. Every so often someone comes along who not only can cure the self, but can guide others to a cure as well.”

  I reach for the container and sip more of the milk mix as I try to fathom what Maya is saying.

  “And I am one of those.”

  Her eyes fairly glow. “Yes. You were born to heal. It is a fire within you. That is why you went against your father's wishes and chose medicine over law. That is why your personal life suffered because of your practice, why medicine always seemed to be the most important thing in your life. You are a healer, Will. It is as much a part of you as your fingerprints and the color of your skin. And now you can go on healing, but in a new and different way, a better way.”

  “How? By entering a body and adjusting its physiology like I just did to myself?”

  The residual Old Will tries to reject this, but I hammer him down.

  Accept . . . accept . . .

  Maya is nodding. “If the patient will let you. You cannot enter someone who does not want you. They must accept you.”

  “That's . . . that's frightening.”

  “Yes. Yes, it is. It is terrifying at first. And not always successful. Sometimes they will let you in but their systems will resist you. But when you and the patient are in harmony, you can work cures that seem miraculous. It is an indescribably glorious feeling, Will.”

  Wonder fills me as I consider the implications. A vast vista of healing stretches before me. The power to restore bodies and change lives for the better, to give people a second chance like the one I've just received . . .

  And suddenly I'm depressed.

  “All these years,” I say. “What I could have done if I'd only known. I've wasted so much time. I wish you'd found me sooner.”

  “So do I,” she says softly, staring at me. “For many reasons.”

  I take her hand. “Yes. Why did I have to wait till middle age to find you . . . to find myself? We've got no time to waste, Maya.” My mind is filling, overflowing with possibilities. “We can do more than cure one person at a time. We can use our abilities to advance the entire field of medicine. We can see the workings of cells, sick and well. Imagine what a research tool this power can be! We can trigger a golden age of medicine!”

  She's shaking her head. “Time is not a problem. But advancing the field of medicine . . . that is quite a problem.”

  “Why? When they see—”

  “But they will not see. The field of medicine, the entire world of science is filled with people like Wilbur Cecil Burleigh. You remember him, don't you?”

  The truth of that is a bucket of cold water on the flame that was sputtering to life within me. I remember the man I was a week ago. I can imagine someone coming to him and saying, I have consciousness down to the cellular level.

  Yeah, sure, buddy. And I've got a flying saucer parked outside that'll take you back to Alpha Centauri.

  But I'm not giving up.

  “I'll find a way. But it'll take time and we've none to waste.”

  “Don't worry about time,” she says. “You will have as much as you want. But before you go anywhere or do anything you must get to know your power, learn its limits, become comfortable with it, explore every nook and cranny of your body. You must chase down and eliminate the cancer cells to the very last one. Then you must search out other trouble spots in your body, and learn to repair them: find the narrowing arteries and clear them, restore worn cartilage in arthritic joints, replace aging or damaged cells with new ones—”

  Wonder fills me. “I can do that?”

  “Of course. You are in complete control of your body now.”

  “But if I can replace aging cells . . .”

  “Yes?” Her voice is heavy with expectation.

  “Then I don't have to . . .”

  A slow smile is stretching her lips, deepening her dimples. “Did I not tell you that time is not a problem?”

  And now all my slowly growing strength seems to desert me in a rush. I have to put out a hand to keep from falling back onto the stone. The nagging questions, the contradictions about the various Maya Quennells in Terziski's reports tumble back to me.

  “Maya,” I say, and my voice is hoarse again, but not from the tumor. “The Maya Quennell who graduated from the Sorbonne in 1938 . . . who is she?”

  “Me.”

  “And the Maya Quennell arrested at the Oregon logging camp in 1972?”

  “Also me. I could not sit idly by and let them cut down the Mother's wonderful ancient trees to make wood pulp.”

  Overwhelmed, I close my eyes. “Maya . . . how old are you?”

  “I will be ninety next March.”

  She says it so casually.

  “But your eyes . . . they're different from the eyes in the mug shot. Did you . . .?”

  “Change them? Yes. When I was arrested and booked, I realized that I was leaving behind a photographic record that might catch up to me later. I thought changing my eye color from dark brown to light green would be enough. I know now that I should have changed my fingerprints as well.”

  “You can do that?”

  “We can do that. It takes much time and patience, but many changes are possible.”

  “But why do you want to keep your power a secret?”

  Her lips settled into a tight, grim line. “Do you think you can present your power to the world and be welcomed with open arms? You will learn that the world is filled with individuals and organizations—especially the scientific communities and the world-hating religions—who will see you as a threat. We must tread softly, Will. We must do our work in the interstices and always be on the lookout for others like us.”

  I know she is right about the threat we present to certain powerful segments of the world, yet I am not sure that I can keep this new power hidden forever. Maya is wise and she's been at this so much longer. I will follow her lead . . . for now.

  She seems to read my mind.

  “Do not think you can go back to who you were, what you were, and where you were. If you try, you will regret it.”

  Maya rises and holds out her hands to me. I take them and let her pull me to my feet. My muscles are weak and my shaky legs threaten to buckle, but I struggle upright and lock my knees as she wraps me in her arms and whispers in my ear.

  “Your new life does not come without a price, Will. The old you is gone. You have emerged from the chrysalis that was Wilbur Cecil Burleigh. A line has been drawn across the course of your life, and you can never cross back. From this moment onward you will see the world—life, existence, everything—in a new light that will keep you one step removed from most of humanity. You will be different, Will, and people will sense that.”

  “What do I care about other people if I have you?” I say. “Because I truly love you, Maya.” And I've never meant that as much as I do now. This is more than a beautiful, loving, caring woman, this is a soulmate. If there is a Sixth Harmonic, it is what I feel when I look at Maya. All other women—all other people—I have known in my life seem to have lost substance, faded, dissipated, until there is only Maya. “I loved you yesterday morning, and I love you now, and I will love you as long as I breathe.”

  I hear her sob. I try to push back to see her face but she clings to me.

  “What's wrong?”

  “I have been so lonely.”

  And I realize how isolated she must have been all these years. Never aging while everyone she cares about grows old a
nd dies.

  “Teach me,” I say. “And together we'll work wonders.”

  Maya pulls back a few inches and I see tears on her cheeks.

  “Not together, I am afraid.”

  Something in her voice stops my breath. “What?”

  “We will be as one, always, and we will stay here together for a long time while I teach you all I know, but then we must part.”

  My skin goes cold. “No! What are you saying?”

  “Only for a time, Will. We cannot be always together.”

  “Why not?”

  “It is Gaea's way that we separate at times. There are so few of us, and so much to do. Surely you see that. But you will not be losing me, Will. We will always know where the other is, we will always be able to find each other, and when we do it will be as if we were never apart.”

  Her assurances ease my pain, but only slightly. I feel I'm losing almost as much as I've gained.

  “But what about those in-between times?” I say.

  “You will be traveling, honing your powers and healing others. Come.”

  She breaks free, takes my hand, and guides me to the edge of the plateau.

  We stand together, looking out over the village and the ocean. It's a new day for us, a new world for me.

  “We have work to do and a love to share, you and I,” Maya whispers. “And all the time in the world to do it.”

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