Dreamstorm Read online

  Be careful how you interpret the world: It is like that.

  –Erich Heller

  By the grace of God above / I'll shine the light 'cause I am loved

  –Adam Young, "My Everything"

  BRIEF GLOSSARY

  Alet (ah LEHT): “friend,” but formal, as one would address a stranger. Plural is aletsen.

  Arii (ah REE): “friend,” personal. An endearment. Used only for actual friends. Plural is ariisen. Additional forms include ariihir (“dear brother”) and ariishir (“dear sister”).

  Dami (DAH mee): “mom,” in Tam-leyan. Often used among other Pelted species.

  Fin (FEEN): a unit of Alliance currency. Singular is deprecated finca, rarely used.

  Hea (HEY ah): abbreviation for Healer-assist.

  Kara (kah RAH): “child”. Plural is karasen.

  Tapa (TAH pah): “dad,” in Tam-leyan. Often used among other Pelted species.

  Chapter 1

  “Say again?” Jahir said, but the spring that bloomed in the mindline made it clear he’d heard Vasiht’h clearly. It was that flush of happiness that inspired Vasiht’h to repeat himself, for the pleasure it gave them both.

  “Luci would like to know if we’d be willing to attend her wedding.” Vasiht’h spread the invitation. “She’s having it on Seersana, in the university’s religious row, believe it or not.”

  Jahir set aside his own tablet, cupping his mug in long fingers. “Is she? I wonder why. Did she say?”

  “No, so we’ll have to ask when we get there.” Vasiht’h glanced at him. “We are going, aren’t we?”

  “Oh, we must.”

  Vasiht’h grinned down at the invitation. It was spare, completely in keeping with Lucrezia’s personality… which had been atypical for homeworld Harat-Shariin, but perfectly suitable for a colony-bred pard who’d had non-standard desires. “We’ve got a month before we have to show. That gives us plenty of time to move our schedule around.”

  “And find a gift?” The mindline carried a flavor, like that anise liqueur they’d tried once and found so puzzling. “Is that customary?”

  “I… don’t know, actually.” Vasiht’h thumbed down, looking for details. “I think the homeworld ceremony involves the family giving the guests gifts, but Luci might be doing something differently. Let’s see… ah, here we go. ‘Gifts welcome but not necessary,’ it says. And ‘Donations to genetic research foundations suggested.’ Maybe that means she’s marrying a non-Harat-Shar?”

  “Or perhaps it is a cause her work brought her into contact with.”

  “Or that.” Vasiht’h laughed. “Goddess, I can’t wait to ask her.”

  “And to see the university again?”

  “And that.” Vasiht’h set the tablet down. “Do you want to, too?”

  The Eldritch considered, looking down at the steam rising off the mug. “It was a good place for us both.”

  Was that humility? Reserve? Or something else? Vasiht’h could appreciate the Eldritch’s pauses, but they were never simple. Nothing about an Eldritch was simple. “It was.”

  “Why then would I not wish to?”

  The mindline wasn’t suggesting anything; it remained washed with Jahir’s sunlit gladness at the news of Luci’s forthcoming nuptials. Probing was probably a bad idea, but Vasiht’h couldn’t help trying, just a little. “I don’t know. Going backwards maybe? It’s been five years. Longer than that, a little. We’ve moved on.” He paused, trying not to wince as he really listened to that. Saying that five years was long for a Glaseah would only compound the error. Or hastening to say that time was relative, and five years could be a long time? Goddess, there was no fixing this particular blunder…

  Gently, Jahir said, “We never leave behind those things that form us. And as I am grateful for the events that shaped my life on Seersana, I would be pleased to return.”

  Vasiht’h sighed, smiled. “You always know just what to say.”

  “Not always,” the Eldritch said, “But sometimes. Sometimes.”

  Five years was a long time, though. Vasiht’h reflected on it later as he shopped for the wedding, jogging through the Commons of Starbase Veta. The two of them had arrived on the starbase straight into a probationary period, during which they’d been forced to prove their worth to the community… or rather, Vasiht’h had, because the starbase’s administrators had been more than willing to extend their hospitality to a member of the Alliance’s most mysterious allied species. It was that Eldritch’s mundane partner they’d had problems with. They hadn’t been the only ones either, because at least two of the therapists who oversaw Veta’s populace had been skeptical of their methodologies. Six months hadn’t been long enough to convince those two of the merits of esper dream therapy, but it had been long enough to make the most strident of their detractors decide to give them a chance.

  And that had been five years ago. Now Vasiht’h couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. Their practice was so busy that they had to turn away patients, and their ties to the medical community were robust enough that they had a network of specialists and peers they could refer cases to when they couldn’t handle them. They had friends, too—people they could have dinner with, meet for coffee, turn to for help—though they didn’t need to socialize nearly as much as Vasiht’h had assumed.

  Having a mindline was… better than any partnership Vasiht’h had ever dreamed. More satisfying, in the same way his relationship with the Goddess was. To know there was someone who’d always be there for him, who would always love him….

  Vasiht’h caught his expression in one of the windows and made a face. His sister would have teased him endlessly about his syrupy eyes if she’d seen it. But he couldn’t help it, for the same reason he now had a virtual bookshelf with several handfuls of romances by an immensely effervescent author who’d driven him crazy with her first book.

  He loved an Eldritch, who loved him back. It was the most wonderful thing in the world.

  Which wasn’t to say they didn’t have their troubles, because all relationships did. But that was all right. They would manage.

  Vasiht’h stopped outside a shop specializing in local produce and wrinkled his nose. Maybe Luci would like wine from one of the starbase vineyards? Some of it was good, though he could tell through the mindline, sampling it across his partner’s palate, that it wasn’t superlative wine. Maybe unavoidably, given the closed ecosystem. But Luci would probably cut fruit into it anyway, so did it have to be perfect? He tried to remember if the pard liked chocolate, and if so, what color, and kept walking.

  Five years. Did Jahir love their life as much as he did? Was uncertainty behind that tiny pause? Regret? Or was he reading too much into it?

  Thinking of what he knew of the Eldritch, Vasiht’h sighed ruefully. No, more likely he wasn’t reading enough.

  Jahir found it entirely appropriate that the day brought correspondence from mother, who was currently in the Seni Galare apartments in the capital for the Summer Court. Like all her letters, it had been handwritten and then digitized for its journey across the Alliance, because sending the physical object would have been expensive and ill-advised, given the Eldritch dedication to the Veil. Jahir himself couldn’t have navigated back, had he been pressed to: the Queen’s dedicated courier service handled all the passengers going to and from the Eldritch homeworld, none of whom were permitted onto the bridges of their specialized ships. What few passengers there were. Jahir was probably the most recent of those emigrants, and he could have named only two or three others who’d gone before him in his lifetime, that he knew of.

  The Eldritch went to the summer court to negotiate alliances and ensure allegiances between families, so his mother’s observations of those activities formed the bulk of her letter.

  �
��your brother, of course, is not interested in marrying. My refusal to betroth either of you in the cradle remains a subject of gossip, but pay it no mind, my love. I know you will choose wisely when you do, and your brother with you. In the mean, it does no harm and a great deal of good to be here, even without children to settle. The Queen is strengthened by every partisan who arrives to the court. Her enemies remain committed to cutting off what little congress we maintain with the Alliance… as if we have so much already! Any less contact and we will be well and truly isolated, and what good will that do any of us, I ask you?

  You know yourself, my son, how much we have to learn from the other and the alien. Your letters have been a delight to me. I am so pleased to hear that you are spending your time away profitably, and look forward to the day I might make the acquaintance of your offworld associates, particularly your partner. Do you take good care of him, for such gems come infrequently into a life.

  Jahir smiled fondly at the words. Few, seeing his mother, would think her such an iconoclast, but under the demure demeanor and perfect mask she was as fiercely devoted to the stars as the sons she’d reared. How had she done it, he wondered? How had she imparted that love? Or had it been solely that she had refused to stand in the way of it?

  The events on his world concerned him, but they always had. Given the glacial speed at which the Eldritch initiated change, he doubted anything would disturb the status quo for the decades he planned to be away. He would return before anything erupted, surely, and help his mother and the Queen who’d been so generous in funding his visit to the Alliance.

  He set to his response to her letter, and unlike her wrote it on the data tablet directly, though it recorded his handwriting faithfully. Sealing it and sending it left him free to sort through the remainder of his mail, but none of it required an immediate response. Strange to have so much of it; leaving a public tag out had required a great deal of work, given how assiduously the censors installed by the treaty erased all evidence of his existence online. He’d had to prevail on a client for help, writing a tag he could access without inspiring an alert that he’d touched it. Once she’d managed that feat, he’d asked her to begin on more delicate tasks; her acquiescence was responsible for what little ability he had to maintain records in the Alliance.

  Now that he thought of it, that former client had been one of their patients from their practicum on Seersana.

  Jahir set the tablet down and went to the kitchen to start on a simple soup. Vasiht’h was shopping—only partially out of agitation, he judged, but it would harm nothing for his partner to return to a meal. He loved Vasiht’h, more than he could adequately describe, with a quiet certitude that he would never have imagined possible for a mortal relationship. Vasiht’h was family. But of the two of them, the Glaseah was far more apt to find anxieties in everyday circumstances. It was clear to Jahir that Vasiht’h was worried about whether Jahir was… contented? With what they had? And that this had come to mind because their return to Seersana would recall the circumstances that saw them graduate there, and Jahir’s choice to go clinical rather than medical.

  Jahir suspected his partner still worried that the Eldritch regretted that choice. But no amount of protestation on his part would convince Vasiht’h otherwise. Perhaps because some part of him did regret it. Not actively, in a way that would corrode his contentment with what he had. Regrets could be that way: something that gave contrast to the present and its excellences. It was the regrets that demanded action, that bled like wounds, that cut up one’s peace.

  These kinds of regret should have separate names, he thought as he set to slicing mushrooms. It would make the situation easier to explain, because the mindline would reveal those shadows, as certainly as breathing. That it would also reveal Jahir’s acceptance of them wouldn’t matter, because Vasiht’h would have opinions about those regrets, opinions that would be more real to him than Jahir’s. No mindline, no matter how storied, changed that part of humanoid nature. Jahir smiled, thinking of his early experiences with Vasiht’h, and his naïve belief that being able to hear another’s thoughts, sense each other’s feelings, would make communication easier. What it did was make it more complex.

  He would have it no other way. Life complicated people, gave them a texture, endowed their souls with a richness. That he could experience this directly with his partner was, he believed, a blessing.

  Clear soup, he thought. It would inspire the Glaseah to make something to accompany it… and a Glaseah in a kitchen was, he had learned, a calmer Glaseah.

  The mindline warned him of his partner’s approach long before Vasiht’h reached the door. By the time the Glaseah peered inside their apartment, the soup was simmering and Jahir was looking through their spice cabinet. Before Vasiht’h could speak, the Eldritch said, “Why do we have nine varieties of peppercorn?”

  “Instead of sixteen or seventeen or forty?” Vasiht’h put his bags on the counter, the mindline surging with a champagne-foam amusement. “Because I haven’t had the chance to buy them all yet.”

  “Which of these embarrassment of riches do I want for this application?” Jahir asked.

  Vasiht’h padded into the kitchen behind him and leaned over the pot, sniffing. “Winter soup? Mmm. Um. The gold ones, from Asanao.”

  Jahir brushed the vials aside until he found the correct one. It still amazed him, the technology in even the most innocuous of the Alliance’s devices. These vials that maintained an internal environment so that the spices in them never lost their freshness… how had they been manufactured? He couldn’t even imagine their price. No doubt here they cost almost nothing because of the economic infrastructure that backed their creation. But it still felt like magic. “Here.”

  Vasiht’h picked up the vial from the counter, absent. “This needs… bread? Rice? Hmm. Something solid to chew.”

  “There is duck in the soup?”

  The Glaseah wrinkled his nose, sniffing. “So there is. Good choice. You haven’t gotten too far with it… let’s thicken it up and pour it over rice. It’ll make a nice base for a sauce.”

  “Very good. Shall I prepare anything else?”

  “More vegetables. There’s some in the grocery bag.”

  Obediently Jahir went into it. “Did you find something for Lucrezia?”

  “Not yet, but you know. We have time.”

  “So we do,” Jahir said, and ignored the suspicious tickle in the mindline. He concentrated on his belief in it, willing the Glaseah to accept it.

  Vasiht’h chuckled a little. “All right. Message received.”

  For now, anyway. Jahir wondered how this particular anxiety would develop, if it would. And he would not have wagered on it remaining quiescent. He suppressed his sigh, tempered it with fondness, and ignored the glance the Glaseah threw at him. “Shall we go early?”

  “Hmm?”

  “To Seersana,” Jahir said. “We have many friends there. It would be pleasing to have time to visit.”

  Vasiht’h tapped the ladle on the pot. “It would, yes. How long?”

  “Is a week too little?”

  “It’s longer than I was thinking!” The Glaseah chuckled. “But yes. I’d like that.”

  “Then we have work to do after dinner, with our client schedules.”

  “And I’ll have to shop faster,” Vasiht’h said.

  “Woe,” Jahir said, smiling. “Such hardship.”

  “We do have it good, don’t we.”

  Chopping the broccoli, Jahir said, “Do you not forget it, arii.”

  Chapter 2

  Vasiht’h couldn’t describe how weird it was to walk through campus in the middle of spring, watching the bustle of students, and not be part of it. He didn’t feel old enough or different enough to be looking down on them from some rarified height of experience, so it seemed unnatural not to be joining the stream of people on their way to classes. But then… he’d spent almost ten years here, between his undergraduate and graduate years. Maybe this disorient
ation was normal?

  Consulting Jahir would probably not be useful. For either of them. You didn’t ask the alien friend with ten times your lifespan if it was strange to feel out of place in a place you shouldn’t because you hadn’t marked the time passing.

  And yet: “I feel it also.”

  Vasiht’h glanced up at the Eldritch. The weather was cool enough that his friend was wearing a high collar and a light scarf, but the sunlight invested Jahir’s face with a warm glow that worked well with his honey-yellow eyes. He looked happy, which in an Eldritch meant a slight curve of the mouth and a faint upward bow of his lower eyelids. It was only under that, in the mindline, that Vasiht’h sensed the faint bittersweet taste of nostalgia, like hibiscus tea. Not bad, just… yes. Whatever that was.

  “I should have known you would,” Vasiht’h said, smiling. “So where first? We’re early. No one’s expecting us for an hour. Gelato?”

  Jahir did smile then, more obviously, and a twinkling merriment scattered the mindline with glitter. “Tea and Cinnamon. There will be time enough for gelato.”

  That’s where they had lunch, then, and it was a good choice: Tea and Cinnamon was a café in the middle of campus, next to the student center, and from their table by the window they had a fine vantage. It was the middle of up-week a month after midterms, and there were a gratifying number of people going about the business of learning.

  “Strange that it looks less cosmopolitan now that we’ve been living on Veta so long,” Vasiht’h observed. “Back when I first moved here, it felt really urban.”

  “It is urban,” Jahir answered over his cup of coffee. “There are more people in this one university than in some cities on this planet, much less on other, less populous ones. But we have been residing in a port city, which is another level again more diverse than this.”