LITMIR.BIZ

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are stubborn.”

      “Good leaders.”

      “Agreed.” Rhemun got up. “You have my permission to speak to Hahnson, and I promise not to mention it until you give me equal permission.” He chuckled. “Will that do?”

      “Indeed it will.”

      “I wish you great good fortune with the ambassador’s daughter. And I look forward to meeting her, as well.”

      “How is Edris?” Mekashe asked.

      “Recovering very well. Would you like to see our daughter?” he added.

      “Yes!”

      Rhemun pulled out a miniature holo and held it up. There was a tiny, black-headed baby in the cradle of her beaming mother’s arms. Edris, looking as lovely as ever before, and Kipling, their son, standing beside his mother, grinning.

      “This is Larisse,” he said with pride.

      “A delightful child! She will look more like you than Kipling does, I think,” Mekashe commented.

      “I think so, as well. She is the light of my life already, as my son and my mate already were.” The little girl was only the second female born into Clan Alamantimichar in thousands of years. Princess Lyceria was the first.

      “I rejoice in your good fortune,” Mekashe said. “And I look forward to rejoicing in my own!”

      “Speak to Hahnson. I’ll see you before you leave, yes?”

      “Of course!”

      * * *

      STRICK HAHNSON LOOKED more like a wrestler than a physician. He had been with the Morcai Battalion since its creation, in the horror of the Rojok death camp, Ahkmau. At least, his original had been. The true Hahnson was tortured and killed by the Rojoks, who were trying to find an almost fatally ill Dtimun hidden in the camp by his cellmates. Dtimun had cloned the physician for Captain Holt Stern and Dr. Madeline Ruszel as recompense for snatching them out of the Terravegan Strategic Space Command and into the ranks of his newly formed Morcai Battalion. It had been a bittersweet reunion. Stern, too, was a clone. In the old days, the two of them would never have been able to return to Terravegan society because they were clones. There was a terrible prejudice there. But the emperor, out of gratitude for their help in saving his son, had given all the humans of the Morcai Battalion Cehn-Tahr citizenship. The clones of the Holconcom, and the human ones, had meshed quite well together.

      Hahnson looked up, surprised to see Mekashe walking into his lab. He grinned and locked forearms. “What a nice surprise,” he enthused. “How in the world did you get here without the ship alerting everybody?”

      “The holon,” Mekashe said easily, and with a smile. Hahnson was one of only a handful of humans who knew about the holon tech. “I have a very personal matter to discuss.”

      “Still amazes me,” Strick said, walking around the Tri-D3-d image to study Mekashe. “I can even touch you,” he added, doing it, “and you feel real.”

      “It suffices, when mates are separated,” the other male remarked wickedly.

      “Well, sit down. How are you liking your new job? And why are you here?”

      Mekashe took out the white noise ball and put it on the table. “New tech,” he told Hahnson. “It can even block the emperor. You did not hear me say this, because I am not here.”

      “Absolutely,” Hahnson agreed, grinning.

      “You were bonded to a Cehn-Tahr during the end of the Great Galaxy War, were you not?” Mekashe asked, very solemnly. “I apologize for bringing up such a painful subject,” he added quickly when he saw the look on Hahnson’s face.

      “It was a long time ago.” Hahnson took a deep breath. “I have all the memories of my original, including that one. She was a suicide. After all the years in between, it still is an agony to remember.”

      “A suicide?” Mekashe asked, stunned.

      “You didn’t know. It’s all right. Only a very few people do.” He sat down. “It’s something I don’t talk about. But, yes, we were bonded.”

      “Which is why I’m permitted to discuss something quite intimate with you,” Mekashe hastened to add. “You know what rigid rules of culture permeate our society.”

      “I do,” the other male said.

      Mekashe locked his hands together and studied them. “I have met a female. A human.” He managed a faint smile. “For many years, I had a vision of such a human. I knew her, without knowing her, almost all my life. I thought at first that Edris Mallory was her personification. But in my visions, the female found me equally attractive, and Edris had eyes only for Rhemun.” He lifted his eyes to Hahnson’s. “Now I have met the true female, the one from the visions. She is everything I knew, all that I expected. But the attraction I feel for her is growing too quickly. I have no desire to frighten her or shock her. Like most humans, she has no idea about the mating rituals, how deadly they can be to other males. I want to touch her.” He bit off the words and made a face, like a grimace. “But I dare not. I was wondering, hoping, that there might be some bit of medical tech that could permit touch without the danger of triggering a mating behavior.”

      “I think I have just what you need,” Hahnson said, moving to his medicomp. “In fact, you’re in luck, because this is cutting-edge tech, only just released. It was meant for diplomatic use, but I understand that it has been employed covertly for a number of other reasons.”

      “What does it do?”

      “It coats the skin in nanobytes,” Hahnson said. He pulled up a top secret vid, showing the range of protection it encompassed. “It’s undetectable, much like certain poisons developed on old Earth millennia ago.”

      “And it can be trusted not to fail?” the alien asked with some concern.

      Hahnson shook his head. “Well, as far as we know.” He hesitated. He was the physician for the human element aboard the Morcai, not their resident Cularian expert who specialized in Cehn-Tahr, Rojok and other alien species. But he heard from Tellas, Edris Mallory’s former assistant, that Mekashe had physiology much like Dtimun, who was the product of generations of genetic improvement.

      “Something disturbs you,” Mekashe perceived.

      Hahnson shrugged. “It’s probably nothing,” he said after a minute. “You know that there can be issues between different species, especially in intimate contact.”

      “Yes, I know of this,” Mekashe said easily. He smiled. “It is not a concern.”

      What he meant was that he knew Rhemun had no difficulty in mating with Edris, and he also knew that Dtimun and Madeline Ruszel had mated and produced two children. He had no idea that Rhemun’s branch of the Clan had no genetic modification or that Madeline had to undergo genetic modification to mate with Dtimun.

      Hahnson, who assumed that the other Cehn-Tahr had made him aware of the issues, just smiled. “Okay, then. I’ll just create a few vials of the tech so that you won’t run out. How long is this trip going to take?”

      “Several weeks,” Mekashe said with a wistful sigh. “I look forward to getting to know Jasmine.”

      “Jasmine. A lovely name.”

      “She is a lovely creature,” Mekashe replied softly. “I have never encountered such a being in all my travels. She has no hauteur at all, no sense of superiority. She is humble and sweet and—how did she put it?—scattered.”

      Hahnson’s eyebrows went up and he chuckled while he worked. “I like her already.”

      “Her father seems quite nice,” he added. “He will be the first Terravegan ambassador to Memcache. An intelligent man, with a background in history and politics. He was a professor of political science on Terravega.”

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