Mindline

by M. C. A. Hogarth

  "That's it?" Radimir's ears splayed. "Just... held his hand?"

  "Yes?"

  "We've all been holding his hand," Radimir said. "Or holding his entire body. You're sure you didn't do something different?" He glanced at Jahir's fingers and added with a lopsided smile, "Is there something magical about your hands that might rub off on the rest of us?"

  "Did something happen?" Jahir asked.

  "He was deep in shock and now he's not." Radimir shook his head. "He's talking now. Not much, but given how little he was interfacing with reality that's an improvement of over a hundred percent. I was hoping you could tell us how you did it."

  Jahir leaned against the wall to save his energy. "I'm afraid it was as simple as holding his hand, save perhaps that for me such an act is an intimacy." Radimir canted his head and Jahir finished, "Because it means I touch his mind."

  The Harat-Shar winced. "That must have been harsh."

  There didn't seem any value in hiding it, but none in agreeing either. "I think seeing his grief reflected on someone outside himself helped." Jahir rolled his lower lip beneath the upper, thinking. "In fact, it is a bad thing that his family isn't present. Where are they?"

  "The registration people tell me he doesn't have any on-world."

  "And the deceased's family?"

  "On their way from one of the stations in the system."

  Jahir nodded. "When they arrive... I think that will help. Until then, we should keep him here unless we can release him to the custody of a friend or community support group."

  "Now that he's talking maybe we can get that information out of him," Radimir said. He grinned, tired. "Maybe we should sic you on all our unresponsives. Have any luck with the other one we've got?"

  "None," Jahir admitted.

  "Ah well. Guess the magic touch only works when they can tell you're there."

  "Perhaps," he murmured.

  With only twenty minutes left before he passed his responsibilities to the night shift, Jahir stopped again at the door to the Asanii's room. She remained just where she'd been left... had not so much as shifted. The halo-arch's array of colors and noises were subdued, indicating their function and her relative lack of it. Jahir drifted closer and looked down at her. So there were others? Was it some disease, as the possibility of a medical emergency suggested? Or some new violence more suited to the police's intervention? He wondered what that intervention would look like; at home, there had been constables, deputized by the lords and ladies to which a town owed allegiance, but there was nothing so formal as a police force. The Eldritch were not so numerous as to need one, and the custom of dueling had supplied an outlet for the aggrieved to seek redress personally—or to decide the insult was not sufficient to the threat of dying. It was not a perfect system, but he was beginning to think there was no such thing. Gently, he reached out and brushed his hand over her forehead... but if there was magic in his hands, it did not suffice to save her. He curled his fingers into a fist above her brow, feeling the leaden weight of her aura.

  And then it exploded.

  Color! Noise! Light! A terrible urgency, the urgency of a failing body. Images, some that made sense, entire scenes—and some that didn't, and some that did and then were shredded and became nonsense that overwhelmed him. Somewhere beside him a siren went off, but he had already leapt away, his back striking the wall. The physical distance saved him from feeling her die. When the attendant rushed in with his healers-assist at his flanks, they were already too late. Jahir managed to find his way out and then sat heavily on the floor outside the room, which is where Radimir and Paige found him. He held up a hand to stay them, when they might have reached out to touch him. "No, please."

  "What happened?" Radimir said, crouching in front of him.

  Paige was staring into the room. "Looks like our unresponsive didn't wake up."

  "She is... not going to, no," Jahir said, hugging his knees. He felt raw from the unexpected assault on his senses, and the synesthesia clung to him, painting Radimir's concern in blue washes that smeared into the hallway. He put his head down and closed his eyes, hoping that would help.

  "Were you in there?" Radimir's voice was soft.

  "Yes."

  Silence then, long enough that he wondered if they were gone. But then Paige said, "Did you... feel her?"

  He couldn't answer that without starting to shake.

  A few moments later, a blanket draped around his shoulders and he looked up. "I... I am sorry. Did I--?"

  "No, you didn't pass out," Radimir said. "It's only been a couple of minutes. I sent Paige for the blanket, that's all."

  "Do all people die like that?" Jahir found himself asking, even knowing that neither of them could tell him. How could a non-esper know whether dying always felt like such a trauma? And yet, Radimir did.

  "No. Sometimes people go peacefully. Smiling, even. There's no firestorm of activity in their bodies just before they die. Things just... ease quietly away, and then they're gone. There's a sense of closure and rest, when people die the way they want to."

  "This was not restful," Jahir said. "And there was no closure. And they are not dying the way they have wanted." He shuddered. "How many more of these did they find?"

  "Four more, scattered across the city."

  "God and Lady help them," Jahir said softly.

  Chapter 9

  Vasiht'h woke to a note, and if it was virtual rather than hand-written it was still enough like old times to make him smile. He perused the attached schedule—an hour of physical therapy and then eight hours at the hospital—and decided that gave him plenty of time for everything he wanted to accomplish before his roommate got home. But first things first. He checked the time on Tam-ley and put in a call while unpacking his bags. Sehvi answered as he was pulling out his small travel pillow. He'd borrowed the apartment's far better projection equipment to supplant the one he'd been using in his data tablet, and her image appeared in the room with him, flat but life-size and in vibrant colors that blocked out the wall behind her.

  "Ariihir?" she said, then found him in the room and pointed. "Talk now!"

  "I intend to!" He grinned at her over his shoulder. He wiggled his fingers. "Look, I made it!"

  "Annnnnd?"

  "And he was glad to see me, and he doesn't want me to leave, ever," Vasiht'h got out, hardly believing it as he said it.

  His sister squinted. "Is that hyperbole or do you mean it the way it sounds?"

  "I mean when he opened the door on me I blurted out that I wanted to stick around until one of us died, and he said he couldn't imagine ever sending me away," Vasiht'h said, ears sagging a little with chagrin. "And then the mindline snapped into place and... that's it, as far as we're concerned. Other than working out all the little annoying things, like who sleeps where and how I'm finishing my degree and whether he's finishing his residency and—"

  She held up her hands. "Goddess, slow down!"

  He stopped obediently, grinning at her, until she folded her arms and started to laugh.

  "What?" he said, all innocence.

  "I'm glad you're happy," she said, more serious. Her mouth started twitching. "Though you're enjoying teasing me a little too much for your little sister's comfort."

  "After all the times you've teased me—"

  "Yes, but you deserved it!"

  "Ha!" He laughed. "All right. Go ahead and ask."

  "I want to know about everything! Start with the mindline?" She sounded wistful. "Is it as wonderful as all the stories say?"

  "Better," Vasiht'h said firmly. He reached for his sense of Jahir and felt it as a warm answer, like sunlight on his second back and shoulders. Nothing more distinct: would that change with time? Would the bond grow? He couldn't remember what the literature had said, and even then what had they ever said about a bond with an alien? "I... I don't know how to describe it. But it's better than I imagined. In a less showy way." At her look, he spread his hands and said, "I... I don't know. But you know you r
ead the romances other species write, and it's all passion and fireworks and it sounds very..."

  "Uncomfortable," Sehvi said dryly.

  "Yes," he said. "This isn't like that. It's comfortable, like knowing someone's going to be with you forever and not having to rush over to make sure of it."

  She sighed out. "You're sooooo lucky, ariihir."

  "I know," Vasiht'h said, serious. "And I intend to do everything in my power to show the Goddess that I'm not going to take it for granted." He drew in a breath. "Anyway. It's good that I came because Selnor's just about as heavy as home, Sehvi, and wherever he's from it's lighter than Seersana, by far."

  Sehvi grimaced. "That's no good. They putting him through the acclimatization?"

  "They can't, he's already done it once." Vasiht'h continued excavating his bags. "I've asked him to consider relocating someplace less strenuous and he's agreed that if in two months he doesn't feel any better we'll go. There's no point to him having one of the most coveted residencies in xenopsychology if he's going to be completely flattened by the planet during it."

  "I certainly wouldn't want to do it. But I can't imagine what it's like, either. There aren't too many worlds heavy enough to give us pause."

  "So I have two months," Vasiht'h said. "I'm going to use it to try to make him as comfortable as I can. He's really exhausted, ariishir. And he's lost a lot of weight. The kind of food they want him eating is like chewing your way through bricks. It might taste good, but it's denser than a black hole. Getting through a whole serving of it takes real fortitude. He hasn't even unpacked, and I get the impression that all he's done once he gets back from work is fall over."

  She wrinkled her nose. "Sounds like a fun life. I knew he was a workaholic but you can tell him your sister has it on good authority from the Tam-illee—who are super-disciplined about things—that everyone needs a life outside of work. Speaking of which, what's Heliocentrus like?"

  "You know, I don't know?" Vasiht'h said. "I just got here last night. But I'm about to go shopping, so I'll tell you next time we talk."

  The answer to that question was that Heliocentrus was amazing. Vasiht'h went out into a bright day washed by a cool breeze driven off the coast and found the city bigger than any he'd ever been in. Even Seersana's capital hadn't seemed this populous, and a quick check of his data tablet told him that it wasn't. He tucked the tablet into his saddlebags and gave up on it for the day. No doubt he could lose himself consulting it for corroboration of every guess; far better to wander, trusting his own feet and senses to bring him where he should go.

  Like most cities built in the Core, Heliocentrus had been designed around walking distances, with aircars—sparrows and wrens mostly but the occasional kestrel or larger vehicle also—following traffic patterns midway up around the skyscrapers. The greenspaces were frequent and well maintained, though the vegetation was lusher and more vibrant than the flora had been on Seersana; it reminded Vasiht'h of his homeworld, in fact, which had tended toward lush rainforests. The tropical brightness of the flowers that grew up lattices edging the buildings comforted him, like old friends, even if their colors and patterns were novel: fluorescent oranges on fire in the sunlight, startling bright blues splotched with magenta and pink, coral petals that bled to bright red at their curling edges.

  There were two markets within walking distance, doing a brisk business selling fresh food grown on the city's roof gardens and in its greenspaces. Vasiht'h joined the people browsing there and asked many questions about what he was buying. Some of the produce was recognizable, Earth imports brought with the Pelted during the original Exodus and rigorously maintained across the Alliance on all the worlds where the cultivars could be supported. Some of them were native to Selnor, though, tagged with species-safety information but otherwise mysterious. Unfortunately none of these exotics had any information on Eldritch safety, but if something was broadly tolerated by most of the Alliance's species, Vasiht'h bought it, deciding he could try it even if Jahir couldn't.

  He saved the meat for last and paid to have it delivered, and from the market went searching for a store where he could buy housewares and particularly proper pillows. After tending to that, he bought incense from an outdoor vendor who was burning it, a fragrant curlique of smoke that led him to her table. She had a selection of religious and spiritual items for a truly bewildering assortment of cultures, and he lost half an hour studying tiny effigies of gods and goddesses from around the Alliance, as well as the DNA helix jewelry used by those who'd made a spiritual practice out of the Exodus events. He even found a statue of Holly, who'd been the mother of the Pelted fight for freedom on Earth... standing peacefully alongside a figurine of Mary, Mother of God. The human Christian Mary, not the Hinichi Christian one, since the latter was inevitably portrayed with a pawprint medallion or a wolf at her feet.

  Heading back to the apartment, Vasiht'h reflected that he would have to tell Sehvi that Heliocentrus was exactly what he would have expected in the Alliance's winter capital: balmy, tropical, cosmopolitan, enormous and beautiful. But even as he admitted to that beauty, he knew he would never want to live anywhere so big. He didn't feel dwarfed by the city, or at least, not to the point of feeling insignificant... but he didn't like knowing he'd never really know any appreciable percentage of the people he shared a city with.

  Strange how the starbase had also felt beautiful and cosmopolitan, while also seeming small enough to get his arms around. A community, rather than a city, though the civilian city had been large enough to be called one.

  Back at the apartment, Vasiht'h queued some of the recorded lectures from the classes he was taking and started working on dinner while listening. The cultured tenor of the professor discussing business and legal considerations for a psychologist's practice blended with the bubbling of boiling water for soup and the sharp snickt of the knife moving through the vegetables on the new cutting board. Once he had the soup simmering, he took a cup of tea to the coffee table and started on the reading. Halfway through it he realized he'd replaced the audio of the lecture with the music from last night. He still liked and didn't like it, and smiled, shaking his head.

  By the time the alert he'd set to warn him of his roommate's impending return went off, he'd finished making dinner, unpacked Jahir's bags and arranged both their things in the small space they had, and was contemplating making another batch of tea and reading about heavy gravity complications. That occupied him until the mindline began to whisper: fatigue, perplexity, anticipation. He looked up before the door opened.

  "I don't know what's more astonishing," Jahir said. "That you are here, and not actually the product of a happy dream I had... or that the apartment smells like something."

  "Hopefully something good," Vasiht'h said, trying to hide his delight at the comment and knowing he'd failed when the Eldritch flashed a look at him that anyone else would have read as somber; but Vasiht'h had known him long enough to read the sparkle in his eyes, and even if he hadn't he could taste the effervescence of his friend's pleasure over the weight of his exhaustion.

  "Very good," Jahir said. "Like home."

  Vasiht'h said, "Good. Now sit and I'll bring you tea. You can tell me about your day. Or you can hear about mine, if you prefer."

  "Oh..." Jahir trailed off. He sat, using a hand on the arm of the couch to steady himself on the way down. "How strange. To have come into this again. I needed it, when I was doing rounds before." He looked up, yellow eyes, pale face, wisp of hair escaped from an otherwise tidy braid. Strange to see his face exposed that way; on Seersana he'd left the hair down, and it had obscured a jawline far more masculine than Vasiht'h had realized. The Glaseah wondered how many women and men were swooning over him so far. "Do you know that you kept me steady then?"

  "Yes," Vasiht'h answered, subdued. He poured two cups of tea, watching the steam flare from the cups. "That's why I sent you away. I wanted you to figure out if you could do without the emotional support."

  Jahir accepte
d the cup, head and shoulders bent. Vasiht'h didn't think he realized he was listing. "And the answer to that is 'I do better with it.' But how is that a surprise to either of us, given our studies?"

  "You're right," Vasiht'h said. "We should have known better." He sat across from the Eldritch, watching him drink and disliking the deep lines traced beneath his eyes. "Was it a hard day?"

  "Somewhat," Jahir said, drawing the words out. A deflection? No, the feel through the mindline was of someone gathering scattered flower petals. Strange image, but when the Eldritch had collected them, he continued, "There was a suicide watch, which was difficult. A Tam-illee who lost his wife." He looked up from his cup. "I held his hand."

  Vasiht'h flattened his ears. "That... must have been very bad."

  The Eldritch took a sip and sighed, the steam parting off the top of the cup. "But not as bad as the woman I felt die." He set the tea down and laced his fingers together between his knees, head hanging. "There have been several patients the past week who've shown up at the hospital, and now at several clinics, in an unresponsive state. No one knows what has befallen them, but they are thinking some form of violence, or perhaps a disease."

  Vasiht'h frowned. "They haven't found any clues?"

  "None," Jahir said. He ran a hand up his arm, bunching the sleeve, and the cold that stippled his skin made Vasiht'h's fur stand. "Her death was not a good one. And I had a hand on her when she passed into that storm."

  "You have had a bad day," Vasiht'h said. He tried to send as comforting a sensation as he could think of, given his friend's pleasures, and came up with sunlight on his backs on a summer morning.

  Jahir looked up with a bemused look.

  "Not good?" Vasiht'h asked, anxious.

  "No, no, it's quite good," Jahir said. "It's just... I've never had an extra half of a body."

  Vasiht'h laughed. "I'll get dinner."

  After eating, Jahir prepared for bed and Vasiht'h washed dishes, putting a pot on the stove to heat some milk while he worked. Once it had warmed, he mixed it with a few herbs and honey and left it to steep while he lit the incense beside his paper Goddess and finished putting everything in order. Then he took the cup with him into the bedroom and found the Eldritch sitting on the edge of the bed. He offered the cup, which Jahir took with a bemusement that he answered by saying, "Warm milk. Something to help you sleep and stoke that metabolism that's overworking."