Robert Sawyer - Foreigner

There were no signs of additional eggs.

Quintaglios normally laid clutches of eight. Assuming this Other wasn’t anomalous, these people only had four eggs to a clutch.

The three intact eggs were fully formed, with tough, soft shells, as if they’d been ready to be laid. Indeed, Toroca wondered whether the Other they’d encountered had been walking the beach looking for a suitable spot to deposit her eggs. If that was the case, then the eggs were probably still alive. He’d heard stories of eggs being rescued from the body of a dying female.

Toroca hurried off to find leather blankets to wrap the eggs in.

“The talking cure is not always pleasant,” said Nav-Mokleb, leaning back on her tail. She was standing about fifteen paces downwind of Afsan’s rock. “You will have to bare your innermost thoughts to me. Further, the cure takes a great deal of time. We must meet for a daytenth every other day for a protracted period—perhaps as long as a kiloday.”

“Five hundred sessions!” said Afsan. “Five hundred daytenths.” And then, as was his wont, he extended the mathematics: “That would mean the aggregate of our sessions would total fifty days.”

“Yes.”

“Mokleb, I don’t have fifty days to spare. I’m old.”

“To invoke math, as you are so famous for doing, you are not old. If you survive an average span, your life is a little less than half over.” Mokleb let out a long, hissing sigh. “Look, this is an unusual case for me. Normally, patients seek me out on their own. They believe in my techniques and are eager to be cured. You, however, are here because the Emperor and your physician recommended it. I see that you are skeptical, and reluctant to undertake the process.”

“Skepticism is the mark of a good scientist,” replied Afsan. “As for reluctance, as I said, I don’t have fifty days to spare.”

“The Emperor asked me to take you on as a patient,” said Mokleb, “and I am a loyal subject of Dy-Dybo. But if you are reluctant now, it will only get worse as our explorations take longer. You must be committed to this process, or it cannot work.”

“Then it will not work,” said Afsan.

Mokleb shrugged. “The loss is yours. I sleep well at night, Afsan, and I can see. I don’t expect you to envy me for that, but I had been led to believe that you desired those same things yourself. I see that I was mistaken. My apologies for taking up some of your precious time.”

Mokleb began walking away. Insects buzzed. She passed three Rockscape boulders before Afsan spoke. “Wait,” he said. And then, a moment later, “Come back.”

Mokleb walked back toward Afsan’s rock.

“I’m sorry,” Afsan said. “I understand you are trying to help me. Please—I do want to be cured.”

“Good,” said Mokleb. “That brings us to the question of compensation for my labors.”

“I have an unlimited imperial endowment,” said Afsan. “Please talk with Dee-Laree at the palace; he’ll make sure you are well looked after.”

“I will speak to Dee-Laree,” said Mokleb. “But simply having a third party provide me with recompense is insufficient.

We are about to embark on a long and difficult road, Afsan. There must be a contract directly between us. Normally, I wouldn’t say this to a patient, but I’m sure you would figure this out for yourself—and I know that the moment I leave, you will send an assistant to the library and have him or her bring back my writings and read them to you anyway.” She paused. “I have found that, as therapy progresses, patients begin to skip appointments. They wish to avoid facing difficult questions. Therefore, I will charge you a personal fee for every session, to be paid whether you attend or not, said fee to be dear enough to make you reluctant to waste it.”

“A fee! On top of what the palace will give you?”

“Yes. You’ve already made clear how valuable your time is to you, Afsan. Mine is equally valuable to me, and I won’t be trifled with.”

“But a fee! Doctors don’t trade directly with patients, Mokleb. Surely you already receive a stipend.”

“That’s irrelevant. You must be committed to the therapy, and a fee helps ensure that. Plus, there’s another reason to charge you a fee. Again, I wouldn’t normally mention it, but you will be savvy enough to see it, anyway. During the course of the therapy, you will have many different reactions to me. At times, those reactions will be ones of aggression and hate. Paying me a fee will help assuage your guilt over having those feelings. You must have no humiliating debt of gratitude to me for tolerating such outbursts; rather, you must feel that you have bought the right to make them.”

Afsan was silent for a time. Then: “Although Dybo looks after my needs, Mokleb, I personally own little. My endowment is mostly to finance research. I have no precious stones, no percentage interest in any ship or caravan, and only a few trading markers. How would I pay you?”

“What do you own that you value most?”

“I have few possessions. My greatest prize, I suppose, was the far-seer that Novato gave me. But that is in the custody of my son, Toroca.”

“What else do you treasure?”

Afsan’s tail, hanging off the back of the rock he was straddling, waggled back and forth. “Well, to my astonishment, my old teaching master, Tak-Saleed, left me a complete set of his Treatise on the Planets, the most famous of his works.”

“What good are books to a blind person?” asked Mokleb.

“Oh, occasionally I have a student read passages from them to me. But simply owning them, running my fingers over the kurpa leather binding, smelling the musty pages—that gives me pleasure.”

“How many volumes are there?”

“Eighteen. Three per planet, other than the Face of God.”

“Excellent,” said Mokleb. “And how many times does eighteen go into five hundred?”

Afsan tipped his head. “A little less than twenty-eight: 27.778, to be precise.”

“Very good. You will pay me in advance. Today, you will surrender the first volume of the treatise. After every twenty-eight sessions, you will surrender another volume. If you are still being treated after five hundred sessions, we will renegotiate the contract. Agreed?”

“I cherish those books,” Afsan said softly.

“Agreed?” said Mokleb harshly.

Afsan tipped his head down, blind eyes looking at the ground. “Agreed,” he said at last.

Novato mentally whipped herself with her tail for not having come up with the idea. After all, it was a logical extension of her own invention, the far-seer. The far-seer used lenses to make distant objects appear close, and this device, the small-seer, used lenses to make tiny objects visible. The small-seer’s inventor, Bor-Vanbelk of Pack Brampto in Arj’toolar, had discovered amazing things. Tiny lifeforms in a drop of water! Little disks within blood. Minuscule chambers in the leaf of a plant!

Novato, balancing again on the side of the cliff, clinging with one hand to the rope web, was using a small-seer to examine the spreading blueness. Here, right at its very edge, she could see shifting patterns of dust. Even through the lenses, the grains were all but invisible. But unlike the random jostling in a drop of water, these motes moved in regular patterns, back and forth, up and down. It was as though Novato were watching a dance from the back of an impossibly high amphitheater, the individual dancers virtually impossible to discern but the mathematical precision of their movements still a thing of beauty.

Dancers, thought Novato. Dancers smaller than the eye could see. But they weren’t just dancing. They were working, like ants building an anthill, moving with determined insectile exactness.