Matushka Page 5

  Yes. Of course, that explained why Maddy had such unexpected poise! She might have lived all of her short life in a human enclave on alien Kesra, but without Katy to insist on a measure of family privacy no doubt George had entertained a constant stream of official company. He could afford it, he loved it, and clearly it had been the salvation of his little girl.

  I never thought I’d be glad about that part of George being George, Romanova thought with a carefully suppressed smile. During their time of residence on Terra she and Linc had hosted their young friends often, but their guests were people they could help instead of people whose political or economic influence could help them; so the lively conversations at their gatherings seldom amounted to polite small talk.

  “Maddy, look down at the ground,” she said now, deciding it was time to divert her daughter before any inadvertent harm could be done. “We’re over the plains now. If you watch carefully, soon you’ll see our farmstead’s boundaries.”

  “Is it really ours, Mum? I thought it belonged to our cousins, to Ivan and Lorena.” Maddy frowned with puzzled interest.

  “They like to be called Johnnie and Reen,” Romanova said. “Small properties, like the house back in MinTar, can belong to individuals here on Narsai. But farms belong to whole families, Maddy, and that means the Romanov Farmstead is just as much yours as it is theirs. Only they have proprietors’ control over it, and a correspondingly larger share of its income, because they earn that with the work they do there.”

  “That’s not like on Kesra.” Maddy’s frown deepened. “But on Kesra there aren’t that many humans, and on Narsai there aren’t any real Narsatians.”

  Romanova had been calling herself a “Narsatian” all her life, but she responded to the term in the way that her daughter had meant it and not in the way that she had always interpreted it. She said, “True. Narsai has no native sentient species, nor does Sestus 3. Of the five most habitable Outworlds, two were unoccupied when humans first arrived and two—Kesra, and Sestus 4—have accepted us only as immigrants, and only on a limited basis. Mortha’s the only Outworld where humans and native sentients been able to intermarry, to start to meld together into one people.”

  “We own our house on Kesra, but most human families don’t,” Maddy admitted thoughtfully. “Most human residents are temporaries, and the government makes sure they leave when they’re supposed to. But Papa’s ancestors were given citizenship because they kept Kesra from being taken over by Terran colony-agents, over a hundred years ago.”

  “I know.” Romanova smiled now, with both amusement at her daughter’s pedagogical tone and with honest reminiscence. “I lived in your father’s house on Kesra for more than twenty years, Maddy. I gave birth to all four of my babies there, and it was where your brothers grew up just as you have.”

  The child knew that, perfectly well. But their visits on Kesra had always taken place in George Fralick’s presence. Today was the first occasion since her daughter had been a baby too small to walk or talk that Romanova had been allowed to spend time with her without that constraint, and it seemed that they now must talk about all the things that had gone unspoken before—that even as she introduced her child to the Narsatian half of her heritage, she must deal with the Kesran-resident half that was all Maddy had known until today.

  “It’s so big,” Maddy said now, gazing at the expanse of land below them and seeing how tiny the farmhouse and the equipment barn and the control complex seemed by comparison. “And just two people run all of it?”

  “Most of it’s automated. But in growing season we bring in hired hands, machines can’t do everything.” Romanova adjusted the controls, expertly. “We’re going down now.”

  Down, in a graceful descent that she reversed when the readings on the aircar’s instrument panel did not jibe with those she had come to expect after having flown into this place a hundred times and more over the years since she had acquired her very first civilian pilot’s license.

  What the hell…? She didn’t say it, because she didn’t want to alarm Maddy; but the young woman beside her realized something was wrong, and quietly brought the co-pilot’s seldom used control panel on line.

  There was a vehicle under cover down there, and its readings didn’t belong to the Farmstead’s equivalent of the common-garage aircar that they were riding in now. Nor were those readings coming from the type of farm transports that at this season should not have been present, because Narsatians believed firmly that all vehicles should be utilized as continuously as possible in order to keep the numbers of them that must be built and kept operating down to a minimum. While the North Continent farms and ranches were resting under a blanket of winter snow, their vehicles were flown to the two southern continents and were put to use there until spring.

  “Mum?” Maddy already knew something was wrong. Of course she did. “We aren’t going to land, after all?”

  “Yes, we are,” Romanova decided, her mouth thinning as she initiated a new approach. “But we’re going to be careful. It looks as if our cousins may already have company.”

  She wasn’t surprised when Rachel Kane quietly moved a concealed blaster holster from inside her trouser waistband to a more normal location against her hip. Her own civilian clothing would have been ridiculously loose on this slim young woman if Kane hadn’t been pregnant, but given her current condition the trousers and loose overshirt fit quite well.

  Romanova had a small blaster in a holster inside her tunic, concealed under one arm. It was illegal on Narsai, of course, but she got away with carrying it no matter where she went because her native world did not allow any type of routine scanning of its citizens. Only when she entered a military or diplomatic compound did she have to leave her personal weapon behind.

  Its shape was comforting now, pressed between her arm and her breast where all she had to do was reach across her body and snatch it from under her clothing. Never once had she been obliged to draw it on Narsai, yet she never went out of her home without it. She would have felt naked—an old clichй, but in this case a completely accurate one.

  She considered activating the comm, but did not do so. If something was wrong down there, she’d already indicated her suspicions by having broken off her first approach. She would not reinforce that impression by trying to contact Johnnie or Reen.

  How best to protect Maddy? Leaving her daughter alone aboard the aircar wasn’t to be considered, she would not have done that even if she’d had a spare weapon to leave with the girl and even if Maddy had been trained to use it. Which she surely had not, not unless George Fralick had completely lost his mind.

  Romanova was still considering that when she felt a stab of astonishment that had nothing to do with the current situation. It was an emotion that did not belong to her—a feeling that came from someone else’s mind. That mind was familiar, but the cause of its amazement was a mystery to her.

  It remained so. Linc had no time to tell her, through the channel of consciousness that had briefly been opened between them, before she felt pain and the normal fear of any threatened sentient being—and then darkness, and the absence of all feeling.

  She’d been standing beside the pilot’s chair, about to walk to the aircar’s exit ramp to disembark. Now she swayed, and had to clutch at the chair’s back to steady herself.

  “Katy?” Rachel Kane had at last stopped trying to address the older woman as “admiral.” She reached out and touched Romanova’s arm inquiringly.

  “What’s wrong with him, Mum?” Maddy wanted to know, her brown eyes wide and alarmed.

  “What did you feel, Maddy?” Romanova shivered, and not because the aircar’s passenger compartment was too cold.

  “The man I met at your house. Linc, Captain Casey. Someone hurt him just now. He was surprised, he felt scared—and then whatever it was that hurt him happened, and then I think he passed out. Anyway, I can’t feel him now.”

  The implications of this development, Katy didn’t even want to consider.
Did it mean that whenever Maddy was on the same world with them, she and Linc would not know a moment’s mental privacy? Gods, she hoped not. Yet this girl had been an unborn baby in her womb on that day above Mistworld, when Ewan Fralick’s little raider had raced to the aid of the light cruiser that was foundering and about to enter the planet’s atmosphere and be incinerated…the light cruiser that had been carrying both of Ewan’s brothers.

  Both ships had gone down to their doom, and while Group Leader Catherine Romanova had watched from the Firestorm’s bridge all three of her sons had died. She had come as close to breaking at that moment as she ever had, ever would. But then the man who stood beside her had put his hand on her shoulder—and instead of a simple but completely inadequate gesture of comfort, he had given her the first true embrace of her entire life.

  Or so it had seemed, although of course later—much later, long after Mistworld was behind them and her pregnancy had been completed and she had ended her marriage to George Fralick—she had discovered what full union with Lincoln Casey could encompass. But at that moment she had been overwhelmed by love, surrounded by someone else’s strength and support and tenderness, and she had been able to close her eyes and stand still and drink it all in.

  To drink him in, the essence of the man who had been her friend for so long and whose love for her she had not even suspected until that day.

  How could she have guessed that inside her body, the child she carried was also participating in that spiritual union? Even Linc hadn’t known that was happening, Romanova was certain that was true. Yet he had suspected something…she remembered the deliberate touch he had given Maddy earlier today, and she recalled that although she had been astounded at the girl’s resulting recognition her husband had experienced the pleasure of a scientist whose pet theory has just been confirmed.

  “Mum?” Maddy was asking again. “Is he dead?”

  “No, Maddy, he’s not dead.” Romanova shook herself, firmly and deliberately. “But something did happen to him, I felt the same things you felt.”

  “Are we going back? Right now?” the girl wanted to know. Hopefully, as if she couldn’t imagine that her mother would do anything else.

  “I want to, but first I have to know what’s happened here.” This was pure warrior’s instinct, something Katy Romanova had bred into her from her star-exploring ancestors and that she had honed through four decades of military training and experience. The wife and the woman wanted to rush back home as fast as this damned slow civilian aircar could take her, true enough; hell, right now she would welcome the use of a teleporter! But what had happened to Linc was connected to whatever was happening here, she knew that without being able to prove it; and besides, there was Rachel Kane still standing beside her and looking at her with puzzled concern.

  Retirement hadn’t released her from the oath she had taken to protect civilians. And whether or not she could regard Kane that way, there was not doubt about the duty she owed to the three babies the younger woman was carrying.

  Besides, Johnnie and Reen definitely were civilians and she also needed to know that they were safe. There should not be a ship with enough power to attain planetary escape sitting in a transport barn on their farm. Something was wrong here just as much as something was wrong back at her home in MinTar, and she couldn’t leave one place to return to the other until she had found out what.

  “Come on,” she said to the young woman, and to the girl, “and keep behind me. Probably Johnnie and Reen are fine, probably everything’s just the way it should be; but let’s not take chances until we know that for sure.”

  CHAPTER 6

  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 a
lso 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.