“You’ve had your house in MinTar for a long time, Katy, but you haven’t really lived on Narsai since you were just turning eighteen.” Ivan Romanov was sitting in the co-pilot’s seat as the rented aircar headed back toward MinTar, with Katy at the controls and with young Maddy once again in the seat behind them. “And since you and Linc did move back, you haven’t had a lot to do with local people and I suspect you haven’t been paying much attention to Outworld politics. Not even the war rumors.”
“No, I haven’t,” Katy admitted, when her cousin paused as if he expected her to answer him. “I had enough of war rumors before we left Terra, and here on Narsai it’s not hard at all to just turn off the holo-casts and forget that the rest of the Commonwealth is there. Cab socializes with us even though she’s our doctor; I’ve known her since we were babies. She tells me how Mum and Dad are doing, and I talk to some of my other old friends from time to time. But mostly Linc and I both just record the occasional lecture for transmission back to the Academy, and work on our own projects, and spend time in the parklands.”
Romanova’s parents were well up into their nineties now, but on Narsai as on most technologically well-developed worlds that was not the enfeebled very old age that it once had been for human beings. Katy at sixty was regarded as no more than middle-aged. Her retirement had been premature; if not for the crisis in which all scramblers were expelled from the Service, she and Linc would probably have stayed put in their hard-earned power positions for at least an additional decade. Perhaps for longer than that, the Star Service had no mandatory age at which an officer must step down.
Cabanne Romanova, for whom Cab Barrett was named, was still heading up the Narsatian University’s main campus at MinTar; and her husband of eighty years, Trabe Kourdakov, was still chairing that university’s philosophy department. Katy, their only living child, had not seen either parent since she had divorced George Fralick and had come home to Narsai married to her adjutant and without her baby girl.
Ivan Romanov’s face softened as he looked over at his cousin. He said gently, “I know, Katy. Aunt Cabbie and Uncle Trabe just barely forgave you for not marrying me. They still can’t accept your divorce, can they?”
“It’s partly the divorce,” Katy responded quietly, and spared herself a moment to glance over her shoulder in Maddy’s direction. She was not certain she wanted her young daughter to be hearing this…but, she reminded herself firmly, at Maddy’s age she had been Johnnie’s lover. Besides, sending the child out of her sight right now was something she simply didn’t have the ability to do. They had to get back to MinTar, she had to know what had become of Linc.
Yet Johnnie was making her talk about subjects that he had to know were delicate ones. Why?
“It was partly your divorce, but it was mostly that you left your child on Kesra,” Johnnie said bluntly. “I’m sorry if you didn’t know that, Maddy, but it’s the way things are and there’s no sense trying to keep it secret from you now. Your mother’s parents think she should have stayed with you and your father until you grew up, no matter what.”
“My father thinks so, too,” Madeleine responded, in a tone that was such a precise echo of her much older male cousin that Katy wanted to laugh. “But my father’s not always right. Anyhow, what does that have to do with a war we may be going to have?”
“Your grandfather holds Senior Chair on the Narsai Council,” Ivan Romanov answered the girl, as Katy’s mouth tightened. That fit of insane amusement had ended as quickly as it had struck her, and she was blessing this strange child of hers for redirecting the conversation back to where it belonged.
She was also wondering whether she should have headed from the Farmstead directly to the nearest public teleport facility, the quicker to get back to MinTar. But no, although this way was slower it was less likely to arouse the suspicions of anyone who might be observing her movements. Admiral Romanova teleporting when she didn’t have to was a sight guaranteed to make anyone who knew her habits very suspicious indeed.
“I thought he was a professor,” Maddy said, frowning. “He and Granma both.”
“They are, but here on Narsai we don’t believe the government should be headed by professional politicians. The Council is a hereditary body, and its Senior Chair is often held by a scholar.” Johnnie Romanov might have spent his entire adult life running a farm, but he was not an ignorant man. He understood his society and how it functioned, and following politics by every remote means possible was his favorite way of amusing himself during long winters of physical isolation. “Your grandfather has held the Senior Chair for the past seven years, Maddy. Your grandmother held it before him, and I won’t be surprised if she holds it again when he’s ready to take a rest.”
“So what has this got to do with going to war?” Maddy didn’t sound like a Romanov now, she sounded like a Fralick.
Katy reminded herself, firmly, of how much she once had loved the man who was this child’s father. And she said, “I’d like to know that, too, Johnnie. And before we get right on top of MinTar, please!”
“All right.” Ivan Romanov was well aware that his conversations tended to ramble, and he seldom took offense when an exasperated listener asked him to come to the point. “Uncle Trabe is an Isolationist. So are most of the Council’s other members, which isn’t surprising. Being conservative’s natural when you’re past a certain age, that seems to be true on any world and for any sentient species. But as you know, Katy, the Council can’t always control what the commissioners do.”
“Commissioners?” Maddy asked. Clearly Narsatian government hadn’t been one of the subjects her tutors on Kesra had made her study.
“A commissioner runs Narsai Control,” Katy explained, and wished with all her soul she had decent scanners at her disposal. She hated flying along blind like this, able to navigate and to communicate but not able to do much else. “A commissioner oversees trade with the other Outworlds, and with Terra. A commissioner makes sure the farms are run according to all environmental regulations. And so on, there are sixteen professional and commercial guilds and all their commissioners are popularly elected. Councilors serve by inheritance, just as Johnnie said, although within the Council itself the seat order is elective.”
“Oh,” Maddy said, as if she had understood. Which she probably had. “But the Council decides matters of state? They’d make the decision, if the other Outworlds started fighting against Terra and Narsai had to join one side or the other?”
“Yes. We believe that type of decision is best made by people descended from our original settlers, that it’s far too important to be left to popularly elected leaders.” Katy had learned that line of catechism by heart almost as soon as she could talk, and she said it now automatically. But it had a hollowness in it, today, that she’d never heard before.
Her sons had never asked her questions about Narsatian government. The boys had been like her in that way, they didn’t care about such things. Civilian government had to be dealt with as the ultimate policy maker for the military, but that was the only way it really had mattered to Katy until now; and it never had mattered at all to Ewan or to his brothers.
But Maddy had more of George in her, in that respect at least. She said now, “That sounds to me like the balance of powers between branches that most self-governing planets try to set up. But it’s gotten out of balance, if the people on the Council don’t know or don’t care what everyone else on Narsai really wants them to do.”
“Give this child the Senior Chair, and tell Uncle Trabe to take a rest!” Johnnie Romanov said, and he grinned sardonically. “She just said in two sentences what I’ve spent the past year trying to tell him, and I haven’t been able to get through. Maybe we ought to fly on over to the university right now, Katy, and introduce Uncle Trabe to his granddaughter.”
Katy did not dignify that suggestion with a reply. Instead she said quietly, “So you think the Council will do whatever it takes to keep us neutral. Is that right, Johnnie?”
“That’s exactly what I think. And eliminating half a dozen scramblers, each of whom could have captained a Reb ship, was a pretty good morning’s work if there’s any truth to the rumor that the Commonwealth has agents on Narsai and that our policies concerning strangers give them one hell of a lot of maneuvering room.”
Katy’s stomach turned over, and she swallowed hard in an effort to calm it. Turning a blind eye to anything that happened among visitors on Narsai, or even among residents who weren’t native-born citizens, was a very old tradition; even her otherwise gentle father would never question that custom’s morality.
She would not have done so herself, in the days before she’d left Narsai to live most of her adult life elsewhere. And she had lulled herself into believing that during the intervening decades, as Narsai’s rigid reproductive customs had gradually ceased to be enforced with the old vigor, probably other traditions had also been relaxed.
If she had not believed that, she would never have risked bringing Linc to live here with her. She was a Narsatian citizen, anyone who committed a crime against her would be prosecuted; but Linc was a dual citizen of Terra and Mortha, not Narsai, and no local authority would protect him if some other off-worlder tried to do him harm. His status as her husband by Service-logged marriage would not help him, because according to the customs of Narsai he was nothing more than a person of the opposite gender who was a guest in her household.
Maddy, although born on another world and fathered by a non-Narsatian, was nevertheless just as well protected here as Katy herself was. Her sons hadn’t been, because citizenship was conferred upon a child by its same-gender parent.
Thank gods for that much, at least. Katy said now, “Maddy. Listen to me, and do what I tell you even if you hate it. When someone asks your name—”
“I know,” the girl interrupted, a rudeness she hadn’t once committed in her mother’s hearing before now. “Papa already told me, and he recorded me that way when I had to register with Narsai Control before I could teleport down. I said I was Madeleine Fralick when I met Linc only because he called me that first.”
Bless you, George; or damn you, George? Katy could not make up her mind. But as she used what pitifully little scanner capacity she had in this vehicle to check out her house before the aircar was set down at its front, she said to her cousin exactly what she thought next. “Johnnie, the stakes in this game just went up. Didn’t they?”
Her cousin caught what she did not say, could not say in front of Maddy unless the time came when she absolutely must. Ivan Romanov nodded, though, when she stole a glance in his direction.
Fralick knew a great deal about Narsatian laws and customs, and he had deliberately given his daughter their full protection at the expense of his own ego. So the odds were enormously high that Fralick knew what had become of Lincoln Casey, who was not present in the house they were about to enter.
The scanners couldn’t tell Katy that, but her mind could. Linc wasn’t there. Either that, or only his corpse was; because even his dormant consciousness was missing from their home.
The Morthan physician walked into the Archangel’s brig, and the guards retreated. Lincoln Casey had witnessed that reaction from full humans to a Morthan hybrid’s approach many times, and he still could not determine whether it was awe or whether it was disgust.
One thing was certain, many full humans were afraid of Morthans to at least some degree. They were sought out to be trained as healers because their ability to read their patients’ thoughts and feelings was so useful for that purpose, yet humans seldom completely overcame an instinctive disquiet about allowing themselves to be invaded in that way. It was tolerable when it was being done for medical purposes, but when the Morthan wasn’t there to provide care the humans around him usually preferred to go elsewhere if they could do so.
The exceptions, of course, were the human males who became mated to Morthan females. And the elemental discomfort most humans felt around Morthans was probably very much connected to what they knew (or at least believed) about such unions; female Morthans weren’t called “loreleis” in Terran Standard slang for no reason.
The offspring of those unions should have been losing their mental abilities progressively as the generations progressed, because as Terran males continued mating Morthan females their hybridized children naturally possessed less and less Morthan DNA. Yet as far as he knew Lincoln Casey was the first child of such a mating who had not developed the normal telepathic talent, or at least hadn’t developed it in at all the usual fashion.
Most Morthan males did what this fellow had done, they shook their heads in exasperation and they left Mortha—young adults ready to make lives of their own in every way, except for their complete lack of readiness to reproduce. Sometimes they took their human brides back to Mortha, later on when they did at last become sexually mature; sometimes they stayed wherever their wives induced them to settle. But since offspring never resulted from such pairings, the Morthan bloodlines were only preserved in those extremely unusual circumstances where a mature Morthan male was able to obtain a much younger Morthan female as his partner.
In other words, about one child in ten thousand born to Morthan females had a Morthan sire. Yet the species did not die out; in its hybridized form, it thrived instead.
Linc Casey had never been able to guess whether he was simply a freak of nature, or the precursor of a time when Morthan blood would become so diluted that one day his people’s alternately prized and feared abilities would begin to fade out; would surface from time to time only. All he knew was that in today’s society, he was an oddity who his mother’s species saw as deficient and whose golden eyes frightened his father’s people because to them any being with those eyes was a potential violator of their minds.
The physician let himself in through the forcefield, effortlessly. He held out a med-scan unit and started taking the prisoner’s readings without saying a word.
He didn’t have to, not out loud. As Linc looked up at him, golden eyes met other golden eyes. Contact was established, and conversation flowed freely after the healer had create the necessary channel.
“You’re comfortable, Mr. Casey? Fralick’s not having you abused in any way?”
“He’d love to, but he doesn’t dare. Not now, anyway,” Linc answered, and could not suppress his pleasure at being able to talk to someone this way again after seven months on Narsai with only Katy to touch his thoughts. Katy, and very briefly young Maddy.
Many of his fellow Morthans refused to converse telepathically with him, but he sensed no reluctance in this man’s mind. If anything the doctor was eager to make this connection—but then, he was the only Morthan on board this ship and no doubt he too had found out how lonely mental isolation could be.
“They’re going to get rid of us just the way they did the scramblers,” the doctor said now, and he started a second scan. Which wasn’t needed, but which gave him an excuse to remain longer. “Or not quite the same way, because now they’re starting to regret treating the scramblers as well as they did. They thought if they gave them separation pay and sent them back to their home worlds, there’d be no hard feelings; and instead, the scramblers are starting to form up the core of a rebel fighting force.”
Coldness settled into Linc’s chest. He had expected that to happen, although he had not discussed it even with his adored and implicitly trusted Katy. He had expected it, but on some level he had gone on hoping he might be wrong; and he had given his wife enough distress during his time of illness back on Terra. From months of anticipating an ugly civil war, at least, he had been able to spare her.
But he had been wrong to do so. Now she was alone down there on Narsai, and she was going to have to decide whether to protect him or to lead her people if war came. It was a choice no one should ever be required to make, and if she had to do so it would be at least partly his fault because in presuming to “protect” her he had quite possibly withheld from her the knowledge she now needed in order to protect them both.
“If that’s the only stupid thing you’ve ever done in your life, Mr. Casey, then you are incredibly lucky.” The physician had followed his thoughts effortlessly, partly because the doctor had full Morthan mental capabilities and partly because Casey had made no attempt at all to think privately. “So. Back to the rest of us Morthans in the Service. The damn fools in the top offices are debating what to do with us right now, and I’m not sure whether we’ll wind up being shipped back to Mortha or if they’ll actually be smart enough to kill us.”
“If they try to send all of you back to Mortha, will you go?” Casey added to that thought a polite reminder that he still had no name by which to think of this man. “Doctor” was, after all, only a title just like “Lieutenant Commander.”
“I’m a Marin, just as you are. The one of my given names that I use, and that’s on my Service record, is Kerle.” All Morthan surnames came from the mother to the child, so this really was one of Linc’s own distant cousins. His human father had insisted that he be called Casey on the official records, though, and since Linc had actually been born on Sestus 3 that insistence had been respected. “Probably most of us would go, we’re conditioned all our lives to heal and it’s not natural for us to fight back against what full humans want to do to us. But you’re not the only exception to that, cousin; not anymore.”
Lincoln Casey had been an oddity at the Star Service Academy forty years earlier, because Kerle Marin was correct. Morthans did not train to be military officers, not unless it was as medics. Morthans could be physically violent if they were driven to it, to protect their own bodies from immediate harm or to defend their young children or their mates; but if they had the slightest choice, they always opted to get clear of the conflict instead of seeking a physical solution. That young Linc wanted to learn to be a warrior, even in a service where exploration was an equally important function, had astonished and shamed his mother and her people. And his physician father, although fully human, had been no closer to understanding his son’s dreams than were Kalitha and the rest of the Marin clanstribe.
“There are others of us who are damned sick of being called ‘mindfuckers,’” Kerle Marin said now, in the silent link between them. “Mostly young ones, mostly males of course. But on Mortha the human residents don’t much like the way their Terran relatives treat them when they try to go home, and most human fathers of Morthan children are angry when their families won’t accept their offspring.”
That was true. Linc’s own human father had been an unfortunate exception; usually a human male who united his life with that of a Morthan female, promptly forgot all about any prejudices he might have possessed before that union and settled in to live on Mortha as if he’d been born there. Such men usually doted on their young ones, and only experienced psychological conflict about their chosen lives when their sons experienced the consequences of their mixed heritage in delayed (by human standards, anyway) sexual maturity and in their resulting flight from life on Mortha.
Gladstone Casey had done something unheard of in taking Kalitha Marin away from Mortha while she was carrying their child. And in refusing to sire more children with her, he had done something else that was not at all acceptable behavior for the human mate of a Morthan female. Linc had always wondered whether growing up as he had, far from others with whom he might have interacted telepathically, had stunted his mental abilities in the same way that a child could become physically stunted by lack of proper nourishment.
“Perhaps. Or perhaps it’s the other way you’ve often thought it might be, and as our Morthan heritage becomes more and more diluted the time will come when all of us will be more like you than not.” Kerle Marin’s thoughts became more urgent. “I have to go soon. That bastard Fralick thinks you can’t communicate with me this way, he somehow has the stupid idea that you can only talk to your wife mind-to-mind. So we have that much going for us, anyway; and now that we’ve linked once, I believe you’ll be able to contact me just as easily as I can contact you. You really aren’t like a full human. With them I always have to do the initiating, and even then the ‘conversation’ is pretty much one-sided.”
“I hope you’re right,” Linc answered, and carefully did not allow his smile to reach his face. “But I never could do that with another Morthan, not since I was young enough to link with my mother.”
“That may be because no other Morthans helped you develop your abilities,” his cousin answered, thoughtfully but with painful bluntness. “I think you’ve been denied a lot of interaction that the rest of us just expect to have, and I wouldn’t be recognizing that now if I hadn’t been the only telepath on this goddamned floating city for the past three months. I can’t tell you how good it feels to touch someone else’s mind and not have to do every single bit of the work!”
With that the doctor put his scanner away into its belt pouch, and stepped out through the forcefield and said loudly, “Guard! He’s fine, I can tell Ambassador Fralick that he isn’t going to suicide unless something changes to make him want to do that. Now let me out of here, I’ve got patients to take care of who really do need care and I want to get back to them.”
Linc lay back on the bunk in his cell, and still did not permit himself to smile. It was likely that he was being watched, at this and every other moment throughout the starship’s artificially scheduled twenty-four hour day. But there was bittersweet amusement in his thoughts, nevertheless, as he realized that his newly discovered cousin had used his exit to remind Casey that a Morthan hybrid was capable of turning his body off and dying at will.