As much as she was trying to disrupt the session, she’d given me an excellent way to involve the others. “Does anyone else feel that therapy is useless?” I asked.
Kwame raised a trembling finger. He wore a business suit from his world, as though ready to go before a press conference: a cream linen jacket with sharply creased trousers, and a zigzag pinstripe shirt buttoned to the collar. I nodded and he spoke in a slow, solemn manner, concentrating to overcome his aphasia. “I think… that perhaps Olivia has forgotten how much we have gained from our stay on Hub. We may not receive all we would wish for, but I can assure those who are new to this world that they are very kind to us here.”
“Hasn’t stopped you being a crackpot, has it?” said Olivia. They’d both been on Hub for a while, and had met before at the Psychiatric Centre. By all reports they hadn’t been friends.
“I have not changed my goal. I am as determined as the last time we met.”
“And that’s why they sent you here, wasn’t it? Am I right? They’re fed up with you, so they packed you off here with everyone else they can’t cure of being the last man on earth. They don’t want you to get better, they want you to shut up!”
“I admit… the thought had crossed my mind—”
“So you agree with me?”
“That is not what I—”
“You’re embarrassing to them, that’s what it is, because they don’t want to lift a finger to stop it happening again. We’re all embarrassing.”
A new voice spoke up. “Can I say a word?”
“Iokan. Yes, please, go ahead.” Iokan’s chair had been floated in from the infirmary, and he still wore a hospital gown and cotton trousers. He was emaciated, jaundiced, only just back from the edge of death, but with a light in his eyes that simply ignored his physical state. He spoke his own language, and the rest of us read the translation as it sprang up on our various systems.
“What do you mean, ‘reason’? What reason?” asked Olivia, straight in with her usual bile once her glasses translated his words.
“Olivia. Iokan wants to speak,” I said.
“He’s talking rubbish!”
“He has as much of a right to speak as you do, and you’ve already told us what you think. Iokan’s only just been rescued, remember, and he’s still unwell. If you carry on like this, it’s not going to help.”
Olivia grudgingly surveyed his wasted form. “Fine,” she said, and looked elsewhere.
Iokan continued: “As I was saying, I think we’re all here for a reason, or perhaps many reasons. I don’t know what those reasons might be. But I’d like to find out.”
“Thank you, Iokan,” I said. “Although I think Olivia raised a very valid point.” She looked round, surprised. Kwame looked up too, just as shocked that I was agreeing with Olivia. “She said we can’t cure you of being the last man — or woman — on earth, and she’s right. Nothing can change that. What we can do is help you learn to live with it. Now, that won’t be easy, and you’re all going to have to do a lot of work in the group and in individual therapy. But I believe it’s possible, if you’re willing to try. So, does anyone else have any opinions about the rules?”
I couldn’t help glancing at Olivia first, but she sank into her folded arms. The three who hadn’t yet spoken stayed quiet. “Does anyone else have anything to say?” I asked; but none of them volunteered. In group therapy, it’s vital for the members to be willing to at least talk to each other. Someone like Olivia can disrupt that, but the real danger was that they didn’t participate at all. So I fell back on an old tactic to get them started.
“Okay, then. What I’d like to do is get everyone to introduce themselves to the group. You’ve probably done this kind of thing before but today I’d like to do it differently. I’d like each of you to introduce someone else to the group.”
They perked up a bit, some looking worried. Olivia sneered as I went on. “So what you’ll have to do is talk to one of the others, find out their story, and then explain it to everyone else. Katie, is that all right with you?”
Katie turned her head a perfect forty degrees and locked her eyes on me, always a little unnerving because she never blinked and hardly seemed to breathe. She was tall and heavily built, with close-cropped hair that revealed a trio of metallic sockets on the back of her head. She wore a shapeless jumpsuit that was practical in all circumstances and spoke in fluent Interversal, which she’d learnt astonishingly quickly. “I will comply with all reasonable requests.”
“Do you think this request is reasonable?”
“I am not an effective communicator.”
“But you’ll try?”
She processed for a moment. “I will try.”
“Good. Pew?”
“Yes?” Pew looked back at me, distracted from staring at the holes in Katie’s head. He had the pudgy build of someone who’d spent too long sitting down, and wore clothes from his stay at Hub University: a black hooded top that helped him hide away; comfortable, scuffed training shoes; and the loose, pocketed trousers that had been in style a year before. His hesitancy had nothing to do with his skill in Interversal, which was normally fluent. “Uh. I’ll do it. I’m, I’m not sure I’ll be any good…”
“That’s okay. I’m sure you’ll be fine.” He smiled a little, but was still nervous. I turned to the last member of the group. “Liss?”
“Oh, is it me?” Liss stopped toying with her earrings and perked up as she read her own name in her contact lenses. “Yeah, sure! I’ll just go on and on, though,” she chattered back in her own language, “I’ll get carried away and start talking and I won’t get halfway there before the end. Hope you don’t mind!” Out of all the group, she’d made the most deliberate effort to look good, and had deliberately overdone it. She wore lipstick in a shade of pink I could hardly imagine on anyone over the age of twelve, a top that flounced in a darker shade of pink over a black vest, then a skirt in another pinkish hue and ankle boots that matched the lipstick perfectly.
“Do we have to listen to that?” asked Olivia.
I ignored her and smiled at Liss. “Don’t worry. I’ll let you know if you need to wrap it up. Okay, what I’ll ask you to do is write your names down on pieces of paper, then you all pick out someone’s name, and that’ll be whose story you tell. I’ll give you twenty minutes to introduce yourselves to each other, and then we’ll come back to the group and take it from there. Veofol?”
Veofol already had paper and pens ready, and distributed them among the group. Most of them were comfortable with the old technology, though Katie had to be shown how to use a pen. She rapidly gained an ability to write her name in a perfect sans serif font while Veofol collected the names in a bowl.
Olivia, however, was having none of it. She sat with her arms folded and would not touch the pen and paper placed before her. “You didn’t ask me for permission, did you?”
“I’m sorry, Olivia, did you have an objection?” I asked.
“Well. I don’t want you to think I don’t respect you,” she sneered, “but I don’t want to know any of you, and I don’t bloody want to be here.”
“Can you at least be polite?” asked Kwame, irritated.
“Why should I? I didn’t ask to be here! Did you?”
“That is not the point—”
“Of course it’s the bloody point! I’ve been dragged here against my will and I don’t want any part of it!”