Casey was as much a Morthan as any of his fellow hybrids in that respect, he remembered the comfort of being able to touch his mother’s consciousness at any time during his first months of life. Even when Kalitha had been asleep, baby Lincoln had contentedly cuddled his thoughts to her dreams.
It was normal for a Morthan child to move away from that constant closeness as he or she grew, because like the humans they so eerily resembled physiologically Morthan youngsters needed to separate themselves from their parents in order to live their own lives. Linc had done that, too, as he had grown up. By the time he had completed two standard Terran years of life, he knew how to accept it when his mother refused him access to her mind. He also knew, in a rudimentary way at least, how to do the equivalent to her—although being able to keep her out of his thoughts when she chose to insist on knowing them was an ability he did not develop until he reached what his human father insisted was puberty.
It was, and yet it wasn’t, the same thing that happened to his fully human cousins during their teen years. He grew tall in a sudden rush, as they did. His face and the private areas of his body grew hair; his voice deepened, his shoulders became broad, and his upper body developed an adult male’s musculature. But although he might from a purely physiological standpoint have become sexually active in his mid-teens, as so many young humans did, he could not have caused a female to become pregnant because the reproductive cells in his semen were not fully formed—would not be, until he had lived for at least an additional two decades (or more) in Terran terms. And he had small interest in attempting union with a female, anyway.
His intellect equaled a human’s of his chronological age, looking at him would not have revealed his heritage unless one noticed his distinctive golden eyes; and in every respect except sexual interest, his emotional development kept pace with that of a human adolescent. When he entered the Academy and had to cope with separation from home, with academic and social pressures, and then with learning how to lead others, he proved himself not only just as able as his classmates—he was among the best.
But every other Morthan hybrid he knew at the Academy could and did move easily to unite with the minds of other Morthans, and he could not. And although the minds of other sentient species—humans, Kesrans, Sestians, and so on—could not be understood in the same way as could a fellow Morthan’s mind, their emotions could be perceived and thoughts could be exchanged with them. That was true of both Morthan females and Morthan males, although the females with their much earlier arrival at sexual maturity usually paired off with humans and remained on their home-world while the Morthan males left that planet to become Star Service healers and expatriate physicians.
That career hadn’t invited Lincoln Casey. A human like his father could become a physician or a psychologist without anyone expecting that he would be able to “read” his patients, but a part-Morthan who lacked that ability would have been setting himself up to fail. And Linc could no longer read anyone, not even Kalitha, by the time he had passed his fourteenth birthday. Like a man born fully human, he was locked up alone in his body and he had no expectation that was ever going to change.
At first his father had expressed relief when they realized how young Linc was developing, because Gladstone Casey had made the natural assumption that the boy’s Terran characteristics were unusually dominant. If that meant that Linc could not exercise Kalitha’s mental gifts, it was perhaps too bad; but it should also mean that he would mature sexually at the same age as (or at least not much later than) human males, and that he would therefore be able to live what Gladstone Casey was pleased to call “a normal life for a man.”
It hadn’t happened that way. Linc was Morthan in his development, yet he lacked the quality that was the Morthan male’s great compensation for being unable to service his species’ females at the age when they first desired it. And then, when the Morthan male at last did mature, the mate he usually found was a human female—and that union was unvaryingly a barren one. Human males regularly impregnated Morthan females, but no Morthan male and human female had ever produced a conception together. And it had nothing to do with the human woman’s fertility, although more often than not she was past the age for natural conception before the relationship with her Morthan mate commenced.
Gladstone Casey had expected his boy to be the first to break that medical barrier, but it hadn’t happened. Linc had enjoyed friendships with females of every possible species, first at the Academy and then throughout his career as Star Service officer, but he hadn’t been able to figure out why he was supposed to want to lie down in a bed with one (except maybe to keep warm while sleeping) until he was close to completing four decades of life.
When had it begun, his realization that he knew exactly what Katy Romanova was feeling? Very early in their relationship, but at first he had mistaken that dawning empathy for nothing more than what human friends normally shared. A heightened awareness of her facial expressions and their varied meanings, of her body language, of the most subtle tones of her voice; clues that he interpreted with unusual skill, as might any sensitive young human man with a person to whom he was emotionally close. But a day had come when he could not explain that awareness by such means, because he felt her emotions when he could not see her and could not even hear her. And soon after that he had started being able to perceive her thoughts.
He had kept that from her for far too long. For years he had been careful, so careful, not to intrude when her thoughts and feelings were private ones. Yet he had known it before she did when she fell in love with George Fralick, since Fralick was captain to both of them at that time. He had been glad then that he lacked a human man’s sexual passions, because if he had possessed them it would have been damnably difficult for him not to intrude on her mentally many times when she and Fralick were nearby and had not the slightest clue that it was possible for him to listen.
More than listen, to perceive whatever Katy perceived. Fortunately the idea of intimate contact with George Fralick hadn’t just been unattractive to Casey; it had revolted him, on the few occasions when he had accidentally let his barriers down while Katy was with her husband.
Homophobia? No, it was no more that than it was jealousy. It was simply an instinctive drawing back from a powerful and elemental something that he was not yet ready to manage, that he could no more savor as Katy was savoring it than an infant of three months could chew and digest a piece of raw fruit.
He had been terrified that if she realized he could touch her in this way that was so easy for him, by the time they were command officers in their thirties and she was the mother of Fralick’s growing sons, that she would turn on him in horror. Which she might have…he still felt a bit guilty for having deceived her for so long, but he could not repent of it.
And then his body had starting waking up, and he had begun to understand why fully human males behaved in the impossibly strange ways that they sometimes did.
Being near her made him ache. Watching her had always been a pleasure, Katy was lovely even though she had no great confidence in that fact (and Fralick, damn the bastard, never let her forget it when each pregnancy left her a bit less slender than she’d been before—did the man not have brains enough to realize that it was bearing and nursing his children that had put those few additional kilos onto his wife’s frame?). Yet until he was nearing forty, Linc Casey appreciated Katy Romanova’s femininity exactly as he had appreciated that quality in his mother. The sight of her was pleasing, in a way that the sight of another man wasn’t; there was a special kind of comfort in having her nearby. But by the time his fortieth birth-anniversary had come and gone, if she simply stood close beside him on the bridge he could feel his breathing begin to change.