Dreamhearth

by M. C. A. Hogarth

  “You bought something that smells good,” he said as he came in the door.

  “Scones,” Jahir said. “Inevitably.” He set out a box.

  “And what flavor are the inevitable scones this time?” Vasiht’h asked, amused.

  “Blackberry, with cream whipped with honey. The honey is… some sort of special flavor also, but I have forgotten what.”

  Vasiht’h peeked in the box, swiped a finger through it. “Delicious, whatever it is. I bet Ilea could tell us what kind of flowers it came from. Unless it’s imported?”

  “I don’t know,” Jahir admitted. And added, “You have been shopping also?”

  “Yes!” Vasiht’h brought the quilt from the bag and spread it out to show off the pattern, soothing blues and greens and happy yellows. “I bought it from one of our neighbors. This one is a ‘flying geese’ quilt. I thought we could use it for the office, for the people who find the afghan too heavy. Or too holey.”

  The mindline grew flowers in the same yellow color, and the blues and greens in the quilt seemed to flow through it. “It is lovely. And a good thought.”

  “I thought so.” Vasiht’h sat back, added, “Do you ever think of what we’ll do when we retire?”

  The flowers in the mindline faded. While Vasiht’h wouldn’t have called the breeze that blew past them arctic, it still had a touch of autumn in it, one that reminded him strongly of the nightmares his friend used to have. Paling, he said, “Ah, you don’t have to answer that.”

  Jahir smiled at him, a tiny crooked smile that didn’t break Vasiht’h’s heart, quite… but did bruise it a little. “Shall we eat?”

  “I’ll make coffee.”

  Their next session was with Pieter, who arrived and gave them the same nod and exchange of courtesies he always offered on the way to the couch. Jahir didn’t perceive him to be withdrawn or taciturn… it was more that he preferred action to words, a point his dreams re-emphasized repeatedly. They’d come to regard their sessions with him as invitations to 3deo entertainments they would ordinarily never have consumed.

  /What do you guess it’ll be this time?/ Vasiht’h asked him, resigned. /Whitewater rafting? Big game hunting with a low-tech bow and arrow? Parachuting off an airplane?/

  But it was none of those things. When they took hands and slipped into the Seersa’s dreams, they fell into an adrenaline rush and the sound of their own breathing in an enclosed space. A helmet? Flashes of light strobed against part of their vision. They were spinning—they’d been flung from the hull of a ship. The tightness of their chest was an effort not to vomit against the unexpected rotation. Toggling the suit thrusters too quickly wrenched something in their back, but it stopped the spin and the disorientation.

  This allowed them to see how far they’d been thrown from the ship.

  Never had they been so isolated. Hanging alone amid the stars in all the preternatural clarity of airless space, they felt nothing but awe: awe, and excitement that they were here, that they were able to share, in some small part, in the glories of an endless creation. That it was their daring that made it possible. And that it was now their responsibility to make their way back to the ship, without surrendering to panic.

  When they withdrew from that dream, Vasiht’h whispered, voice separating into a multi-part whisper like a choir softening out of song, /Wow./

  Jahir squeezed his fingers and let them go.

  When Pieter woke, he accepted a glass of water and rolled his shoulders. “That was interesting.”

  “Did it happen?” Jahir asked, quiet.

  The Seersa nodded, ears flipping forward. “Remember it clearly. Kind of a pivotal moment.”

  “I believe it,” Vasiht’h said. “You weren’t scared at all?”

  “Scared?” He frowned, a little wrinkle of furred brow. “No. Startled, certainly. But what was there to be scared of? I’d had extensive training on EVA emergencies. I had plenty of power to get back to the ship. I knew exactly where she was, too. Pretty straightforward problem to solve.”

  “You miss it,” Jahir said, voice still quiet.

  Pieter looked at him without flinching, his eyes steady. “Yeah. I guess I do.” He rose, brushed off his pants. “Same time, next week?”

  “Of course,” Jahir said.

  /You’re working on something./

  Was he? Jahir stood to escort their client out, feeling a vast emptiness in his head, one that trembled with tension… much like Pieter’s reaction to the void when he’d found himself faced with it, alone and unbowed. /Yes, I think so./

  /What do you think?/

  “Have a good week,” Pieter said with a nod, and turned from them only to pause.

  There, standing across from the door into their office, was the human man with the dog from the train.

  “Doctor Tiber,” Pieter said.

  “Pieter-alet.” The human studied him, then looked past him at Jahir and Vasiht’h. His eyes narrowed before he finished, “It’s good to see you. How’ve you been?”

  “Well enough, thanks,” Pieter replied. “Kids wanted me to try these new therapists, so I’ve been seeing them. Been going fine.”

  “I’m glad to hear that.”

  There was a pause then. It was evident that the human—Allen Tiber, one of the base’s established therapists—wanted to talk with Jahir and Vasiht’h, and that he had nothing more to say to Pieter. But the Seersa remained where he was between them. He folded his arms, his stance already wide, and though he remained relaxed he gave the strong impression of a man preparing for a fight.

  /What is he doing?/ Vasiht’h asked, baffled.

  /Defending us, I think,/ Jahir answered, and stepped up beside Pieter. “Next week, then, alet.”

  Pieter cocked his head, looking up at the Eldritch—no, searching his eyes. Jahir let his calm seep through, hoping the Seersa could read it, and apparently it worked. Pieter nodded, satisfied. “Fine. Next week, aletsen. Thanks for the session. They’ve been helping.”

  “Our pleasure,” Vasiht’h said, the Glaseah’s confusion still tainting the mindline.

  “We aim to serve,” Jahir agreed, and that made the Seersa smile before he turned and headed off. That left them with the human, and it was easy to see why Pieter had reacted to him. His entire body spoke of his agitation, and the fist at his side was actively aggressive. The only thing that mitigated the portrait was the soft hand on his dog’s head.

  /Is he angry at us?/ Vasiht’h said. /What in Her name for?/

  /I suspect we’re about to find out./

  “So you’re the people siphoning off everyone else’s clients,” the man said.

  “I was not aware there was any prohibition against seeing clients who made appointments for therapy,” Jahir answered as Vasiht’h came to stand alongside him.

  “It is when you’re using a dangerously untried modality.” The man lifted his chin. “Of course, I’ve only heard rumors. Hearsay can be wrong. You might not actually be forcing yourselves into their minds?”

  /Great,/ Vasiht’h muttered. /Not only is he angry, but he’s ignorant./

  /He is concerned for the welfare of his former patients,/ Jahir murmured.

  /You sure that’s what it is and not hurt pride that we stole them from him?/

  /No,/ Jahir admitted, smiling faintly. /But let us assume the best before we assume the worst./

  /If he really cared about his patients he’d be preserving their confidentiality by having this spat with us in private, not out here in the open. And he’d be willing to hear our side of the story…/

  /Would you, if you heard someone was doing something you considered potentially dangerous to your client?/

  Vasiht’h growled in the mindline, but the noise was colored with his exasperation. Tiber did not know him well enough to perceive the affront in his extremely punctilious reply, but Jahir heard it as if someone had rung a gong by his ear. “We don’t force ourselves on anyone, alet. That’s a prosecutable crime. By the way, I don’t think we’ve b
een introduced. You are…?”

  The dog at the man’s side was beginning to show signs of agitation, ears flicking back and head lowering. “Doctor Allen Tiber.” A pause. “Licensed xenotherapist. I’ve worked here for six years.”

  “It’s nice to meet a colleague,” Vasiht’h said. /Usually./ “My name’s Vasiht’h. This is my partner Jahir. We just moved here.”

  “Someone licensed you to practice by invading people’s thoughts,” Tiber said.

  “As I said, we don’t invade thoughts.” Vasiht’h’s ears had flattened, and Jahir could feel the fur on his lower back bristling like a tingling ache over his own spine. “That would be actionable. We use our abilities to help people address subconscious impulses that might be hobbling them. And we have a license. And a degree from Seersana University, which is renown for its medical school.”

  “You can’t help people solve their problems by tweaking their thoughts for them,” Tiber said. “If you do the work for them, you rob them of the chance to develop the skills they need to cope with their challenges without you.”

  “Are you accusing us of fostering codependency in our clients?” Vasiht’h asked, his incredulity a weight so heavy it bowed the mindline. “First, you want to tell us we abuse our esper abilities, and now you suggest we’re manipulating people to keep them?”

  “I call them like I see them,” Tiber said.

  “You’re calling them wrong,” Vasiht’h answered. “And I think that’s a pretty good end to this discussion.”

  Tiber scowled at him, then looked at Jahir. “And you? Nothing to say for yourself?”

  “We have begun what might have been a collegial relationship rather poorly,” Jahir answered, choosing his words. “I would not be averse to beginning anew.”

  /I would!/

  Jahir hid his smile in the mindline, and his resignation as well, where he felt it chasten his partner. He finished aloud, “I know I, for one, am curious how Terra educates its therapists.”

  Tiber frowned. “How did you know….”

  “You said you were a doctor,” Jahir answered. “That is a human title, indicating training in Terran educational facilities.”

  This hesitation in the conversation felt like an opportunity. Perhaps he had succeeded in pushing Tiber off-balance, enough to consider re-evaluating his opinion? But the mask fell back over the human’s face. “I’m not interested in pursuing a relationship with people I consider to be practicing an ill-conceived modality—if I can even call it that!—on vulnerable patients. I don’t know what you think you’re doing here, but it’s not therapy. And I plan to tell all my clients so.”

  /Calmly,/ Jahir said. “As you will, alet.”

  Tiber hesitated, waiting for something else. When Jahir didn’t give it to him—or let Vasiht’h do so—he backed away and left, spine stiff. The dog trotted at his side, occasionally glancing up at him as if worried.

  /The nerve! Coming here and… and accosting us in front of our own office. To accuse us of… of raping our clients!/

  Jahir winced. /Arii—/

  /You’re going to tell me to calm down but… but what he just accused us of, it’s a crime. It gets you stripped of your abilities on Anseahla. It’s not the kind of thing you just casually say about a person. About anyone!/

  Jahir stopped at the door, startled. /You can do that? Take telepathy away?/

  Vasiht’h stalked past him into their office and sat in front of the couch, mantling his wings. /Yes. It’s not pretty. Sometimes you get other parts of people with it./

  The shiver that ran his spine… Jahir sat, arms folded and head bowed.

  “You’re not sick, are you?” Vasiht’h asked, fretful. “Did he upset you?”

  “No,” Jahir said. “Surprised me, certainly. Puzzled me. But upset me… not the way you are thinking.” At Vasiht’h’s frown, he offered, “Why did he do it?”

  “Do what? Come assault us?”

  Jahir clicked his tongue. “Hyperbole.”

  “Fine,” Vasiht’h said. “Confronted us. Aggressively. And without evidence.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s an angry and controlling personality who can’t stand that we took something from him?” Vasiht’h answered, tail flicking.

  “Possibly,” Jahir allowed. “But rather the worst reading we could take on the situation.”

  Vasiht’h sighed gustily. “Fine. Maybe he lost some clients, tried to figure out where they went because he was worried when they didn’t show up again, and discovered them in the office of the newest therapists in the base, who were also doing things to them he doesn’t understand and can’t find any ethical or procedural frameworks for. And that upset and worried him, so he came down to… yell at us? That’s the part where it breaks down. What did he hope to accomplish?”

  “Maybe he wanted to judge our reactions to his accusations.” Jahir leaned back. “Or perhaps he hoped he could shame us into giving up our work?”

  Vasiht’h snorted. “Given the people we’ve dealt with already… he’s going to have to work a lot harder than that to get us to give an inch.”

  Jahir smiled a little.

  “Maybe he didn’t have a plan,” Vasiht’h said finally, reluctant. “Maybe he was just so upset he couldn’t stop himself from taking it out on us.”

  “Or perhaps a little bit of all these things.”

  Vasiht’h threw up his hands. “Great. He’s not even a client and we’re psychoanalyzing him.”

  “Perhaps we should send him a bill,” Jahir answered, demure. And that won him the laugh he’d hoped for. “There is no use refining too much on it, arii. Unless he interferes further.”

  “And how much you want to bet he won’t?”

  There was no taking that wager, because Jahir knew as well as Vasiht’h that he would lose. He suppressed his sigh.

  “Exactly.” Vasiht’h tugged on the mindline, let an apologetic breeze blow through it, smelling like the aftermath of a storm: wet and heavy. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have overreacted. It’s just… that really is a serious accusation back home.”

  “Something he no doubt failed to realize when he made it. You were correct about his ignorance.”

  “Yeah,” Vasiht’h answered. “But it’s not like he’d have many opportunities to learn about it, would he? Humans don’t produce espers, or at least, they don’t as far as I know.”

  And the reasons for that, Jahir thought he could keep to himself. “More interesting to me, however, was Pieter’s reaction.”

  “Pieter’s…you mean to Tiber?” Vasiht’h frowned, crossing his paws and stretching the topmost absently. “He seemed civil enough. I would guess there was no hard feeling between them? Or maybe he didn’t even say he was leaving?”

  “Perhaps,” Jahir said. “I was more interested in that he felt compelled to protect us.”

  “He did what—” Vasiht’h stopped abruptly, the mindline blossoming with fireworks. “Goddess. He did, didn’t he? You said it yourself… he was defending us. I didn’t even notice.”

  “That surprises me, given how often you have interposed yourself between me and anyone you believe to be attacking me,” Jahir said, smiling.

  Vasiht’h’s blush did not show on his face but it colored the mindline like a drop of dye spreading in water. “I imagine you’ve had a lot of practice observing it, then.”

  “Which makes it easier to identify in someone else.” Jahir folded his arms. “I wonder, a little, if we are taking the wrong approach with Pieter.”

  “In what way?”

  “We have been working on the assumption that his need for adventure is a condition to be coped with,” Jahir answered, slowly, testing the words as he spoke them. “What if the real issue is that he’s not in the right place?”

  “You mean… here?” Vasiht’h leaned back, eyes narrowed. “Physically. Like his life.”

  Jahir sorted the puzzle pieces, thought they locked together too well for anything but truth. “He needs to go
back to Fleet.”

  Both Vasiht’h’s brows rose.

  “He left it to raise his children, and his children are grown,” Jahir said. “There’s no reason for him not to go back to the work he obviously loved.”

  “If there’s no reason, why hasn’t he yet?” Vasiht’h asked, thoughtful. “Habit?”

  “Perhaps he’s waiting for permission from his children.”

  “Or maybe it’s something out of his control.” The Glaseah tapped the couch cushion, thinking. “Can he just go back to Fleet after years out of it? How does that work?”

  “I don’t know,” Jahir said. “But even if there was some prohibition from him rejoining—is that the correct term?—there’s no reason he can’t take up some other similar work. Passenger liners and cargo ships need crew. Or he could become an instructor for the sports he enjoyed so, or a ranger on some remote ski slope…”

  Vasiht’h eyed him, his bemusement blurring the mindline’s edges. “You want us to suggest to our client that he should cope with his feelings of confinement and disappointment by… switching careers.”

  “Not all problems arise from within,” Jahir said. “Sometimes they are a result of a mismatch between the interior mind and the environment. If the environment can be addressed….”

  Vasiht’h made a face. “But how do we go about doing that? We don’t even know why he’s still here instead of hightailing it for the nearest Fleet recruitment center.”

  “I don’t know,” Jahir admitted. “But we have time to consider it.”

  “Time,” Vasiht’h said, scowling at the door, “in which we hopefully won’t have to deal with people camping outside our door, waiting to ambush us with baseless accusations.”

  “Allen Tiber is no doubt a busy man.” Jahir picked up the data tablet to pull up the information on their next appointment. “He will have limited time to hound us.”

  “From your mouth to Her ear,” Vasiht’h muttered.

  Chapter 11

  Joyner MakesDo started their session by explaining his Foundname. “It was a joke when I was younger,” he said, sitting on their couch with his fingers threaded in his lap. “I was clumsy and not great at math, and I’d improvise a lot, or try to figure out workarounds for things I couldn’t do the way they taught me. That usually worked out for me, so I kept at it. When I started my first job and we didn’t have the resources we needed, I’d make a go at it anyway with whatever I could find…” He paused, ears sagging and a chagrined smile on his face. “Sometimes that went well and sometimes it exploded in my face. But my mother used to say that I was a wizard at making do with what I had, and it just sort of stuck.” He paused and added, almost defensively, “It’s not… you know. Some kind of statement that I’m not happy, or that I’m getting along because I don’t think I deserve any better.”