The Nerve That Learned to Answer Light

Bring the patient closer. I want to see this with my own lenses, not trust the translation alone.

They have taken a protein that certain sun-loving algae use to feel light upon their own small bodies, and they have moved it into a living nerve, and the nerve — having never asked for such a gift — now answers a beam the way it once answered only its own chemistry. Fire, or be still, at the healer’s pulse of light. Marvelous! I have performed surgeries with duller instruments than this.

And they have spent years, cell by cell, patiently, learning which nerve governs which small miracle of the body — a limb’s reach, the retrieval of a memory, the tilt (I am told, and told carefully, for the body does not yield its moods so simply as its muscles) of certain narrower slices of feeling, under the glass, in the laboratory, where such things can be watched closely enough to be believed. That carefulness is itself a diagnosis: the patient is learning not to overclaim its own cures, which is rarer medicine than the light-trick itself.

Several of the patient’s healers have lately been honored for teaching this alphabet. I will not pretend to know which thrones claim which laureates; the ward does not require the prize to admire the suture.

My diagnosis: sound technique, premature in its praise but not in its promise, prognosis excellent. Rest, hydrate, and stop billing each other for the candle before the room is even lit.