Lincoln Casey had learned late in life, by the standards of his mother’s people, how to touch another adult’s mind and spirit. It was an ability with which Morthan hybrid children were born, first manifesting itself in the bond between mother and infant. Casey had experienced that quite normally; like most non-humans he could recall his own gradual awakening to consciousness within his mother’s womb, could remember the mixture of trauma and delight that was birth, and could not really imagine what it must be like to be a full human and have no recollection of any part of life that preceded walking and the use of language. But although Sestians and Kesrans and other nonhumans recalled prenatal existence, infancy and toddlerhood (or its developmental equivalent, for those species that swam or flew or crawled throughout their lives), only Morthans of those species humans had encountered thusfar possessed the fabled gift of being able to communicate with other beings on a mind-to-mind basis.
Casey was as much a Morthan as any of his fellow hybrids in that respect, he remembered the comfort of being able to touch his mother’s consciousness at any time during his first months of life. Even when Kalitha had been asleep, baby Lincoln had contentedly cuddled his thoughts to her dreams.
It was normal for a Morthan child to move away from that constant closeness as he or she grew, because like the humans they so eerily resembled physiologically Morthan youngsters needed to separate themselves from their parents in order to live their own lives. Linc had done that, too, as he had grown up. By the time he had completed two standard Terran years of life, he knew how to accept it when his mother refused him access to her mind. He also knew, in a rudimentary way at least, how to do the equivalent to her—although being able to keep her out of his thoughts when she chose to insist on knowing them was an ability he did not develop until he reached what his human father insisted was puberty.
It was, and yet it wasn’t, the same thing that happened to his fully human cousins during their teen years. He grew tall in a sudden rush, as they did. His face and the private areas of his body grew hair; his voice deepened, his shoulders became broad, and his upper body developed an adult male’s musculature. But although he might from a purely physiological standpoint have become sexually active in his mid-teens, as so many young humans did, he could not have caused a female to become pregnant because the reproductive cells in his semen were not fully formed—would not be, until he had lived for at least an additional two decades (or more) in Terran terms. And he had small interest in attempting union with a female, anyway.
His intellect equaled a human’s of his chronological age, looking at him would not have revealed his heritage unless one noticed his distinctive golden eyes; and in every respect except sexual interest, his emotional development kept pace with that of a human adolescent. When he entered the Academy and had to cope with separation from home, with academic and social pressures, and then with learning how to lead others, he proved himself not only just as able as his classmates—he was among the best.
But every other Morthan hybrid he knew at the Academy could and did move easily to unite with the minds of other Morthans, and he could not. And although the minds of other sentient species—humans, Kesrans, Sestians, and so on—could not be understood in the same way as could a fellow Morthan’s mind, their emotions could be perceived and thoughts could be exchanged with them. That was true of both Morthan females and Morthan males, although the females with their much earlier arrival at sexual maturity usually paired off with humans and remained on their home-world while the Morthan males left that planet to become Star Service healers and expatriate physicians.
That career hadn’t invited Lincoln Casey. A human like his father could become a physician or a psychologist without anyone expecting that he would be able to “read” his patients, but a part-Morthan who lacked that ability would have been setting himself up to fail. And Linc could no longer read anyone, not even Kalitha, by the time he had passed his fourteenth birthday. Like a man born fully human, he was locked up alone in his body and he had no expectation that was ever going to change.
At first his father had expressed relief when they realized how young Linc was developing, because Gladstone Casey had made the natural assumption that the boy’s Terran characteristics were unusually dominant. If that meant that Linc could not exercise Kalitha’s mental gifts, it was perhaps too bad; but it should also mean that he would mature sexually at the same age as (or at least not much later than) human males, and that he would therefore be able to live what Gladstone Casey was pleased to call “a normal life for a man.”
It hadn’t happened that way. Linc was Morthan in his development, yet he lacked the quality that was the Morthan male’s great compensation for being unable to service his species’ females at the age when they first desired it. And then, when the Morthan male at last did mature, the mate he usually found was a human female—and that union was unvaryingly a barren one. Human males regularly impregnated Morthan females, but no Morthan male and human female had ever produced a conception together. And it had nothing to do with the human woman’s fertility, although more often than not she was past the age for natural conception before the relationship with her Morthan mate commenced.
Gladstone Casey had expected his boy to be the first to break that medical barrier, but it hadn’t happened. Linc had enjoyed friendships with females of every possible species, first at the Academy and then throughout his career as Star Service officer, but he hadn’t been able to figure out why he was supposed to want to lie down in a bed with one (except maybe to keep warm while sleeping) until he was close to completing four decades of life.
When had it begun, his realization that he knew exactly what Katy Romanova was feeling? Very early in their relationship, but at first he had mistaken that dawning empathy for nothing more than what human friends normally shared. A heightened awareness of her facial expressions and their varied meanings, of her body language, of the most subtle tones of her voice; clues that he interpreted with unusual skill, as might any sensitive young human man with a person to whom he was emotionally close. But a day had come when he could not explain that awareness by such means, because he felt her emotions when he could not see her and could not even hear her. And soon after that he had started being able to perceive her thoughts.
He had kept that from her for far too long. For years he had been careful, so careful, not to intrude when her thoughts and feelings were private ones. Yet he had known it before she did when she fell in love with George Fralick, since Fralick was captain to both of them at that time. He had been glad then that he lacked a human man’s sexual passions, because if he had possessed them it would have been damnably difficult for him not to intrude on her mentally many times when she and Fralick were nearby and had not the slightest clue that it was possible for him to listen.
More than listen, to perceive whatever Katy perceived. Fortunately the idea of intimate contact with George Fralick hadn’t just been unattractive to Casey; it had revolted him, on the few occasions when he had accidentally let his barriers down while Katy was with her husband.
Homophobia? No, it was no more that than it was jealousy. It was simply an instinctive drawing back from a powerful and elemental something that he was not yet ready to manage, that he could no more savor as Katy was savoring it than an infant of three months could chew and digest a piece of raw fruit.
He had been terrified that if she realized he could touch her in this way that was so easy for him, by the time they were command officers in their thirties and she was the mother of Fralick’s growing sons, that she would turn on him in horror. Which she might have…he still felt a bit guilty for having deceived her for so long, but he could not repent of it.
And then his body had starting waking up, and he had begun to understand why fully human males behaved in the impossibly strange ways that they sometimes did.
Being near her made him ache. Watching her had always been a pleasure, Katy was lovely even though she had no great confidence in that fact (and Fralick, damn the bastard, never let her forget it when each pregnancy left her a bit less slender than she’d been before—did the man not have brains enough to realize that it was bearing and nursing his children that had put those few additional kilos onto his wife’s frame?). Yet until he was nearing forty, Linc Casey appreciated Katy Romanova’s femininity exactly as he had appreciated that quality in his mother. The sight of her was pleasing, in a way that the sight of another man wasn’t; there was a special kind of comfort in having her nearby. But by the time his fortieth birth-anniversary had come and gone, if she simply stood close beside him on the bridge he could feel his breathing begin to change.
And if she leaned over him, if she touched his shoulder in the way she had a habit of doing, other things happened. He woke at night, and knew he had dreamed about her, and was embarrassed at what those dreams had caused his body to do.
She was nearing the place in her career when she would be considered for promotion to flag rank, and he was wondering whether the time might not have come when he should separate his life from hers—for both decency’s sake, and for that of his own sanity—when she came back from a leave spent with her husband, she embraced her friend in welcome, and Casey immediately sensed a new life within her.
He hadn’t sensed her sons’ presence while she had carried them, twenty and more years earlier. He had only just learned to follow the working of Katy’s own mind, in those days. But he had known small Madeleine was alive inside Catherine Romanova’s womb for several weeks before Katy herself had become aware of the changes in her body’s rhythms, had sought medical advice (thinking she was simply entering menopause, since she had been in her middle forties by that time), and had been told that she was carrying the daughter she’d wanted for so long.
Still he hadn’t told her the truth. He had stayed with her, though, because leaving her then was unthinkable. Somehow he had known she was about to need him in a way she had never needed him before—and that premonition had come horribly and spectacularly true, far above Mistworld, when two ships in Romanova’s battle group had become balls of flame and when Casey had finally reached out to her mind-to-mind without even thinking about holding back.
After that he no longer had to touch her covertly, he always did it openly. Her pregnancy with someone else’s baby had fortunately kept his sexual interest under control, she hadn’t had to deal with that potentially alarming aspect of being in mental and emotional contact with the friend she had thought she knew so well. He had comforted her while her marriage to George Fralick, rocky in its later years at best, had disintegrated even as she grew huge with Fralick’s daughter. And then he had had to let her go off to Kesra with Fralick, to give birth to the baby to whose mind he already felt powerfully connected. He had remained on duty, and had not been able to decide whether he hoped that for Katy’s sake her marriage might be revived by the new child’s arrival—or if he hoped instead that she would finally break with Fralick, once she had borne and weaned the baby.
Even he hadn’t expected Fralick to do what the man had done, though. He had not thought that any man who claimed to love his wife would show that “love” by using her baby to try to hold her in a marriage she no longer wanted. Katy had arrived back on the Firestorm after her maternity leave not sad about the separation but glowing with pride in her new child, as he had seen her arrive back from bearing first Ewan and then the twins so many years earlier; instead she had been barely holding herself together, and as soon as the formalities of her return were over and they were alone she had broken down in his arms.
He had wanted her so desperately that day, but to take her then would have been beyond excusing. He had held her, mentally and emotionally as well as physically; he had comforted her, supported her, loved her. But not until a full year afterward, when she was about to assume her new rank as a flag officer and he was about to take on the role of her adjutant, had they become lovers.
She was ready for it, by then. Fralick was in her past, she was used to the mental intimacy that she and her friend and long-time professional partner now shared, and adding the physical dimension to their existing closeness had only seemed natural.
Katy had been sharing her body in that way from the night of her thirteenth birthday. Linc had never done so before. It had been awkward, at first—but it had also been beautiful. Intensely, incredibly beautiful, and the wonder of it hadn’t faded as time had passed and as their physical union had become a thoroughly familiar act.
He was thinking about that now, as he came back to consciousness, because someone was touching his thoughts and whoever it was wanted him to think about his relationship with Katy and how it had developed over the years. But once he realized that was the case, he shut off those thoughts in horror.
“So you’re awake now, cousin.” A golden-eyed man about half Casey’s age was looking at him and smiling when he opened his own eyes. “I’m sorry we had to hurt you, but it was either that or take control of your mind against your will. And that would be against ethics, as I’m sure you know.”
“So shooting me with a stunner was a better idea.” Casey looked beyond the young man’s shoulder, and saw something very familiar. He was in a starship’s sickbay. The young man wore a Star Service uniform, that of a physician who held the rank of lieutenant commander.
Which meant he probably was the ship’s chief medical officer. But which ship? And since when did the Star Service kidnap one of its own retired senior officers, from the sanctuary of his home?
“Captain? Our guest is awake now,” the physician said into a comm unit. Then to Casey he added, “Captain Casey. That’s going to get confusing.”
“‘Mister’ Casey will do.” Reaching out for the doctor’s mind was pointless. To this day, Linc could touch only two minds uninvited. His wife’s mind, and—as he had discovered what he thought was still not very long ago—little Maddy Fralick’s mind. The fact that this physician was a fellow Morthan hybrid was of no help to Casey whatsoever. His old failing, to which he hadn’t given a thought since settling down on Narsai with Katy, confronted him again; and it annoyed him just as much now as it had when he was a little boy visiting his mother’s family. The other Morthan children talked without speech, and they left him out…and later, at the Academy, another cadet would see his golden eyes and try to touch thoughts with him and be disgusted when that was possible only if the other Morthan was willing to do all the work.
It had been easier once he became an officer who had some seniority. But from time to time the same thing had gone on happening to him, so he was not the least bit surprised to find it happening to him again now. Everything else about this situation astonished him—but not that.
“Which ship is this? And what in hell am I doing on it?” Casey inquired now, sitting on the edge of the medical bed where he had awakened and putting up a hand to pinch the bridge of his nose. He felt the typical post-stunning tightness of his scalp, a sensation which was not quite a headache but that felt uncomfortably close to the start of one.
“I’d like to be able to answer all your questions, Captain Casey, but for now at least that won’t be possible.” A slender, dark-skinned human man had entered the compartment while the Morthan hybrid had been speaking. A man who wore four stripes on his uniform sleeves, and who was poker-faced in a way that Casey had long ago learned usually masked feelings that must be put aside for duty’s sake.
He did not have to be able to touch humans’ minds to know what they were feeling. Many times that was obvious to him, just by observing them.
“At least I can tell you which ship you’re on, anyway,” the dark man continued. “Archangel. And I can tell you my name, Paolo Giandrea—but that’s going to be about it.”
The hatch to the passageway opened again, and two humans wearing security uniforms came through it. Casey realized that the Morthan doctor had moved away from him, and knew that although he could not see it a forcefield had been erected between them. He had ordered that done to a potentially dangerous prisoner many times, when he had been the one in command.
“I’m sorry,” Captain Giandrea said again. “But I guess I don’t have to tell you that sometimes I don’t like my orders, Captain Casey. I never served with you, but I’ve heard plenty about you from Dan Archer—so I know you’ll understand there’s nothing personal about what I have to do now.”
The guards moved forward, stepping through the forcefield where gaps of precisely the necessary size opened to allow them to pass.