Dream Called Time (19 page)

I gave him a grim smile. “Let me handle that.”

After assuring Xonea that I wouldn’t let Maggie out of my sight, I went over to her and informed her that Shon and I were leaving. “I have to examine Healer Valtas and determine if there is any damage to his body.”

She flicked a glance in his direction. “There is not.” She pointed at the guard. “Why do these males carry such crude destructive devices?”

“They use them to shoot things they don’t like,” I advised her. “So be nice. How can you tell Healer Valtas has no damage to his body?”

“I can see his insides. They have already healed.” She tried to touch the guard’s pulse rifle, making him step back. To him she said, “I wish to examine that device. Give it to me.”

“Uh-uh.” I took her arm and guided her away from him. “We don’t let kids play with guns.”

“I am a thousand years older than any being on this vessel,” she said, sounding sulky now. “And I do not play.”

I stopped and turned to her. “If you’re not going to behave yourself, I’ll tell the captain to dump your ass on a drone launch and send you back to the planet.”

She frowned. “But I cannot go back. You have not yet answered my questions.” Her expression turned suspicious. “Are you going to tell me how you were able to use the collector?”

“I don’t know. Maybe when I feel better about you.” I nodded to Shon, who followed us out of the bay and down the corridor.

“Where are you taking me?” Maggie asked in between staring at everyone who passed.

“Medical.” I marched her into the lift. “I want to see if your assessment of Healer Valtas is correct.”

“I am not wrong,” she said, her tone growing lofty again. “I am never wrong. We Jxin do not make errors.”

I thought of what Future Maggie had said to me to try to keep me away from the derelict. “Someday you might revise that statement, honey.”

She spent the rest of the time it took us to reach Medical explaining to me how she could not be compared to the food product of a hive insect, complaining about the inefficient design of the ship, and making general observations about how bored she was. As we had on the launch, Shon and I ignored her, which seemed to be the only way to keep her attention focused.

ChoVa was making rounds when we entered the bay, and handed off a chart to a nurse before coming over. “Cherijo, we were deeply concerned about your abduction. The captain just signaled and apprised us of your”—she glanced at Maggie—“situation.”

“You are not like the others,” Maggie said, inspecting ChoVa. “You cannot regulate your body temperature as Cherijo and Shon do. And you are green and scaly and have many teeth.” She glanced past the Hsktskt healer and became riveted. “
What
is
that
?”

“I am called PyrsVar.” The rogue came up to Maggie and sniffed her. “She smells strange. Did you find her on the planet?”

“It speaks.” Maggie’s expression filled with revulsion as she walked around him, staring at his body. “You made this, Cherijo?”

“I am not a
this
,” PyrsVar told her. “I am a person, like you.”

“You are not like me. Or like them.” She squinted as she came around to the front of him. “You are two people. But you are one. Your insides are all wrong.” She turned to me. “This thing was made, not born.”

“Lots of us were made,” I reminded her. “And PyrsVar is not a thing. He is a person, and you will treat him as such.”

“But he is ...” Lost for words, she shook her head. “How could you allow him to take apart another being and put the pieces inside himself so?”

“This was forced on me by an evil one who deceived me,” the rogue answered for me. “Healer Torin is trying to restore me to be as I was born.”

“You have to separate him,” Maggie told me. “He must be made into the two again.”

“I’m working toward a less drastic solution, but we don’t have time for that now,” I said, and turned my back on her to speak to ChoVa. “We need to do a full workup on Shon.” Using my hands close to my chest, I made the Jorenian gesture for “no.” “Nurse, can I have a blank chart?” When it was handed to me, I made some quick notes, explaining my plan to ChoVa, and handed it to the Hsktskt. “Set up assessment room five for the examination, and monitor him from the main console.”

“There is nothing wrong with him,” Maggie said as she followed us into the room. “I told you that.”

“We primitive beings have to follow certain procedures,” I told her. “None of which include relying on the word of Jxin as a diagnostic tool.”

“You could be employing your time to do other things.” When I didn’t react to that, she said, “How long will this take?”

Through the view panel I saw ChoVa working at the main console. “Oh, no time at all.”

While I performed a thorough exam of the oKiaf, ChoVa used the scanners embedded in the walls—the room had been designed for healers to remotely assess dangerous or quarantined patients—to scan Maggie, me, and Shon. I wanted to be sure the oKiaf and I were not contaminated with any more protocrystal, but more important, I wanted to find out exactly what Maggie was.

Shon’s vitals and scans read normal for his species, with a slight elevation in synaptic activity. “Any headache or aftereffects?”

“I feel as I did before we came into the rift,” he said carefully, and touched his chest. “I think my difficulties after the passage were caused by the protocrystal infection.”

“It did not infect you,” Maggie said. “It merged with you. Do I have to stay here? I want to look at that PyrsVar person again, and this is taking forever.”

I glanced at ChoVa, who nodded to indicate the scans were completed. “You can talk to him, but don’t be offensive. He can’t help what he is.”

“None of you can.” She left the exam room.

As soon as we were alone, I rubbed the back of my neck. “She’s like my daughter was when she was a toddler.”

“She is quite childlike.” Shon looked thoughtful. “She has no parents, I assume.”

“I didn’t see any kids down there. Maybe after they attained immortality, they lost the need to reproduce.” I saw his gaze turn shrewd. “What are you thinking?”

“She maintains that she is superior to us, and yet since we came from the planet, she has been recurrently boasting about herself to you,v he said. “It is as if she wishes to impress you.”

I thought about it. “You mean if she genuinely believed that she was superior, she wouldn’t bother bragging to me. The same way I don’t go around telling my cats how wonderful I am.”

“I think it more accurate to say that she wishes to obtain your approval. In the same manner a child wishes a parent to admire their accomplishments,” he said.

I covered my eyes and groaned. “She has to grow up and be my mother someday. I can’t be hers.”

“Perhaps you were
her
maternal influencer.” Shon fastened the front of his tunic. “You remarked on how different her speech is from the Maggie you knew in our time. And yet just now she used Terran slang: ‘This is taking forever.’ ”

“She absorbed the language from me when we were on the planet, she said. The language she taught me from birth.” My head whirled. “When I was a kid, I always wondered why she talked the way she did. And I’m the one who taught her. God.”

Shon touched my shoulder. “I do not mean to upset you. But everything you do in this time, especially in Maggie’s presence, could have a direct effect on you in the future. Be careful, Cherijo.”

Maggie seemed to be getting along with PyrsVar, who was showing her how to operate the prep unit, so I called ChoVa into my office, where she related to me and Shon what the room scanners had revealed.

“She appears to be somewhat humanoid,” the Hsktskt healer said as she pulled up a holoimage of Maggie’s form. “Her internal organs are similar in size and arrangement to that of certain biped species from our time, but they no longer appear to have active function. There are some other, startling differences, such as this.” She stripped the derma, musculature, and organs from the holoimage, reducing it to a skeleton.

“Her bones are transparent.” I magnified the image. “No cells. No marrow.”

“She does not possess any blood cells, either. Her body fluids are as clear as her skeletal system. Here is the most interesting aspect of the scan.” ChoVa switched the display to thermal, and we saw Maggie’s bone structure begin to twinkle with millions of tiny white lights.

“What is that?”

“Our medsysbank could not identify it,” she advised me. “It does not register as matter or heat, only light.”

“They absorb sunlight,” I said. “Maybe they’re converting it into this light. Some kind of advanced photosynthesis. It would explain why they no longer need to eat or rest.”

“Are their bones made of crystal?” Shon asked.

“They don’t scan as mineral, bone, or any other matter.” ChoVa turned to me. “I never believed I would encounter a living organism whose physiology is beyond our comprehension, but it would appear that this female’s species has evolved beyond the limits of our knowledge and understanding.”

“Maggie told me on the planet that they are purifying themselves for this Great Ascension. From what I observed, they’re preparing to discard their corporeal bodies and transition to a higher-level existence.” I thought for a moment. “Once they abandon their bodies, they won’t be able to exist here anymore. The process has to be irreversible.”

“What has that to do with us?” Shon asked.

“From the time I left Terra, Maggie has been communicating telepathically with me, manipulating me and using me to carry out her orders.” I turned to him. “The Jxin didn’t make us immortal healers just so that we would live long enough to combat the black crystal. They couldn’t do it by themselves, or they would have. After they ascend, they’re going to realize they screwed up. They’re going to create us to clean up the mess they left behind.” I uttered a single bitter laugh. “We’re not doctors, Shon. We’re janitors.”

He didn’t like it any more than I did. “We must stop them from ascending.”

“How? They aren’t going to listen to us. On the planet, they barely acknowledged our existence.” I pulled up the scanner readings again. “Why didn’t their synaptic activity register?”

“It did, briefly,” ChoVa corrected. “The scanner’s display stopped registering when the comparative exceeded the maximum scale of nine hundred and ninety-nine trillion.”

A nurse called in on the com panel. “Healer Cherijo?”

“Hold on.” I looked at the Hsktskt. “Their synaptic activity is a quadrillion times more than ours?”

“At the very least,” she agreed.

At last I understood why Maggie’s people had been so quick to dismiss us. “A Jxin having a conversation with us would be about the same as me trying to having a heart-to-heart talk with bacteria.”

“Healer Cherijo,” the nurse called again over the panel.

Feeling impatient over the interruption, I punched the button. “What is it?”

“It is the female visitor,” the nurse said. “She and the crossbreed went into one of the surgical suites.”

The last thing I needed right now was Maggie fooling around with the equipment. “Please tell them to come out of there.”

“I attempted to, Healer. The female secured the entry from the inside before she initiated a sterile field.” The nurse sounded frightened. “According to the power console, she has enabled the lascalpel.”

ChoVa shot to her feet the same moment I did. “PyrsVar.”

The three of us ran to the suite, which was in procedure lockdown. The panel refused to accept my emergency override codes.

I tried the intercom. “Maggie? Open this door.”

“There is no need for you to come in,” she said calmly. “I am helping you with your work.”

“Open it this instant,” I insisted.

“I will when I am finished.” She shut off the com.

ChoVa used her fist to punch a hole into the entry panel, from which a shower of sparks exploded. Then she dug her claws into the panels’ center seam and wrenched them apart.

“Deactivate sterile field,” I called out as she rushed in, and then Shon and I followed her. We stopped beside her as we saw Maggie and PyrsVar, or what was left of him.

“You should not have done that,” Maggie said as she passed her hand over the rogue’s gaping chest cavity, causing it to glow with light as one of his hearts floated out of it. “The air on board this vessel is not pure.”

She deposited the heart into a second body that lay on another gurney, a body that also had an open chest wound—one that was filled with PyrsVar’s bloodied Jorenian organs.

Twelve

“What have you done?” ChoVa said as she rushed over to PyrsVar’s side. “You have killed him.”

“I removed the organs that do not belong in him,” Maggie said. “He is not dead.”

Nor was he anesthetized, I saw, but mercifully he was unconscious. “Was he awake when you started cutting into him?”

“I made him go to sleep,” Maggie said. “The other one was already asleep.”

“What other one?” I demanded. “Who is that? One of the interns? Where did you get him?”

“I did not get him. I made him.” She nodded toward the Jorenian body on the second gurney. “I used the stunted, sleeping one trapped in the Hsktskt’s chest to make the form. I needed something to serve as the receptacle, and he was not using the other.”

As soon as she had transferred the organ into the Jorenian body, I shoved her aside and inspected the rogue’s chest cavity. She may have been using some form of light energy to perform the horrific surgery, but she was no surgeon. She’d butchered him.

“Shon, get into your gear.” I pulled on a shroud, a mask, and gloves. “ChoVa, see to the Jorenian.”

“I will help you,” Maggie offered.

“You will stand aside,” I told her, “while I try to repair what you’ve done to this man.”

She looked mystified. “I have done the work. I have separated him.”

“You’ve hacked him to pieces.” I put PyrsVar over onto the heart-lung machine and pulled down the lascalpel. Maggie had cauterized the severed vessels as she removed the organs, which would buy me a little time. “I need four scrubs nurses in here,” I shouted.

ChoVa had pulled on her gear and was now focused on the Jorenian, although she kept looking over at PyrsVar.

“It’s all right,” I told her. “I’ve got him.”

“We could put him in stasis now,” she said desperately. “You could use the retroviral compound to rebuild his body.”

“I designed it to work in an immersion tank, and he’d never survive that.” I turned my head and saw the monitors weren’t hooked up. “Shon, scan him and give me his vitals.”

“BP is dropping, heart rate decreasing,” he told me as he performed the scan and then started anesthetic. “He needs blood, but what type?”

“Auto-infuse him for now.” I looked over at the nurses coming in. “Do we have any crossbreed blood synthesized?”

“He is not a crossbreed any longer,” Maggie announced. “I have purified him.”

“Shut up,” I snapped, and turned to Shon. “Type his blood.”

“I already have.” He met my gaze. “It’s Hsktskt, type J.”

Thirty minutes ago PyrsVar had been a crossbreed. “It can’t be. Do it again.”

“I have, three times. All the readings are identical.” Shon sent one of the nurses to retrieve all the units of Hsktskt J blood we had stored. “Maybe we should permit the Jxin to complete the separation.”

“It is done,” Maggie told him. “You said you wanted them separated, Cherijo. That is what I did.”

“Can you repair all this damage?” I asked Shon.

He gave the chest cavity a long look. “The organs will have to be in their proper position for me to heal them.”

“That I can do.” I pulled down the lascalpel and started on the heart. “ChoVa?”

“The Jorenian’s heart has begun to beat on its own,” she told me, her voice harsh. “I am completing the liver transplant. Can you save him?”

I exchanged a look with Shon. “We’ll bring him back.”

As I worked on putting PyrsVar’s remaining organs back in their proper places, I cursed myself for leaving Maggie alone. Her literal interpretation of our casual remarks might cost the rogue his life, and ChoVa the love of hers. As soon as I could, I was putting her on a launch—or pushing her out of the nearest convenient air lock.

“You are angry with me,” I heard Maggie say in an astonished voice. “That is why you behave this way. But why?”

“I’m not angry,” I assured her. “I’m furious. I could kill you with my bare hands.”

She looked sulky again. “No, you cannot.”

“What makes you think you can rip open a man’s chest and start pulling organs out of it?”

“He was dying.”

“He was fine.” But even as I said that, I moved down and saw the condition of his only remaining kidney. It was atrophied, but with a little luck Shon could heal it. “What did you do with his other kidney?”

“It was dead tissue, and it was poisoning him,” she replied blithely. “I removed it and destroyed it.”

ChoVa made a strange sound. “That explains the strangeness in his color. He was very pale today; he must have been in renal failure. But he never said anything to me.”

PyrsVar probably thought admitting something was wrong was unmanly. Since his Jorenian kidneys had not been functioning, without treatment he probably would have died in a few hours.

“Why didn’t you come and tell me this?” I asked Maggie.

“I wished to, but the male said I should not,” she told me. “He believed that you would not permit me to separate him. He said it was his decision, not yours.” She came over to the table. “The derma will take several weeks to regenerate. I promised that I would also help regrow the two missing limbs and his rear appendage.”

“You’re not to touch a single scale on his body,” I said through my teeth. “Or anyone else on the ship. Ever again. Is that clear?”

“Your language is quite simple,” she assured me. “I understand you perfectly.”

I finished reconnecting the organs in PyrsVar’s lower abdomen and checked over the major vessels in the rest of his limbs. “All right,” I said to Shon. “Your turn.”

He stripped off his gloves and came around the table, inspecting the open chest. “I will begin with the heart, and work out from there. It will not take long. As soon as his pulse and respiration restart, you must remove him from the machine.”

I took Shon’s place by the equipment. “I’m ready when you are.”

The oKiaf placed both paws over the open chest cavity and closed his eyes as his pads started to glow.

“He uses the light as we do, for purification,” Maggie said, astounded. “Why did you not have him separate them?”

“Be quiet,” I snapped at her, staring at PyrsVar’s organs as Shon healed them one by one. As soon as the heart pulsed and the lungs inflated, I took the rogue off life support. “His heart is beating, ChoVa,” I said over my shoulder. “He’s breathing on his own now.”

She murmured something under her breath, maybe a prayer. “I will need your assistance when you are finished there,” she said. “This Jorenian could awake before I am able to close.”

When Shon nodded to me, I left him with PyrsVar and went over to the second gurney. Despite her distress ChoVa had done an excellent job transplanting the remains of the Jorenian liver, although there appeared to be another half still intact in the chest.

I started anesthetic to keep him unconscious before I inspected the rest of her work. “The heart looks good. What about the bowel?”

“It was not as lengthy as it should be, and then . . .” She looked at me over the edge of her mask. “It began to grow inside him.”

“I accelerated the growth of some of the organs that required enlargement to attain the correct size,” Maggie put in. “That is the only way they would work.”

“I’ll take it from here,” I told the Hsktskt. “Go and see if Shon is ready to close.”

Once I had scanned the Jorenian’s chest and ensured all the organs were functioning, I closed the cross-shaped incision Maggie had used to open his chest. The last of my sutures ended just below the collarbone, and I noticed a small black spot on the side of the throat. It was the male’s ClanSign, the uplifted wing that was the mark of HouseClan Torin.

I hadn’t thought about what Maggie would build out of PyrsVar’s Jorenian organs—or whom.

The male’s black hair had already grown several inches out of his scalp and had fallen to cover half his face. I knew that mouth, but I still tugged off my glove and brushed the hair back so I could see the nose and eyes and brows. The four parallel scars that had been on PyrsVar’s face were gone.

I looked down at the face that I had never expected to see again in this lifetime or any other. “Kao.”

Maggie pushed me away from the gurney, tearing my shroud at the same time. “Cherijo, you must go out into the large room now.”

I wanted to deck her, but as she’d pointed out on the planet, I’d just hurt my hand. “I’m not done here.”

“You are needed.” She wrapped her hand around my wrist, used her other hand to blow a hole through one of the wall panels, and dragged me through. She gestured at the gaping medical staff. “Make them move.”

“Move where?” I tried to pull free, but she had a grip like a snow tiger’s. “Stop it.”

Maggie turned to the staff. “Move back. Hurry.” When several of them extended their claws, she jerked on my arm. “Make them move. If I do it, they will be hurt.”

I didn’t want her to kill my people. “I Shield the Jxin,” I said to keep them from attacking her. “Evacuate immediately to the corridor.”

The staff quickly filed out, although several still looked back at us with murderous expressions.

I turned to Maggie. “Now, what is the big—”

A wide, powerful surge of energy shot from the lower deck and punched a hole through the upper, scorching the alloy and then melting through it. The blast fanned out from there into a dozen and then a hundred crackling streams. The displaced air slammed into me, and only Maggie’s hand kept me from being knocked flat on my back.

In the center of the energy streams a dark vortex formed, pulling in the power all around it and billowing outward. Every piece of equipment in the bay went dark, while datapads, charts, and instruments flew into the air and began whirling around the twisting mass like debris until the last of the energy was swallowed up. The vortex brightened and began to shrink as if it was collapsing in on itself.

“Can you move it off the ship?” I shouted to Maggie over the noise.

“Wait,” she said, peering into the mass. “They are almost through now.”

“They?” I echoed, squinting as the light grew blinding. “Someone is in that thing? Who is it?”

“I do not know.” She looked almost afraid now. “Now they come.”

Without warning the vortex disappeared into itself, and the small cloud of debris that had encircled it fell to the deck. A few crackles of residual energy still buzzed in the air as two figures appeared: a tall adult and a small child.

I didn’t believe my eyes, even when they solidified. “Reever?” I had to walk over and reach out my trembling hand so that I could touch my daughter. “Marel.”

Her face looked dead white, and when she spoke, her voice came out in a whisper. “I found her, Daddy.”

Reever caught her as she fainted, and lifted her against his chest. Over her golden curls he stared at me, becoming my mirror, both of us gaping at each other as if we were seeing ghosts. “Cherijo?”

I took Marel from my husband and carried her over to the nearest berth. She lay limp and unresponsive in my arms, and as soon as I checked her vitals, I knew she was in shock. I shouted for a nurse as I checked her pupils, which barely contracted, and quickly her small form for external injuries.

“What happened?” I demanded.

“I don’t know. We were on Joren, at the Torin pavilion.” Reever’s voice sounded hollow. “Marel and I were sitting in the courtyard.”

“Where you were sucked into an energy vortex that transported you six million years into the past, where you just happened to land on this ship in my medical bay?” I glared at him. “You might want to run that by me again, Duncan. Starting with, how?”

“We were in the courtyard,” he insisted. “She has been trying to signal the
Sunlace
without success, and asking me each day when you would be returning. I felt it was time to tell her the truth. I explained to her that your ship had vanished into a rift in space.”

I scanned her for internal hemorrhaging, but found nothing. “Then what?”

“She claimed she could find you. I told her that the rift had disappeared, that it was impossible even to know where you were.” He flexed his fingers as if they were stiff. “She put her hand in mine and smiled up at me. The next thing I knew, we were here.”

“You’re telling me that our daughter can tele-port through time?” I snarled. “Have you lost your mind?”

“He speaks the truth.” Maggie appeared beside me and looked down at Marel. “She can sense the places where space is thin and conduits can be made. She is not particularly skilled at making them stable, however. I felt it begin to collapse before they emerged.”

My daughter was in shock, I was surrounded by crazy people, and we were all stranded millions of years from the nearest medical facility. I shouted for the only person who could help me save my daughter’s life. “Shon.”

“Here.” He didn’t spare Reever a second glance as he looked at my kid. “She is very weak. I can hardly feel her.”

I could barely take in enough air to speak. “Can you bring her back? Please?”

“This is not damage to the body, Cherijo,” he said. He turned to Maggie. “You know what has to be done, do you not?”

She lifted her chin. “She said I was not to touch another being on this vessel.”

I grabbed the front of her robe and yanked her close. “Don’t you dare start acting snotty again. If you can heal her, do it. Now.”

“The conduit was unstable. As she tried to keep it from collapsing on her and the man, she left some of herself between. She cannot live without it.” Maggie looked down at my fist. “You are angry with me again.”

“I apologize.” Knowing my daughter’s life hung in the balance, I could afford to lie through my teeth. “Please, if there is anything you can do to repair the damage, help her.”

“I do not have what she needs,” Maggie told me. “What she left behind is lost. It can be replaced, but it must come from the source. It must come from you.”

“I don’t understand.”

“She is not exactly like you,” the Jxin said, “but she has some of you, and some of him.” She nodded at Reever. “She needs what you gave her before, when you made her.”

“What? What exactly does she need?”

Maggie tapped my wrist. “It is in your blood.”

“My blood is poisonous,” I snapped. “I can’t give her a transfusion. It’ll kill her.”