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 mind. 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.