The offspring of those unions should have been losing their mental abilities progressively as the generations progressed, because as Terran males continued mating Morthan females their hybridized children naturally possessed less and less Morthan DNA. Yet as far as he knew Lincoln Casey was the first child of such a mating who had not developed the normal telepathic talent, or at least hadn’t developed it in at all the usual fashion.
Most Morthan males did what this fellow had done, they shook their heads in exasperation and they left Mortha—young adults ready to make lives of their own in every way, except for their complete lack of readiness to reproduce. Sometimes they took their human brides back to Mortha, later on when they did at last become sexually mature; sometimes they stayed wherever their wives induced them to settle. But since offspring never resulted from such pairings, the Morthan bloodlines were only preserved in those extremely unusual circumstances where a mature Morthan male was able to obtain a much younger Morthan female as his partner.
In other words, about one child in ten thousand born to Morthan females had a Morthan sire. Yet the species did not die out; in its hybridized form, it thrived instead.
Linc Casey had never been able to guess whether he was simply a freak of nature, or the precursor of a time when Morthan blood would become so diluted that one day his people’s alternately prized and feared abilities would begin to fade out; would surface from time to time only. All he knew was that in today’s society, he was an oddity who his mother’s species saw as deficient and whose golden eyes frightened his father’s people because to them any being with those eyes was a potential violator of their minds.
The physician let himself in through the forcefield, effortlessly. He held out a med-scan unit and started taking the prisoner’s readings without saying a word.
He didn’t have to, not out loud. As Linc looked up at him, golden eyes met other golden eyes. Contact was established, and conversation flowed freely after the healer had create the necessary channel.
“You’re comfortable, Mr. Casey? Fralick’s not having you abused in any way?”
“He’d love to, but he doesn’t dare. Not now, anyway,” Linc answered, and could not suppress his pleasure at being able to talk to someone this way again after seven months on Narsai with only Katy to touch his thoughts. Katy, and very briefly young Maddy.
Many of his fellow Morthans refused to converse telepathically with him, but he sensed no reluctance in this man’s mind. If anything the doctor was eager to make this connection—but then, he was the only Morthan on board this ship and no doubt he too had found out how lonely mental isolation could be.
“They’re going to get rid of us just the way they did the scramblers,” the doctor said now, and he started a second scan. Which wasn’t needed, but which gave him an excuse to remain longer. “Or not quite the same way, because now they’re starting to regret treating the scramblers as well as they did. They thought if they gave them separation pay and sent them back to their home worlds, there’d be no hard feelings; and instead, the scramblers are starting to form up the core of a rebel fighting force.”
Coldness settled into Linc’s chest. He had expected that to happen, although he had not discussed it even with his adored and implicitly trusted Katy. He had expected it, but on some level he had gone on hoping he might be wrong; and he had given his wife enough distress during his time of illness back on Terra. From months of anticipating an ugly civil war, at least, he had been able to spare her.
But he had been wrong to do so. Now she was alone down there on Narsai, and she was going to have to decide whether to protect him or to lead her people if war came. It was a choice no one should ever be required to make, and if she had to do so it would be at least partly his fault because in presuming to “protect” her he had quite possibly withheld from her the knowledge she now needed in order to protect them both.
“If that’s the only stupid thing you’ve ever done in your life, Mr. Casey, then you are incredibly lucky.” The physician had followed his thoughts effortlessly, partly because the doctor had full Morthan mental capabilities and partly because Casey had made no attempt at all to think privately. “So. Back to the rest of us Morthans in the Service. The damn fools in the top offices are debating what to do with us right now, and I’m not sure whether we’ll wind up being shipped back to Mortha or if they’ll actually be smart enough to kill us.”
“If they try to send all of you back to Mortha, will you go?” Casey added to that thought a polite reminder that he still had no name by which to think of this man. “Doctor” was, after all, only a title just like “Lieutenant Commander.”
“I’m a Marin, just as you are. The one of my given names that I use, and that’s on my Service record, is Kerle.” All Morthan surnames came from the mother to the child, so this really was one of Linc’s own distant cousins. His human father had insisted that he be called Casey on the official records, though, and since Linc had actually been born on Sestus 3 that insistence had been respected. “Probably most of us would go, we’re conditioned all our lives to heal and it’s not natural for us to fight back against what full humans want to do to us. But you’re not the only exception to that, cousin; not anymore.”
Lincoln Casey had been an oddity at the Star Service Academy forty years earlier, because Kerle Marin was correct. Morthans did not train to be military officers, not unless it was as medics. Morthans could be physically violent if they were driven to it, to protect their own bodies from immediate harm or to defend their young children or their mates; but if they had the slightest choice, they always opted to get clear of the conflict instead of seeking a physical solution. That young Linc wanted to learn to be a warrior, even in a service where exploration was an equally important function, had astonished and shamed his mother and her people. And his physician father, although fully human, had been no closer to understanding his son’s dreams than were Kalitha and the rest of the Marin clanstribe.
“There are others of us who are damned sick of being called ‘mindfuckers,’” Kerle Marin said now, in the silent link between them. “Mostly young ones, mostly males of course. But on Mortha the human residents don’t much like the way their Terran relatives treat them when they try to go home, and most human fathers of Morthan children are angry when their families won’t accept their offspring.”
That was true. Linc’s own human father had been an unfortunate exception; usually a human male who united his life with that of a Morthan female, promptly forgot all about any prejudices he might have possessed before that union and settled in to live on Mortha as if he’d been born there. Such men usually doted on their young ones, and only experienced psychological conflict about their chosen lives when their sons experienced the consequences of their mixed heritage in delayed (by human standards, anyway) sexual maturity and in their resulting flight from life on Mortha.
Gladstone Casey had done something unheard of in taking Kalitha Marin away from Mortha while she was carrying their child. And in refusing to sire more children with her, he had done something else that was not at all acceptable behavior for the human mate of a Morthan female. Linc had always wondered whether growing up as he had, far from others with whom he might have interacted telepathically, had stunted his mental abilities in the same way that a child could become physically stunted by lack of proper nourishment.
“Perhaps. Or perhaps it’s the other way you’ve often thought it might be, and as our Morthan heritage becomes more and more diluted the time will come when all of us will be more like you than not.” Kerle Marin’s thoughts became more urgent. “I have to go soon. That bastard Fralick thinks you can’t communicate with me this way, he somehow has the stupid idea that you can only talk to your wife mind-to-mind. So we have that much going for us, anyway; and now that we’ve linked once, I believe you’ll be able to contact me just as easily as I can contact you. You really aren’t like a full human. With them I always have to do the initiating, and even then the ‘conversation’ is pretty much one-sided.”