“Even if it means raising a toddler?”
Gladiolus laughed. “That’s going to be the least of our adventures.” Her expression softened. “But I admit, it’s already better than I imagined it would be. And I wouldn’t have tried it, had she not just… thrown herself into it, and asked me to go along.”
“We need other people sometimes,” Vasiht’h murmured.
Gladiolus shook her head. “We always need other people. Life would be hollow without them.”
That stayed with him in the days that followed, like a drifting rope of incense, and his anxiety quieted beneath the dense cloud of his thoughts. About needing people. About people being complicated. About knowing who you were without them, so you could understand what you had to offer when you were with them. About love, and adventures you would never have embarked on without someone to face them with you. About being happy with where you were, because you knew you were supposed to be there… even if other people would have been miserable had they been in your shoes. All four of them.
Vasiht’h cleaned, and baked, and savored his contentment, accepting it for what it was. And maybe this too would pass, like the emotional weather it was, but for now… for now it was perfect. Even more importantly, nothing he felt in the future would take away the fact that he’d felt this moment now; and this moment would become part of him forever. He was ready, then, when Jahir walked back into their apartment and set his bags down, and the mindline was suffused with the Eldritch’s gladness to be home, and pleasure at the sight of him again, and yes… with the love that shaped their lives, the lives they’d willingly chosen, and the adventures it brought them, no matter how unexpected, or how difficult.
“Did it go well?” Vasiht’h asked, even though he knew the answer.
“It is done,” the Eldritch replied.
Vasiht’h nodded, smiled up at him. “It’s late, but I bet you haven’t eaten. Should we have dinner?”
Jahir paused. “So long as it involves cake.”
“Hah!” Vasiht’h laughed. “Now I know you love me.”
“Was there ever any doubt, arii?”
“No,” Vasiht’h said, satisfied. “Never.”
CASE STUDIES
These vignettes were originally serialized online after the first set of case studies (reproduced now in their entirety in the backmatter of Dreamhearth), and represent the later years of Vasiht'h and Jahir's practice. Readers with long memories will find references to the events in those studies in the final case study presented here.
Case Study: Finite
Neither of them believed their client could fit into their apartment, and yet at the scheduled time the door opened and nine feet of alien pressed between the jambs, feathers slowly popping out to frame the alien’s body. And then, in a rush, the entire creature was in their common room, shaking out his wings and the vast train of his tail. At their disbelieving stare, he leaned toward them, showing them the gape of a toothed beak in what served his species for a smile, and said, “Narrow bones.”
They did not force him to squeeze into their office.
Their client was an Akubi, one of the few true alien races of the Alliance, giant, bird-like creatures with horned heads and hints of saurian scale along the sides of their long, muscled necks and on their backs. Their particular visitor was male, the smaller and duller of the three sexes: the males were the hunters, and their feathers and hides came in camouflage colors of mahogany brown and dull gray with a faint gloss of iridescent purple. Their smaller bodies had evolved to navigate the cluttered canopies of their world’s enormous trees, leaving the larger females to fly the skies and grow the spectacular plumage that attracted groups of males to feed their clutches.
While the Akubi in the Alliance were few, they made for genial neighbors. They were amazing mimics—which meant their client spoke Universal better than Jahir had when he’d first gone to college on Seersana—and for all their true alien origin they were often less inscrutable than some of the stranger third generation engineered species, like the Phoenix. They had such stable temperaments that finding one on their appointment schedule had been unexpected. Once their visitor had settled on the floor, mantling wings so enormous Vasiht’h felt a breeze over his bare toes, they asked what had brought him by.
“It bothers me,” the Akubi said, “that the sky is finite.”
Their client had just moved to the starbase, and to its central city, which had been built in a spherical bubble on the starbase’s skin; half its globe faced the hollow interior and the other half faced outward, forming the commercial docks built, maintained and overseen by Fleet. The bubble was, of course, finite... but the “ceiling” of the bubble was very, very far away. The city-sphere itself was large enough not just for the existing habitations—and their attendant parks and water environments—but also for growth, expanding outward into broad flat fields of short grass. The city even had climate: not severe, of course, but enough variation in temperature to trick the fruiting trees in the greenspaces into giving evidence of seasons. Most days, a citizen of the starbase didn’t even think that they were in an artificial environment; the only external clue was the distant spindle that showed pale as a midday moon in the sky.
But it was finite. And for the Akubi, who’d freshly come from skies as broad as a true world, the knowledge that somewhere above him was a clear flexglass wall was enough to give rise to panic attacks. He’d heard that Jahir and Vasiht’h did work in dreams: since his subconscious was fueling his distress, he’d been hoping they could heal it directly.
For two months, they trawled the dreams of a true-alien and found them... astonishing. Not because they were unfathomable, but because they were: were fathomable, were real, were breathtaking in their immediacy. In dreams they flew alongside their client on vast dark wings, through pewter-colored clouds into forests shadowed in black and purple, through wet air smelling of something strange and yet familiar. They felt the tickle of their mustaches against their breasts as they hunted climbing prey, tucked wings close and dove. They tasted blood, and it was good, hot liquid on tongues, stinging the insides of their mouths to life. They felt the euphoria of breaching the canopy to the free air above and dancing there with the third sex, the waiting-sex that could be either male or female and spent much of their lives waiting for the environmental cues that caused the change.
It was not an idyllic life, but it was a real one, a primal one, and they heard it in their minds as a heartbeat as urgent and complex as a drum song.
But they could not heal their client of his fears.
“This is going nowhere,” Jahir said, resting the side of his head against a hand. He was sitting at the end of their sofa and taking up even less space than usual on it, body language tightly constrained. “Not that the experience hasn’t been intense, but I fear we’re deriving more benefit from our sessions than our client is.”
The mindline between them was sour as a underripe grapefruit. Vasiht’h loosened a mouth that had puckered in response, rubbed his cheek. “Maybe we’re going at this all wrong. Maybe we should be trying exposure therapy.”
“You want to make him fly at the barrier?” Jahir said.
Vasiht’h glanced up at his partner. “That might be a little extreme for a first try. But he’s never actually seen the barrier. We could take him there. On the ground.”
Jahir was silent, but the mindline hummed with the intensity of his concentration. It stopped abruptly and the Eldritch said, “So systematic desensitization, in vivo.” He chuckled a little. “A bit straightforward for two espers who usually dream-walk to do their work.”
Vasiht’h’s mental shrug tasted like flat seltzer. “If a Medimage platform doesn’t work, you might as well try a plain old scalpel.”
Teaching relaxation techniques to a giant alien bird proved more difficult than navigating his dreams, partially because Akubi were more naturally relaxed than any Pelted or humanoid species they’d worked with. Jahir brought a handful of senso
rs and used them to monitor their client’s vitals, but they rarely fluctuated in response to the techniques they taught him. He learned them anyway, grinning at them with a turned face and an enormous yellow eye that seemed to glitter in amusement at their perplexity.
Once the client had control over the techniques, they brought him to the barrier. No one lived that far out from the center of the city and the starbase wall, so they were undisturbed: one bipedal humanoid, tall; one centauroid, squat; and one avian shape that dwarfed them both, standing together on a plain of short green grass where it ended at a thick clear wall. Through it, one could just see the exposed interior wall of the starbase, stretching away toward the limit of their vision.
The sensors reported no change in the client’s heart-rate or breathing, no special excitation of the brain. The Akubi looked up at the wall and said simply, “I don’t like it.”
They tried exposure therapy for several weeks, going so far as to send their client on a flight along the inside of the barrier. The Akubi navigated all these challenges with seeming equilibrium, but did not report a decrease in his anxiety. “The world should not have an edge,” he said, to which Vasiht’h said privately to Jahir, “What can we say to that? He’s right.”
Four months into their treatment of the alien, Jahir said, “This isn’t working either.”
“I’ve run out of ideas,” Vasiht’h said, warming his hands on his mug of kerinne and trying not to look disgruntled. The mindline was littered with the detritus of his discontent, though. “What’s left to try? How do you fix the unfixable alien? Of something that, in the end, is a reasonable anxiety? Artificial environments are untrustworthy.”
“Natural ones are too,” Jahir said, tired. “Frankly, Alliance engineering feels a great deal more solid to me than being on a planet without the benefit of high technology.” He smiled a little. “Perhaps we should take him outside the starbase on an EVA tour. Allow him a respite from dealing with the finite. Give him back the natural world so he can breathe and enjoy himself for a while.”
“A vacation,” Vasiht’h said. “I could use one myself.” At the tickle of amusement through the mindline, he finished, “But not EVA. That’s a little too much reality for me.”
“Should we make the suggestion?”
“Why not?” Vasiht’h said.
As was inevitable, the starbase’s commercial docks had a space reserved for recreational EVA, far from the traffic routes of incoming and outgoing merchant vessels. There, for a reasonable fee, one could be fitted with a slimsuit, attached to a tether, and sent off to experience space in all its magnificence. Visitors could walk along the skin of the starbase or choose to float weightless, and several hours later return to the safety of their carefully maintained habitat. The Akubi thought their suggestion intriguing and agreed that being able to fly in any direction without fear of running out of space would be a relief. They offered to accompany him to the EVA area and wait for him to finish, and he agreed.
For an hour, they sat in the visitors’ lounge, looking out the vast window at the stars and the people floating on the ends of their tethers. They did not see their client, and after some time decided to pass the time reading, the mindline warm between them with a patience that deepened when shared. When the hour was up, their client padded into the lounge and both of them stood. There was a stiffness in the alien’s gait that they had not yet seen. The silence in the mindline was a held breath. And then the Akubi spoke.
“There is such a thing as too much space.”
They saw their client only one more time, several weeks later. The anxiety had ceased: confronted with the infinity outside the starbase, the city-sphere had begun to seem very agreeable to the Akubi—”Almost nestlike,” he said. It was not how they’d expected to help him, but, as Vasiht’h observed a few days later, walking alongside Jahir on the way to their favorite café, “we rarely seem to know how to do what we do until it’s done.”
“Our clients usually have a better idea of what they need than we do,” Jahir agreed. “It’s often a matter of getting them to show us what it is.”
“The Akubi, though... that’s not really how it happened.”
“No,” Jahir said with a smile that tasted wry, like strong lemonade. “Sometimes none of us know what’s going on until it’s over.”
For weeks after, they had trouble drinking anything cold, and one or both of them would wake from dreams of flight through a sky neither too endless... nor too small. Just enough space, for life.
Case Study: Piano
They had season tickets for very nearly every cultural offering in the area—partly because of the mutual fascination that had driven them into xenopsychology, and partly because Jahir thought exposure to their clients’ arts helped make sense of their dreams and the symbols they used to shape their personal narratives. It was a rare week that didn’t see them making at least one outing to a concert, a play, an exhibit or festival; they were very well-educated on the many cultures they lived alongside.
But the famous concert pianist who was making an Alliance-wide tour was special even by their standards. Vasiht’h shook out his best sari, a shimmering red silk edged in gold, and pleated it over his lower body, carefully spreading its tails over his second back between the wings. Even Jahir, who normally did everything possible to efface himself in a crowd, dressed with such stark elegance that Vasiht’h was taken aback.
Drawing on white gloves, his partner said, “Shall we?”
They went to the concert hall, two among hundreds who’d been fortunate enough to procure tickets for the third and final performance the pianist was giving on Starbase Veta. At the proper time, the audience was seated, silent and attentive. There was a piano on stage, the high gloss finish of its upswept lid gleaming: a piano and nothing else. Vast screens hung above it, broadcasting close views of the stool, the beige and black keys, and the closed folder with the paper score on the stand.
The woman who entered was human, brown hair swept up and pinned in place with two black sticks. Her understated black gown made her seem kin to the instrument as she sat at it, tucking the stool closer and opening the folder.
And then she played, and for two hours held them all fast in their seats.
There was a reception afterward in one of the adjoining festival halls, as was typical for concerts. Sometimes the two of them attended to mingle, for they were fairly well known; sometimes they went home early. And sometimes they lingered if they’d been deeply affected by the performance, enough to need time to step back out of the world the art had created for them. So Vasiht’h was not surprised that they stayed for the pianist’s reception.
He was surprised to find the artist approaching them. On her final night of a sold-out run, he hadn’t expected to meet her in person amid the many fans waiting for her attention. But he thought that they were perhaps more noticeable than usual, particularly Jahir. His black coat might have been designed by an Alliance tailor, but he was the only Eldritch filling one, and his hair glimmered beneath the high lights like a polished pearl.
“Madam,” Jahir said to her. “You have a deft touch. Your treatment of the dynamics in the final piece was particularly sublime.”
Surprised, she said, “You flatter me, sir. Are you a musician then?”
“A hobbyist, merely,” he said. “But educated enough to appreciate your talents. You play like an angel.”
She flushed prettily. “I only wish,” she said. “But as far as I’ve come I still have far to go.”
Jahir introduced himself and Vasiht’h, who smiled at the pianist and complimented her skill, if with less erudition than his partner. And Vasiht’h watched and listened to the ensuing conversation. It was typical of them both and of Jahir in particular, his habit of asking questions that gave her an opportunity to talk about herself—while skillfully deflecting attention from himself.
But the woman only took that opportunity half the time. The other half, she made attempts at learning somet
hing about Jahir. At one point, talking about the second piece with its difficult key combinations, she laughed and said, “I’m sure you wouldn’t have had any trouble at all… you have wonderful hands. No wonder you play.”
Jahir demurred. The woman bade them stay and slipped off through the crowd. Watching her go, Vasiht’h said, “She’s flirting with you.”
“I know,” Jahir answered, the mindline gray and low, like fog.
When she returned, she had the folder with the score. “If you’d like?” she asked. “A memento? I can sign it.”
“We’d be honored,” Jahir said.
She set the folder on a side table and put her name to it before handing it to him. He thanked her for the evening, she lowered glittering lashes and smiled, and then she returned to her public.
“She gave you her commtag,” Vasiht’h observed. “Probably her private one.”
“I know,” Jahir said, “I was watching.” He turned toward the door and began heading that way.
/You could call her,/ Vasiht’h said, reverting to the mindline for privacy.
/And why would I do that?/
Vasiht’h said nothing, though his suggestion took form between them, something warm and intimate that smelled of wine and was lit by dim candles. Jahir stopped and looked over his shoulder at him, then shook his head, a minute twitch of his chin.
“It would accomplish nothing,” he said, quiet, and resumed walking.
They left the reception hall and found themselves in the echoing silence of the antechamber. Vasiht’h said, “Is it because she’s human?” Tinted in the mindline: living too fast, dying too young.
“No,” Jahir said. “It’s because what we both love would come between us.”
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