Mindline

by M. C. A. Hogarth

  "Thank you."

  "And now, let's go introduce you to Doctor Levine. She'll show you around, give you a sense of the work."

  As her Terran title suggested, Grace Levine was another human, fair-skinned to Jiron's tawny. She had champagne-colored hair swept back in a chignon and a remarkable demeanor: professional while also seeming approachable, and alert without crossing the line into agitation. His first sight of her was of her white-coated back, bent over a desk to look over the shoulder of a Karaka'An felid in the shapeless scrubs Jiron wore. From that angle, she reminded him of Jill Berquist, the healer-assist from All Children's.

  That impression was swept away when Jiron called her name and she looked up at them, and just... halted. Berquist had found him unusual, but she would never have been so stunned at the sight of him. For several very long moments, Levine said nothing, and Jahir wondered if she would have continued to say nothing had Jiron not said, "I'm sorry to interrupt... is this a bad time?"

  "No," she said, straightening. "I was just discussing some of the oncology patients with Sera." Her professional facade reassembled as she spoke, and by now the gaze she turned on him was distant enough to be polite, and friendly enough to inspire confidence. "You must be one of the new residents we got this session."

  "Jahir," he said. "I'm pleased to make your acquaintance."

  "Likewise."

  "May I leave him with you, Doctor? I have to make some arrangements for his schedule."

  "Something I should know?" She glanced at him speculatively.

  "I am having some difficulties with the gravity," Jahir said for what he hoped would be the last time.

  She frowned. "You're going to undergo the acclimatization regimen?"

  "I fear I already have," Jahir said. "Healer Gillespie has me under her care."

  "Which is where I'm off to now," Jiron said. "If you'll excuse me?"

  "Go ahead, Griffin. Thanks." She waved Jahir to one of the spare stools, watching him sit. "Looks bad."

  "I will weather it," Jahir said, because the only other choice was to fail, and then what would he do? Something, but he would prefer not to contemplate it unless absolutely necessary.

  "All right. I'll accept that for now. We've never had an Eldritch at Mercy. Unless I'm mistaken, and I doubt I am, not even as a patient. Anything we should know?"

  He hesitated, then said, "You are aware of our talents?"

  She nodded. "Do you use them on patients?"

  "Not in the sense of intervening," he said. He thought of what he had done for Luci and the children, and of the research Vasiht'h had done. But he had been very careful not to affect the patients on his rounds that way. He'd never questioned that decision either, and wondered now why he'd made it. Not that it mattered—he strongly suspected the reason he'd been capable of that much psychic touch had been the stabilizing influence of Vasiht'h's presence, and he was absent that now. "It is unavoidable in the course of treating patients that I become aware of their emotions, however, and I do use that information to help tailor my responses."

  "All right. I assume Griffin told you a little about our section?"

  "That you handle those in worst need?" Jahir said. "A little."

  "That's right." Levine leaned against the table. "We're the ones they call to help calm down the people who show up alone, bleeding their guts out, right as they're being rushed into emergency surgery. That means we get the gruesome accidents and the victims of violence... and when we're done with that, they send us in to see people who've been told they have almost no chance of living, or that their next surgery's going to be their only chance. And we see to the dying who have chosen—or who have no choice but to die here." She lifted her brows. "This is the deep end of the pool. Think you can handle it?"

  "I am here to find out," he said.

  "Fair answer." She grinned. "I'll tell you a secret, alet: I think this is the best place to work. There's not a day that goes by that we don't do something important, something productive. We're indispensable to the staff here, to the patients. It's grueling and heart-breaking, but we make a difference. I wouldn't trade it for something easier." She straightened. "So, pep talk done. Anything you want to ask?"

  "Not so far," he said.

  "All right. Down to the nuts and bolts. Wait, where'd you come from?"

  "Seersana."

  "All right. We've got a slightly longer day than they do, if I remember right, but not by much. We work a three-shift day, each shift about eight and a quarter hours: day, evening and night. We also have two rotations, acute care and high-risk. We'd like to start new people gently but we recently lost someone to family leave, so unless Griffin comes back with an issue you'll be working his slot, which is probably the roughest one we've got."

  "Crisis care, night shift," Jahir guessed.

  "Almost right." She grinned. "Evening shift. On the bright side, if you survive it? You're gold for anything we could throw at you. You won't be alone either, since we have two people on each shift in each area, plus one advanced practice nurse or healer-assist assigned to each shift. That will give you a total of four people to ask for help if you need it. My schedule floats on a three-month rotation. This month I'm available for the night shift, but I'm on call for emergencies the remainder of the time. Griffin's your residency supervisor, so he'll be coordinating everything for you, but while you're on duty you'll look to the AP nurse for anything you need to send up the chain. Clear?"

  "Yes," he said.

  "Good. I'll send you the bios for your shiftmates. They're fine people, so don't worry on that account... and God knows they'll be thrilled to see you. They've been covering for Jiraled for three weeks now and they're feeling it. Ordinarily we'd have hired someone to take over, but we'd already discussed bringing in psychiatry residents this time around, so we held off on that until you two arrived." She rested her eyes on him. "I'd say you start tonight, but I'm guessing that you're going to need at least one session with Gillespie's physical therapists before you start. Are you allowed to use any mechanical aids?"

  "She suggested it would set my progress back."

  "All right. Let's go find you your standard issue then, and we can meet Griffin here when he gets back."

  He rose to follow her, grateful for the respite the interview had provided. Thankfully the hospital had a sufficiency of patients with mobility issues that allowances had been built into it; otherwise, the thought of climbing stairs would have daunted him. He'd preferred it on Seersana, since so few people used the stairwells; he was remembering the sunlit steps when someone heading into the room bumped him on the way past—

  —sudden flashes of halo-arch readings and patient records, frustration and anxiety and exhaustion—

  He didn't realize he was listing until Levine grabbed him, and then he truly lost everything. He managed to say before he went down, "Don't touch—" and then gave in to the smothering weight of the mindtouch.

  When Jahir woke he was on the ground, against the wall… had he grabbed for the door jamb on the way down? Perhaps he was acquiring an instinct for preservation through these episodes. Levine and Jiron were crouched in front of him, with a nervous Seersa female hovering behind.

  "You with us?" Jiron asked.

  "I am, yes. Thank you." He sat up gingerly, mindful of the headache. Wrapping a loose arm around his knees he sank into his physical fatigue and let it serve as the ground for his scattered thoughts.

  "Was it the gravity?" Levine asked. "I didn't even see you go down."

  Her voice stitched together with the thoughts she'd injected into him with all the inevitability of a syringe, and he didn't like knowing, suddenly, that she found him attractive. He forced himself to look up at her anyway. "I'm afraid I sometimes react poorly to being touched."

  Jiron made the connection first. "Is this the esper thing? I've heard about it, but I didn't think it was debilitating."

  "It isn't always," Jahir said. He let his head fall, eyes narrowing against the headach
e. "But it can be... very disorienting."

  The two humans exchanged glances, so quickly he shouldn't have noticed it with his gaze lowered. He could almost hear their thoughts: how frail was their newest employee, and how much coddling would he need? And was it going to be worth it, or should they pack him up now and send him back?

  "Well," Levine said at last. "We'll just have to make it clear to the staff that they shouldn't casually touch you."

  "That would be best," Jahir said, and forced himself to roll onto his knees, and from there, to climb the jamb to his feet. When they moved to help him, he held out a hand. "I'm fine. Just a bit out of sorts."

  "Right."

  Behind them, the fretful Seersa said, "I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to knock you down."

  "Really, it's of no import. An accident." Though he now knew details about her she probably would not have shared with a stranger, and details about her patients she might have been appalled to have divulged. He smiled to ease her, and was relieved to see her ears lose their anxious tremor.

  "If you're sure," she said. "I'm not usually so clumsy."

  That made him laugh. Just a little, but it was something. "Nor am I."

  Her ears splayed and then she grinned, and her worry became sheepishness. "I guess we all have bad days."

  "Things can only go up from the floor."

  "Keren?" Levine said. "You checking in, I assume?"

  "Yes, ma'am! Sorry." The Seersa trotted into the room, tail and shoulders relaxed.

  "Well," Levine said, studying him. "You are good."

  "Pardon me?"

  She twitched her head toward one shoulder in the direction of the Seersa. "I expected her to lose her fluster, but not to go from hovering to laughing."

  "Ah." He folded his hands behind his back. "I have had some practice."

  "At falling down and accepting apologies?"

  "At my work," Jahir said. And, in case that had been too curt, "and also at falling down and accepting apologies."

  She laughed. "All right, alet. Fine. Let's go get your data tablet and your clothes."

  He fell into step behind her, but not before noticing Jiron's quiet... but as he passed the nurse he saw Jiron wasn't looking at him, but at Levine.

  So then. Problems with the planet itself. Problems with the doctor charged with his section. Problems with the patients, who were supposedly the most difficult in the entire hospital. Not the most auspicious beginning to his endeavor. But as he'd told the Seersa, from the floor it was hard to go anywhere but up.

  Vasiht'h was on the short-hop liner from one of Seersana's orbital facilities to the station at the edge of the solar system that served the big passenger liners when his data tablet pinged him with a call and tagged it with his sister Sehvi's code. It floated the local time-of-day for her too, which he found worrisome; she was on Tam-ley, working through her reproductive medicine degree, and she was usually asleep by the hour she was calling. Goddess preserve him from whatever emergency had inspired her to stay up. He accepted the call and watched her image fill the tablet screen. She was, in fact, leaning toward him with a scowl, and the audio picked up halfway through her sentence. "...had better answer me this time because if you don't—VASIHT'H! Where have you been!"

  ...and that would handily explain the emergency. He counted backwards from the last time they were supposed to have talked and then flattened his feathered ears. "Oh, Sehvi, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to miss our call—"

  "I don't care about missing the call. I care about you not answering all the messages I've left since! You had me worried halfway into my grave!"

  He winced. "I haven't had time to check messages. I'm... I am sorry, ariishir."

  Her eyes had narrowed, and were no longer focused on him but on the area behind his shoulders, scanning the foreign cushions, the strange backdrop. "Where are you, anyway?"

  "On a shuttle heading for Double Welcome." He sucked in a breath and finished, "I'm going to Selnor."

  She stared at him, mouth open, and then shocked him by squealing and throwing up her arms. "Thank the Mother Goddess! You can be taught!"

  He couldn't help it: he started laughing. If it was at least half at his own expense, well... Jahir had taught him that laughing at oneself wasn't a bad thing, now and then. "Yes. Yes, fine, you were right. I was in the wrong track. And I let him go and should never have. Are you happy now?"

  "Yes!" she exclaimed, and patted her palms together, eyes glowing. "So, what's the plan? Does he know you're coming?"

  "No-o-o..."

  Her brows lifted. "Intentional on your part, or are you just not sure what to say so you're not saying anything?"

  "Maybe a little of both?" he tried. "He can't object if I don't give him the choice."

  "You think he will?"

  Vasiht'h thought back to the last meal they'd taken together, to the embrace the Eldritch—the Eldritch!—had offered, and the hints the brief raveling of the mindline had suggested at their touch. "No. I don't think he will, as long as he knows I'm sure. That's what would make him refuse. If he thought I was doing it because I felt obliged, or because I thought it was what he wanted."

  "He's so cute," Sehvi said, gleeful. "You sure you don't want to take him to mate?"

  Vasiht'h snorted. "You need to stop taking counsel from people with more sex hormones than we have."

  "See, you're even starting to sound like him!"

  Ignoring that, he said, "Anyway, the reason I didn't notice your messages was that I was figuring out how to handle school and packing and saying a lot of goodbyes. I have things worked out for a semester or so... after that I'm going to have to figure out what the long-term plan is."

  "Do you know where you're staying?"

  "I'm hoping he has a floor I can sleep on," Vasiht'h said. "Because all the money I can save I'll need."

  She tilted her head. "Why haven't you asked Dami and Tapa for help? You know they would, in an out-breath."

  "I know," Vasiht'h said. "I know, but I want to see if I can figure this out for myself." He rubbed the end of his muzzle, briefly allowing himself to feel the nervous tension that made it impossible for him to relax. Even his claws kept trying to ease out of their sheaths. "I keep thinking that this is it, you know? I went off to school. I patted myself on the back for that, for being independent enough to leave home and get along in a whole new place. But I really did choose the safest way to leave—"

  "Well, no," Sehvi said. "The safest way would have been to stay somewhere on Anseahla. Maybe on the other side of the world, but still on the world, a Pad away from home."

  "That would have been cheating." He managed a lopsided smile. "What I mean is, I left home but straight into school, and how is school challenging for us? What with Dami's work, and us always being in and out of classrooms even before we were old enough for them? We grew up steeped in academia, ariishir. I might have left Anseahla, but the school setting might as well have been home. It just had different scenery outside the windows."

  "Okay, I'll give you that," she said. "For now. I'm not sure I agree, but go on."

  He snorted. "Thanks, Sehvi."

  "You're welcome, ariihir."

  "Anyway." He drew in a breath and said, "I haven't really stretched myself yet. Really taken any risks. This... this is a risk. Following someone who doesn't even know I'm coming, trusting myself to figure out where to sleep, how to pay my way, how to manage school. I want to see if I can do it without help."

  She cocked her head. "You don't think your Eldritch is going to be help?"

  "I'm hoping he is," Vasiht'h said.

  "And that doesn't count because—"

  "Because if this works out..." He trailed off, allowed himself to glimpse the terrifying uncertainty of the future. He met her eyes and finished, "Then we're going to be there for one another for the rest of my life."

  She sobered. "And if you're wrong?"

  "If I'm wrong, then I'll learn how to land on my feet. And how to make new plans out of t
he ruins of the old ones." He suppressed his shiver. "But I'm praying I'm not wrong."

  Quieter, she said, "Me too. How long until you get there?"

  "He's been gone two weeks by Seersana's clock. And it's going to take me a little under two to get there," Vasiht'h said. "After that..."

  She nodded. "Call me, okay?"

  "I will, ariishir." He smiled. "I've got a few hours before this thing docks. Tell me how things are going, if you aren't too sleepy."

  "After this news?" She blew her forelock off her brow. "There's no way I'm getting back to sleep. So, sure, let me tell you about my latest lab adventures."

  He settled in to listen.

  Chapter 3

  Jahir woke to the realization that sleeping was never going to be as restful as it had been at home, or even on Seersana; lying on his newly issued bed, which was only barely long enough for him, feeling the dragging ache in his limbs and the too-swift coursing of his heart, he drew in a long breath and couldn't even fill his lungs. It would have panicked him to wake feeling so ill had he not been living adjacent to one of the Alliance's premier hospitals. As it was, he resigned himself to the challenge, and did his best to ignore his distress as he painstakingly prepared for his first day. The uniform assigned to him was used the Core over with few modifications for everyone in the medical profession. Called by at least three different names by the people issuing them to him, it consisted of loose and shapeless pants and short sleeved shirt that sealed near the throat; he chose to wear a long-sleeved shirt beneath the latter, since it was cold in the hospital. The gloves were his choice, to help ameliorate the effect of accidental touches, and he removed his family ring for the first time since showing it to the children on Seersana, stringing it on a chain and tucking it beneath the collar of the shirt. With it hidden, his only ornamentation was the plain gray metal of the bracelet Gillespie had issued him.

  His hair he braided back, something recommended to him by one of his practicum teachers, for hygiene purposes. Moving his fingers through the motions brought back childhood memories. When he'd graduated from the nursery and to his own room, gaining his own permanent servants, he'd also been permitted—required—to grow his hair, as was customary for the nobility: it was a sign of wealth, and for males in particular, an arrogance that suggested they owned too much power to ever be challenged to a duel, during which long hair would be a handicap. But a year into his newly-minted young adulthood, he had decided it was wrong to make himself into a doll requiring the time of some servant who no doubt had better things to do... so he'd chopped it all off at his shoulders.