“That blue fellow who can walk through walls.” In a burst of regretful reminiscence he added, “By the Ideal, he nearly drove my poor Hellcat mad.”

“Traveler.” Mark turned away, wrapped his bony arms around himself as if the act could somehow comfort. The scent of the alien tobacco was sweet in his nostrils.

Zabb was continuing. His voice was low, calming, eminently reasonable. “You have chosen a philosophy for yourself. A foolish one by my lights, and one I cannot understand, but you are the one who must face the shame of your descendants, and the rage of your ancestors. But how can you make the decision for this other individual? He might be willing to help me. To help Tisianne.”

With a tongue suddenly too thick for his mouth, Trips managed to mutter, “I do care… and he won’t help. He’ll be too afraid.” He paused, considered. “Maybe he’ll even believe it’s wrong.”

“How nice for you if he does. How fatal for Tisianne.” Zabb dropped the pipe into an ashtray with a clatter. “And then there’s the infant…”

Trips found words beyond him. He let out a sound that was half curse, half sob, and pulled out the small vial of blue powder. Downed it. As the transformation began to take hold, he faintly heard Zabb saying, “Don’t take it so to heart. You can always ease the conscience with the comforting argument that it wasn’t you. You were right, sophistry is the other great Takisian art.”

“Made any more progress?” Tisianne asked, as she shut off the computer and turned to face Taj. They were in the medical labs of House Ilkazam.

Not by the flicker of an eyelash did the older Takisian indicate that he read the wealth of fury and sarcasm behind the four words. “A little. It hurt us when we lost our two best researchers.”

“Ansata’s death was his own choice. A simple surrender was all that was required.”

“Or you could have released his ship.”

Tis wasn’t going to buy one instant of guilt. She buried the brief flash that tried to surface. “That was never an option. I weighed fifteen lives against the thousands on Earth. Ansata lost. And as for my absence – I was unavoidably detained.”

Jay surprised Tisianne by speaking up. Obviously he understood Takisian better than he spoke it. “If your ship hadn’t been damaged, would you have stayed?”

Slowly she said, “Probably not. I was very young, and I was making a grand gesture in the best and grandest Takisian style. You were just faceless masses who were going to be so very, very grateful. Only later did I learn to love you.”

“You have reason to be grateful, groundling,” Taj said. “You obviously have received some great and potent power, or you would not be a companion to Tisianne.”

Jay didn’t have to climb down the alien’s throat, Tis did it for him. “Grateful! Grateful! The Ideal curse you and leave you childless. Is Jay’s power worth tens of thousands of lives? Is it worth the damage to his life, concerned as he must be over the fate of any children he may sire? Is it worth the loss of all that I am? What was conceived in this room I am now carrying to fruition.”

She spun away and tried to regain control of her ragged breaths. The fury, the anguish helped propel her to a cabinet. It kept her from thinking too much about the purpose of the drug she was loading into an epispray.

“I see you haven’t lost your flare for impassioned speeches. Do you still favor desperate causes?” Taj asked.

He was trying to fathom the mind of a person who would run off to save the inhabitants of an alien world. Trying to see if she regretted throwing away her birthright and her future. Tis thrust the epispray deep into her pocket and looked her uncle straight in the eye.

“I’d do it again… in a second…”

His expression softened. “That’s my Tisianne. Your father would be proud.”

“Did he ever forgive me?”

“No… but he missed you to the end.”

“It’s time I saw him.”

The infirmary was almost empty. There was one young man floating in a biogerm bubble. The bubbles hung from the ceiling by long filaments that monitored the injured body, but it did look as if the patient had been swallowed by a Portuguese man-of-war. Tis also thought of them as placenta pods. They served the same function as the womb, growing a healthy body, and the individual floating in their soothing soup often seemed to revert. Like the man before them, curled on his side, his thumb in his mouth, eyes squeezed shut, and nutrient feeds stabbing his body at a hundred different points.

“Gross,” Jay said, but Tis wasn’t certain whether he was reacting to the bubble or the horrendous wounds that raked the man’s flesh, laying bare the various levels and colors of a Takisian body.

At the far end of the ward lay a pair of heavy plasteel doors like the entrance into a security vault. And it was a safe of sorts; it was designed to protect the most precious and powerful of the House Ilkazam as they healed. The guards took up positions at the door to the infirmary, and about the vault doors. Taj stood before the access panel, an abstract piece of appliquй art with multicolored silicon crystals, each of them flashing with white lights. Taj sent the telepathic code, and order became chaos. Crystals flashed with clashing and discordant colors, and then the doors slid slowly open with a soft whine.

“Do you want me to wait outside with the hired help?” Jay asked.

Tis couldn’t force words past the lump in her throat. She shook her head and entered. Jay followed.

Shaklan was also floating in a biogerm bubble, also curled into a fetal position, but there was no sense of the healing infant. This was a breathing, excreting husk. Rollers had been placed in the palms of each clawlike hand to prevent them from closing into permanent fists. The hip bones thrust like knife blades against the gray skin of the pelvis, and the bones of the rib cage fell away to a shrunken belly. Long, long hair floated like seaweed about the shriveled body.

Tisianne evaluated the vital signs being constantly monitored from the control panel. The monitors certainly supported the general consensus that the mind and soul of Shaklan brant Fleva sek Agem had fled.

“You still want the scan?” Taj asked.

“Yes.”

She keyed the panel, and the nutrient bath began to drain away. An examination table rose out of the floor and gently received the desiccated body. Pulling aside the gelatinous bubble, Tis stared into the face of this half-dead thing and tried to reconcile it with the face of her father. It had the proper shape. That was all.

Taj gathered her hand in his, physical contact helping him to capture and augment her own feeble mental powers. They went searching and found nothing. The flesh breathed, the mind was gone.

She paced, felt as if something were battering at the top of her skull. Found her hand thrust deep into her pocket clenching the epispray. She marched all the arguments through her head. The conclusion was inescapable.

She forced herself back to her father’s side. Laid a hand against a hollow, stubbled cheek.

“Daddy…” She was a little embarrassed using the human word, but she had always liked it. It spoke of warmth and affection, and the Takisian High House equivalent didn’t suggest intimacy, much less love. “I’ve come home. I’m sorry for the things I said. I… love you…” sound died as if strangled, and she walked away.

Taj followed and laid a hand on her shoulder. “Do you want me to…?”

“No!”

Tis held out her hand, and Taj laid a pair of tiny golden scissors on the palm. The hair was lank and wet as she separated out a strand and snipped it off. Carefully she wrapped this token of her father around one wrist.

Shaklan’s lips held a hint of warmth, and it almost shattered her resolve. Then courage, pragmatism, love, and selfish need spurred her, and Tis pulled out the epispray. Laid it against her father’s arm.