“Medical? He’s not ill?” Regis felt a little frisson of fear. Why would Dan Lawton send for him, of all people? He had no medical training and only the most rudimentary knowledge of laranhealing, so he could be of little use there. If Dan were badly injured, dying, he might send for Regis—to disclose what?
The messenger shook his head. “I wasn’t g-given that information, j-just to ask you to come.”
Regis nodded, decisive. “I’ll be ready shortly. Wait here, and for Evanda’s sake, man, get some hot drink into you!”
Outside, clouds had blotted out the stars. Needle-edged rain slashed down, a harbinger of the coming spring. Although the temperature was above freezing, the damp wind penetrated even the warmest woolen clothing.
A motorized ground transport stood waiting for them outside the gated grounds of the town house. Regis sensed Danilo’s abhorrence of the machine, an echo to his own. The messenger held the door open. Regis sighed as and he and Danilo slid into their seats. The conveyance was practical, given the hour and the weather. Truthfully, he was glad not to have to walk, to arrive at Terran HQ shivering and soaked.
Danilo, tautly vigilant, eyed the Spaceforce patrolmen as they passed through the checkpoints. Beyond the gates, fences and barricades cut off all view of the spaceport. Stark white lights illuminated the entrance to Central Headquarters. The building was dark, the floors slick. The heels of their boots clattered on the hard synthetic surface. Although an underground power plant heated the complex, the entrance hall was frigid. To Regis, the chill was as much of the spirit as of the flesh.
As they made their way up the strange rising shafts and along the corridors of the Medical section, the lighting shifted, became less harsh. Perhaps the sick required illumination that soothed and sustained instead of assaulting the senses. Unlike the outer areas of the building, the Medical section was as busy at this hour as during the day. Staff in white uniforms, and some in pale green or blue, hurried by, speaking in pairs, clutching recording tablets. A few stared at Regis and Danilo.
The messenger brought them to a halt below a sign that read, INTENSIVE CARE. A young man glanced up from behind a long, curving barrier that served as counter and desk. Regis decided he must be a nurse, because his white uniform bore the staff- and-serpent emblem of the Terran Medics. A musical recording issued from the console behind the counter, a woman singing in a lilting, alien tongue, accompanied by drums and guitar. The snatch of melody reminded Regis of the sea.
Regis tried not to stare, for the nurse’s skin was a glossy blue-black and his hair a cap of fuzz. His ears were like ebony shells set on either side of his skull. Dark eyes, bright with intelligence, took in the two Darkovans, their native clothing and pale skins. But there was no judgment in that brief glance, only curiosity and good will.
How insular we are,Regis thought, and how little we know about the infinite variety of humankind.
“We have been expecting you,” the nurse said in a musical voice. “Please wait here while I page Dr. Allison.” He returned to his work at the computer console. Regis caught his flicker of amusement at being the object of curiosity.
He knows what it is to be set apart from his kind, to feel different, and yet he has made his peace with it.Regis would have liked to speak further with the man, but just then Jason Allison emerged around the corner. Jason wore a white coat, unbuttoned and flowing, over ordinary Darkovan clothing.
“ DomRegis, Danilo, I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you,” he said in flawless casta, inclining his head but making no effort to shake hands. “Come this way.”
Regis had known Jason since they had worked together on finding a vaccine for trailmen’s fever. He liked and trusted Jason, who had been born on Darkover and lived several years among the nonhuman aboriginals.
They hurried down the corridor that ran behind the nurse’s station and past three or four open doors. Regis glanced in, seeing darkened rooms and empty beds, two to a room. The next door was closed, but Jason entered without preamble.
The first impression Regis had upon entering was that he had stepped onto another planet. The chamber was saturated with light and the clutter of carts and machines. The stink of chemicals masked a miasma of emotions. Before he could raise his laranbarriers, he caught a whiff of curdled fear from the woman on the other side of the bed. She looked up at him with frightened eyes. Regis recognized Dan Lawton’s wife.
From the patient on the single bed, surrounded by machines and a spiderweb of wires and tubing, came the flare of laran, wild and un-shaped. Frantic, barely contained anguish radiated from the man in the corner chair.
The intensity of the emotions and the utter strangeness of the surroundings battered at Regis. Sensations, raw and intense, flooded through him.
Memories surged up through the tumult. In the recesses of his mind, Regis was once more fifteen and wracked by threshold sickness. He remembered how visions had swept his mind like blasts of a Hellers storm. His head had throbbed, and his eyes had flickered with jags of eerie light, incomprehensible visual traceries . . .
Solid warmth steadied him. Blinking, Regis came back to himself. Danilo stood at his back, leaning into him, supporting him.
Ever there, my faithful friend. You saved me then, and you save me now.
The bizarre sensations had not been solely memories of his own struggles as his laranawakened. Regis had been picking them up from the boy who lay on the bed. With his own psychic senses, he tasted the drugs surging through the boy’s bloodstream, off-world medicines designed to sedate and numb. All they had accomplished, however, was to blur the boy’s mind, to deprive him of any understanding of what was happening to him.
Moved to pity, Regis reached out to touch the boy. His mother shrieked, “Stay away from him!”
At the same time, Dan Lawton, who had been sitting in the corner, leaped to his feet.
Jason ignored the woman’s outburst. “Regis, do you know what’s wrong with him? Is it threshold sickness?”
“This farce has gone on long enough!” the black- haired woman cried. Her anguish sizzled in the air, panic edged with bitterness and love for her child. “I will not have abominable, superstitious natives treating my son! Felix is critically ill. You said so yourself, Dr. Allison! I insist on proper medical care for him, do you hear?”
Jason guided her toward her husband. “Ms. Lawton, sit down now or leave the room.”
“I mean your son no harm,” Regis began. “I’m here to help, if I can.”
“There’s nothing you can do!” Violet eyes blazed at him, molten. “Nothing! Because he cannot possibly have contracted this degenerate alien threshold syndrome!” She jerked away from Jason’s hold. “Daniel, tell them!”
“Tiphani, we’ve been over this—” Dan protested.
“No!” Ebony tresses whirling around her pale face, Tiphani faced her husband. “This is all wrong! I will not have my own son exposed to those native—those— perverts!” She lunged at Regis as if she would attack him with her bare hands.
Regis recoiled, not only from her words themselves but from the burst of hatred behind them. Danilo placed himself between Regis and the near-hysterical woman. Danilo had not drawn his dagger, but Regis had no doubt that he was now fully protected.
Danilo said, in a voice all the more menacing for its calm, “No one speaks in that manner to the Heir of Hastur. No one.”