“Perhaps we would all feel calmer if the guards backed away from the door,” Ukatonen suggested.
The man nodded. “Do what he says. Get away from the door.”
The security guards backed away, and Ukatonen was relieved when the man instantly became calmer. This was like taming an animal. The more cornered the animal felt, the harder it was to get him to calm down.
“What’s wrong with your daughter?”
“Leukemia. Like that little boy you healed. Carlo.”
It had been Moki who healed the little boy, Ukatonen recalled, but that was all right. It meant that the man was underestimating Moki.
“I remember that,” Ukatonen said. “I’ll need to touch your daughter in order to heal her.”
The man hesitated for a moment. “All right, but if anything happens to her, the woman dies.”
“I will not hurt your daughter,” the enkar promised.
He stepped over to the bed. The little girl lying there was pale, and there were dark shadows under her eyes. Her eyes darted between her father and the door, quick nervous glances that were the only sign of her fear. “Hello, my name is Ukatonen. What’s yours?”
She looked over at her father for a second. He nodded.
“I’m Sarah. Are they going to hurt my father?”
“I don’t know, Sarah,” Ukatonen said. “He must love you very much to do this. Are you scared?”
She hesitated a moment, then nodded.
“So am I, a little bit, but right now I’m going to try to make you better. Do you want to get better, Sarah?”
Sarah’s eyes went to her father and then back to Ukatonen. “Yes, please,” she replied in a voice barely above a whisper.
“All right, then,” he said. “I’m going to hold your arm like this,” he said, taking her arm. “It will sting a little, like a shot, and then you’ll go to sleep. I’ll be inside you then, and I’ll find out where you’re sick and make it better. All right?”
Sarah nodded. “What about my dad?”
Ukatonen glanced over at the child’s father. He was watching them intently, Moki was apparently forgotten.
“We’ll worry about that later.”
Ukatonen linked with the child. He could feel the wrongness inside her as soon as he linked. The cancer was very bad. He cleared out what he could of the immediate damage, and left killer cells behind to eliminate the rest of the[[ i ]]cancer. He paused, looking over his work. It was good. The girl would seem to go into a gradual spontaneous remission.
Finished, Ukatonen pulled out of the link, leaving his[[ i]]eyes hooded and his body relaxed, as though he were still linked. He glanced sidelong at the child’s father. He was completely ignoring Moki, and his arm had relaxed a little. The sharp blade had fallen slightly away from Eerin’s throat.
“Now, Moki!” Ukatonen signed in skin speech.
Moki moved with reflexes honed by a lifetime of being both predator and prey. He pulled the knife away from Eerin’s neck, and stung him asleep almost before the man knew what had happened.
Security came rushing in, taking the man into custody.
“Wait!” Ukatonen commanded as they started to haul the sleeping man away.
To his surprise, the security people halted.
“Let me wake him up so he can say good-bye to his daughter.”
They looked at Eerin, who nodded, and they let Ukatonen sting him awake.
He looked blearily up at Ukatonen. “How is she?” he asked.
“Your daughter was very sick,” Ukatonen told him. “I’ve done what I could, but”—he paused. “I don’t know if it was enough. I can wake her so that you can say goodbye, if you’d like.”
“No,” the man said, shaking his head. “I don’t want her to see me like this. Tell her I love her, and that I’m proud of her.” He looked at Eerin, “I-I’m sorry to have scared you, but”—he glanced at his daughter sleeping in the bed—“she’s all we have. I couldn’t let her die.”
“I understand,” Eerin said. “But if Moki or Ukatonen had gotten hurt— ” She turned away, anger on her face.
The man looked down, “I’m sorry,” he said. He looked up at the security guards and nodded. They led him away.
“What will happen to him?” Moki asked.
“He’ll be put in jail, like I was,” Eerin told him. “But he’ll have to stay there for a long, long time. His daughter Sarah will be an adult before they let him out.” She looked away for a moment. “He gave up the chance to watch her grow up, in order to know that she would.”
“Why doesn’t he kill himself?” Ukatonen asked.
“That’s a difficult question to answer, Ukatonen,” Eerin replied. “In some cultures he might. In others, he would be tried and killed. Here, he will be expected to serve a long prison sentence at a penal colony far from his family. Eventually, he will be released and be free again. We think of that as punishment enough.”
“Doesn’t he have any honor?” Ukatonen asked, thinking of his own painful decision to keep living. He wished he could link with the man, and understand why he had done this. Perhaps he would never understand humans; perhaps harmony with them was impossible. He turned away from the thought. His spirit was already weighed down by despair. He couldn’t deal with any more of it.
“It is not so simple as that, Ukatonen. Even if he wanted to commit suicide, he would be stopped by the prison guards. Many of our religions prohibit suicide.”
“Every time I think I understand you humans, you surprise me,” Ukatonen said, purple with puzzlement.
Eerin grinned at him. “That’s okay. We surprise ourselves all the time, too. Come on, let’s get out of here.”
Juna stood at the window of her bedroom, looking out over the rows of vines, their gnarled trunks obscured by tangles of last season’s canes. Midwinter was a quiet time on the farm. Most of the work went on in the vast vaulted cellars, racking and aging the wine in huge oak barrels, bottling the mature vintages. Juna felt like one of those barrels, waiting here with the baby maturing inside her. It was good to come home again and rest after their demanding work at the hospital.
Just then the baby stirred inside her. She smiled and put her hand on her abdomen. She had first felt the baby move the day before, when they were descending in the elevator from the shuttle dock to the terminal. At first she thought it was some internal shifting caused by the increasing gravity. But the little flutters and sudden shifts had continued at odd times ever since. The movement of the baby thrilled her, but it also reminded her of how little time she had before the baby arrived. She was starting to show. In another month, it would be time for maternity clothes. And she had done nothing about getting married since her visit to the Xavieras. She dreaded the task of looking for a family to marry into, but she was going to have to face it soon.
There was a knock on the door.
It was Toivo. “Hei, Juna, look! I walked all the way over here!”
“Oh, Toivo, that’s great! I’m so pleased!”
He flopped into a chair with a tired sigh. “Dr. Engle says that if I keep improving at this pace, I’ll be able to help with spring planting.”
“That’s good,” she said. “I’ll be so pregnant by then that I won’t be any use at all.”
“You can be our fertility goddess,” he said, teasing her.
Juna looked down at a pale square of wintry sunlight on the floor. “Oh, Toivo, what am I going to do?”
“I thought you were planning to go to Earth with the Tendu.”
“Yes,” Juna said, not taking her eyes off the carpet, “we are. But that’s not what I’m worried about. If I don’t get married, they’ll take the baby away. I should be looking, but frankly, I haven’t a clue about how or where to start.”