The woman’s alien features a stark contrast to his own, her once luminous silvery skin has dulled to almost gray, her waist length, deep blue hair has faded to perriwinkle, her once navy blue lips have now faded to match her skin.
As he sits there leaning over the railing in deep contemplation and extreme sorrow the room door quietly opens just enough to flood the room with dazzling light from the corridor beyond. He pays no heed though knowing it is just another nurse making their rounds, but is startled to feel a warm hand on his shoulder as someone presses against him causing him to turn to the person.
“Hey grandpa.”
“Lauralie, I thought you were off-world?”
“I was, but when mom called about grandma I began looking for a way home. I found a perishable food freighter that the captain upon hearing my story said I could ride along; he didn’t even charge me. It was the fastest flight back too. He made the trip in forty-eight hours! It took me one hundred and sixty-eight to get out there on a passenger ship.”
“I’m glad you made it, this time of day gets a bit lonely.”
“What’s grandma’s prognosis?”
“The docs don’t expect her to wake up again, the fall down the steps really did her in this time…she took a pretty bad blow to the back of her head. I was mowing the yard so had no idea she went to the basement alone…I don’t know how many times I told her not to wear flip flops on those stairs, or that she really shouldn’t be going down there alone. Of course I knew exactly when she fell. I rushed back in and called the paramedics, I sat beside her…I couldn’t hear her in my head…I thought she was dead. It was the first time in sixty-seven years that our connection was lost, and now I feel so lost inside because literally my other half is gone.”
“Oh grandpa! That has to be awful. I remember grandma teaching me to control the hive mind, reminding me not to link unless I knew the person was who I would be mated to. Not to use it to cheat, steal, or manipulate others. Oh how those lessons gave me such a headache, but she knew, and would reach across to take it away…the only times she entered without asking.”
“Not the only ones.”
“No, that instance with Neil I reached out to her as I had no idea what else to do…I wasn’t even sure it would work that far away, and suddenly boom there you were. I had no idea anyone could punch that hard, then dad showed up…I wondered how Neil was still alive after you two were done.”
Grandpa just smiled at her.
“Do you need me in your head?”
“No, no, your mom offered. It wouldn’t be the same and besides it would just push the pain out further…better to just deal with it now.”
“Has mom tried to reach into Grandma?”
“She said there isn’t much coherent in her, it’s all a big jumble.”
Lauralie steps to the side and drags a chair to the other side of her grandma’s bed, and the two sit in silence for a few minutes.
“Grandpa, how did you and grandma meet?”
“She never told you?”
“No, I never thought to ask either.”
“Back when I was 27 and in the army, we deployed to Lulufenz. We were there to push back the Voltarians, on request from Lulufenz via a mutual aid treaty, and aid survivors. The Voltarians had dropped copper core fusion bombs and micro singularity devices. Between the extreme heat and the gravitational fields there were so many injured, so many just gone…either vaporized or crushed to non-existence.
I was assigned to a camp just outside of a conurbation that had a fusion detonation used in a nearby city. We were set there to assist with recovery of survivors and prepare some for temporary refugee resettlement on some of our own colony worlds. I found Mischievous a few days later doing a sweep for survivors.”
“You know after all these years I have only ever heard you call grandma Mischievous, but is that really her name?”
“No, but I have never been able to say her real name, Mischievous is the closest I could ever get out and it kind of matches her personality amazingly well.”
“Yea, it really does.” Lauralie laughs as she agrees.
“I had exited my mech suit to examine a collapsed building and when I came back she was leaning against its left leg. Her right leg was at totally the wrong angle and had a twist causing her foot to point backwards. I winced seeing her just knowing the amount of pain she had to be in. I realized later she couldn’t feel it from the level of shock she was in. She told me years later that she more or less drug herself to my mech and had just got up to lean on it when I found her.
I treated her as I could in the open, then entered my mech, carefully picked her up and returned her to base. I left her with the surgeons and headed back out, but couldn’t get her off my mind. By the time I was back out the medic transports were up and running so I didn’t have to transport each person I found instead I’d digi-flag them and either the medic robots or the morgue bots would pick them up. I must have seen a few dozen survivors that day but none stuck with me like Mischievous.
Back at camp I was eating in the chow hall when a Lulufenzian healer came up to me.
“Are you Sergeant Lopez?”
“Yes Ma'am.”
The Doctor sat down across from me.
“You brought a young woman of our race in this morning. Let me start by she is doing fine now, but how are you doing?”
“Back then this seemed like a very odd question to which I replied ‘I’m doing okay.”
“Have you had any out of the normal mental issues?”
“No, but she has been on my mind ever since I treated her before bringing her in…why?”
“How much do you know about our people?”
“Aside from your skin is silver, and you have a hive mind not much really.”
“Hive mind implies all of us share a more or less single consciousness, we link with our immediate family unit, so spouses, parents to children, grandchildren, seldom beyond that though we can.”
“Are you telling me the reason she is on my mind is because she linked with me?”
“I think she did. As a healer we often temporarily link to the less than conscious in an effort to treat them, and in her case I was seeing what you were seeing in the field. This proved itself when the injured you were sending back matched what I was seeing before me. We seldom link outside of our own people so I knew I had to find you and check on you.”
“So she has a memory of the carnage I was seeing out there? That won’t be good to have in her head.”
“No, but no worse than what is in your own. When you are finished with your meal would you please come see me at the hospital?”
“I agreed, he brought me to her as the link would be closer and she would rest better.”
“That’s why you haven’t left her side even now?”
“Partly, but mostly I can’t bare to be away from her. Over the following days she finally woke up, by then we had started to silently bond with each other through her link, we had been talking so to speak for days, she saw my dreams and I saw hers, she saw everything I saw, and I saw what she had seen before I arrived. I saw her flashbacks to the fusion bomb drop, heard her thoughts about getting there and how she might have to pay for help.
It was really weird hearing her voice for the first time, I expected a soprano like in her thoughts, but she was a tenor. She spoke in perfect English apparently picked up from being in my head for days…that concerned her people. As you know in Lulufenzian society that depth of connection is equal to marriage and to them she was underage, she had just turned twenty-four at the time and wouldn’t be of age for another year. Her people outcast her, they didn’t blame me, but she was considered nothing more than a common slut in their eyes and that was unforgivable. A counselor of her people visited each of us separately and together in an attempt to decouple us, assuming the connection was merely made in dire need, but by then her link was too deep.
I figured she would tire of me, move on to someone of her own kind, but being an outcast none would speak to her let alone go near her. Their healer still cared for her, still spoke to her, but they took a vow of celibacy and would be of no use to her and even if they connected it would have meant the shaming of the healer too. I felt bad for her, so she stayed with me once the healer released her. She had nothing, no family, no keepsakes, no clothes, no home, nothing but herself. I brought her to my living unit–a small shipping container converted to basically a secure bedroom and supply cache. I let her take the unused top bunk. It was odd coming home to her, she was happy to see me, but was basically a prisoner by her people in our camp as she could leave at any time, but her people acted like she was not there.
In camp everyone just treated her like anyone else, she took to working in the main kitchen and she quickly picked up more human traits.
I was on Lulufenz for a year and as my time to ship back home grew closer, I filed the papers to bring her back to Earth with me. My commanding officer performed the official marriage duties, and a few weeks later we were on a ship back here. Now in a few days we will have officially been linked for 67 years…I can barely remember my life before her and I can’t fathom life without her.
Lauralie reaches across the bed and takes her grandpa's hand and her grandma’s other hand then closes her eyes. Reaching out her mind she enters both her grandparents mind’s, soon she finds her grandma then acting like a bridge between them brings grandma into grandpa’s mind.
In his head he hears her voice, the lilting soprano he is so used to. “Hello Petrus, do you mind if I move in with you?”
“I think we can make this work.”
In the room around them the slow beeping stops.
