Matushka

by Nina M. Osier

  It didn’t occur to the Kesran-reared child to request medical aid, not even here in Narsai’s most advanced facility. That was a blessing, because Katy wasn’t sick. She simply was too absorbed inwardly to direct her own body’s outward behavior, and now that she was no longer required even to maintain balance enough to stand that didn’t matter.

  But she did say to her husband, “Linc, let Maddy know I’m okay. I’m scaring her, and I don’t want you bringing her in on what we’re going to have to do next.”

  He did as requested. Beside Katy her daughter relaxed, and then assumed a protective posture that would have been comical if the situation had allowed for humor.

  Hopefully the hospital’s staff had other things to do besides notice a distracted-looking woman in a Star Service admiral’s uniform, sitting in its emergency admissions waiting area with a slim pubescent girl who looked very much like her seated at her side. What Katy Romanova had to do now didn’t involve her body at all, but if anyone disturbed that shell it would interrupt something that definitely ought not to be interrupted.

  “Who are you?” She asked the most natural question first, before she was even sure that questions from her would be welcomed. She had to know that, she had to have a frame of reference or she could not participate in this process in any meaningful way.

  “Who are we would be a better question, Admiral Romanova.” The being was amused that she had thought changing her body’s coverings would conceal her identity. But that amusement was surprisingly gentle, it had no flavor of scorn as her mind tasted it.

  She was “tasting” amusement? Senses for this being were rather different than the five she had always experienced, or even the sixth one with which she had made so many split-second decisions and had so often kept herself and her people alive when her five normal senses by themselves would have failed her.

  “I am not like you, no. Your mate feels the need to assign me a gender, but I cannot classify myself in that way.” More amusement, followed by a brisk desire to proceed with business. “I am speaking for everyone aboard the vessels that survived your warship’s effort to destroy us, but my species is not the only one present here. As your mate has already learned, there are Morthan hybrids like him among us; and I do mean like him, and not like the Morthan that thinks of itself as ‘Marin.’”

  “You mean Morthan hybrids whose telepathic abilities are limited? And who are capable of fighting?” Katy grasped that immediately, because she had always felt certain that Linc couldn’t be the only one of his kind. The first, maybe; but not the only one. And now that was being confirmed.

  “Yes. Exactly so. Also we have full humans whose fellows have rejected them for reasons beyond their control. There are some who think of themselves as ‘scramblers’; I sense that this term has meaning for you, also, and that it is not a negative meaning.”

  “Not at all!” Katy answered, and thought deliberately of her foster son.

  “Excellent. And this one of whom you think with such affection, on whom you place such value, is also a member of an additional despised human sub-grouping. The Sestian female we have taken aboard would consider him a beast, would she not?” This amusement was different. Clearly the being did not approve of the Sestian’s attitude—although for some reason it had thought saving her life was worthwhile, when the Archangel was about to die and only a relative few of those aboard could be rescued.

  “Yes. Dan’s grandparents were miners on Sestus 4, and you seem to understand exactly how it is for humans who are stuck with having to live there.” Romanova knew that her body had sighed, and she hoped she wasn’t alarming Maddy. But she could do nothing now to communicate directly with her daughter, not without breaking this communion that absolutely must not be disrupted.

  “Just so. There are others like him here with us. Not only from his particular group, but a variety of other humanoid creatures whom your mind and that of your mate think of collectively as ‘rebels.’ That term I do not quite comprehend; who gave the government of a far away world authority over all of you here? I understand that individuals who claimed to represent you may have made such assertions on your behalf, but has any of you affirmed this personally?”

  “That wouldn’t be possible,” Romanova said, and was surprised to think that she was defending Terra’s right to govern the Outworlds via the Commonwealth even though her Star Service oath obliged her to do exactly that. Never in her life had she been more aware of the dichotomy between Admiral Romanova and Katy, the girl who had once been female heir to the Romanov Farmstead.

  She wondered in a tiny, uncontrolled corner of her mind whether Johnnie and Reen were all right, and remembered that Marshal Vargas had left them where he’d found them. So they, at least, should be safe now—although no doubt they were at least as frightened as any other civilians on Narsai, and maybe more so because they were so much better informed than were their more typical contemporaries.

  “To be locked alone within a body; how terrible that must be!” There was genuine sympathy in the voice that no longer seemed alien to her. “But that is true for all of you, even for those called Morthans who have some telepathic abilities. But we digress, and there is no time for that just now.”

  “Who else did you rescue besides the Archangel’s healer? And why did you make this alliance with the Rebs?” Along with the strangeness, Katy’s fear was abating. Like just about every other living creature she’d ever encountered, this one was capable of destroying other living things if it was given the right (or the wrong, as it were) conditions to require or justify doing so; but it wished her no harm. She was certain of that, to her very core.

  “The humans who were brought into existence to be used by other humans, the ‘gens’ as you think of them who were aboard the warship, we had a duty to free if we were able,” came the answer to her first question. “And we do not know any Kesrans or any Sestians, so we claimed the opportunity that was offered to us. But you have known us before, Catherine Romanova; and you also, Lincoln Casey. And when you recognize us, then you will realize why we have made this ‘alliance’ as you call it—although to us the concept is not the same thing that it is to you, because we are not locked up alone in corporeal bodies. But you will remember that we had difficulty with this concept before, although after many rotations of accepting and caring for individuals cast out by your ‘Commonwealth’ we now understand you much better than we could understand you then.”

  Long-unvisited memories surged up now to fill Katy with re-created pure terror, until Linc’s mind wrapped hers in loving reassurance. And although she had asked him to keep Maddy out of this, and he had agreed and at the time had acted to accomplish that exclusion, she now felt her child’s consciousness with her as well.

  “It’s okay, Mum,” came the girl’s thought. “Even though they’ve changed a lot, I can still remember these people from before I was born. They can’t scare me the way they’re scaring you.”

  It should have been humiliating, to have her thirteen-year-old take her mentally by the hand and lead her. But it wasn’t. Instead, it was a profound relief.

  “Papa doesn’t need to bring back a fleet protect us from them,” Maddy added, with both wonder and assurance in her tone. “They didn’t come to hurt us. They wouldn’t have destroyed the Archangel if it hadn’t attacked them the minute they arrived. And they got rid of the comm satellite only so that they’d have time to talk to us, because they knew if they didn’t do that people here would do whatever the Commonwealth told them to do instead of thinking for themselves about what’s best and what makes the most sense.”

  A child’s clear vision could be the most useful thing in the universe, Katy thought as she felt herself being steadied by these two who were holding her so lovingly. Linc on one side, Maddy on the other, just as if they had been standing together physically instead of Linc’s being seated in a flight controller’s chair several klicks away across the city; while she and her daughter sat in a medical center’s em
ergency waiting area amid the unnatural hush of a hospital that right now wasn’t admitting anyone, because not a soul dared to venture out of whatever shelter it had found.

  “I knew the cloud-beings on Mistworld,” Katy said at last, after she had calmed enough to be coherent again. “They’re the only species I’ve ever even heard about that are sentients without corporeal forms.”

  “Then you recognize us now, Katy?”

  “Yes!” Of course she did—although what the sentient, but noncorporeal, life forms of Mistworld’s upper atmosphere were doing aboard starships off Narsai baffled her completely. And Maddy was right that they were not exactly as she remembered them, either; but after more than a decade of associating with the colonists who lived on their planet’s surface, she supposed it would be ridiculous for her to expect them to be unchanged.

  At its beginning what happened at Mistworld thirteen years ago had been like a dress rehearsal for the war that might be starting in Narsai’s space now. Certainly it had been sparked by the same issue: conflicting claims on limited resources, by groups who needed those resources in order to survive.

  Mistworld had been the last truly inviting M-class planet to be discovered in the Outworlds, out beyond Mortha where most of the available planets were marginal or downright hostile to human existence. No sooner were Commonwealth homesteaders established there, then those homesteaders had been attacked—by a flotilla sent from an overcrowded principality elsewhere to dislodge them, to clear the planet for that principality’s own settlers. The homesteaders had called for Star Service protection, and a battle group commanded by Catherine Romanova had arrived at Mistworld to drive the invaders back to their own sector.

  Romanova had anticipated making short work of that assignment, since she had more ships than the enemy did; and at first, things went just as she expected. Then both sides started losing ships—not to each other, but to energy discharges from the planet’s upper atmosphere. Her sons had been among the first of her people to die that way, when one of those deadly blasts had engulfed two vessels—one already crippled by a conventional shot from their known enemy, the other rushing to its aid before it could be incinerated as it was drawn down into Mistworld’s atmosphere.

  For both fleets to gather their survivors and retreat was not an option at that point, because the settlers were still there and stranded. The invaders had fled, and hadn’t been heard of again; but Romanova had been obliged to stay and determine what was causing those devastatingly accurate energy discharges—and to find a way to halt them, so that traffic could move once again between the planet’s surface and space beyond it.

  To withdraw, to abandon the settlers and wait off-shore while a fast shuttle made the trip back to base and summoned more sophisticated scientific aid, would probably have been the wisest course of action; and for the pregnant Romanova to have claimed a berth on that shuttle would have been completely understandable, too. But while she had thought about doing that, at the same time that she and Linc had been alternately savoring and grappling with their first mind-to-mind communications in which she played any conscious part, other minds had joined them.

  These beings who lived in Mistworld’s atmosphere had not objected when the first settlers arrived, because travel through their domain by humans who wanted only to reach the planet’s surface or to return from there to space had no effect on them at all. When the ship-against-ship conflicts began, they were not concerned because the initial fighting took place further out than the levels where they existed; but as the battle intensified, and as it shifted and came closer, they had started feeling its effects. So they had begun fighting back, in the only way that they were able to do so.

  They told Romanova, when she asked them how they knew she was the fleet’s commander and the person with whom they should negotiate peace, that they had no real concept of what a “fleet” was or a “commander.” But after the fighting had stopped, when they explored the minds of those few creatures aboard the remaining ships that could accept telepathic contact, they had discovered that if they did not disclose both their presence and their true nature they were very likely to be located and eliminated without their enemies’ ever realizing that they were fellow sentients. Then they had sought to know which of the bewildering array of individuals—these scraps of consciousness isolated within fleshy envelopes, as humans and even Morthans appeared to them—had the power to control the others’ actions. And they had been relieved to learn that although the individual they sought was among the “humans” with whom they could not communicate directly, her mind was nevertheless accessible to them because of its strong ties to that of a more flexible being.

  Today Romanova was credited for the successful negotiations that had followed, with Casey’s role left out of the historical accounts. That omission still suited him. He had cooperated completely, had eased his friend and captain through the strange experience and its naturally attendant terrors. He had, in fact, been grateful that her need for his help had made it impossible for her to draw away from him after the shock of learning that he could perceive her thoughts; but he had not particularly wanted anyone except the cloud-beings (as humans soon started calling them) to know what he had done. And Katy had respected his wishes; so when the Commonwealth’s scientists and diplomats arrived and telepathic interpreters took over to finalize the treaty, her bond with Linc became a private thing once more.

  A private thing, a sacred thing, that Casey had permitted those strangers to violate only because the survival of both of Mistworld’s resident species had depended on it. But never once after they left Mistworld had any third being except Maddy been allowed to share in his communion with his love, until now.

  The human settlers surviving on Mistworld had remained there. They were permitted to replace their communications link to the rest of the Commonwealth, to resume traveling through the atmosphere to and from orbit; in most ways the terms that emerged from the final round of negotiations allowed them to go back to their lives almost exactly as they had lived them before. But they agreed to ban energy discharges within the cloud-beings’ zone of residence, and they were required to open an on-going dialog with those beings in order to avoid future misunderstandings.

  Katy Romanova had never expected to encounter the cloud-folk again. Certainly not here, in her home star system; and certainly not with the cloud-creatures traveling in ships the way humanoids traveled. But they were here, she recognized them unmistakably now, and the soft voice inside her mind was continuing to speak.

  “When you understood what we were, you led your people to make peace with us. And there are some among your own kind who condemn you for that even now, because to them it seemed an unnatural act on your part.”

  The voice was gentle, as if its owner or owners understood perfectly what losing her boys had meant to this human mother. But other humans had indeed accused her of lacking normal feelings, for negotiating peace with the beings responsible for her children’s deaths; and the first to charge her with that had been George Fralick, arriving on the first ship to reach Mistworld in response to her appeal for diplomatic and scientific back-up. And while Katy had never been able to blame her former husband for his grief-driven fury, at her and at the cloud-folk, the memory of how viciously he had raged at her was just as hurtful now as it had been then.

  “Of course I did.” She felt herself swallowing painfully as she acknowledged that recollection. “If I couldn’t have done that, I’d have had no right to call myself a captain. Being able to admit it when a fight is caused by misunderstanding is something every command officer has to be able to do, otherwise you go on wasting lives long after you could have stopped the killing.”

  “That is why we are willing to deal with you now, on behalf of the many humans and other corporeals—on our own world, and on less hospitable worlds nearby—who have become our responsibility.” The word “responsibility” was not a precise rendering of the alien concept, Romanova knew that; but it was as c
lose as her own thoughts could express its true meaning. “We came to Narsai because Narsai is best able to supply the support that our charges need, but finding you here is good fortune. For us, and for those who think of themselves as your superior authorities. There are many beings now among our corporeal charges who can communicate as we do, but we nevertheless need you or someone like you to speak for them with those of your own kind who have the power to change that which needs changing.”

  “So you want me to stand in the middle for you again?” It was very clear now.

  “Someone must. Your superiors trust you, we trust you, and it is your world that will suffer most if war comes because the aid our corporeals need is not given. Will you help us, Katy?”

  She would not be forced to do this. If she refused, she would not even be blamed. But no one needed to force her, because this was what she wanted; and Linc was with her in it, and so was Maddy.

  She said softly, and with all her being: “Yes.”

  CHAPTER 24

  What felt so much like a single being, an individual, was not that at all. The divisions among the cloud-dwellers were not distinct boundaries, as was the case with every other life form Katy Romanova had ever encountered.

  Deliberately planted colonists from some far-off other world? Castaways, stranded in a place to which they had managed to adapt? At any rate these beings had not evolved on the planet whose atmosphere they now inhabited, and when they had come there they had been corporeal. And until humans also came there to explore and to colonize, they had been unable to leave.

  “We allowed the original band of humans to remain on our planet’s surface because it seemed to us that what they did there would not affect us, and because it saddened us that so many like them were killed when we were forced to protect ourselves,” the single voice that represented all of the cloud-folk told Katy now, as she sat with Linc and Maddy in the university library in the middle of the circle formed by Narsai’s councilors and commissioners. Calling those people together for a second meeting had taken some doing, because they were almost all frightened of traveling so soon after the battle that had taken place in their star system—the first battle to be fought there, or even nearby, in centuries.