“Torri, you look so sad.” Vic took one of her hands gently between his own large, warm hands and his deep blue eyes filled with concern.
“I just…haven’t had a very easy time here, lately.” Torri swiped at her eyes with her free hand. “Sorry, I don’t mean to cry. It’s just…I used to have a career and a life and the freedom to go where I wanted when I wanted. But that’s all gone now and I’m just stuck here.”
Vic didn’t ask her why she had been admitted to St. Elizabeth’s in the first place, he simply held her hand and looked at her with sincere sympathy in his blue eyes.
“I haven’t known you long, but I find it bothers me greatly to see you upset,” he rumbled softly. “Is there anything I can do to make you feel better?”
“You’re doing it already.” Torri sniffed and swiped at her eyes again. “Just having someone to talk to is really nice.” She tried to smile at him. “Thank you. I know this is just a dream but, well, it’s the nicest dream I’ve had in a long time.”
“I don’t normally have dreams myself,” Vic admitted. “But thank you for letting me invade yours.” He frowned. “I wonder if the organic part of my brain is having to work harder because the positronic part is malfunctioning and that is why I’m able to Dream Share with you?”
“Now you’re talking like a robot again,” Torri pointed out, laughing a little.
“At least I can talk in your dream,” Vic said. “In the waking reality, I am always searching for words. And communications used to be my specialty!”
Torri wanted to comfort him the way he had comforted her.
“I’m sure you can regain your speech with a little therapy,” she said, squeezing his hand, which she was still holding.
“Possibly. Or maybe the positronic part of my brain will eventually repair itself.” Vic sounded hopeful. “After all, when I first experienced the communications break, I was unable to say anything at all. But in the past day or so, I have at least been able to put a few words together.”
“Is that what happened when you were in the President’s office? Your, uh, brain broke?” Torri asked.
He nodded.
“Exactly. And then the protectors of your President threw me to the ground. I judged it was best not to resist since I couldn’t explain why I had come in the first place. Also, they would not believe I meant them no harm if I fought them.”
“It’s too bad your brain picked just that minute to quit on you,” Torri remarked. “I’m sure the guy we have in the White House now would be open to meeting a new alien race with brand new medical technology.”
“Unfortunately, the Kindred may never come to Earth now,” Vic said. “If I don’t eventually get back to the Mother Ship to let them know what happened to me, they will think I have been destroyed by the humans and decided that the Earth is too primitive to form a genetic trade with after all.”
“Then you have to get out of here and tell them!” Torri exclaimed. “You can’t let yourself get stuck here, the way I am.”
“I need to see if my brain will heal itself any further,” Vic said, frowning. “It would be difficult to navigate a hostile alien landscape with such obvious speech deficiencies.”
It was on the tip of Torri’s tongue to say she would go with him—that they could escape together when the time came—when she felt someone shaking her shoulder.
“Ms. Morrison? Ms. Morrison, it’s time to get up now,” a familiar voice said as the dream began to fade. The bright sunny meadow, Nana’s cabin, and Vic’s blue eyes…all drifted away.
“Hmm?” Torri opened her eyes and looked around. She was in her room at St. Elizabeth’s and weak morning light was coming through the high window.
“You all right?” Mazy was looking at her anxiously. “I heard you had a quiet night last night—didn’t scream the house down for once,” she added, smiling a little.
“I…I’m fine.” Torri sat up, running a hand through her hair and trying to wake up.
What a strange dream she’d had! The new patient, Vic, had rescued her from the AllFather and then the two of them had gone to Nana’s cabin and sat in a field of daisies and talked.
He told me he was a robot—no, a cyborg, Torri remembered. And that he had come to Earth to represent a race of alien feminists who wanted to call human women as brides. And he said his brain broke when he was trying to tell all that to the President.
Also, she had been wearing the patchwork skirt Nana had made her that she had outgrown when she was nine. What a weird dream!
Weird but nice, Torri thought. Of course it obviously wasn’t true—she was probably just “projecting” (as Dr. Burrows would say) her own hopes and wishes onto the new patient, who was basically a blank slate. But it was so nice to wake up in the regular way instead of screaming herself awake or being shaken awake by someone else because she was screaming from a night terror, Torri didn’t even care.
I hope I can sit by him again today at breakfast, she thought, thinking of how Vic had held her hand in the dream. She would rather dream about him than the AllFather any day of the week!
Twelve
Vic got up when he was told to by the humans, but the experience of Dream Sharing for the first time remained strong inside him. The organic part of his brain—the part that still worked correctly—was generating all kinds of emotions to go with the vivid images he had seen in Torri’s dream. Emotions he normally didn’t feel, because the positronic or artificial part of his brain was usually what ruled him.
For instance, her fear in front of the huge alien doors had aroused a powerful feeling of protectiveness in him—a wish to keep her safe from whatever danger threatened her.
Vic frowned when he remembered that part of her dream. The vast, blackish-gray doors with their glowing green markings reminded him of something but he couldn’t remember what. Was it a race he had encountered once? A hostile one, even? Perhaps an enemy of the Kindred…
It was impossible to tell with the positronic half of his brain barely working. Vic had been on so many missions over the years, he had encountered a multitude of alien races. Though he had Kindred DNA, he was actually more like part of the Mother Ship—useful only on certain occasions.
But despite his limitations, he had many special attributes that even the mightiest Kindred warrior lacked. His ability to camouflage himself anywhere, for instance, and the ease with which he could manipulate machinery and transport and information systems, were excellent advantages.
These special abilities made him perfect for covert missions to possibly hostile planets. Typically, he would scout a new planet, return and report back everything he had seen, and then he would be frozen in stasis again, in his special compartment aboard the Mother Ship. He sometimes went generations between wakings, as he had come to think of them, and the faces he saw when he was brought out of stasis were almost always different.
But despite all his missions, he had never been to a planet quite like Earth. And he had never had emotions like the ones he was experiencing for Torri.
Besides the strong feeling of protectiveness, he had also felt sorrow when he saw her cry and a deep need to comfort her. He had wanted to take her in his arms and hold her close as she wept. Her tears made something in his chest feel tight, as though her pain was his. But they had only just met—even if he was somehow Dream Sharing with the curvy little Earth female—so he had contented himself with holding her hand instead.