James White - Mind Changer

“As the newly appointed hospital administrator,” Braithwaite added, “I am making that my first executive order.”

Eventually he was allowed to board the Monitor Corps supply ship Cranthor, a regular and frequest visitor to the hospital. It had an all-Tralthan crew and one passenger cabin that was environmentally suited to Earth-human DBDGs. Those members of the crew who had not met him knew who he was and what he had been, and they were so eager to please him that they offered to start another farewell party on board. He told them that he just wanted to rest without company or conversation or entertainment tapes while he tried to recover from the first one. But the truth was that he wanted to watch the vast, dazzling spectacle of the hospital complex as it shrank to become a tiny, multicolored jewel in the aft viewscreen, while reminding himself that he was seeing it for the last time and remembering back to the time when he had been in a construction gang working on the empty structure, and the strange, weird, and exciting events and people he had met on his way up to his recent and brief appointment and sendoff as its retiring administrator.

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.