It fits with some of what I’ve learned about my past. I was a neurosurgeon who became the leader of the most advanced medical research institute in the world. But implanting chips into a brain? Before this dream I saw bats swooping into a cave and putting out candles. That wasn’t real. That was a nightmare. So what was this?
As I rise and step outside, basking in the warmth of the three suns, I think more of Drew’s story. He told me he saw how he died after the days of his most grueling planting and harvesting. Maybe hard work unlocks memories in dreams? That would be no stranger than how it worked in the other towers—dunking my head in the Sieve in Blue, staring at a flame in Red, or drinking sap in Green.
I decide to test it out. If yesterday’s sheen of sweat brought me into a half-dream, half-nightmare of surgery on an isolated brain, then today I will toil until I’m drenched in sweat. No shortcuts with my power, either. Just work. Even if it doesn’t help my dreams, I need a field of corn so I can trade and bake my nine-grain bread and get to Emma.
I begin to plant the kernels. The memory of using a scalpel, with such precision, mocks my hands as they scoop out little holes of dirt, insert a kernel of corn, and cover it again. Yellowish brown dust wedges under my fingernails. I plant three rows, spacing out each kernel to leave room to grow. A fourth row is devoted to the oat seeds that Drew gave me. It’s only two grains, not nine, but it’s a start.
I use the empty milk jar to wash off my hands and then water the rows of seeds. It takes a dozen trips or more to drench the four lines. By then the three suns have heated the land. It feels fifty degrees hotter than it was at night. The temperature swings wildly in this place. I pause to stare at the half-finished rows. They look lifeless. Drew said things grow fast, but there’s no use waiting to watch.
Kernel prances up to me. I pet him and feel an object fastened to his collar. I pull it off and smile. It’s a small shovel, just the right size to hold in my hand.
“Thanks, boy,” I say.
He cocks his head like he wants to tell me something.
“What is it boy?”
He trots off and looks back to make sure I’m following. He stops beside a small object on the other side of my hut.
It’s a small brown bird, a wren maybe. It flaps its wings, but one of them is hurt. I kneel, set the shovel on the ground, and cup the bird gently in my hands. Its delicate body trembles.
Inside the hut, after confirming the cat is nowhere around, I lay the bird down on the ground near the hearth, where it’s warm. The wren’s beady eyes dart from me to the hearth. It pecks at the dust of corn on the hard-packed dirt floor.
Eventually I go back outside, to continue my work. My hands become dirt-stained again, and a blister opens on my palm. But still I press on, digging and planting, digging and planting.
The rows are mostly finished and watered, and the suns are setting, when I hear a loud cawing from the hut. I rush back to it and find a crow perched in the windowsill, black against the gloaming sky. It glances at me, then at the little wren on the floor, then suddenly swoops toward it.
“No!” I shout, trying to scare the crow away.
But it doesn’t flee. It lands on the hearth, oily feathers darker than night. I’ve never seen such a bird so close. It unnerves me.
“What do you want?” I ask, questioning my own sanity as the words come out.
“Caw! Caw!” It hops down to the floor, circling me, eyeing the wren.
I quickly scoop up the little brown bird to protect it.
“Caw!” the crow cries as it leaps back to the windowsill.
“Shoo!” I rush toward it, summoning the wind. “Get out of here! Shoo!”
“Caw!” it cries again, like a warning, then soars out of sight, its wings smoothly catching my blast of wind.
I sit in the chair by the table and study the bird in my hands. Kernel comes to my side and licks at my hand. His round eyes look up at me like he wants something.
“You know what that was about?” I ask.
He licks my hand again, studying the bird.
I feel around at its wing. A miniscule bone could be broken—too delicate for my fingers to fix. I bet Emma could heal it. She learned about healing here. She said the Healer is Yellow’s facet of the prism.
I figure it’s worth a try. I reach for my power. The blue threads come easily, but there’s no yellow. I weave the air around the bird, but it only ruffles tiny feathers. I prod around with the wind, hoping to infuse it with light, with anything that could pull in a trace of Yellow’s power, but nothing works. There’s no sign of the Healer.
I give up and set the bird closer to my pallet of straw, where I can keep an eye on it, then spread more corn for it to eat during the night. The bird seems calm.
I lay back and close my eyes. My body is tired from the day’s work. My thoughts are confused by the crow and the wren. The other animals have been so gentle, helpful even. But the crow seemed ready to attack. Why? Why these plots? Why these animals? Why this Yellow Tower? The string of “whys” carries me into sleep.
THE GOLDEN BLUR LOOKS like a rain drop under the microscope. Turn the dial, zoom there, and the blur takes on fine, glistening edges. The gold plops up in the center and ripples out, like a pond after a stone has been dropped in it, except that this shape is frozen. The molten gold cooled after the material sank into it, crystallizing into this in-motion-pond of atomic number 79. Outside the golden ring are the lethal chemical toxins. They would kill a person with the wrong dosage, but this dosage is perfectly calibrated and targeted. We’ve saved mice and monkeys, attacking the cancers that attacked them, and now we’re ready to save humans by firing these nanotech torpedo missiles straight at the cancerous cells.
I step back from the microscope. I ask the research team around me if they’re sure it’s ready. They answer eagerly and affirmatively. It has been tested. It is ready. The first patients have given their approval. Normal chemo has failed them. The tumors still grow on their brains, and this is their last hope. I sign off, without seeking any other authorization. The disease that took my son will be stopped.
The next day we employ the microscopic golden missiles, loaded with toxins, into the frail bodies. No one vomits or loses hair. They hardly notice the days of assault we bring against their cancers. The first patient’s white blood cell count drops noticeably in three days. The others drop within a week.
A month later, two of the patients are pronounced clean, five are doing much better, and only one is dead. Without the golden rings, they’d all be dead. It’s a victory.
That night my wife Susan opens a bottle of champagne. We sit together on the balcony of our Washington apartment as the sun sets. Everything is golden—the fading light, the bubbles streaming up my glass, the ring on my wedding finger.
“You’ve worked so hard for this,” Susan says. “How does it feel?”
“Good.” But it won’t bring Benjamin back.
“So many lives will be saved.”
“This is only the beginning of what we could do.”
Susan smiles. “It’s a miracle.”
She doesn’t know what I really mean. Only five of my researchers, the most brilliant and trustworthy ones, know what else we have been trying. The nanotechnology has yielded amazing new possibilities. We have been experimenting, secretly, to transfuse it into brains of those who have just died. It requires the most exquisite work. Far more than any brain surgery I’ve done, but we are close. We have kept a brain alive without a body for an entire week. We have spliced synapses from one person’s cortex to another’s spinal cord. And if we can do these things together, we could keep a human alive forever.