Mindtouch

by M. C. A. Hogarth

  Vasiht’h stared up at his roommate, wide-eyed. “I… don’t know what to say.”

  “Say ‘Jahir, I would like a cup of tea while I am working on this, would you make it for me, please?’”

  “That sounds nice?” Vasiht’h said weakly. And added, “What kind of cookies am I making?”

  “Your nut butter cookies are very popular at the meetings,” Jahir said, bringing the kettle to the sink. “We have ingredients for it.”

  “Which you know because…”

  “I did the shopping,” Jahir finished. “And I have learned to put aside materials for baking against your occasional upsets.”

  “I don’t have upsets,” Vasiht’h protested, though not as aggressively as he felt he should.

  “Then against the times when you have issues to work out,” Jahir said. He began heating the tea. “Come, take up the spatula. I’ll leave you to think, if you wish.”

  “No,” Vasiht’h said, and sighed out, a deep sigh that seemed to come all the way from his lower lungs. “No, I’d like it if we talked.” He padded into the kitchen, careful not to bump into his taller roommate.

  “It’s about the children, I imagine,” Jahir said, spooning some of the tea leaves into a wire strainer.

  “I guess that part was obvious,” Vasiht’h said. “It’s just… I know they’re seriously sick. I don’t want them to get sicker. I want them to get better.”

  “Of course,” Jahir said, and glanced at him.

  “You are looking at me like you can’t believe I noticed it? Hadn’t noticed it before?” Vasiht’h started going through the cabinets for supplies. “We’re out of vanilla extract.”

  “I had not known we had it,” Jahir said. “I suppose we could pay for the genie fee?”

  “No,” Vasiht’h said with a wrinkled nose. “I don’t really want to use up our energy budget on baking supplies. I’ll just improvise, I guess.” He hunted through the extracts he had left. Lemon? With nut butter? No. “You haven’t agreed with me. Or disagreed.”

  “Should I have an opinion?” the Eldritch said, a little more delicately than Vasiht’h expected. He looked up over his shoulder at his roommate. “It is a matter you might find offensive. Or troubling.”

  “That you think I might be distressed that children could die?” Vasiht’h said.

  “That you think you might not be distressed that children could die.”

  Vasiht’h froze, tub of sugar in his arms. He was aware of his own heart racing.

  “Vasiht’h?”

  “I… of course I…” He put the tub down and rubbed his forehead. “It hurts, thinking about it.”

  “It would be abnormal for it not to,” Jahir said.

  “That’s the problem,” Vasiht’h said. “I don’t want to feel those things. It’s not overwhelming, you know, more like… like an anxiety. But I’m not sure why I’m feeling it. Am I gratified it’s not as intense an emotion as I imagine you would feel? Am I disturbed that I felt anything at all? Am I disturbed that I didn’t feel it more deeply? One of the reasons I decided on psychology was because I like people, Jahir… but also that I feel like I can survive hearing about their problems and helping them with their grief, because I don’t have that deep an empathy. What if I’m wrong? What if the first really hard case I tackle demonstrates to me that I’m not going to be able to handle it?”

  Jahir was silent, setting the lid on the teapot and fetching two cups and placing them on two saucers. He brought out spoons and honey, and only when he’d set everything on a towel did he say, “Maybe you won’t. Would it be so bad to have empathy?”

  “It would if it prevented me from doing my work!” Vasiht’h exclaimed.

  “Were you decided then, on the clinical track? I thought you were also considering the research concentration.”

  “I was, sure, but…” Vasiht’h trailed off. “I wasn’t sure if I wanted clinical. Now that I think I might not be able to do it, I’m upset. Does that mean it’s what I wanted in the first place? Or is it just that I’m unhappy that I no longer have any choices?”

  “Perhaps that is what you must contemplate while baking,” Jahir said. He took his cup of tea. “Make your batter, alet. I’ll build us a fire.”

  “All right,” Vasiht’h said, feeling out-of-proportion comforted by the domesticity of it all. He sighed and went through the cupboard. Nut butter with nut extract? For extra nuttiness? He had Selnoran more-almond, which he’d bought on a whim when he’d had too much spare fin. He should have saved it, but he couldn’t pass up a gourmet import. He set out all his ingredients and tools and went to work, and at the edge of his vision he could see Jahir moving to and fro, bringing wood, stacking it with expert hands, and coaxing the fire to life. The Glaseah was completely sure that no one had ever used the fireplace since the apartments had been built, and if they had, he couldn’t imagine they’d been as good at making them as Jahir. There seemed to be a trick to it, or at least, a system.

  But he made the cookies, and the routine calmed him. He’d done this for as long as he could remember, first with his older sisters, then by himself, then teaching his younger sisters. Not just baking, but cooking too. The creation myth had mentioned nothing about whether the Goddess had given Glaseah discerning palates, but Vasiht’h loved the smell and taste of fresh food, and more than that, loved the meditative process of making it.

  He put in a tray to bake—three cookies, two for him and one for Jahir—and stored the remainder of the dough for tomorrow so the results would be fresh for the gathering. Then he took his cup of tea, still warm from the teardrop-sized heater in the saucer, and brought it with him to the hearth, where the fire was hissing and snapping.

  “I don’t know what to think,” he said once he’d settled. “But I’m a little calmer about the uncertainty.”

  “A great wisdom, that,” Jahir said, “given how little in life is certain.”

  “Yes,” Vasiht’h murmured. “I guess that’s the point.”

  CHAPTER 12

  When Jahir had first started classes, he’d found the material daunting: not just dense, but wall-like, insurmountably complex. There were so many species in the Alliance, to be so varied and yet to have come from the same fount. Humans had engineered a batch of ur-Pelted; those Pelted had developed, via segregation during their exodus from Earth and some tinkering by Pelted scientists, into the core species of the Alliance: Team Cat and Team Dog, as Vasiht’h had put it. But there were others: the inscrutable Naysha, created by humans at the same time as the Pelted, meant to function as mermaids—mercats? Merotters? God and Lady knew—but in practice far more alien than ever any mermaid of myth. As well as the Aera and the Malarai: extreme human experiments the Pelted had rescued just barely from genetic self-destruction. And then the Pelted had engineered new species of their own, in what Jahir suspected had been an attempt to come to terms with their own identity as made-people… and that had given rise to the Glaseah, the Ciracaana, the Phoenix. And then there were the true aliens, the Platies and Flitzbe, with whom few people could truly communicate and almost no one saw, and the Akubi, with whom there could be communication, often more meaningful than the conversations that could be sustained with the ostensibly less alien Phoenix.

  It was a truly boggling amount of information to absorb, and Jahir had lacked any of the cultural context that might have helped, context someone like Vasiht’h would have had growing up as one of the members of the Alliance. The Eldritch were not technically members, but allies, like humanity; unlike humanity, however, the Eldritch had embraced their xenophobia and chosen not to foster any stronger tie with their neighbor than was necessary to ensure they were left alone.

  When he first started the classes, he’d been behind. He’d worked hard to catch up to his classmates, and he was certain he hadn’t. Not really. The chemistry, the basics of the biology, that he could grasp, did grasp easily, in fact. But he often couldn’t remember how many Pelted races there were, or their names, and recalling
information specific to their brain chemistry without the framework for something as fundamental as knowing all of them by heart…

  He’d been very frustrated.

  But at some point, all that confusion had… vanished. A scaffold had appeared in his mind, become populated with scent, sound, sight and memory. Some of those memories were his own: sitting on a bench, watching other students pass by; taking notes in the back corner of a room, listening to one of his classmates ask a question; pouring tea for one of the quadmates at the weekly evening gatherings.

  But most of those memories weren’t his.

  They were the girls’.

  He’d begun absorbing the Alliance culture through the skins of the children when he held them or touched them. When he tucked them into their beds, they gave him their fatigue and their fear, and also their worlds. He’d had no idea it was happening until he’d spread his books and data tablet on the desk in his room so he could begin his studies for the midterm examinations. Staring at the diagrams in one of the books as he opened it, seeing the information on the page, so bald without context, brought it into abrupt focus.

  He sat, very hard.

  The dreams grew more powerful with each visit they paid the children. They remained free of overt menace; for the most part they were things of pale grief. But they were completely involving, and it didn’t matter that the children did not have a sense for how much they would miss if they died, could not invest those dreams with regret. Jahir had already lived over ten times their lifetimes so far, and he did know what they would miss if they died, and it hurt him horribly to know.

  But he had found somewhere to go, to keep himself from feeling just how unbearable that sorrow was… and it was to his roommate.

  Vasiht’h took him to ice cream, to galleries, to the quiet parties every week in the center of the quad. Vasiht’h sat near him, studying in their great room, sharing the fire and the busy, contented quiet. Vasiht’h cooked while he did laundry; made him laugh even when he didn’t let those laughs reach his lips; steadied him when they went to the hospital. Perhaps four feet made it easier to stay grounded… the thought made him smile. But he was deeply grateful for having met the Glaseah.

  Nevertheless, it troubled him that he’d taken so much from the children. The Eldritch ethical philosophy on the use of esper abilities was quite straightforward: don’t. The nuances of how one dealt with the children’s accidental gifts were not described in a normal Eldritch universe. Waking up melancholic from the dreams of their plight didn’t seem enough compensation, particularly when he realized that Kuriel had taken care of his problem with Seersana’s calendar. As might be expected of a race that had created all the major languages of the Alliance for the genetically-engineered Pelted, including Universal, the Seersa had a deep and broad tongue of their own, one that included every known phoneme that could be created by a humanoid mouth and throat. Their calendar had sixteen months in four seasons, and all of them had names that Jahir could not, for the life of him, remember… until he could. Kuriel, the only Seersa in the group, native to the world and the language, had somehow passed it to him through her skin.

  “You seem preoccupied,” KindlesFlame said. “This is midterms week, isn’t it? Worried about that?”

  “No,” Jahir said truthfully. The waiter, a Seersa male with tiger stripes on a brown pelt, set down their cups, black coffee for the Tam-illee and black tea for him. The plate between them held a selection of what were locally called chat-snacks, small, bite-sized samples of the foods these coffeehouses served.

  “So, if not that, then what?” KindlesFlame said, plucking up a square of cheese decorated with a curled slice of sweet pepper.

  Jahir debated the merits of maintaining his silence. He valued his privacy and felt bound to keep the Eldritch Veil. Nor was KindlesFlame an esper himself, to give him advice specific to his conundrum. But the Tam-illee was a healer, educated in what constituted professional behavior in a clinical setting, and he had broad experience as an administrator of both a school and a clinic, tasks that had no doubt involved counseling juniors on similar problems. Jahir glanced up, found the man studying him with a frank expression, curious without veering into unseemly interest.

  “You are aware, somewhat, of how my abilities work?” he said at last.

  “You’re a contact-esper, yes?” KindlesFlame said. “I assume that when you touch people, you get some sense of their surface thoughts and emotions.”

  “Their emotional state I can sometimes sense without touching, if it’s intense enough,” Jahir said. “But touching, yes. Skin to skin particularly. Often more than their surface thoughts, and a great deal more than their surface emotions, depending on the length of the contact. Clothing blunts it somewhat.” He paused, then said, “This being my experience. Every Eldritch is different.”

  “Naturally,” KindlesFlame said. “Go on, then.”

  “The children at the hospital… I have been allowing that sort of contact.” Jahir looked at the plate and moved one of the small caramels with a fork, but did not take it. “It seems mean to refuse them when they want to be held.”

  “I couldn’t imagine doing it,” KindlesFlame agreed. “So. You’ve been reading them. Where’s the ethical problem?”

  “I think… it’s helping me with my studies,” Jahir said. “I now have a better sense for the cultures of the varied Pelted species. And I seem to have finally fixed the Seersan calendar in mind.”

  “And this concerns you because you feel you’ve taken something from the minds of these children without their permission,” KindlesFlame said. He tapped the caramel with the side of his fork. “If you’re going to play with that, at least put it on your plate. Better yet, eat it.”

  Jahir obliged and halved it with his fork while KindlesFlame considered. It made him feel better, that the Tam-illee had divined the source of his discomfort so quickly, and did not minimize it with an easy response. He let the other man think while attending to his plate. The caramel was salted and had some spice in it. Living with Vasiht’h had given him enough of an education in them to guess at it. Cardamom, perhaps? Nutmeg? Something with a touch of a citrus. It married well with the tea.

  “These thoughts you get from them,” KindlesFlame said. “Private things, I imagine?”

  “Were they my thoughts I wouldn’t discuss them with anyone,” Jahir said, and because KindlesFlame had asked—a healer, a professor, and the former Dean of a medical college—he analyzed the thoughts he could remember receiving and said, “Though not in the sense that they contain personal information. More… thoughts in response to being ill. As one might imagine from their situation.”

  “Of course,” KindlesFlame said. “Have you discussed those thoughts with anyone?”

  “No,” Jahir said. “I would never. I have not asked permission.”

  “And I assume these children don’t know that you’ve gotten something from this exchange,” KindlesFlame said.

  “They knew they were not supposed to touch me because it meant I would know their thoughts,” Jahir said. “Vasiht’h explained it to them when first we met. But that was some time ago, and such things slip from the minds of children unless reinforced. Particularly in the face of a deeper acculturation toward touch as a source of comfort.”

  KindlesFlame chuckled softly. “You’re getting the language right… good for you.” He wedged his fork under one of the other caramels and lifted it onto his plate. “I’m guessing that’s the real source of your unease. You haven’t discussed it with them. Have you considered telling them what’s going on and asking them if it bothers them?”

  “No,” Jahir said, surprised.

  “I would recommend that,” KindlesFlame said. “Explain to them the cost of touching you, see if they’re comfortable with paying it. If they say it’s fine, then your ethical problem disappears. If they say it’s not, then you tell them you can no longer hug them. Part of autonomy, alet, is patients accepting they have responsibilities to fu
lfill in the healer/patient relationship.”

  “They’re children,” Jahir said. “How much autonomy can you expect them to have? They are still wards of their parents.”

  “I think it’s even more important with children,” KindlesFlame said. He warmed his hands on his cup. “You’re right in that they aren’t allowed to make decisions as to their care; that’s the responsibility of their guardians and the patient advocates assigned to them. So little remains in their control. Letting them make any decision at all helps immensely.”

  “Then I must,” Jahir murmured. “And I thank you for helping me to settle the matter.”

  “Of course, this doesn’t answer your broader question,” KindlesFlame said, “which involves the ethical use of your abilities in a clinical setting… and that’s not something we have guidelines on. We don’t have enough espers to justify a class on psychic ethics for medical personnel, and even if we did, we don’t have any materials made up for it. There’s probably a book on it somewhere, though.” He frowned, thoughtful. “You might check in the library, see what you find. But I suspect it’s something you’re going to have to work out for yourself if you go the clinical or medical routes. The latter particularly.” Jahir glanced at him, and he finished, “When you’re seeing patients in an office, the likelihood of your touching them by accident is very low. When you’re seeing them in a trauma unit and they’re flailing on a bed…”

  Jahir said, “Yes… I see.”

  “You know there’s a bulletin on you out,” KindlesFlame added casually.

  “Ah?”

  “The Dean of the Medical College and the head of the children’s hospital are both friends of mine,” the Tam-illee said. “They sent a note to their staff and faculty about your care and feeding.” He stirred his caramel-sticky spoon in his coffee and sipped. “Apparently, your arrival was a first for the entire university, not just my clinic.”