James White: Mind Changer

“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 Sector 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?”

“No, yes, and no,” she replied. “I know you now, O’Mara, and everything you have ever experienced and thought about yourself, the others in your life, and especially about me. Your mind lies close and comfortably with mine, and I want it to do so until the day I die. But there is something about you that I will never understand.”

“What?” he said, feeling the wave of happiness that her earlier words had sent sweeping through him check itself suddenly as if it might be about to collapse and ebb away. “You know and should understand everything. What don’t you understand about me?”

“I don’t understand, mind partner O’Mara” she replied, “how you are able to balance yourself on just two feet.”