My dreams, of late, have been filled with orange light; what my assigned healer terms 'dream-fire', her eyes flashing readouts from her diagnostic device, before she doles out a quarter-milligram of granulated quartz crystals into the steel medicinal tray. "You are burning up," she tells me, "inside and out," and I know full well the look in her eyes as she pushes an extra blue sachet into my palm from under the table, after glancing warily at the unblinking black globe behind her. "It won't be long now."

Dream-scientists, the lot of them, our people's finest, now diagnosing and practicing by the hundreds across the capital: I pay full respect to academic consensus, thanking him as I left the refrigerated office. I recall my grandmother telling me stories of early vaccinology, of the long lines of wary mothers tanning their brood under ion-therapy radiobaths, of the time she received her first magnetic bracelet, generously provided by the Ministry of Health for free to every schooling child. She was a doctor of the old cloth, with full faith in the physics of the material; like her daughters and their daughters in kind, I have embraced its truth as my calling. Once I leave the clinic, the bags of quartz dust go into a nearby bin.

I tighten my magnetic bracelet around my wrist (a childhood reflex, one which my assigned healer claims contributes to constriction of the seventh chakra) and instruct my vehicle to drive me home.

The healer, despite her pseudomedical babble, is not wrong. I have known the signs for months, in plainer, more physical terms: the slowing of the pulse, the shallowness of breath, the droop of a lip. The difference between her and the healers of my mother's day is that the healers of Big Crystal, in ascribing ailments to dreams, seem to pull causes and solutions entirely out of dreams themselves. It is true that last night I dreamed of the old port and its sunsets, and that the night before that was filled with glaring lanterns. But in those dreams blew nothing but the cool harvest air and the faint taste of roasted sweetnuts: not burning fever-death, but blossoming life and all that it affirmed.