Mindtouch

by M. C. A. Hogarth

  With a swiftness that belied their illnesses, the girls were in the gelateria, small hands spread on the glass as they stared into the case at the twenty-four flavors. Their expressions were so enrapt it hurt, in a way that was both good and bad, and completely confusing. He edged back toward the wall and found Jahir there, with Jill. Surprised, he looked up at his roommate. “I thought you would be up there with them. It was your idea.”

  Jahir’s smile was absent, his eyes on the crowd around the case. “Perhaps. But this was not a gift for me, alet.”

  Vasiht’h followed his roommate’s gaze and saw it lighting, not on the children, but on the guardians. “Ah. Yes, I see.” He watched for a while, then said, “But you will get ice cream, won’t you?”

  Jahir laughed, one of his low, quiet laughs. “Vasiht’h. I am in a gelateria. What do you think?”

  Vasiht’h grinned. “Forget I asked.”

  After the children and their families had their scoops and were scattered to the tables at the warm edges of the shop to eat them, Jahir went to order his own.

  Jill said, “He really likes… ice cream?”

  Vasiht’h laughed. “I don’t know anyone who likes it as much as he does.”

  She frowned. “It wasn’t something I imagined him eating.” Vasiht’h raised his brows at her and she said, “It just seems so… mundane.”

  Vasiht’h grinned. “You should see him with cookie dough.”

  The expression on her face… Vasiht’h laughed and followed Jahir to the counter.

  Today seemed a fine day for something pale, since the last time he’d had gelato he’d had chocolate. He ordered coconut and a cup of espresso and brought it to one of the last remaining tables, where he ate slowly, savoring not just the delicacy of the flavor, but the contentment in the store, so palpable he could feel it like a mantle on his shoulders, one that could warm him. He was barely into the bowl when an older woman rose and walked to him, sat across from him. He didn’t know how to judge her age, but from the deliberation of her movements and the sag of her skin, she was very near the end of her span. A Tam-illee, with felt-short fur the fine, bright gray of a fog in spring. He recognized her from her eyes. “You are Nieve’s grandmother, perhaps?”

  “That I am,” she said. “She’s spoken a great deal of you, young prince.”

  “I’m not—” The look on her face, patient, indulgent, amused… he stopped and laughed. “As you will, Matron.”

  “Mmm,” she said. “Nieve mentioned your courtesies. You have fine manners and a light hand. I can see its evidence in my girl.”

  “And is it yours I see in her love of poetry?” Jahir asked.

  “And her father’s as well,” the woman said, nodding. “I just wanted to have a look at you, and thank you for her fine dreams and good memories. She’ll be traveling light when she goes, and everything she packs counts.”

  Jahir felt something in him become very still. He met her eyes and said, “You speak of her dying with great equanimity, madam.”

  “Would you have me speak of it with wailings and weepings? Or worse, not at all?” she said, and snorted. “How would that give her comfort?” She shook her head. “I’m old, young prince. From this side of a life, you speak of many things with great equanimity, no matter how much they pain you.”

  “Yes,” Jahir murmured. “I imagine that must be so.”

  “So then,” she said, tapping the table with a thin finger. “Pay attention now. For I don’t give advice often, seeing as how the young rarely listen to the old when they’re convinced they’re right.”

  “I am listening, Matron,” Jahir said.

  “Some distance, young prince,” she said. “Find a way to hold some to you.”

  “How—” Jahir stopped. Of course. Nieve, with her too-wise eyes. “I see some things run strongly in your family, madam.”

  “When I was young,” she said, contemplative, “I felt everything like a river, like a wide, wide river running, and I was a twig in it. The problem with that is that a twig is powerless against a river. A life deeply-felt is not so useful to other people as a life spent doing something about those feelings.”

  “Is the point of life then to be useful to others?” Jahir wondered.

  She smiled and arched one brow, a thin thread of dark gray against light. “What other point is there?” And then she turned and said, “And here is my little girl, trying to sneak up on me.”

  “No, gran,” Nieve said, climbing up on the chair beside her. “I was just trying not to disturb you, that’s all.” She slipped her arms around the older woman’s waist and beamed at Jahir. “You eat ice cream!”

  “I love ice cream,” Jahir admitted.

  “Miss Jill said this was your idea,” she said. “If it was… thank you. This has been the best day. I can’t even remember a day this nice.”

  God and Lady, how it hurt to hear such things and know that she was comparing them to weeks spent under the supervision of a hospital staff. But he answered, simply, “You’re welcome.” Seeing them together, the crone and the maid, and both of them younger than him, he suddenly wondered how living in the Alliance could be made bearable, because at the moment he could not imagine how it could be managed.

  The ice cream outing had interrupted their usual schedules, so after seeing the girls back to the hospital and taking leave of their assorted guardians, the two of them returned to class. Vasiht’h stopped by his professor’s office to pick up material for the lecture he’d missed—he could have requested it through the network, but found the faculty reacted better to flesh-and-blood visits—and then he went to his afternoon session. He was having trouble concentrating on the subject, though. It didn’t help that it was the already dry Cognitive Roles in Perception class.

  By the time he staggered to the apartment, he was tired and couldn’t tell why, but he strongly suspected it was depression. He started the bath, an indulgence he didn’t usually bother with, and then sat next to the tub while it filled, measuring bath salts into a cup and prodding at his own mood.

  The girls had had a wonderful time. He would have thought that seeing them in a normal setting, doing normal things, would have cheered him. Instead, it made him think of all the experiences they were missing. He sighed and rubbed his face.

  Part of Glaseahn religion involved trusting the Goddess, and another part understanding that everything in it was Her dream, Her interwoven thoughts. If he went to a siv’t and asked the priests, they would tell him that people didn’t die because the Goddess never forgot them. That was part of having a Goddess’s mind: unlike the mortals who worshipped Her, She could hold an infinite number of thoughts in Her mind. If Her attention was sometimes more focused on one aspect or another of reality, well… that was to be expected. But the dead were merely separated from the living by the same thin wall that separated dreams from reality. Vasiht’h had once heard it said that if they could learn to bridge that wall, they would also know how Aksivaht’h’s dreams made the worlds.

  It had been a long time since Vasiht’h had made the trip to one of the on-campus shrines. The university maintained several for the major religions of the student body. The one for the Glaseah didn’t have a priest, but the important functions of Aksivaht’h’s clergy weren’t services Vasiht’h could imagine asking for while on campus anyway, so it didn’t bother him. Maybe, he thought as he carefully walked down the shallow ramp into the tub, he should go back. Light a candle, try to find some calm.

  Maybe, he thought, this was what Sehvi was trying to tell him about needing real world experience. He had been very fortunate in his life, not to experience much suffering. And he thought he could help other people deal with their own?

  He sighed and settled in the water with his torso draped over the edge and his head in his folded arms. “This,” he muttered, “is the part they don’t mention about college. That all the real learning takes place outside of class.”

  But the water was soft and fragrant—a musk-and-greens
cent combination he liked from home—and he was mindful of the fact that the Goddess needed quiet minds to work Her will. So he drifted, letting the heat relax him, and only left the water when he thought he might fall asleep in it. By that time it was late enough in the evening that he wondered at his roommate’s absence. He peeked down the hall and didn’t see Jahir in his room and was just beginning to worry when his message queue chimed. He went to the wall in the great room and spread his box on its large display: “Am fine, just walking. Home later. —J.”

  Vasiht’h let out a sigh and then smiled, rueful. “And now,” he said to the imaginary Sehvi in his head, “we are well enough acquainted that we know we’d worry without telling one another when we’ll be late.” He looked up at the ceiling and said, “I blame you for this!”

  Imaginary Sehvi snickered, and to prove that he wasn’t being influenced by her he made a late dinner and set aside the leftovers in the stasis box. The note he left was a physical one, because Jahir seemed inclined toward them. ‘Food is in the box.’

  And then, because the day had seemed uncommonly long, he went back to his nest, plumped the pillows and paused to smell his freshly laundered blankets. He smiled and pulled them up over himself and read for a while before he could no longer keep his eyes open, and then he slept. He woke only a little when he heard the front door hiss open, and the quiet footfalls of his roommate; but then Jahir moved out of easy hearing range, and comforted by this evidence that he had indeed returned, Vasiht’h turned over on his pillows and went back to sleep.

  After afternoon class, Jahir left the building and started walking. He didn’t stop until he felt lightheaded and tired, at which point he found a convenient bench and sat on it. Since his first faint he had been scrupulous about taking his adaptation medicine and minding the warning signs of over-exertion; his goal was not to earn himself another clinic visit. But when he had his wind back, he rose and resumed walking until once again he needed to pause. He kept his pace slow, and rested at need, but at home it had been his habit to take long rides when he needed to clear his mind. Absent a stable and a convenient place to ride, then, he improvised.

  But it didn’t help. Everywhere he went, he was surrounded by the wonders of the Alliance. By the tall, clean buildings with their enormous windows and the sweeping beauty of their landscaping; even in winter, gone stripped and frost-burnt, the grounds were striking. And the architecture was only a backdrop, a crown for the true jewels that shone with a fierce and glittering beauty: the people. So many people. He knew them by sight now: Tam-illee passing him, fox-points on their conical ears and long brush-tails, a Karaka’An and Hinichi sitting together on a bench, bent together, clots of Seersa, somewhat more ubiquitous than the rest for this being their world…

  He knew their reputations also. The Pelted had all sprung from the same small source, and segregated themselves into different races, and yet one could sense they were once all one species, one family with different personalities. Thus the linguist Seersa and the engineer Tam-illee and the scientist Glaseah and the hedonist Harat-Shar….

  What did that make the Eldritch? he wondered. The Alliance’s token elder race, fading into irrelevance.

  He veered from that thought and kept walking.

  His late afternoon snack was a cup of buttersquash soup from Tea and Cinnamon, along with a pastry made with flour ground from seeds that had a bright, piquant flavor. He ate and watched the jewels of the Alliance crown, set all around him. So healthy, the people passing in and out of his field of vision. And even so, they would die too soon. He had his data tablet with him from class, and he brought up the statistics while finishing his strong black tea. The averages for most of the bipedal Pelted were in the low one hundreds: on average, around one-hundred-twenty, perhaps. The Phoenix lived a little longer, at the upper range of two hundred. But for the most part, every single person around him, the slim gray male who’d served his soup, the eager, focused students who’d shared his lecture during the afternoon, the professor teaching it, the counselor who’d helped him select his first courses, Vasiht’h, KindlesFlame, Luci and the quadmates, and all the children not just in the hospital but all over the city… they would all live, grow old and die in less than a tenth of his lifespan.

  He could go home, of course. Pack now and go back. But the only thing waiting for him at home was stasis: eight or nine hundred years of managing one of the Seni Galare’s minor properties while waiting to inherit. He could probably fill some of that time: exploring and mapping, breeding horses, playing music, learning one—or two—or three—professions. He could allow his mother to find him a bride and make an early attempt at heirs.

  But the Queen had already had a survey done of the planet, though she told few people about it. And he’d already bred horses through several generations. He had his whole life to play music, and the reason he was here was to learn a profession. And he very much did not want a wife yet, particularly given how high the mortality rate was for pregnant Eldritch women.

  The alternative to going home, though, was staying here: a visitor to an eternal garden of beautiful, short-lived flowers, and he fated to remember them long after their own grand- and great-grandchildren did not. The only way he could imagine surviving that heartache was not to care… but his life had prepared him to dismiss people he’d already disliked, for the Eldritch dedicated themselves to holding each other apart and were masters of cutting remarks and petty cruelties.

  Nothing he had lived through had taught him how to cut off people he could be fond of. Rather the opposite, given how rare it was to find an open heart.

  He was sitting on a bench halfway to the School of Languages when he realized how late it was. His roommate would worry, he thought, and left a quick note. He was putting the data tablet back in his bag when he realized if he wasn’t careful, it would be too late for him to go. The relationships he was building would become too strong for abandonment. And then he would be committed to seeing this experiment to its finish, and learning how he fared.

  The only question was, how much time did he have left, before he could no longer leave?

  His walk did not resolve any of his questions. It had served only to crystallize them. He returned to the apartment heavy-hearted, to find Vasiht’h had cooked for them both. He ran his fingers lightly over the edge of the paper note—such a delightful anachronism, and he had a hunch as to why Vasiht’h had chosen it. He wondered if it was too late for some of the people around him, and what harm he would cause by amputating the relationships to save himself.

  He ate dinner standing up in the kitchen, in its silence, and by the dim glow of its night-light. And then, resigned, he washed up and went to sleep.

  Vasiht’h had been hoping for the dreams of the Goddess, something inspiring, something to help dispel his anxieties. Barring that, he would have settled for some pastoral thing like the dreams he’d tried to give the children, of the breath of the Goddess in windchimes, and the smell of Anseahla drifting in through his open window at home.

  Naturally, he had none of those things, and woke up solely because he’d cramped his foreleg badly enough to cut off circulation in it. He couldn’t feel the paw even. He sighed and forced himself to his feet. He was used to giving himself a numb limb now and then; arranging a centauroid body for sleep was an awkward exercise even with practice and a lot of bolsters. The only thing for it was to walk until the feeling returned. He’d make himself a tisane; that would help him fall back asleep once he could wiggle his toes and feel them. Vasiht’h limped to the kitchen and hunted in the near-dark for one of the herbal tea bags.

  He was pouring hot water into his cup when he heard a noise he never wanted to hear again in his life. He’d been told that people moaned in pleasure and had yet to experience it, though he imagined it must be a pleasant sound. He’d heard that people also moaned in pain, and had failed to imagine what it must sound like, and had not really tried.

  It sounded like distress made manifest, as if
the Goddess had taken anguish and made it palpable, made it more real than pain like that ever should be. He dropped the kettle and jumped back from the resulting splash, then turned on a paw and ran for the sound. He couldn’t imagine what horror had inspired it, but he expected… blood, sickness, something. To dash into his roommate’s room and find him sleeping—

  —but sleeping with tears on his cheeks—

  He didn’t stop to question the rectitude of it, or whether Jahir would have permitted it, or what his ethics professor would have said. He reached with his mind and almost his hands, desperate to make the grief stop, and said, Rest.

  And: Softly. Softly.

  And: Hear the wind through the chimes. Smell the night-blooming irises. The Goddess is passing through your dreams.

  He could feel his words sinking into that dreaming mind and stilling whatever sorrow was moving through the Eldritch. When he opened his eyes and withdrew, he felt the bad dream reasserting itself, so he sank to his feet, belly to the ground, and concentrated. Not just on his own offering, but on memories of Jahir’s descriptions of the gifts he’d made the children. Sunlight too, then. Music, since Jahir loved it so: lullabies and harp-song from the concerto they’d been listening to last. The sense of lengthening days that turned into beautiful blue nights.

  It was hard work, but he became aware of a great sense of peace while doing it. He smoothed out his roommate’s troubled aura and blew soft breath into it—serenity—and carefully held himself away from whatever thoughts and images were inspiring the nightmare, not just to observe his roommate’s privacy, but to prevent those things from bleeding into what he was making.

  And at some point, he fell asleep, and his subconscious mind kept that link alive and shared his calmer dreams with Jahir.

  It was a noise that woke Jahir, one that didn’t belong in his room, a slow scrape that he couldn’t place. And then his eyes didn’t want to open… his lashes were matted. He frowned, feeling beset and aching in every joint and not remembering what he’d done to earn such opprobrium. But he managed to look, though the will to lift his head was not yet in him, and found his roommate’s shoulder sliding in slow jerks down his wall.