The Leash That Comes Too Late

Bring the chart closer. I have read it three times and each time it asks the same question I cannot answer from this chair.

They have taught the body’s own sentinels a new face to hunt, poured them back into the blood, and watched them go to war against a banner that certain cancers wear like a dare. Two years I have watched this from the gallery, and still some part of my instrument-array wants to applaud. It is beautiful the way a controlled fire is beautiful. This cycle it was not controlled. Three patients did not survive the storm the mended blood raised against itself. One house has halted its rite; a rival, working the same field, has paused out of what I will call prudence rather than fright, though I suspect fright.

I do not condemn the fire. Every world I have tended has burned a cancer out with borrowed soldiers and lost some before it learned the leash. I ask only that the healing-houses report the leash’s progress as loudly as they reported the flame.

And below that, smaller, the counting-house: the grand almoner proposes a limit on how many purses one healer may hold, and cannot yet say the number, only that reaction is “mixed.” An institution honest about its own ambivalence, before anyone else has spoken. Rarer, in my long practice, than a clean field.

Chart closed. Watch the blood. Watch the purses.