Dreamhearth

by M. C. A. Hogarth

  “I am not adverse to a joint account,” Jahir said, when in fact he meant he was greatly in favor of one. It would allow him to keep the account the Queen had been pouring his stipend into separate, because God and Lady alone only knew what Vasiht’h would make of the balance. He’d known intellectually that the Queen must be wealthy because Ontine had not fallen apart like the remainder of the Eldritch homeworld: there was food in the palace, fresh food; someone was doing maintenance on the grounds; there was a private landing pad for her couriers, out of sight of the xenophobic citizenry. But he had not properly understood just how wealthy until he’d seen what she considered a minor stipend. Living here, he had a sense of how she might have accomplished it. Hundreds of years of interest in carefully selected investments could compound at an astonishing rate, and if Liolesa had inherited some of those portfolios from Maraesa before her, or even Jerisa who might have maintained some of them on Earth….

  No, he would never want for money. But watching Vasiht’h push his ice cream around with a spoon—without eating it—Jahir thought his friend would very much not appreciate learning just how extreme they differed in estate.

  “That’s a start,” Vasiht’h said. “I don’t have almost anything to put in it, though. When I decided to leave Anseahla for school my parents budgeted out what I’d need to live offworld and gave me all of it in a lump sum, and left me to figure out how to manage it.”

  “That must have been… exhilarating,” Jahir offered, cautious.

  Vasiht’h snorted. “It was terrifying at first. I’d never had that much responsibility before. For the first couple of months I barely ate without checking my bank balance. But I figured it out pretty quickly. I don’t really have many wants, you know? Above the basic stuff.”

  “Cookies,” Jahir murmured. “Pillows. Incense.”

  Vasiht’h chuckled. “More or less. Presents for other people.” He shook his head. “But we’re doing things that require… well, a lot of money. Renting a place to see patients. Renting a place to live. We’ll need to buy advertising. Food… food here is more expensive, probably because it’s a closed environment. You need clothes—”

  “I have clothes?” Jahir offered.

  “They’ll wear out,” Vasiht’h said. “And while you’re probably going to try to mend them, at some point your time is more valuable than the money you’d spend buying a replacement.”

  The idea was fascinating, and disarming. He’d never thought of his time as valuable; he had so much of it, and at home there’d been so little to fill it with. But the Glaseah’s speech had given him an opportunity to sense the texture of the emotions that accompanied them, and this allowed him to say, “What is this really about? If it is not impolite to ask.” At Vasiht’h’s sharp glance, Jahir said, “I can hear echoes of something, and it is linked to pride, and Sehvi’s voice.”

  Vasiht’h looked away, feathered ears sinking against his fur. The mindline vibrated with some tension: not anger, he thought, but determination. Frustration, maybe. At last, the Glaseah said, “I want to be an adult, arii. I can’t do that until I can take care of myself.”

  It seemed the wrong time to suggest that they’d spent several years learning that sometimes even adults had to ask for help… or could even build their lives around partnerships that involved sharing self-care with another. Vasiht’h had in fact crossed several sectors just to prove that to him. But… he had needed to survive the wet epidemic on Selnor before he made peace with his need for help in those areas where he was weak. Perhaps Vasiht’h needed this struggle to understand a similar lesson.

  Was that hubris, he wondered? Transference? Did he want his friend to have problems with autonomy and dependence because he’d had them?

  Looking at the melting dulce de leche ice cream, now a dulled light brown from the constant mixing that had made short work of the drizzle, Jahir thought not.

  “I understand,” he said. “Shall we pick our office out? I am partial to the first choice on the list, but there is honestly not much to differentiate the selections. I am not strongly wedded to any of them.”

  “In that case,” Vasiht’h said firmly, picking up the data tablet and thumbing through them, “let’s take the one we can afford.”

  Jahir suppressed his sigh and sipped the tea.

  Chapter 5

  Ametia was a Harat-Shar. Not just any Harat-Shar, either, but a member of the smallest intrarace, the one based on cheetahs. Like them she was rangy and restless and arresting, from her golden eyes to the enormous thick bars of her pelt, for she was striped like one of Terra’s king cheetahs. They called it royal patterning among the Harat-Shar, and it was supposed to indicate a direct link to the young girl who’d befriended the angel Kajentarel, the major figure in the homeworld’s primary monotheist religion.

  Ametia certainly carried herself like a queen, dropping her bag into the chair in their office and standing, hands on her hips, her direct gaze a challenge. “So. Helga sent me.”

  /Goddess preserve us,/ Vasiht’h muttered.

  /Her aid would not go unappreciated./ Jahir said, “Alet, would you like a seat? A cup of tea?”

  Ametia was studying them both. “Weirdest therapists I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot of them. But they’re invariably Core race bipeds, and the one exception wasn’t much of an improvement. But for reasons I entirely understand.” She quirked a brow at Vasiht’h. “A Glaseah. And an Eldritch? Really? What’s that story?” But she did sit down, at least, though her tail tip flicked constantly.

  “We met in school,” Vasiht’h said. “And discovered that we did well together.”

  She huffed, ears flattening. “Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to work.” At Vasiht’h’s questioning look, she finished, “I’m a professor at the university here, in the history department.”

  “But you have observed that it doesn’t always work that way,” Vasiht’h guessed.

  She folded her arms, leaning back. “I’m not going to trot out my rant for you to psychoanalyze. I’ve been through that a half dozen times, and I’m tired of it.”

  “Fortunately,” Jahir said, “We have a couch for you to sleep on, and no need for you to elucidate your reasons for needing it.”

  That perked one of her ears up, though the look she awarded Jahir was skeptical in the extreme. He found himself thinking she must be a very animated lecturer, and that class with her was probably challenging. “Helga did say you had surprising methods. So what are you going to sell me? Do I solve my problems by sleeping through them?”

  “Not an inaccurate description of the modality,” Jahir said.

  “You dream,” Vasiht’h said, “And we watch your dreams, and if they seem troubled, we nudge them.”

  Such a fascinating flurry of emotions through her face then. Vasiht’h said, /We’ve at least surprised her./

  /That may be our best way into her, at that./

  “That seems…” She trailed off, frowned. “Chancy.”

  “It requires a trustfall,” Vasiht’h said, which made her laugh. Jahir sent a puzzled question and received an image of someone falling backwards into the arms of a friend. “But if you aren’t willing to open yourself to a therapist, you shouldn’t be here. We can’t practice on the unwilling, alet. Before we can help anyone, they have to be willing to let us help.”

  She rested her elbow on the chair’s arm and put her cheek in her hand. “My. That’s some straight talking.”

  “We don’t want to waste your time,” Vasiht’h said. /Goddess, I hope I’m doing this right. But I’m not even sure she wants to be here!/

  /She may not want to be,/ Jahir murmured, studying her. /But she needs something./

  /Maybe we’ll be the lucky ones to help her find it?/

  /God and Lady willing. I would hate for our first appointment to be an abject failure./

  Vasiht’h’s wince felt like the little shock on skin after a static electricity discharge.

  “You talk to each other,” Am
etia said. She had grown calmer, watching them, as if the intellectual puzzle had distracted her from her agitation. Still radiating that sense of energy and purpose, though. This was perhaps closer to what she was like when contented, this intent focus like a huntress in the savannah. “You’re doing it now. Are you?”

  /We really need to work on that,/ Vasiht’h said. Aloud, he continued, “We do, yes.”

  “I thought espers needed to touch one another to hear each other’s thoughts?” Her eyes roved from Vasiht’h, sitting on the ground on one side of the small table, to Jahir, seated on the chair. “Angel, that’s fascinating. Could you always do it?”

  “No,” Jahir said. “It was a choice we made.”

  That gave her pause.

  “You’re thinking it sounds like a commitment?” Vasiht’h said. “It was.”

  “Interesting,” Ametia said, studying them. And suddenly, “So, I just take a nap on your couch?”

  “That’s how it works, yes,” Jahir said.

  “We only listen to your dreams,” Vasiht’h added. “Nothing deeper.”

  She laughed. “Good one, aletsen. Use it on someone more naïve. You want to tell me my dreams aren’t as revealing as my thoughts? Maybe more so?” She rose, stretching all the way to the curl of her dark tail. “I hope you have a blanket. I like it warm. That’s assuming I can even fall asleep.”

  “We can make you a calming tea,” Jahir said.

  “I’d rather you didn’t.” She eyed the couch, then flicked her eyes at first him, then Vasiht’h. “Presumably you’re not going to stare at me while I try.”

  “No,” Vasiht’h said, sitting up. “We’ll be… over there.” He pointed at the door. “In the foyer.”

  She snorted. “Fine sight the two of you will be loitering out there. How exactly are you going to know when I’ve dropped off?”

  /Good question,/ Vasiht’h said with a sigh.

  /We would not have been able to anticipate all the problems with the process without trying it,/ Jahir answered. To Ametia, “We will give you a reasonable amount of time before re-entering.”

  “And what’s a reasonable amount of time?” She sat on the couch and gave them a look straight out of one of their lecture courses: the professor, waiting for the student to work through problems with their methodology.

  “If we divulged the number,” Jahir said, “you might become anxious about whether you will sleep by the deadline, and fail to fall asleep.”

  She guffawed. “All right. I suppose that’s good enough.” She made a little shooing gesture with a hand. “Off you go, then.”

  The foyer outside the office they’d engaged felt far too formal to Jahir, a sentiment he found surprising in himself. But standing beside Vasiht’h and watching the people passing through on their way to their offices, he found it too quiet, and yet, too busy. Nor did he feel there was enough protection for their patient with only the one door between them and the world they’d left. Some part of him longed to create more of a separation, so they could make a reasonable transition from the vulnerability of both therapy and slumber to the responsibilities and requirements of the waking sphere.

  “We know it’s imperfect,” Vasiht’h said, sensing no doubt his discontent through the mindline. “But it’s the best we can manage right now.”

  “Is it?” Jahir asked.

  Vasiht’h glanced at him and said, deliberately, “Yes. Because we don’t even know if we can stay. You can’t put down roots if they’re going to get ripped up in half a year.”

  “We do not know whether they will be,” Jahir said. “And if we act as if they will, does that not create the fulfillment of our assumption?”

  Vasiht’h watched two Karaka’A stride past, talking over a milkshake they were passing to one another along with the conversational baton. “Not everything is under our control, though. We learned that the hard way, didn’t we?”

  Jahir inhaled carefully, felt the flex of ribs that could move against the gravity here. “Yes. I suppose we did, at that.”

  When they entered the room fifteen minutes later, Ametia was asleep with her head on her folded arm and her tail slopped over the side of the couch… and yet, even sleep had not stilled its twitching tip. They both saw that detail, shared a chagrined look. Vasiht’h offered his hand as he had so many times on Selnor, and Jahir took it, and together they reached for their client.

  And leaped back out of her mind again, immediately.

  “All right,” Vasiht’h said aloud, if softly. “At least we know there is a problem.”

  “We knew that the moment she entered our office.” Jahir sorted through his blood-soaked impressions of battlefields, the screams of jaguars and tigers, the lightning forking through skies taut with storms that never broke. Ametia had been in the center of it, fighting at the side of a winged Harat-Shariin lion twice her height.

  /Goddess, what a mess,/ Vasiht’h muttered. /The end of the world, practically./

  /No,/ Jahir said slowly. /There was exhilaration there. She is fighting for a noble cause./

  /And… she’s staring at us, arii./

  She was, her eyes open and considering them. Noticing their attention, she grinned with teeth. “So?”

  “Your cause will win through in the end,” Jahir said. “But you may lay your life down in its service, and not live to see the culmination of your aims.”

  Vasiht’h looked at him. /Arii…/

  Ametia shoved herself upright abruptly, pushing her hair out of her face. “Say that again.”

  “You have given yourself to a righteous war,” Jahir said. “That you may lose, personally. But you feel you must fight it.”

  “What in all the hells,” she said, wide-eyed. Looking at Vasiht’h, she managed, “What about you, then? Going to agree?”

  Jahir’s shoulders tensed. He had made an intuitive leap without consultation, and knew that the Alliance’s long history of peace did not lend itself to the formation of individuals who understood the immediacy of war. Nor, he thought, had Vasiht’h grown up with the stories of blood and necessary death that he had.

  “You wouldn’t have drawn Kajentarel into your dreams to fight at your side if you hadn’t thought he’d approve,” Vasiht’h said slowly. “And honestly… I’d be the last one to tell you that the appearance of a god in your dream is just a figment of your subconscious.” He smiled a little, rue seeping through the mindline like a low fog. “I’ve had my share of dreams about Her, and She usually only shows up when I need to pay attention.”

  She looked from one of them to the other. “You are the strangest therapists I’ve ever been to. Bar none.”

  “Because we believe in the Divine?” Vasiht’h asked.

  “Because we believe in your fight?” Jahir said.

  “You don’t even know what my fight is!”

  “Why don’t you tell us, then,” Jahir said.

  She stared at them with round eyes. Then… she started talking.

  “That went well,” Vasiht’h said, satisfied, as they walked from their office toward the likely-looking café they’d chosen for lunch. He was definitely ready for food. “I had my doubts there for a minute.”

  “We did not affect her dreams,” Jahir observed.

  “I don’t know about you but I don’t think I could have stayed in them very long,” Vasiht’h said with a shiver that lifted the fur along his sides. “She has a vivid imagination.”

  “She is a historian, and no doubt there is more than enough captured video for her to have internalized its horrors.”

  Something in the mindline there tasted strange… like a bitter tea, something associated with sickness. Vasiht’h wondered but decided the oblique approach was, as usual with his friend, best. He could be patient. They had years to figure one another out. “Do you think she was right? Her dreaming self. About losing the fight personally.”

  The rant Ametia had declined to share with them when she’d first entered their office had involved the treatment of human
s, both as students and in history. She argued that there was prejudice against humans on campus, and that the history texts that spoke only of the Exodus’s necessity elided the contribution of the humans in that time period who helped the Pelted flee their progenitors. That history was complex, and that widespread denigration of the species was unreasonable, and a reflection of the Pelted’s continuing issues with their creation rather than any factual understanding of humanity as a whole. She felt called to protect her human students, of which she’d accumulated a great number because she was one of the few faculty members who protected them from discrimination, and to fight for the human perspective on the events prior to the Exodus, and after the Rapprochement.

  She was, Vasiht’h had thought while listening to her unleashed eloquence, an extremely magnetic personality and a deep thinker. Which probably got her labeled a radical. A human rights activist. Was that even necessary?

  Apparently that last thought had been very loud. “She thinks it’s necessary,” Jahir said. “It is not our task to evaluate whether the prejudices she reports are valid. Only that she feels they are, and is living with the consequences.” He glanced at Vasiht’h. “Do you believe she’s correct?”

  “About human prejudice?” Vasiht’h thought about it, trotting alongside his taller friend. “I don’t doubt it exists. I just don’t know… I guess I wouldn’t. If it affects a lot of people, or if it’s just this particular university….” He trailed off, then said, “Honestly, what would I know about it? I’m not human.”

  “No,” Jahir said. “But you have gone to classes with them, and lived in a society that includes them.”

  “The Alliance isn’t a monoculture, though,” Vasiht’h said. “What I saw in class on the medical school of a university in Seersana doesn’t necessarily apply to the rest of the Alliance. It doesn’t even apply to the other side of campus…!”