Lost In Translation (24 page)

“Has Doctor Chung had a reply to her request for the regeneration treatment?” Kathryn gulped the fresh-squeezed orange juice that had accompanied her French toast and sausage. God bless human-crewed ships.

“Yes,” Ukkaddikk said. “Doctor Kapusianyk is eager for the opportunity, and Commonwealth Central is anxious to see the experiment proceed, as well, feeling it offers great hope for S'sinn and may help smooth acceptance and implementation of the new peace agreement. The Guild has approved the use of the
Unity
to ferry you and Jarrikk to Earth in five days' time—”

“Five days?” Kathryn stopped a forkful of sausage halfway to her mouth. “Why not at once?”

“Doctor Chung feels it best to remain here, where there are S'sinn medical experts, until Jarrikk is further along the flight to recovery,” Ukkaddikk responded. “But this slight delay should not be your main concern. Doctor Kapusianyk, Commonwealth Central, and Karak are all adamant that this procedure can only take place with the full and informed consent of Jarrikk.”

“Didn't Doctor Chung tell him that he could be healed—that he could fly again?”

“I asked her not to.”

Kathryn stared at him. “What? Why?”

“I believe that you, and only you, should tell Jarrikk. You are the one closest to him.”

“We've only known each other for a few days . . .”

“But you Translated together. More than that, you sacrificed your Translation ability together. And more than that, there is what you did for Jarrikk between the Temple and here.”

“I don't
know
what I did.”

“Nor do I,” Ukkaddikk said. “Nor does anyone else in the Guild I have talked to. Somehow you achieved a bond, similar to the Translation Link, without symbiote or Programming. Such things have been known within races—the Swampworlders, for one, are said to join minds, and of course the Aza Swarms are group minds. But such a natural linkage between two races has never been observed before, even between powerful empaths. We must know more about how it happened . . .”

“. . . so the Guild can figure out how to use it,” Kathryn finished, and surprised herself with the bitterness she felt, knowing that Ukkaddikk would feel it, too.

“You and Jarrikk serve the Guild,” Ukkaddikk said. “Surely you will be happy if this phenomenon proves useful to the Guild.”

Kathryn said nothing. She wanted time to work through exactly
what
she felt about the Guild. Something, unexpectedly, had changed.

Ukkaddikk, being a good empath, didn't press the debate. “In any event,” he said, “this unique link between you and Jarrikk may help you convince him to take part in the experiment.”

There was no question about Kathryn's support of
that
. “I'll try.” She pushed aside her breakfast tray. “Take me to him.”

 

Several hours had passed since Jarrikk woke. He had endured the ministrations of the human nurse who had changed the dressing on his chest, but he had not acknowledged her presence in any way, even when, with something of a shock, he realized he could sense her empathically, that his ability had returned.

He ignored Ukkaddikk just as thoroughly when he entered later. Jarrikk heard and felt Ukkaddikk's concern, but he sensed something else, too, an odd eagerness that made him suspicious.
Ukkaddikk serves the Guild,
he reminded himself.
He stopped me from taking the knife the first time because the Guild needed me. I've been stopped again because the Guild needs me. Ukkaddikk cares nothing for my sacrifice. He cares only for the Guild.

He was through letting the Guild use him. He was all used up.

Then came Dr. Chung. He could sense her, too, professionally concerned, but with that same strange eagerness underneath. Suspicion that had budded with Ukkaddikk's appearance blossomed now. He was not being told everything.

But then, as she talked about his wound and how they had treated it, she told him one thing he had not expected—one thing that made his ears roar and the room spin around him.

She told him it had been Kathryn who had saved him—
Kathryn
who had stopped his sacrifice! Karak, Ukkaddikk, the Guild itself, had had nothing to do with it!

And so when Kathryn herself appeared, and he felt that same strong undercurrent of eagerness beneath her open concern and happiness, a bitter anger such as he'd never felt before welled up in him, and if not for the constraints, he would have hurled himself at her.

As it was, he had to be content with keeping his gaze fixed firmly on the ceiling, though with an intensity that should have burned a hole right through it.

 

The cheerful greeting on Kathryn's lips died as she came into Jarrikk's room and felt a sudden blast of hatred and fury from the furred figure on the shikk. She staggered back against Ukkaddikk, whose strong, clawed hands grabbed her arms and held her upright. She turned to him almost blindly. “Did you feel—”

“Yes. Your task will not be an easy one. I wish you luck.” He slightly opened his wings in salute to her, then went out.

Kathryn turned back to Jarrikk. “I . . . I am glad to see you awake,” she said uncertainly. “I was afraid I'd brought help too late.”

A renewed surge of fury left her gasping. That had obviously been the wrong thing to say. But why . . . ?

Another good thing about human-crewed ships was that they put real chairs in rooms. Kathryn took one near the door and moved it beside the shikk. She couldn't force Jarrikk to meet her eyes, but he couldn't stop her from talking.

If only he would listen . . .

“Jarrikk, I know why you did what you did. I felt it inside you, when we Translated . . . I didn't want to accept it, but I knew it was your way. In your mind, you had no choice, and I respected that.”

No change in her sense of his feelings.

“But now you have a choice.” Not a flicker of interest. She pressed on. “There is a human doctor, a brilliant man, who has developed a technique for regenerating damaged limbs and organs. It's very new, very experimental—it's only been used on a few humans. But it has worked, almost every time.” She paused. “Jarrikk, he thinks it can be used on S'sinn, too.”

Still no change. Had he even heard her?

“Jarrikk, don't you understand? Doctor Kapusianyk could heal you—not the wound in your chest, that's healing anyway—but the real hurt. Your wing.” She reached out hesitantly, then touched the upturned palm of one of his restrained hands. “Jarrikk, you could fly—unnh!”

With lightning speed, his hand snapped shut. Kathryn snatched her fingers back reflexively, but not before a dagger-sharp claw sliced a three-centimeter gash in the back of her right hand. She clapped her other hand over the wound and, as blood welled between her fingers, stared at Jarrikk, who finally turned his open eyes toward her—and let her feel his fury full-force.

 

Jarrikk saw Kathryn's blood dripping from her fingers with grim satisfaction heightened by her sense of shock and violated trust. Let her understand what it felt like to be turned on by someone she had counted as a friend—as he had counted her a friend. And now he knew why she had done it—they wanted an experimental animal. They would take away from him the one meaningful act he could still perform as a S'sinn, they would cut him off completely from his people, make him a freak, a scientific subject, nothing more than an exhibit in the Commonwealth's ongoing attempt to prove how benign it was, how it served all races. And when he was still a Translator, he might even have volunteered—but he wasn't being asked to volunteer. He wasn't being asked anything at all. They had stolen his choice from him. A dark, brooding pride that Kitillikk would have recognized instantly swelled up inside him. Who were these furless monstrosities, these murderers of the young and helpless, to choose the fate of S'sinn? He glared at Kathryn with black rage. How could he ever have thought of her as “friend”?

I once swore an oath to Kitillikk to use my life well,
he thought.
I should have used it to help her destroy all humans!

He screamed the Hunter's challenge, struggling uselessly against the restraints that were all that kept him from Kathryn's throat.

 

Kathryn clapped her bloody hands over her ears as Jarrikk's piercing shriek filled the tiny room, and staggered up and back from the shikk, the chair clattering to the floor. She could feel nothing now but his hatred and rage and wounded pride.
He's gone mad,
she thought.
The shock . . . he's insane!

He pulled at the straps so hard she feared he'd hurt himself, then harder yet, until she feared even more he might break free. She edged around the wall of the room toward the door, leaving a trail of smeared red handprints, then stopped with her hand on the door controls.

If she left that room, Jarrikk would die, sooner or later, by his own hand. There would be no miracle cure, no hope, and everything she had done to offer him that hope would have been futile.

But he wants to die,
she argued with herself.
He wants to die!

He wanted to die before, she answered. You knew that. Yet you stopped him, to give him this choice.

He hasn't even considered it. He may not have even heard you. He's too full of anger and wounded pride to think. What kind of choice is that?

She remembered holding his head as he lay in his blood in the Place of Flightless Sacrifice, reaching inside him, touching more than just emotions. Deep under layers of thickening darkness, she had connected with something else, with his self, his mind. Like Translation, Ukkaddikk had said, but it had been something else, something that went even deeper than Translation's joining of knowledge and memory.

If she could re-create that bond now, here, with his waking mind, if she could contact that inner core of his personality beneath layers of rage just as she had beneath layers of pain-filled darkness, maybe she could make him think, make him see that she had done what she did because she cared so deeply about him, because she didn't want to lose him . . .

The thought terrified her. How could she bear his hatred if it were a hundred or a thousand times more intense than she already felt it, when even now her stomach churned with it?

How can you not face it?
a sterner part of herself argued.
Actions have consequences. What he feels now is a direct result of what you did. If you abandon responsibility now, you also abandon him. Do that, and his won't be the only inner self you're afraid to face.

She took a step away from the door, toward the shikk; then another, and another. The shock of the cut on her hand had made her dizzy; she staggered the next two steps and had to cling to the back of the chair until the spinning fuzziness in her eyes and the roaring in her ears went away. Jarrikk screamed again, so loudly she expected nurses and doctors to come running, but the door behind her remained sealed. She probably had Ukkaddikk to thank for that.

Her next step brought her to the shikk itself. She took a firm grasp of one of its solid metal supports with her left hand and stretched out the still-bleeding right toward Jarrikk's forehead.

 

Jarrikk howled his hunting cry again as Kathryn approached, and tried to turn his head away from her touch, but the restraints wouldn't let him. He could smell her blood, a smell that fed his rage and made his upper lip curl back from his fangs, then he felt her strange, blunt fingers in his fur . . . and then he screamed again as he felt her enter his mind . . .

 

. . . and this time Kathryn screamed with him, though she didn't know it. The room vanished. She could see nothing but darkness, could feel nothing but hatred and anger surrounding her, pressing in on her, trying to smother her, to force her out again—but she wouldn't give in. She growled deep in her throat, though she didn't know that, either, and pushed with her mind, hard and then harder, pushed in the way she had pushed when she fought herself free of the mind of the Master during her First Translation, only this time in the other direction . . . deeper into Jarrikk's mind.

Emotions, emotions, she could feel nothing but his emotions. What had been darkness when he lay unconscious now took shape all around her, shifting all the time: bursts of flame, swords and spears, smothering darkness, and howling gray fogs. She pushed harder yet, as hard as she thought she could, and then even harder, and all she found was more chaos and rage and . . .

. . . and then, glimmering among the emotions, the beginnings of thoughts. Memories she recognized from Translation flashed past. She fell inward, faster and faster, memories streaming by so quickly she could no longer recognize them, emotions struggling to cling to her, to slow her down, but being stripped away by the speed of her passage, and there, ahead of her, grew a white light . . .

 

Jarrikk screamed a fourth time, but was no more aware of it than Kathryn. He stared sightlessly at the ceiling, but the images in his mind were not of bare white metal. Instead, it seemed to him he crouched once more on the rim of the chasm marking the border between the human sector and the S'sinn sector of Kikks'sarr, that once more he watched the humans launch one of their horrible little flying machines, only this time, instead of flying out to it, he started pelting it with everything that came to hand, rocks and knives, torches and twigs, but nothing stopped it, it just came closer and closer until he could see the pilot, could see her familiar, once-loved, now-hated face, could see a strange white light in her eyes . . .