Alienist

by Laurence M. Janifer

  “Anything is possible,” the Master said. “He said ‘these spaces’ are his ship—that is, these spaces are where he now resides, and through which, or by which, he now travels. These three—or four—spatial dimensions.”

  “As opposed to what?”

  “Other dimensions?” he said. “I say that very hesitantly, Gerald—and, indeed, without any clear idea of what such a phrase might in fact mean to us.” He shook his head. “I sound as if I were talking about a very bad piece of science-fiction. A dimension is a heuristic convenience; it is not, if we except the ones we normally live in, an object, a thing one can point to and so define.”

  “Space-four can’t be pointed to,” I said.

  “And space-four is a dimension by definition only,” he said at once. “We cannot in fact point to time, Gerald. We can define, practically, so to speak, three dimensions of space, and those only.” He drank off some wine. “What do we mean by ‘dimension’—and what can it possibly mean to say that this creature, this voice, this Folla lives in some other one or ones?”

  I poured out the last of the wine for him, and emptied my own glass. “Damned if I know,” I said.

  There was quite a lot to be dug out of the comparatively few words I’d had with Folla, whoever or whatever he was. (He, she or it, I suppose—but “it” doesn’t seem to cover the case, somehow, and since Folla is not really a nice sort of being, I’d rather include him in my own gender than insult my companions of another g.) It was somewhere after midnight by City Two clocks, and positively into early morning by mine, when the Master sighed: “This shall have to be continued. I must leave.”

  I agreed that it was getting late. He got up, grabbed his cane from beside his chair—he’d had it leaning against the portable table—and headed for the door. He wastes very little time on polite goodbyes.

  But at the door—I trailed him by a few feet, politely—he turned. “Gerald,” he said, “I would like you to talk to a psychiatrist. An expert in Psychological Statics.”

  I took a second to digest that. “Well,” I said, not wanting to burst out with objections, of which I had several hundred on immediate call, “why would you want me to do that? If we’re to accept the experience as objectively real—”

  “That is why,” he said. “Euglane has an interest in such matters. He may prove quite valuable, if we are to inquire into what has happened at all. We could of course simply drop the whole matter.”

  “And spend the rest of my life wondering what the Hell had happened,” I said. “Thanks. But why a psychiatrist? I may have a few bats in my personal belfry, but—”

  “Your bats are your affair,” the Master said, “as mine are my affair; that is what it means to be human, and adult. But I believe you will find his insights helpful, as regards this particular problem.”

  I was doubtful—but he was, after all, the Master. “If you say so,” I told him.

  “I do,” he said. “I will call him in the morning, and he will then call you. By the way, Gerald—he’s a Giell.”

  I blinked. “A what?”

  He gave me his chuckle—a dry sound, part muted trumpet and part creak. “Not a gel,” he aid. “A Giell. You may not have heard of the race. There has been very little contact as yet between humans and Gielli, though they have found a place here. In City One they are become, even, fashionable.”

  “A new race?”

  “New to humans,” he said. “Or to most of them.”

  He chuckled again. I said: “I can hardly wait.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Euglane explained a little about the Gielli to me, after we’d had a chance to talk about my problem, and when we met the next evening. He’d had, he told me, appointments right through the day, “and it would be unkind in me to break them, if I can avoid doing that,” he said. “There’s a certain dependence, you know.” His voice was middle-register for a male human, pleasant and even and just a little gruff.

  I nodded at that, and I didn’t press it. I agreed to meet him at his home at what Ravenal calls eighteen-thirty and I call six-thirty P. M. I was there about eight minutes early, but when I thumbed the entry switch the little bell-announce had barely stopped chiming inside when he opened the door. He was smiling, or he looked as if he were smiling. With a face like his, it was hard to tell, and mostly in the eyes.

  Two eyes, a rather small head, and a beak. The head was tan, the beak dark and glossy, either brown or black. His eyes were large, looked almost human—the irises were narrow upright ovals—and bright blue.

  Imagine a koala with the head of an eagle. Wearing, by the way, a short-sleeved white shirt, a pair of shorts, and slippers, and standing about five feet eleven inches tall. That isn’t it— Euglane wasn’t as puffy as a koala, and his head was larger and longer than an eagle’s—but it will give you a fast idea. I said: “Mr. Euglane?” and he said:

  “Euglane, please. You’re Knave?”

  Despite its hard, glossy appearance, the beak was mobile enough to shape vowels. “I am,” I said. He stepped aside, and I went in, to a small, light entry hall panelled in expensive dark wood. He shut the door—which was also wood; apparently this particular Giell was doing all right for himself financially—and then led the way to a big, airy living room. There were couches, tables, overstuffed chairs; he indicated a small couch and I sat down, and he dropped into a big chair nearby.

  “I don’t know what Master Higsbee has told you about me,” he said.

  “Not a lot,” I said. “To be frank, I’d never heard of the Gielli till he mentioned you last night. He said you might be helpful.”

  “Well,” he said, “I will be if I can. That’s my nature, being helpful. It’s what I do, you know.”

  “I suppose so,” I said. “A psychiatrist, after all.”

  At that point he remembered his manners, or something, and offered me drinks. I said fruit juice, to be friendly, and he went away and came back with a couple of tall glasses on a tray. I took one, he sat down again and said:

  “Do you mind if I relax?”

  “Not at all,” I said.

  He nodded, put his own glass on the tray, which sat on a nearby small table, and sighed. A second went by.

  Then his arms and legs started to extend.

  When each limb was about four feet long, he sighed again. “Thanks,” he said. “It’s a strain, but it is best to seem as non-threatening as possible. Long arms mean a long reach, long legs an overpowering height. Not always the best or most reassuring picture for a human.”

  Accordion limbs? They seemed to be boneless, with strong muscles for motion. Expandable cartilage? Standing upright looked to be a problem without anything as hard as bones to take the weight over four feet of leg, and I thought, when fully relaxed, he probably got around on all fours, in a sort of sea-lion crawl. “I can see where it might be a strain,” I said. “Holding yourself in like that.”

  “Well,” he said, thrashing his arms and legs a little, just loosening up after a long day, “it’s worth it, if it keeps my patients calm. But of course you’re not a patient.”

  “To tell you the truth,” I said, “I wasn’t quite sure. The Master was—a little vague.”

  “He was very vague with me.” Euglane said. “He told me he wanted me to form my own impressions—a good idea generally, but I’m pretty much a blank at the moment; anything you tell me is going to be news.”

  I nodded. “What do you know about dimensions?” I said.

  “Dimensions?”

  I explained, as briefly as possible—which was not very. I finished: “What I ran into recently—not anywhere near here, though I am not at all sure ‘near’ has any meaning in this context—is, then, and among other things, a claim to live in terms of ‘other dimensions’. I am damned if I know what that means.”

  He shut his eyes. His arms began to twine around each other, not tightly. I waited for a long minute.

  “I assume,” he said without opening his eyes, “you heard this claim as
something literal. Not some sort of figurative, poetic statement.”

  “The speaker didn’t strike me as the poetic type,” I said.

  He hummed for a second. Not an unpleasant sound—a little distant. Then his eyes opened. “A dimension is a mathematical convenience,” he said. “N-dimensional space is a common enough theoretical concept. But to speak of living in some— other set of dimensions—well, we can define a dimension in terms of right angles.”

  “Go ahead.” The easiest way to consult an expert is to let him explain to you, even if you know most of what he’s going to tell you.

  “Take a line—one-dimensional, assume it’s a mathematical line, without width. Erect another line at right angles to it and you have a two-dimensional structure. Erect still another at right angles to both of those, and you have an object in three dimensions.”

  I nodded. “Clear so far,” I said. “And a fourth line, at right angles to all the other three, defines a fourth spatial dimension—space-four, in fact.”

  “That’s the theory,” he said, “and since we do travel in terms of space-four, we can accept the theory as having some sort of practical existence.”

  “Line, square, cube, tesseract,” I said. “So far I’m with you.”

  “Now, if we continue to erect lines, each at right angles to all of the previous lines, we will be creating objects of more and more dimensions.”

  “We can deal with the objects mathematically,” I said. “We can’t picture them. Not that picturing them is a final test of anything.”

  “It is some sort of test in this case, though,” he said. “This being—Folla?”

  “Folla.”

  “Folla was able to interact—massively, he moved your ship—in terms of our four spatial dimensions. While he was doing that, he must have been—in a way—picturable. If you see what I mean.”

  “He must have existed in this space.”

  “At least in part,” Euglane said. His arms twined again. “The question is: does he exist in terms of more than our dimensions—three spatial dimensions, we can travel by means of space-four, but we can’t do anything in it, so to speak, or with it, we just pass through—or merely a different three?”

  He had said something I hadn’t expected, for the first time. And I had only one reply, though I seemed to have been saying it a lot lately. “I am damned if I know.”

  “It must be one or the other,” he said, and as he said it I held up a hand. Something had occurred to me, something interesting. Just perhaps…

  “He said he was now existing in these spaces, and implied he’d been existing in different ones, or a different combination,” I said. “But does this involve a different set of dimensions?”

  Euglane raised an arm over his head, and turned it. A shrug?. “What else can it mean, after all? It sounds like science-fiction, as I understand such stuff—it sounds, even, like very bad science-fiction—but there it is.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “just maybe, there it isn’t.”

  He left his chair. I’d been right; he didn’t stand upright. He eased himself to the carpet, which was expensive-looking but thin and comparatively stiff, and got around in a sort of combination crawl and all-fours. He went over to another table, where there was a small pile of papers. He levered himself up to a chair next to the table, picked a paper off the top of the pile, and said: “I’ve been thinking about this general subject for some time.”

  What a psychological-statics expert had been doing thinking about other dimensions I couldn’t really imagine, and, as politely as possible, I said so.

  “A few of my patients report contact with alien intelligences from other dimensions,” he said.

  I blinked. “But—”

  “But they’re mad,” he said. “Crazy. Mentally many degrees out of true. Yes. And I do not for a second believe that any report I’ve heard has any foundation in objective fact.”

  “Well, then—”

  “But my habit is to look everywhere,” he said. “Let me give you an example.”

  I took a swallow of fruit juice. “Go ahead.”

  “A few years ago,” he said, “a patient of mine reported that she was being spied on by aliens. From some ‘other dimension’, I don’t doubt. They patrolled her building, she said. They had a set of signals that told them which room of her little apartment she was in—she lived at the top floor of a small building—so they could train their spy-rays on her at any time.”

  “And you found the aliens?” I said.

  He laughed. He had a musical sort of laugh, with an undertone of the gruffness that was in his voice. “I did not,” he said. “I never expected to. But I looked. I hired some people to look.”

  “And?”

  “There were no aliens,” he said. “Of course there weren’t, and never had been. But—on the roof of a building near hers, with a good view of three of her windows—there was a human. A peeping tom.”

  I nodded. “Everybody needs a hobby.”

  “I suppose so,” he said. “A little talk with him stopped the practice, at least as far as my patient was concerned—and perhaps altogether, I can’t be sure.”

  “And that relieved your patient?” I said.

  “Not by itself, though it certainly helped,” he said. “Humans do tend to feel that they’re being watched—when they’re being watched. Sometimes, as well, when they’re not—but the feeling diminished greatly for my patient when the practice stopped. Some further work with her helped relieve her of her delusion about the aliens.”

  I took a second with it. “So when people report contact with aliens from other dimensions—” I began.

  With his patients, he was probably quieter. But he was one of those people who seldom let you finish a sentence. “I look into the contacts they’ve had with beings from these dimensions,” he said. “Friends, business associates, relatives—and so on. And,” he went on, lifting the paper again, “I look, generally, into the idea of other dimensions as well.” He went to the floor again, and came over to me, holding the paper in one hand. He gave me the paper, and went back to the chair near me. “The fact is, Knave, very little about the universe is certain. It’s a good idea to check everything you can—however odd it seems to do so.”

  It’s an attitude I’m very fond of, and one I never expect to meet in anybody else—except Master Higsbee, of course. I nodded at him. “The damnedest things do turn up,” I said.

  “Exactly,” he said.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Before we go on,” I said, “and I do want to go on with this, if you’ve got the time—tell me a little bit about—well, about you. About the Gielli. And about what a non-human being is doing practicing as a psychiatrist for humans. It seems just a little strange, and I’d like to know, so to speak, who I’m talking with.”

  He smiled at me. The beak did move, a little, but the effect was mostly eyes and cheeks. “It’s a consequence of Troutman’s Theorem,” he said, “which you don’t know, and don’t want to hear about. Psychological Statics. But I can put it, more or less, into standard speech.”

  “By all means,” I said.

  “Most psychiatric work with patients is built on the very ancient idea—among humans—of transference. That is, the patient treats his doctor, his psychiatrist—they used to be called psychoanalysts, you know, long before rigid methods of analysis were even possible, before Psychological Statics really existed—”

  “Before the Clean Slate War.”

  “So I understand,” he said. “The term’s a little threatening, for many patients, and we don’t use it now. ‘Analyst’ has rather menacing overtones, and ‘anal’, which some patients respond to without being fully conscious of the fact, is of course even worse. ‘Psychiatrist’ is comparatively neutral.”

  “You were saying something about transference.”

  “So I was,” he said. “In a transference, the patient treats his doctor the way he’d treat—his mother, his father, his brother or sister—som
eone close to him during an early period of his life, when attitudes were being formed.”

  I nodded. “I see,” I said. Always let an expert be an expert.

  “Some psychiatrists use the transference, for all sorts of purposes,” he said. “Good ones. We have little use for it among ourselves—the Gielli are—strongly empathic, you might say. We’re interested in attitudes rather than objects; it might be put that way.”

  “Not an unusual kind of interest for a psychiatrist,” I said.

  “You might say that the Gielli were born to be psychiatrists, though less often for, or among, ourselves,” he said. “But to go on: in transference, among humans,” he said, “there are difficulties—it’s hard to establish the distance you need for treatment. You’re always juggling the doctor-patient relationship and the transference relationship, whatever that transference relationship is.”

  “Human doctors seem to manage it,” I said.

  “They do,” he said, and nodded. “But it’s always a difficulty—and if the doctor is—non-human, deep transference is less likely to occur. Other means develop, and are in fact as useful.”

  “So a non-human doctor—”

  “Is much less likely to have to deal with the difficulties of deep transference,” he said. “Distance is easier to establish, and work becomes much simpler. Of course, there is the question of initial trust—very important—but humans seem to find us likeable people. We are trustworthy, and it’s our good luck that we also seem to be trustworthy.”

  “And your patients don’t—well, confuse you with these alien beings they’re in contact with?”

  He laughed. “We’re not aliens,” he said. “We’re Gielli. We’re a known quantity, now.” He paused, and smiled once more. “We’re not extensive travelers, you know—we’ve had space-four travel for a few hundred of your Standard years, but we’ve never been much for exploring. We ran into a human ship—whose pilot was exploring, scouting a new area a few light-years from the inhabited planet humans call Rimshot— forty-four Standard years ago, and began talks. Some of us decided to settle here on Ravenal fifteen years ago; our physical requirements are similar to yours, though at home we do have a lighter gravity. The weight here is a bother, but not a great bother.”