by James White
The party had taken three days and two nights, because all the people who wanted to say good-bye to him had not been offduty at the same time. He could not understand the reason for all the fuss, because he knew that he was an intensely unlikable person even if he had been good at his job, but some of the things the senior and very junior staff of many species had said to him had almost wrecked his emotional self-control. He had been respected much more than he had ever imagined and, while nobody would admit to liking much less loving him, the intensity of that dislike had manifested itself in some strange and often touching ways.
Love, he thought, was supposed to be akin to hate. In their own particular fashion they must have hated him very much.
He stayed with Cranthor while it refilled its holds on Traltha, Orligia, and Nidia, but left it there because its next destination would be a return trip to Sector General. Over the years he had become an expert at hopping from ship to ship and, although he was still able to travel as a retired space officer and Sector General administrator, he had accrued enough back salary over the years to be able to pay his way if he wanted to keep a low profile. This time it wasn’t necessary, because Korallan, a tour ship larger and better appointed and, presumably, less likely to have operational mishaps than the old Kreskhallar, was berthed at Nidia’s Retlin spaceport while its passengers saw the sights, and was due to depart for O’Mara’s final destination in three days’ time. He was already familiar with Retlin from earlier stopovers, but used the time to reaccustom himself since his last leave to shopping and staying in low-ceilinged buildings where he had to bend almost double, and to public-transport vehicles in which he had to either kneel or squat.
On the first night out he discovered that the multi-species dining room contained seven other Earth-human passengers, three females and four males, all of them young. He was given a seat at the end of their table but deliberately avoided joining in their conversation. Unlike the situation in Kreskhallar’s dining room, this time he wasn’t the only male show in town and he had no intention of engaging in a shipboard romance. His life was complicated enough as it was.
He left the ship when it was disembarking at Kelgia’s main spaceport and took a private groundcar into its capital city. The driver was used to Earth-human and many other strange shapes squeezing themselves into its vehicle and politely, for a Kelgian, described items of scenic or architectural interest, not realizing that O’Mara had traveled this way many times and was already familiar with them. Even so, he could not help watching as the sprawling expanse of Kelgia’s largest multi-species hospital complex, looking like an open, beautifully landscaped, and aseptically clean white township, moved slowly past.
Even though he had never actually visited the place, every stretch of parkland, garden, and tree-shaded walkway, as well as the layout of the wards, operating theaters, and staff accommodation in every building, was known to him through the memories of his mind partner, who had trained and served there.
Kledenth, its fur rippling in a combination of impatience and pleasure, was already waiting for him at the entrance to its house when he paid off his driver and began stretching to ease his stiffened leg and back muscles. The Kelgian indicated its own larger and more comfortable vehicle parked a few meters away.
It said, “I had to pull, as you Earth-humans say, a few strings, but I got it. All the equipment you wanted is loaded on board. Now, I suppose you’re in a hurry to use it?”
“Eager to use it, Kledenth,” O’Mara replied, “but not in a tearing hurry. This time I’m not on leave and don’t have to return to Sector General, so hopefully I’m on this world to stay. There is time now, and there will be more later, to talk to you and your family and to thank you yet again for everything you’ve done for us over the years. The debt for saving your fur after that accident on Kreskhallar is more than repaid.”
“Look at the way my fur moves, said Kledenth. “In spite of my age is it not beautiful? It could so easily have been otherwise. My life and successful career subsequent to that accident, my loving lifemate and children, I owe to your specialist knowledge and gross insubordination toward that ship’s captain, and to the skill of the Earth-human female. That debt will never be repaid. But I think you are making one of your stupid and unnecessary Earth-human pretenses, so get into my groundcar and stop wasting time being polite to someone who doesn’t understand the concept.”
Their vehicle was picking up speed and Kledenth’s home was shrinking behind them when it said, “How fares the Joan entity?”
“She congratulates you on the birth of your latest grandchild,” O’Mara replied, “and she says she is well. Reading between the lines I could detect no evidence of serious emotional upsets between her life-mate and herself or their two matured offspring. Her last few letters, as you would put it, were showing happy fur.”
They had traveled more than a mile before Kledenth spoke again.
“Myself I thought it visually quite repulsive,” it said, “but when I showed the shipboard photographs I had taken to an Earthhuman business acquaintance, it said that she was a dish and that you had been a very fortunate man. O’Mara, why didn’t you continue and develop the relationship instead of…
“You know why,” said O’Mara.
“I know,” said the other, “but I think you’re mad.”
O’Mara smiled. “I’m a psychologist.”
“And a very good one,” said Kledenth. “I know that, too. But we’ve arrived. I won’t go in with you because the place makes me feel very uncomfortable. It reminds me of how I might have been.”
The Retreat was a large establishment surrounded by lawns and gardens whose occupants were hidden by a thick screen of aromatic foliage from the view of chance passersby who would otherwise have been seriously distressed by seeing them. O’Mara used his key to open the high, opaque gate and, carrying his luggage in one hand and the equipment container in the other, walked slowly toward the house. He recognized some of the people who were lying curled up on the grass like furry question marks or undulating between the flower beds, because he had long since learned how to tell Kelgians apart. He spoke to them in passing and some of them were feeling well enough to speak back.
Inside the building he climbed the tiny steps of the Kelgian staircase. His room was exactly as he had left it a year earlier except that it was tidy and she had attached sprigs of festive aromatic vegetation to his favorite pictures. The tidiness, they both knew, would be a temporary condition. He dumped his bag on the tiny, lowceilinged room’s single, narrow bed, but held on to the equipment container while he went back downstairs to her office.
There was only one person in the establishment whose feet made a sound like his, so he wasn’t surprised that she was already watching him as he came through the doorway. He placed the container on a side table and, with one hand still resting on it, turned to look back at her. The silence lengthened. Another person might have said hello, or asked if he’d had a good trip or verbally eased the situation in some other fashion, but Kelgians didn’t go in for small talk.
“It will take a few minutes to unpack and assemble,” he said, “after which it will be ready for use. Will you allow me to use it?”
“I don’t know,” said Marrasarah. The small areas of her fur that still retained mobility were spiking in indecision.
“You’ve had a year since my last visit to think about it,” said O’Mara quietly, “and now that I’ve severed all professional contact with Sector General and I plan to stay on Kelgia for the rest of our lives, you can take a little more time to think about it. What’s the problem? Remember, I know your mind as well as you do yourself.”
“You knew my mind,” said Marrasarah, “at the time I donated the Educator tape. In the intervening time that mind has changed, for the better. This was due entirely to your curative therapy and never-ending patience with me. But I, apart from the thoughts and feelings that I have been able to deduce from your words and actions, know nothing of your m
ind. But that may be enough for me.”
“But it isn’t enough for me,” said O’Mara, gesturing toward the container. “At the hospital I used my influence with Prilicla, who is the only other being who knows about us, to have a tape made of my mind. I have it with me. I can talk to you and try to describe them in words, but I don’t have the fur to show you the true depth of my feelings for you and why I’ve held them over these many years. In a few minutes you could know everything.”
“I am afraid,” she replied, “to know everything?
As he waited for her to go on, even the dead areas of fur seemed to be twitching in her agitation. With one of his own kind he would have moved closer and placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder, but that would not happen here.
During the thirty-odd years that she had been his patient and more than friend there had been no physical contact between them.
“You know everything about me because you carry my donor tape within your mind, she said finally, “but you are forgetting that it is no longer the same mind and you, O’Mara, have changed it. For reasons which you described to me in words and which still don’t make sense to me, you took on my case. It was not through pity for my deformity, you insisted, but because I represent a problem which, because of your growing affection for the personality I had been, you wanted to spend all of your leaves of absence from the hospital, except for the first one when you and the Earthhuman female Joan saved Kledenth’s fur, trying to solve…”
“It was, is, much more than affection,” said O’Mara.
“Don’t interrupt me,” she continued. “I cannot tell a lie, but the truth is complicated and difficult for me to speak. You solved my problem, not by performing a medically impossible miracle on a grossly deformed body but by repairing the wreckage of the mind within. And by working patiently you gave it, and many other minds here, a reason to go on living instead of existing in pain and self-loathing and cut off from friends and families until a usually self-inflicted death ended it.
“With me,” she went on, the undamaged parts of her fur writhing at the memories, “you began by morally blackmailing Kledenth into tracing the whereabouts of this Retreat through my old hospital. Then you talked. And talked. It was cruel at first, but you reminded me of the great medical future that had streched in front of me before the accident ended it, except that you insisted that the mind inside my deformed body had a future, too, one that did not depend on visual contact and social interaction with my undamaged colleagues. Then over the years, without allowing anyone outside to know of your presence here or what you were doing for us, you reorganized this place of the living dead and, instead of it being a trash can filled with social outcasts that our people preferred not to think about, you gradually changed it into a consultancy that uses the newly healed and multidisciplined minds of its occupants to perform services that are increasingly in demand. The outgoing vision channels are switched off, naturally, so that nobody has to look at the experts they are consulting, but our clients are used to that now. I don’t know what type of mind-changing therapy you used on the others, because their former specialties aren’t medicine and they won’t talk about it, but with me you talked about nothing but Sector General.
“You told me about the wonderful and often dangerous events that took place there,” Marrasarah went on, “and the strange beings who work there, and the even stranger entities and conditions that they are called on to treat, and the challenging problems and ingenious solutions that were and are a daily routine. The staff and patients you described with the feeling of a great and dedicated psychiatrist while the events were related with the medical insight and purely Kelgian viewpoint possible only to one who shares my mind. In the beginning I, too, wanted an excuse to die and leave this deformed body. Instead I began counting the days until your next leave so as to hear more of your life. And now you want me to share that life by copying all of your memories into my mind, including this strange attraction you feel for me. I am greatly honored that you should offer this, but I don’t think I want to share all the knowledge and innermost secrets and the true, unspoken thoughts of the psychologist O’Mara’s mind.
“I am afraid.”
O’Mara tried not to look at the pitifully few mobile patches of fur that were reflecting her fear. Even though it would not alter their future together or his feelings for her, he was becoming afraid, too, of her rejecting a gift that would lead to her full understanding of the rough, untutored, and complex person that was himself.
“Of what?” he said gently.
“I know you through your words and actions” she replied. “They were healing words and kindly actions spread out over many years. But now you are giving me the chance to know the true thinking and reasons behind those words and actions, and of that I am afraid. I am afraid of discovering a small selfishness or imperfection in a being I have long regarded with respect, admiration, and deep affection, or of discovering in you a strange, psychological abnormality that your Earth-human words have unwittingly concealed from me. I–I am afraid of being disappointed.”
O’Mara smiled, knowing that over the years she had learned to understand the meaning behind that Earth-human grimace, and ordered his thoughts for a moment before speaking. He had been looking forward to this moment ever since he had illegally impressed himself with the Marrasarah mind tape to aid the therapy oh the then-young trainee, Thornnastor, and he was afraid, too, but of the disappointment of rejection.
He said, “My words and actions toward you have been those of a therapist with one physically impaired, emotionally disturbed, and professionally challenging patient who, for many years, has ceased to require therapy or be a patient. So I admit that I am selfish and imperfect and not admirable or worthy of respect, and there isn’t a psychologist in the Federation who would not consider me as anything but abnormal because I do need your affection, and more than that.
“Within the first few hours of taking your mind tape” he went on, ‘I formed a strong, emotional attachment to you. It was love at first meeting, but it was a nonphysical love that had nothing to do with sexual attraction because, if it had, that really would have been abnormal. I loved, and love, the Marrasarah personality who had worked and studied hard to rise to the top of a profession which, even on enlightened Kelgia, is predominantly male. I loved the unselfish way you helped your fellow students, your most difficult patients, and eventually your colleagues who had professional or personal problems, and the larger the problems the more you strove to solve them. In spite of your youth when you donated the mind tape, you were widely respected and loved because you couldn’t help being a counselor and friend and at times a mother to everyone who needed help. If I had met an Earth-human who was like you, my early life would have been different and certainly happier. But instead you became my mind partner. Everything about you became part of me and I was more contented and happy than I could have believed possible.
“Since that time,” he continued when she seemed about to interrupt, “your experience has helped me in my work, given me a greater understanding in my professional dealings with otherspecies patients, and generally kept me emotionally stable under stress, especially during my last job with Tunneckis, which as yet you don’t know about.
“But long before I realized how much you were helping me, he continued, “I was angry at the way that cruel accident to your fur had ended an extremely promising career. So I decided to attempt something that the psychiatric source material in our library computer insisted was impossible. I tried to rebuild the otherwise brilliant mind of a fur-damaged Kelgian from the inside, and over half our lifetimes that is what we did. I say ‘we’ because you helped me by controlling the anger and fighting the bitter despair that was pulling you toward the inevitable ending of your own life.
“I owe you for that, too, because I could not have borne losing you as person even though your mind will be in mine as long asllive.
“Many times when I was telling you about Sect
or General,” he went on, “I tried to tell you everything about me in poor, limping, inadequate words. But now, if you will agree to take my mind tape, you can discover the complete truth about me. I have had faults, bad habits, no social skills, secret fears, and phobias since a very early age, and now you can learn about them all. The result may be uncomfortable, frightening, even mentally repugnant to you. If you find it so, the mind tape can be erased again in a few minutes. But be warned. The result will be much deeper and more intimate than the lying together of two people during the act of physical mating, because it will be a true marriage of minds. I have known and will always know you in that way, Marrasarah, and I want you to know me. Please say yes. Or do you need more time to consider?”
“No.” she said.
Without hesitation she moved to the relaxer beside the table holding his equipment container. He didn’t trust himself to speak while he assembled and double-checked and calibrated the equipment for an Earth-human to Kelgian mind transfer. Still without speaking, he fitted the helmet comfortably onto her delicate, coneshaped head and switched on. A few minutes later he removed the helmet again, thinking that this had been the first and hopefully the only physical contact he would have with her. If there was a second contact it would be because she wanted the contents of his mind to be erased from hers. But all she did was look up at him while the small patches of still-mobile fur rippled in slow, even waves. He let the silence run for as long as he could.
“Is there a problem?” he blurted out finally. “Are you all right? Do you want an erasure?”