Dreamstorm

by M. C. A. Hogarth

  That perplexed Vasiht’h enough that he stopped, frowning. Jahir did too, turning toward him.

  “You play?” Vasiht’h said finally.

  “I was taught,” Jahir said at last. At Vasiht’h’s frown, he said, “Arii? You know I love music.”

  “Of course I know,” Vasiht’h said, for he’d observed his partner’s devotion to it since they’d met in college. “But loving music doesn’t necessarily mean you can play. Lots of people never learn, or they learn and never go anywhere with it. You play? Piano?”

  Jahir inclined his head.

  “Then why don’t you? Ever play?” Vasiht’h asked, startled.

  “I just don’t,” Jahir said, and resumed walking.

  Vasiht’h hurried in front of him, blocking the way with the side of his body.

  “What?” Jahir asked.

  /The concert hall is empty,/ Vasiht’h said, where the mindline could put forth the strength of his suggestion.

  Jahir hesitated, but Vasiht’h didn’t move. And eventually, inevitably, Jahir turned toward the empty hall.

  Together they advanced down the aisle, footfalls small in the vast space… climbed the stairs to the stage where the piano waited. Jahir stood alongside it, staring at it for so long Vasiht’h feared he would rethink the entire thing… and then the Eldritch sat on the stool and set the folder on the stand. He opened it to the second piece, calmly unbuttoned his gloves, and stripped them off his fingers.

  “If you’ll turn the pages when I nod?” he said formally.

  “Of course,” Vasiht’h said, mystified by this transformation of a man he’d known for years. He stepped up beside the piano and straightened.

  “Thank you,” Jahir said, eyes rising to the first line, growing intent.

  And then he played a piece that Vasiht’h knew very well he’d never seen before. Jahir’s mind was dense with it, with the novelty of it, with the excitement and concentration, and there was a quality to his thoughts like running water… as if the Eldritch had opened a channel between eyes and fingers, and nothing interrupted it. The first nod came so swiftly Vasiht’h almost missed it, but after that he turned each page with alacrity and growing astonishment. The Eldritch played the piece very differently from the pianist, but he played it flawlessly, and a song that had been wistful in human hands was elegiac in his.

  When he finished, he stretched his fingers and rested them in his lap, then looked at his partner… waiting.

  “How long?” Vasiht’h asked, low.

  “I’ve had lessons since I was old enough to put my hands on an instrument,” Jahir answered.

  “So… several of that woman’s lifetimes,” Vasiht’h said.

  “Very probably.” Jahir rose. He pulled the gloves back on and closed the folder, tucking it beneath an arm.

  “How can you enjoy it so much?” Vasiht’h asked as Jahir pushed the stool back under the piano. “Everyone must sound like an amateur.”

  Jahir chuckled. “She was no amateur, arii.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Jahir smiled, one of the most Eldritch smiles Vasiht’h had seen on him, melancholic and distant. “I do, yet.” He gestured for Vasiht’h to precede him to the stairs. “How can I not enjoy it? What she’s done is frankly miraculous.” At Vasiht’h’s quizzical glance, he said, “I have had lifetimes of practice. She’s had a third of one. And yet she sounds like that?”

  “Oh,” Vasiht’h said softly. Then he nodded. “Yes. I can see that.”

  Together they left the hall. Halfway home, Vasiht’h said, “You should play more often.”

  Jahir glanced down at him, then back at the path. “Maybe. Maybe I will.”

  Case Study: Swimming

  They both had their preferred form of exercise. Vasiht’h liked walking, one of the few activities his poorly-designed body was suited for. There was a park near their office that pleased them both, and when Vasiht’h wanted company Jahir paced him beneath the marble oaks, taking a single step for two of Vasiht’h’s paws. When he didn’t want company, his partner left him to wander, and that was good too: even parted, the mindline ensured they were never alone, not really.

  The park also had a community pool linked to the water environment maintained for the city’s aquatic residents, and while it was large it was also inevitably busy: not only did it attract families who came for recreation and training athletes, but also people who wanted a chance to talk in sign with their Naysha friends, or researchers studying the mysterious Platies.

  Jahir preferred swimming despite the constant bustle. He wore a full-length bodysuit to prevent any accidental contact with other swimmers and their unguarded minds, and against the cold which he felt more strongly than both Pelted and humans. Usually when they arrived there was a free lane for his laps, but if they were all busy he would wait cliently for one to open and never begrudge the time. Vasiht’h would observe him from a distance while the Eldritch sat at the pool’s edge, and his mind when he looked at the water was filled with the reflection of light off waves, with the Now of being immersed.

  Strangely, given the utter uselessness of his body in water, Vasiht’h also liked swimming. He usually brought an inflatable for buoyancy and clung to it while his poorly balanced body paddled along under the surface. When Jahir was done with his laps he sometimes glided beneath the lane marker and reappeared nearby, sleek as a white otter, and together they’d float, sharing their enjoyment of the water through the mindline. Vasiht’h loved those times: his partner’s mind, clear and clean and near, tickled through with air bubbles that felt like champagne and peace and pleasure. But they rarely had the opportunity to swim together, for Jahir avoided it unless he was sure they would have enough space.

  One day when they’d had left the pool and were changing in the room provided for it, Vasiht’h asked him, “Is it so bad? You take more precautions not to touch people when you’re swimming than you do otherwise.”

  “People don’t have as much control over their movements in water as they do on land,” Jahir said, stripping the bodysuit off. “They’re more likely to pitch into you, and it’s an environment where people come to play so telling them not to is unkind. The suit helps, so I wear it.”

  Remembering the taste of his partner’s mind while contemplating the pool, Vasiht’h said, “But it’s worse in the water somehow, being touched.”

  Jahir glanced at him over his shoulder, towel sagging in his hands. Then he resumed drying off. “Yes. Swimming clears my mind.”

  “And the clearer your mind, the louder the contact is when you’re touched,” Vasiht’h guessed.

  Jahir said, quiet, “I value the calm.” He wrung out his braided hair and dressed, and as he did Vasiht’h sampled the ripples that ran the length of the mindline. The acceptance of what was had a flavor, like the salt in ocean water... but he could feel a hint of wistfulness hidden behind it: the sunset seen from under constant waves.

  They’d had a client from one of the other spheres studding the surface of the starbase, in this case one of the agriculture/aquaculture bubbles. Her need had been brief, a response to a trauma they’d helped her weather, but she remembered Vasiht’h and had been delighted to help him with his request. Two months later, then, when they had a weekend off, Vasiht’h led his partner onto one of the bullet trains that ran the girth of the starbase through its dense external wall and they whiled away a pleasant few hours eating in the highly-regarded dining car and then star-gazing through the clear tunnel the track ran through. They disembarked at the agriculture sphere’s station, where Vasiht’h took a mystified Jahir over a Pad and to the facility recommended by their former client.

  As was typical of Pelted engineering, the fish, seaweed and other aquacultural products used by the rest of the starbase were supplied by an artificially created, carefully maintained but otherwise entirely real ocean. Where the land used for crops met that ocean there were miles of beaches, and as was inevitable, someone had sectioned off part of the coast
line and created a resort, including carefully sculpted grottos with ocean inlets.

  These personal pools could be rented. It had bitten deeply into Vasiht’h’s personal account, but he had booked what he could afford without any regret. He’d done so based on viseos of the prospective site... but he was not prepared for the reality of it, the brine and foliage smell, the distant roar of the surf, the utter calm of the water, so clear and bright a blue he could see straight through the surface to the sandy bottom.

  Jahir stood at the edge of the water, staring. His absolute silence hissed through the mindline, wiping it clean.

  “For me?” he said at last.

  “No one else can use it for the next three hours,” Vasiht’h said, deeply satisfied. “Unless you count the fish.” He nodded toward the small building artfully hidden by climbing vines and lush tropical plants. “There are towels in there, shoes, that sort of thing, if you need them. I even brought your bodysuit, if you want it.”

  “I don’t,” Jahir said, still staring.

  The mindline shivered with the vastness of the Eldritch’s internal quiet. To Vasiht’h it tasted like incredulity and joy, and it washed down his back like sun-warmed water. The feeling was so powerful his back arched in response to it, wings mantling. A perfect gift, he thought. He smiled and turned to go.

  “Vasiht’h?”

  He paused, looked over his shoulder.

  “If there’s an inflatable in that shack you might come back in a couple of hours.”

  Vasiht’h hesitated. “I bought it so you could be alone, arii, because you can’t be otherwise.”

  “I know,” Jahir said, his smile like a sunrise on waves. “But come anyway, if you’ll enjoy it.”

  “If you’re sure—”

  “I am. Two hours is long enough.”

  “All right,” Vasiht’h said. “I’ll be back then.”

  And he was. He spent a happy hour sunning himself on the rock in the middle of the pool, or paddling around his floating partner, and the mindline relaxed, expanded outward, lapping like the ocean at the strand. There was in fact an inflatable... but no bodysuit made an appearance, and if they brushed against one another, it mattered not at all.

  Case Study: Wet

  “Thank God you’ve come,” the healer-assist said. “They won’t listen to me. I know what I’m seeing, but they’re so sure nothing like this happens ‘in civilized space’—” The human halted abruptly, hand at his ear.

  Jahir and Vasiht’h stopped simultaneously, on the same foot even. The mindline had intensified when they’d stepped off the Pad into the bustle of the acute care facility at the hospital, so much that their bodies had synchronized in response. Their guide was listening to a telegem earbud and the moment its news accelerated his heart-rate they were both already moving to follow him. “Quick, he’s seizing. This way!”

  They ran, Vasiht’h’s footfalls a quadruple drumbeat to Jahir’s longer strides. They passed in a blur, pale tall Eldritch with hair a white flag, centauroid Glaseah, glossy black fur reflecting the bright hall lights. Vasiht’h’s clearances for the hospital was over a year old but everyone recognized Jahir, and no alarm sounded when they sprinted after the man who’d summoned them and into a room where another human was flailing hard enough to have induced the halo-arch to withdraw to keep him from injuring himself against it. Jahir was already shouting over the chaos “DON’T SEDATE HIM, NO SEDATIVES!” when he crashed into the side of the bed and reached for the body. Vasiht’h pulled back to avoid touching the patient, friction burning his paw pads and haunches almost grazing the floor.

  “Who the hell—”

  “What is he—”

  “He’s cleared, he’s a specialist!”

  “His vitals—”

  All of it vanished as Jahir dropped into the man’s mind like a plummet. The mindline shot after him, his anchor to the real world, and he trusted it and Vasiht’h to haul him out. If they didn’t, he’d die with the addict, because wet left no survivors.

  “What the hell are you doing?” the attending physician said, hostility defrayed by the sudden change in the statistics still being reported by the halo-arch. “And how did you get here? I know him, but who are you and what’s he doing here and not over in general admission?”

  Vasiht’h flexed his toes, slowly, slowly. The sensations from the mindline he shared with Jahir were distant flickers, too sickeningly quick for normalcy, and feeling them brought back terrible memories... but his task in this required him to be calm in body and spirit, so he breathed deeply, concentrated on letting his anxieties fade. Before he’d finished, the healer-assist who’d summoned them spoke.

  “I asked them in. They’re xenotherapists, they’ve seen addiction cases before.”

  “This is not—”

  “This is a klaidopin case,” Vasiht’h said before the physician could barrel on.

  “You mean we’ve got a wet addict?” one of the other assists said, startled.

  The physician scowled. “So HEA Rogers said, but there was no specific evidence, and this is not a part of the Alliance known for street drugs. If you hear hoofbeats in Texas, you don’t assume zebras.”

  “Wet gives a look,” the healer-assist said stubbornly. “I’ve seen it before. This patient has it.”

  “A look,” the physician repeated.

  “And a feel,” Vasiht’h said. “Which we could sense from across the room.” Which was, Goddess save him, the absolute truth. He’d seen enough wet cases to know one after that benighted residency he’d insisted Jahir accept.

  The physician frowned at the patient, whose body was limp under Jahir’s hands. “What is he doing, then?”

  “Bringing him out of the episode,” Vasiht’h said, flexing his toes again. The claws pricked out. “We’re linked espers. We work with people’s dreams; it’s given us a lot of practice dealing with the subconscious mind.”

  “And is that what’s causing the seizure?”

  “No,” Vasiht’h said, suppressing his anxiety with difficulty. “This isn’t a dream or a psychosis. It’s a self-destructing brain. There’s no negotiating with it. It’s like a spinning gun emptying itself. The best you can hope for is to grab it without being shot.”

  Flashes of color. Light. Sound. Utterly nonsensical. Jahir fell into it, head tucked down and arms protecting it from the barrage. The battery was physical, as far as his consciousness was concerned. Worse than blows. Like being sideswiped with knives, some of them slicing, others bruising but promising worse. He drew in a deep breath and exploded outward, willing order onto chaos. The strain of it was winnowing. He never knew, throwing himself into a dying mind, if this one would be too far along for him to help—or make it out.

  He pushed. The mind pushed back, trying to overwrite him, to make him undifferentiated from it, to make him as fast, as disordered, as frenzied and senseless as it was. He refused. He breathed out a white calm.

  Be still.

  NOISE

  Be quieted.

  LIGHT

  Be calm.

  EVERYWHERE EVERY WHICH WHERE GO THERE GO HERE NOW EVERYTHING EVERY EVERY EVERY

  It was always his hope that the first attempt would work. When it didn’t, he reversed... and drew the excess energy into himself, and with it, the disease.

  The patient’s vitals abruptly stabilized.

  “What the hell?” the physician murmured, but Vasiht’h was already diving for the bed. He dragged Jahir off it bodily and wrapped his arms and forepaws around his partner, tucking his head against Jahir’s in time to catch it as it fell limp. With a knife made of anger and fear he cut the bond between the patient and his partner and dove into the horrible reflection impressed on Jahir’s mind, into disorder and meaninglessness and fury. But unlike Jahir he was fighting on familiar ground, and he had his long history with the Eldritch to call on, years and years of working with intertwined minds until some part of them resonated with one another. When he reached, when he made himself the center, t
he spinning slowly stopped, the colors softened, and the noise fell away, until he could feel Jahir’s arms around his upper back, smell the sweat on the Eldritch’s brow.

  “All here?” he said, low.

  “All here,” Jahir answered, hoarse.

  “We need a recovery room,” Vasiht’h said, ignoring Jahir’s weak denial, a bare wash through the mindline.

  Half an hour later, Jahir was holding a cup of hot tea in a quiet room with a fish tank embedded in one wall. Vasiht’h was sitting on the floor beside him, legs stretched and toes digging into the floor. The physician had joined them, taking the chair across from them.

  “He seems to be stable for now. We didn’t have to sedate him.”

  “You can’t sedate him,” Jahir said. “Sedation kills them.” He cleared his throat. “There is no stopping the process. The moment he overdosed, his fate was sealed.”

  “I don’t know much about klaidopin,” the physician admitted. “But it can’t possibly be that cut and dried. Is this withdrawal? Can we address the symptoms?”

  “That’s what you were trying to do before we got here, isn’t it?” Vasiht’h asked.

  Jahir shook his head, hair shifting against his throat. His eyes were closed. “The withdrawal symptoms are irrelevant. By the time you have to worry about them, it’s too late. The brain’s compromised.”

  “No one’s ever been able to mitigate the damage?”

  “No,” Jahir said, and opened his eyes. “He has three days, maybe two.”

  The physician studied him. “Whatever you did seems to have cost you a great deal.”

  “It does,” Vasiht’h said before Jahir could say otherwise. “It always does. It’s why we don’t work acute cases.”

  “And you say he’ll die?” the physician continued.

  “Three days,” Jahir murmured. “Maybe.”

  “Then why did you intervene?” the physician said. “If it was today or three days from now, why waste yourself on it?”