Papa loved her, and it was because of Papa that K’lor and P’tara had worked in the Fralick household, of course; but Papa was so busy with so many other things. And until yesterday, she had seen Mum only in alternate years—and then only during visits on a few successive days for a few hours each session, with carefully regulated and monitored communications substituting for direct contact the rest of the time. Yet right now she wanted with all her soul to go back to Mum and to Linc, and when she heard her father’s voice outside the half-open hatch she did not feel the relief that she knew she ought to be feeling.
The man whose mind was touching hers sensed both her distress, and its cause. He said in his silent way, “Don’t be scared, Maddy. He thinks he’s doing what’s best for you, and he’ll take good care of you if he can. Stay with him for now, and whatever you do don’t let him know you’ve talked with me. That’s going to make him angry. Very, very angry.”
“I know it will. And I won’t do it.” Maddy almost nodded, because communicating in this way was so new to her. But she was glad she hadn’t done that, because the hatch opened fully just then and her father stepped through it.
“Well! Awake finally, are you, Madeleine?” Sometimes he used her formal given name, usually when he was feeling especially sentimental and didn’t want to express that feeling. He came to her now, and took the kind of med-scanner that was in any modern household’s bathroom and checked her vital signs with practiced swiftness. “And you’re fine now. Good, I thought if I got you far enough away from that mindfucker Casey you’d recover.”
“That what?” Maddy asked. Not that she didn’t recognize the vernacular term for sexual intercourse, even she had not been that sheltered; but hearing it used in a compound word with “mind” was completely new to her. And whatever it meant when used that way, she suspected it was no compliment.
“Sorry, love. But he almost killed both you and your mother, and you at least I could protect. So I did.” Fralick sat down on the edge of one bunk, and pushed her toward the other so that she automatically sat down too. “It’s time for you to understand what he is, Maddy. And that’s why I never left you alone with your mother until yesterday, and now I’ll never do that again. I’m sorry, I made a terrible mistake when I brought you to Narsai; but I had no idea Casey could get at you, too, and I figured you were safe from Romanov.”
“Papa?” Maddy was thoroughly confused now. But this was her familiar father, and although he clearly was angry his venom wasn’t directed at her; so she sat still, and waited for him to explain himself.
“Mads, we don’t allow Morthans to set foot on Kesra and we have good reasons. Do you know what they can do to other people’s minds?” Fralick paused, clearly expecting an answer.
“They can feel other people’s emotions, and sometimes they can read other people’s thoughts. That has something to do with how they heal, the Morthans that leave Mortha and work as doctors.” Maddy chose her words carefully. Even though she could not believe that her father would, or even could, really do anything to harm Lincoln Casey, she still knew instinctively that Casey had been right when he’d instructed her not to let Fralick know they could speak mind to mind.
“Yes, they can. And that’s not natural, Maddy. That’s not right, it shouldn’t be allowed. I’ve always thought so; but when Lincoln Casey first knew your mother, and then when they both first knew me, he wasn’t supposed to be like other Morthans. He was supposed to be no different than a full human, except for those eyes of his. If I’d known that through all those years, while he and your mother were serving on ships together and I was off somewhere else in the Diplomatic Service, she was letting him do whatever he wanted to her in private…!” Fralick flushed. He was not used to talking about such matters with his female child, and doing so now embarrassed him. But clearly he thought it was important, clearly he was making himself do this because he felt that he must.
“Papa, you don’t mean Mum made love to Linc while she was your wife.” Maddy, by contrast, was not the least bit embarrassed. But she was surprised, because however many times George Fralick might have thought about his ex-wife’s suspected unfaithfulness he had never once mentioned such a possibility to their daughter. He had not said much of anything to her about Katy, one way or the other, because he knew that if he did so and if the family arbitration authorities on Kesra found out about it his extremely favorable custody and visitation arrangements were very apt to be altered to give Katy more access.
“I think she must have,” Fralick said now, with brutal honesty. “She let him into her mind, anyway, and that’s as bad as letting him bed her—or worse. Which is why I used the word I did. Even though it’s not a polite word, it’s certainly an accurate one for Lincoln Casey and for every other Morthan male who dares to touch a human woman.”
“But they’re married now,” Maddy said. She could think of nothing else to say, and now she wanted her father to stop. Even for an inquisitive girl of thirteen, there were some things that plainly it was better not to know—or at least, it was better not to find out from one’s father.
“That’s disgusting, but true. And somehow when Casey had a medical problem a little while ago, when something made it hard for him to breathe, his condition made you and your mother both have similar difficulties. I understand why, with her; when a human woman sleeps with a Morthan, she lets him inside her mind at the same time she—well, you know how that works, Maddy.” Again, Fralick blushed.
“Yes. P’tara told me, and she showed me pictures of how humans do it because she’s Kesran and they don’t do it the same way. With them it takes—”
“I know what it takes.” Fralick cut his daughter off. “Anyhow! I wasn’t surprised your mother got the spillover from Casey’s problem, and I can’t be sorry for her because she’s spent years getting herself into that kind of attunement to him. But I was scared to death I was going to lose you, and the only connection you’ve got to the man—if I can call him a man—is that he was around your mother almost all the time she was pregnant with you. You’re my child, I had that checked a long time ago and he had nothing to do with conceiving you physically; but I guess he must have had some kind of prenatal influence on your mind. Something that never would have showed up, never would have affected you through your whole lifetime, if I hadn’t been stupid enough to bring you to Narsai.”
Maddy sat very still. Her papa had checked, to see whether or not she was his biological child?
He no doubt meant that to reassure her, as it had reassured him when he had done it; but for Maddy that act had the reverse connotation. Papa’s love for her depended entirely on her being of his siring? If she had been made from some other man’s genetic material, he would not have taken care of her through her babyhood and would not be looking at her now with that jealous fervor shining in his eyes?
Although putting words to her feelings now was beyond her, Maddy knew the difference between protectiveness and possessiveness. What she saw in her father’s familiar gray gaze now was not something that comforted her. Instead, it scared her.
But Linc was right, she could not let him see that. After a moment she said, with her mother’s sure sense of tactics and with all of George Fralick’s own careful diplomacy, “Papa, you weren’t stupid to bring me here. You didn’t know, and I don’t think Mum knew either. But what are you going to do now? You didn’t tell me yet what ship this is, even.”
“I didn’t, did I?” Fralick’s face had been rigid with hate. It relaxed now, and he smiled as he became Maddy’s beloved father once more. “We didn’t get far underway yesterday, aboard the Archangel, before we were hailed by a corporate marshal. He’d come all the way from New Orient, looking for a gen who ran away. He had orders from the commodore at New Orient instructing Captain Giandrea to cooperate, so we had to come about and return to Narsai since that was where he expected to find the gen.”