he planet has no name that we are told, but then we are not told very much. For all we know the planet could be flat, ploughing like Terry Pratchett's juggernautish Discworld through space smash-bang into history (at which point it could well enfold some uninhabited bald globe like a vast veil and be known henceforth as Earth: This is certainly what I'd like to see happen to the Discworld). Or the planet upon which The Healer is set could be a dome, either bulging or hollow, which some "god" or Interstellar Department of Applied Psychology has affixed to the top of an infinite pillar in space for purposes of observation, rather like the world whose mysteries are never really meant to be plumbed in John Crowley's The Deep (1975).
Other possibilities: Michael Blumlein's unnamed planet could simply be our Earth aeons hence, or it could be an abandoned colony world (the absence of any electronic device in a civilization otherwise sophisticated suggests a plot-pregnant occlusion of this sort) that is slowly running down, like the world depicted in Linda Nagata's Memory (2003) maybe; interestingly all three novels—The Healer, The Deep and Memory—contain myths of origin in which the race has been brought to "Earth" from another star. But however we choose (and as SF readers we are accustomed to hypothecate some explanatory cosmogony in cases like this), the main thing we almost certainly keep in mind is that Blumlein's planet positively reeks of experiment.
Or allegory?
All that we are told—and this mainly through inferences readers are absolutely free to draw, but are never explicitly asked to—is that the planet is shared by two conjoined species, humans and Tesques, who remain close enough for interspecies sex to be longed for and (off the page) achieved; that animal species of non-terrestrial origin (like the three-legged bisonlike orts) share the wilderness with wolves and other species whose names are familiar; that the waters of the only sea mentioned in the book (it is called a sea, but it may be fresh) are mysteriously receding. This sea is called the Lac du Lac, which is (I believe) the only French term in the book: If we are to make something of this "clue," we are not told what. In the end, everything on the planet seems to be there simply in order to be there; in the end, everything we come across in this unnamed world seems to have been put there for us—and for our pilgrim protagonist—to encounter.
So we smell a rat.
A doctor and writer meet at last
The particular rat I think I smell is David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus (1920), the most unrelenting, and most haunting, SF allegory of the 20th century. Very briefly, the protagonist of that novel travels by quasi-magical spaceship to the planet Arcturus, where he encounters a series of societies and other challenges in his pilgrimage, through much suffering, to a kind of ambivalent piercing of the veils of illusion at the peak of the world, at which point (like the protagonist of The Healer) an emissary/avatar/doppelganger/god from another star takes him in hand, for he has learned as much as he can of the meanings to be extracted from Arcturus. (A long essay by me on this great pain-saturated tale appears as an introduction to the 2002 University of Nebraska reprint of the book.) Of course there are vast differences between Lindsay's allegory couched as SF and Blumlein's far more ambivalent text. Lindsay's protagonist, Maskull, is a savage pilgrim who has a habit of killing the creatures who serve him as exempla to test, while Blumlein's diffident hero, Payne (but note the blatantly allegorizing name he gives him), does not kill his fellows. They do die, however. Furthermore it can be noted that Maskull, who is nothing like a doctor, has no interest whatsoever in healing, while Payne, who is as close to a medical doctor as the strangulated culture of Blumlein's unnamed planet can offer, does deeply hope to heal his patients.
Blumlein has been a medical doctor for the whole of his writing life, but this is the first time, I think, that his dual career has been heavily emphasized—not entirely unembarrassingly, his name is given on the title page of The Healer as "Michael Blumlein, MD." A hint this broad that our author is an expert author must not be ignored, of course; nor would it be very easy to miss the fact that The Healer embodies an impassioned meditation on the inscriptions of meaning that doctor and patient interchange constantly, like budgies exchanging gravel, profound incisions of mutual gaze, mutual ingestion. The relationship between the dominant humans on the planet of The Healer and the small fraction of the oppressed Tesques (a back-formation from Grotesques) who are able to heal them, unpacks very complexly indeed into a subcutaneous meditation on various dualisms: patient and doctor, oppressor and oppressed, colonizer and colonized, owner and slave. The kicker here is the presumption—never articulated in so many words, though it clearly engines the book as a whole—that it is fitting to sort doctors with the slaves of the world rather than the owners.
The book is immensely easy to read, which may be its problem, as it is all too easy to follow Payne's hegira through his world without understanding that The Healer means very little indeed if it means only what it says. (It says, for instance, that Payne's peculiar immunity to Healer-burnout, or "Drain," is of great importance to the human community; it says that he has been tracked and invisibly guided in his stultified career by humans concerned to shape his experiences so that in the end he can Do Something Important, but this underlying structure of story, like water down a dry gulch, evaporates into thin air.) It is entirely possible not to notice, in the easy flow of a narrative whose surface inconsequentiality only slowly becomes evident, that Blumlein never once in fact says a word about the meaning of his tale, never once tells us why he never in fact actually quite tells it.
Characters disappear, usually into death, without notice; long-hatched motivations are derailed into sidings never entered again. The weird sybilline impassivity and lesions in the telling of The Healer make it into a kind of gnomic mantra, sigils that do not tell their faith. It has, at first, all the affect of a story unfolding, but in the end the affect fades, the felt continuities of Story Unfolding are shed like dead skin. Even David Lindsay embodies in his monstrous protagonist such intensities of striving that we hardly notice that the story he strides through lacks any grammar or thrust beyond the grammar and thrust he imposes upon it. Maskull grapples through pain towards revelation; Payne encounters successive regions of story, which piss on his head, for his route to enlightenment is a passage through punishment after punishment. Payne's pilgrimage is a succession of immurements, from each of which he is released at the behest of others. His life—his profound affinity with the subcutaneous mysteries of healing on this planet—can be seen as a Calling to affliction. He is a martyr to the grammar of the world.
Dying an ambiguous death
So the story is a path without signing, though we need to fix a bits of it into narration space. Payne is a Tesque. Tesques are distinguished from humans by extremely various cranial "deformities," each Tesque bearing the stigma of a unique bump on his head and by an extra orifice, the os meli, located asymmetrically at about chest level. About 10 percent of all Tesques are healers—after suitable training, they are able to meld physically, via sensitized regions in their forearms, with sick humans, and to draw out illnesses. The heart of The Healer (or of any possible, though unlikely, sequel) may reside in the nature of what is drawn out, as it is not a simple extrusion of wrongness but a literal "Concretion." Each concretion becomes through the process of healing a physical entity, which the healer extrudes through his os meli. There are six degrees of Concretion. The lower degrees live for seconds; but "Sixth Degrees"—which "embody" the most complex illnesses—seem almost as autonomous as Tesques themselves, and even more dramaturgically potent. Their vocal outpourings, for they are able to emit endless sounds of pain; their motility; their exemplariness: all mount to a sense that Blumlein is telling us (without saying a direct word) that the meaning of life, the meaning of the bondage between the healer and the healed, resides in the anguish of the Concretion. But we do not encounter Sixth Degrees until the end of the novel.
Only a few Healers, like Payne, are able to cope with the task of extracting—isolating—Sixth Degrees from their mortally ill hosts, and only Payne is immune from the Drain, and thus able to heal not only humans but fellow Tesques. His life, fragments of which The Healer disjunctly lays out for the reader to sort perhaps, has been a kind of via dolorosa through environments which seemingly occlude him from full realization, but which (we guess) are in fact stations of the cross. He spends years in a mining town (echoes here of Blumlein's The Movement of Mountains from 1987); he serves in a metropolis, where he finds and loses faith, finds and loses any sense that radical political action might gain justice for the oppressed Tesques; he is taken to a central Tower, where his gifts are exploited ruthlessly; he is asked to heal Wyn by a human in love with him, and in doing so lifts beyond our ken (we no longer see things through his occluding eyes).
In the end, very little seems to have happened. Most of Payne's colleagues have died, sometimes because of him. Although the civilization of the unnamed planet is hardly described, we are still perhaps rather surprised to note that the long surveillance of Payne has ended in a solitary desert walkabout. So we are left with healing, with an extraordinary set of images of the intricacies and ambivalences of the intertwining of healer and healed. There are hints of a complicity here fathoms beneath the text; hints of some indurate epiphany to be achieved, beyond its last page. The difference between this book and A Voyage to Arcturus—it could be called a healing difference—is that Maskull does everything for himself, that he destroys those he touches in order to find out more about himself, while Payne does nothing alone, though he does get his rocks off sucking Concretions. Like so many human redeemers on our own planet, Payne is transcendentally abject; but, like so many of his predecessors, he dies for us.
But maybe he does not die. The Healer does not care, one way or the other, where it leaves him, aloft in the skies (of sequel?) or desiccate in the terminal sands of singleton. It may be Blumlein's final, quiet, slightly perverse triumph that at least one reader did commiserate, in the end, with Payne. In the context of this novel, to commiserate is to thank the book. And to thank this book is healing.
