Get Off the Unicorn (5 page)

Open to me. Damia's made an alien contact. See it.

Alien? Near Damia?
The fleeting maternal concern was quickly supplanted by professional curiosity as the Rowan scanned Jeff's recent experience beyond Auriga
. Of course, Afra can go. But why on earth would Damia think Afra couldn't be reassigned as you see fit. He often has, but it's true I never get on as well with other T-3's.

 

Too true,
Jeff replied teasingly, to divert Rowan from scanning recent conversations too deeply,
but if I didn't know Afra as well as I do . . .

Jeff Raven, there has never been a single thought between me and Afra that—

Jeff laughed and she sputtered at him indignantly.

Actually,
she continued, thoughtfully,
I'd be very relieved to have Afra with Damia. I know how lonely it must be for her . . .

If she hadn't been so heavy-handed with every other high T young male, she wouldn't be lonely,
Jeff said briskly, before Rowan got started on how she had failed her daughter.
Now, is Afra in gestalt with you?

Right here. I'll leave you two men alone.

Refusing to placate her ruffled feelings, Jeff caressed her with a very affectionate thought before he felt Afra's mind touch his.

Are you sure you're only T-3?
he asked, a little surprised at the firmness in the Capellan's touch.

I'm in gestalt, after all,
Afra replied, good-naturedly.
And, in the course of twenty-odd years in the presence of the fine Raven touch, even a lowly T-3 learns a few tricks. From the expression on the Rowan's face, I'd hazard that Damia is being discussed. What's she up to now?

 

Damia had just returned to Auriga when she heard the Rowan giving the Tower official warning of the transmission of a personal capsule.

Afra?
Damia exclaimed, reaching back along her mother's touch to Callisto.

Damia!
Afra said warningly but too late.

Without waiting for the Rowan to flip the capsule halfway to Auriga, Damia blithely drew the carrier directly from Callisto, ignoring her mother's stunned and angry reaction to such an abuse of protocol.

She regretted her impulsive action almost immediately. But Afra's capsule was opening and he was swinging himself over the edge. She could not have missed his trenchant disapproval if she'd been a mere T-l5. He stood up, looking down at her, the same aloof contained man. Now why, Damia wondered irritably, had she expected Afra to change? Had
she?
And would Afra condescend to comment on those changes in her?

She rose from her own capsule, instinctively standing very erect as if to minimize the differences in their heights. Tall as she was, inches taller than her mother, she came only to Afra's shoulder.

“You will apologize to your mother, Damia,” Afra said, his unexpected tenor speaking voice a curious echo of his quiet mental tone. “Isthia taught you better manners even if we never could.”

“You've been trying to lately, though, haven't you?” The retort came out before she could stop it. Would Afra always have this effect on her?

He cocked his head to one side and regarded her steadily. She sent a swift probe which he parried easily.

“You were distressing Jenna unnecessarily, Damia. She appealed to me as the nearest male of her Clan, and because she did not wish Jeff to know of your indiscretion.”

“She chose well.” Damia was so appalled at the waspishness of her tone that she extended her hand toward him apologetically.

She could feel him throw up his mental barriers and, for a second, she wondered if he might refuse what was, after all, the height of familiarity between telepaths. But his hand rose smoothly to clasp hers, lightly, warmly, leaving her with the essential cool-green-comfortable-security that was the physical/mental double-touch of him.

Then, with a one-sided smile, he bowed to indicate he was flattered but allowed a recollection of her as a nude baby on a bath towel to cross his public mind.

She made a face at him, and substituted Larak's son. Afra blandly put “her” back on the towel beside her nephew.

“All right,” she laughed, “I'll behave.”

“About time,” he said with an affable grin, and looked beyond her to their surroundings.

He had seen Auriga in others' mind-eyes but the amber sunlight was easier on his eyes than Earth's bright yellow, so that Auriga was not a dark world to him, but a restful one. The sweet-scented breeze sweeping down from the high snowy mountain range was lightly moist and the atmosphere had a high oxygen content, exhilarating him.

“It's a lovely world you have here, Damia.”

She smiled up at him, her blue eyes brilliant under the fringes of long black lashes.

“It's a lovely young vigorous world. Come see where I live,” and she led the way from the landing stage to her dwelling.

The house perched on the high plateau above the noisy metropolis that was Auriga's major city, and Damia's Sector Headquarters. Its randomly sprawling newness had a vitality which the planned order of Earth lacked. Afra found the sight stimulating.

“It is, isn't it?” Damia agreed, following his surface thought. Then she directed his mind to her day's discovery, giving the experience exactly as it had happened to her. “And the touch is unlike anything I've ever met.”

“You certainly didn't expect it to be familiar, did you?” Afra asked in dry amusement.

“Just because they come from another galaxy doesn't mean they
can't
be humanoid,” she replied.

Afra snorted in disgust and went into her main living room.

“I'll fix your favorite protein,” she volunteered in one of her mercurial shifts.

“Oh, don't go to any trouble for me.”

“No trouble at all.” Mischievously, she allowed him to see her reaching for supplies from his home world light-years away.

“Always the thoughtful hostess,” he said, graciously inclining his head. “Have you estimated the alien's arrival?”

“I'll know better when I've had a chance to judge their relative speed,” she said. “A day or two would give me some idea.”

He watched her at the homey duties. Like most T-1s, she enjoyed manual work and performed the daily housekeeping herself, without relying on mechanical services most households considered necessities. In a few minutes she set before him a perfectly cooked attractively served meal which he greeted perfunctorily.

“Can't I ever impress you?” she asked, half wistful, half sharp.

“Why should you want to?” he asked, affecting mild surprise. “I knew you from your first incoherent thought.”

“Familiarity breeds contempt, huh?”

“Contempt, no. Understanding, yes. Particularly at our levels. And, of course, confusion, wherever you are,” Afra replied. “Very good, just the way I like it,” he added appreciatively, indicating his dinner.

Damia made a face at him across the table, and with a deliberate disregard for T- manners, reached a portion of the sauce-steeped meat into her mouth without spilling a drop. When Afra continued to ignore her, she sighed and picked up her fork.

“Shall I take over the regular workload, Damia, and leave you free for surveillance?”

“We don't have a heavy traffic right now. It's between harvests in this system, and manufacturing is slow for the next few months. The usual amount of tourists, though.”

“How have you covered your absences with the staff?”

“Just told them I've been resting. I'll account for your presence as a preliminary survey for FT & T. Right? As if any of those lamebrains could ‘search' me,” she concluded contemptuously.

“So true,” Afra, replied, indicating in his public mind his professional respect for her.

She was not deaf to the irony and was about to reply hotly, but went back to eating rather than give him further satisfaction.

It was unprecedented, this contact with sentient life from what was probably another galaxy, yet for all her capriciousness, Damia had not permitted a hint of panic or her own inner excitement to escape. In that she heeded one of the basic tenets of her position. Panic enough was fomented within the complex Federated Worlds in the normal course of power struggles, revolutions, ecological problems, and pioneer exigencies. By common consent, instantaneous communications between planets no longer meant instant hysteria of worlds unconcerned with the emergency. Federated World Government handled the reports of all local disputes which were, by law, reported to them by FT & T Primes. Interstellar political or natural disasters were not added to the emotional burdens already suffered by populations. Primes exercised the option to disperse or retain reports which might affect minorities within their jurisdiction, but digests of all communications were, by law, available on request.

Damia propped her chin in her hands and looked earnestly at Afra across the table. She sighed heavily.

“You were right to call me to task for ‘tasting' Larak and Jenna. But I did want to know what it would be like to be in love and then bring forth a baby.”

“And . . . ?”

“Apart from the pain, I guess it's rewarding enough.”

“You don't sound too sure.”

Damia cocked her head and traced an involved pattern on the table with her index finger.

“It must be different to do it yourself, no matter how deeply you scan.”

A trace thought behind her shield, called forth by her remark, sent through Afra a bolt of terror which he barely managed to contain. She was unconsciously censoring, and it had to do with the alien aura and with her own desire for the experience of motherhood. But trace thought it was, and he had only that one millisecond impression, tantalizing, terrorizing.

“Why, Afra, why?” Damia continued, unaware of the reaction she had produced in him, her own mind absorbed in self-pity. She launched herself physically from the table in one lightning move, and stood at the window wall, her back as expressive of her frustration and bitterness as her mind. “Why am I a loner? The Rowan found Jeff, but where, when will I find someone?”

“Damia, you've met every psionic prospect Talent above Class 7 in the Nine-Star League.”

“Them,” she dismissed those candidates scornfully.

“Young Nicos, the T-5 working with Jeran on Deneb, was mighty taken with you. Calm down a bit—”

“Nicos!” Damia's eyes flashed blue fire. “That post-adolescent mess! Why, it'd be five or six years before he's even presentable.”

Afra was no stranger to such dismissals. He'd heard many since the time Damia had begun to be interested in the opposite sex as a precocious adolescent. There had been times when he wished he had followed his own deep-hidden desire. But he had given a great deal of thought to the variables, and knew that he could only wait. He knew how hard it must be for Damia to watch others pairing off, achieving the enviable total accord that telepaths enjoyed, and for which she was so eager. Her very brilliance and beauty caused many otherwise willing mates to shy away. Usually, she would talk herself out of her mood, but tonight there was a new undercurrent that was dangerous in its intensity.

“Is that why you so eagerly await the arrival of the aliens?” Afra said in a soft drawl, deliberately leaching all emotion out of his words. “On the off chance they're biologically compatible? Do you envision your soul mate winging across the void to you?”

She whirled to face him, her eyes wide with rage.

“Don't
you
taunt me, Afra,” she said in a hoarse whisper.

He inclined his head in apology.

“Better get some sleep, Damia,” he said gently, and gave her a little mental push toward her bedroom.

“You're right. I am tired, Afra, and excited, and silly. It's just . . . just that sometimes I feel like nothing more than a useful mental stevedore: not a person at all. Then this happens . . . and I . . . I have the fantastic chance to establish communication with alien minds . . .”

Again Afra caught the unmistakable and unconscious suppression of a thought within the maelstrom of her weariness.

Damia turned on her heel and left the room. Afra watched the sunset turn the plateau a deep tangerine, then diminish in the east. Brooding over the evening's conversation, he waited until the roiling activity of Damia's mind subsided into the even beat of sleep. Then he, too, went to bed. Carefully, just as he was on the edge of sleep, he reinforced his mental screens so that none of his longing for her would escape. He wondered, in that honest interval between consciousness and dreaming, if he would have enough strength left to cope with a third generation of Raven women.

The next day they initiated the new routine. Damia handled the long-distance items first. Then after the incoming workload had been sorted out and there were no more demands on her talent, she departed into space, to “rest,” leaving Afra to deal with the remaining tasks.

Although the function of a Prime was complex, a two-minute mental briefing by Damia supplied Afra with the background of immediate problems and all the procedures peculiar to that station. The memory bank would give any additional information. When the focal talents of the gestalt were exchanged, not even one-half a beat of the pulse of the Aurigean Sector Headquarters was missed. The allocation of duties pleased Afra because it would give him the opportunity to use the gestalt of the Station to reach Jeff without Damia knowing. She would be too busy “reaching” for the alien touch to be aware of Afra. The temporary breach of her trust in him was offset by the absolving knowledge of its necessity.

In terms of intergalactic distances, the aliens approached at a snail's pace: by interstellar references, faster than the speed of light. A week passed and then one evening Damia returned from her daily “rest” bursting with news. She moved from the landing area right into the living room, where Afra was lounging.