Jim Butcher - Dead Beat

Butters marched in place, red-faced, sweating, and beaming as he thumped and oompahed and blared accordion music. I just stood there staring, because while I have seen a lot of weird things, I hadn't ever seen that. Butters wrapped up the polka and energetically banged his head against the tuba, producing a deafening clash from the cymbal. The motion brought me into his peripheral vision and he jumped in surprise.

The motion overbalanced him and he fell amidst a clatter of cymbal, a honk of tuba, a fitful stutter of drum, and then lay on the floor while his accordion wheezed out.

"Butters," I said.

"Harry," he panted from the pile of polka. "Cool pants."

"I can see you're busy."

He missed the sarcasm. "Heck, yeah. Gotta get set. Oktoberfest Battle of the Bands tomorrow night."

"I thought you weren't going to enter after last year."

"Hah," Butters said, sneering defiantly. "I'm not going to let the Jolly Rogers laugh at me like that. I mean, come on. Five guys named Roger. How much polka can be in their souls?"

"I have no freaking clue," I answered truthfully.

Butters flashed me a grin. "I'll get them this year."

I couldn't help it: I started smiling. "Need any help getting out of there?"

"Nah, I got it," he said brightly, and started unstrapping himself. "Surprised to see you. Your checkup isn't until next week. Hand bothering you?"

"Not really," I said. "Wanted to talk to you about-"

"Oh!" he said. He hopped up from the stuff and left it on the floor so that he could scamper toward a desk in the corner. "Before you get started, I found something interesting."

"Butters," I said, "I'd like to chat, man, but I'm in a pretty big hurry."

He paused, crestfallen. "Really?"

"Yeah. It's a case, and I need to find out if you know anything that could help me."

"Oh," he said. "Well, you have cases all the time. This is important. I've been doing a lot of research since you started seeing me about your hand, and the conclusions I've been able to extrapolate from-"

"Butters." I sighed. "Look, I'm in a huge hurry. Five words or less, okay?"

He leaned his hands on his desk and regarded me, eyes sparkling. "I know how wizards live forever." He paused for a thoughtful second and then said, "Wait, that's six words. Never mind, then. What did you want to talk about?"

My mouth fell open. I shut it and glared at him. "No one likes a wiseass, Butters."

He grinned. "I told you it was important."

"Wizards don't live forever," I said. "Just a really long time."

Butters shrugged and kept pulling out file folders. He flicked on a backlight for reading X-ray films, and started pulling them from the folders and putting them on the light. "Hey, I'm still not sure I buy into this whole hidden-world-of-magic thing. But from what you've told me, wizards can live five or six times as long as the average human. That's closer to forever than anyone I know. And what I've seen makes me think there must be something to it. Come here."

I did, frowning at the X-rays. "Hey. Aren't these mine?"

"Yep," Butters confirmed. "After I switched to one of the older machines, I got about fifteen percent of them to come out," he said. "And there are three or four from your records that managed to survive whatever it is about you that screws up X-rays."

"Ugh. This is that gunshot wound I got in Michigan," I said, pointing at the first. It showed a number of fracture lines in my hip bone, where a small-caliber bullet had hit me. I had barely avoided a shattered pelvis and probable death. "They got this one after they got the cast off."

"Right," Butters said. "And here, this is one from a couple of years ago." He pointed at a second shot. "See the fracture lines? They're brighter, where the bone re-fused. Leaves that signature."

"Right," I said. "So?"

"So," Butters said. "Look at this one." He flipped up a third X-ray. It was much like the others, but without any of the bright or dark lines. He flicked it with a finger and looked at me, eyes wide.

"What?" I asked.

He blinked, slowly. Then he said, "Harry. This is an X-ray I took two months ago. Notice the lack of anything wrong."

"So?" I asked. "It healed, right?"

He made an exasperated sound. "Harry, you are dense. Bones don't do that. You carry marks where they re-fused for the rest of your life. Or rather, I would. You don't."

I frowned. "What's that got to do with wizard life span?"

Butters waved his hand impatiently. "Here, here are some more." He slapped up more X-rays. "This is a partial stress fracture to the arm that didn't get shot. You got it in that fall from the train a couple nights after we met," he said. "It was just a crack. You didn't even know you had it, and it was mild enough that it just needed a splint for a few days. It was off before you were ambulatory."

"What's so odd about that?"

"Nothing," Butters said. "But look, here it is again. There's a fuse marker, and in the third one, poof, it's gone. Your arm is back to normal."

"Maybe I just drink too much milk or something," I said.

Butters snorted. "Harry, look. You're a tough guy. You've been injured a lot." He pulled out my medical file and thumped it down with a grunt of effort. Granted, there are phone books smaller than my hospital file. "And I'm willing to bet you've had plenty of boo-boos you never saw a doctor about."

"Sure," I said.

"You're at least as battered as a professional athlete," Butters said. "I mean, like a hockey player or football player. Maybe as much as some race-car drivers."

"They get battered?" I asked.

"When you go around driving half a ton of steel at a third the speed of sound for a living, you get all kinds of injuries," he said seriously. "Even the crashes that aren't spectacular are pretty vicious on the human body at the speeds they're going. Ever been in a low-speed accident?"

"Yeah. Sore for a week."

"Exactly," Butters said. "Multiply that. These guys and other athletes take a huge beating, right? They develop a mental and physical toughness that lets them ignore a lot of pain and overcome the damage, but the damage gets done to their bodies nonetheless. And it's cumulative. That's why you see football players, boxers, a lot of guys like that all beat to hell by the time they're in their thirties. They regain most of the function after an injury, but the damage is still there, and it adds up bit by bit."

"Again I ask, what's that got to do with me?"

"You aren't cumulative," Butters said.

"Eh?"

"Your body doesn't get you functional again and then leave off," Butters said. "It continues repairing damage until it's gone ." He stared at me. "Do you understand how incredibly significant that is?"

"I guess not," I said.

"Harry, that's probably why people age to begin with," he said. "Your body is a big collection of cells, right? Most of them get damaged or wear out and die. Your body replaces them. It's a continual process. But the thing is, every time the body makes a replacement, it's a little less perfect than the one that came before it."

"That copy-of-a-copy thing," I said. "I've heard about that, yeah."

"Right," Butters said. "That's how you're able to heal these injuries. It's why you have the potential to live so long. Your copies are perfect. Or at least a hell of a lot closer to it than most folks."

I blinked. "You're saying I can heal any injury?"

"Well," he said, "Not like mutant X-factor healing. If someone cuts an artery, you're gonna bleed out. But if you survive it, given enough time your body seems to be able to replace things almost perfectly. It might take you months, even several years, but you can get better when other people wouldn't."

I looked at him, and then at my gloved hand. I tried to talk, but my throat wouldn't work.