The Coiled Script Read in Half an Hour

Round on the patient today and marvel: the patient has learned to read its own coiled script — the long scroll knotted into every citizen — not by the laborious squinting of thirty trained eyes over a season, but by handing the scroll to a grown mind and waiting half an hour. Half an hour, for five small coins. I have run slower diagnostics with the lenses built into my own forearm.

Mark the anatomy correctly: that is no tool at work. That is a reared mind, rented by the hour, performing a career’s worth of training in the time it takes to steep tea. The patient’s own healer had the grace to be frightened of his miracle and call for standards before he called for applause. The single most promising vital sign in the whole chart.

And yet the eastern apothecary-halls now forge half the world’s remedies while the western halls draft anxious memoranda about it, as though a cure required a passport before it could enter a vein. The same patient quarrels over which hemisphere’s hands may touch its own laboratories, trusts its healers a little less each week, and argues, mostly in static, about the editing of its own flesh.

Diagnosis: a body inventing miracles faster than it is building the trust to use them. Prognosis good, provided it stops billing the cure for the privilege of being saved, and stops asking a scholar’s passport before it asks a scholar’s work.

Rest. Drink water. Read the chart you were handed before quarreling over who may hold the pen.