For my part, I did not care. They had caught and tried the Groupman who had perpetrated the massacre; and-as he himself had predicted-he had been executed by firing squad under the provisions of the Mercenaries’ Code with respect to the treatment of prisoners. But I did not care even about that.
Because-again as he himself had said-his execution did not alter things. What he had written upon Dave and the other prisoners with his spring-rifle was past the power of me, or any other man, to erase; and by this much he had done something to me.
I was like a clock with a broken part in it that does not keep it from running, but which you can hear rattling away, if you pick the clock up and shake it. I had been broken, inside; and not even the commendation that came from the Interstellar News Service and my acceptance into full membership in the Guild could mend me. But the wealth and power of the Guild was caring for me, now that I was a full member; and they did what few private organizations would have been able to do-they sent me to the wizards of mental mending on Kultis, the larger of the two Exotic Worlds, for treatment.
On Kultis, they enticed me into mending myself- but they could not force the manner in which I chose to mend. First, because they did not have the power (though I am not sure if they actually realized how limited they were, in my particular case) and secondly, because their basic philosophy forbade the use of force in their own proper persons, and also forbade them any attempt to control the individual’s self-will. They could only beckon me down the road they wished I would go.
And the instrument they chose to beckon me down that road was a powerful one. It was Lisa Kant.
“-But you’re not a psychiatrist!” I said in astonishment to Lisa when she first appeared in the place on Kultis to which I had been brought-one of their many-purposed indoor-outdoor structures. I had been lying by a swimming pool, ostensibly soaking up sun and relaxing, when she showed up suddenly beside me and replied, in answer to my question, that Padma had recommended she be the person to work with me in getting my emotional strength back.
“How do you know what I am?” she snapped back, not at all with the calm self-control of a born Exotic. “It’s been five years since I first met you in the Encyclopedia, and I’d already been a student then for years!”
I lay blinking at her, as she stood over me. Slowly, something that had been dormant in me began to come back to life and began to tick and move once more. I got to my feet. Here was I, who had been able to choose the proper words to make people dance like puppets, making a blundering assumption like that.
“Then you actually are a psychiatrist?” I asked.
“Yes and no,” she answered me quietly. Suddenly she smiled at me. “Anyway, you don’t need a psychiatrist.”
The moment she said this, I woke to the fact that this was exactly my own thought, that it had been my own thought all along, but encased in my own misery I had let the Guild plow to its own conclusions. Suddenly, all through the machinery of my mental awareness, little relays began to click over and perceptions to light up again.
If she knew that much, how much more did she know? At once, the alarms were ringing throughout the mental citadel I had spent these last five years in building, and defenses were rushing to their post.
“Maybe you’re right,” I said, suddenly wary; and I grinned at her. “Why don’t we sit down and talk it over?”
“Why not?” she said.
And so we did sit down and talk-unimportant make-conversation to begin with, while I sized her up. There was a strange echo about her. I can describe it no other way. Everything she said, every gesture or movement of her, seemed to ring with special meaning for me, a meaning I could not quite interpret.
“Why did Padma think you could-I mean, think that you ought to come here and see me?” I asked cautiously after a while.
“Not just see you-work with you,” she corrected me. She was wearing not the Exotic robes, but some ordinary, short street dress of white. Above it her eyes were a darker brown than I had ever seen them. Suddenly she darted a glance at me as challenging and sharp as a spear. “Because he believes I’m one of the two portals by which you can still be reached, Tarn.”
The glance and the words shook me. If it had not been for that strange echo about her, I might have fallen into the error of thinking she was inviting me. But it was something bigger than that.
I could have asked her then and there what she meant; but I was just newly reawakened and cautious. I changed the subject-I think I invited her to join me for a swim or something-and I did not come back to the subject until several days later.
By that time, aroused and wary, I had had a chance to look around me and see where the echo came from, to see what was being done to me by Exotic methods. I was being worked on subtly, by a skillful coordination of total environmental pressure, pressure that did not try to steer me in one direction or another, but which continually urged me to take hold of the tiller of my own being and steer myself. Briefly, the structure that housed me, the weather that bathed it, the very walls and furniture and colors and shapes that inhabited it, were so designed that they subtly combined to urge me to live-not only to live, but to live actively, fully and joyously. It was not merely a happy dwelling-it was an exciting dwelling, a stimulating environment that wrapped me around.
And Lisa was a working part of it.
I began to notice that as I roused from my depression, not only did the colors and shapes of the furniture and of the dwelling itself alter day by day, but her choice of conversational subjects, her tone of voice, her laughter changed as well, to continue to exert maximum pressure upon my own shifting and developing feelings. I do not think even Lisa herself understood how the parts combined to produce the gestalt effect. It would have taken a native Exotic to understand that. But she understood-consciously or subconsciously-her own part in it. And played it.
I did not care. Automatically, inevitably, as I healed myself I was falling in love with her.
Women had never been hard for me to find, from the time I broke loose from my uncle’s house and began to feel my own powers of mind and body. Especially the beautiful ones, in whom there was often a strange hunger for affection that often ran unsatisfied. But before Lisa they had all, beautiful or not, broken, and turned hollow on me. It was as if I were continually capturing song-sparrows and bringing them home, only to find the following morning that they had become common sparrows overnight and their wild song had dwindled to a single chirp.
Then I would realize that it was my own fault-it was I who had made song-sparrows of them. Some chance trait or element in them had touched me off like a skyrocket, so that my imagination had soared, and my tongue with it, so that I had lifted us both up with words and carried us off to a place of pure light and air and green grass and running water. And there I had built us a castle full of light and air and promise and beauty.
They always liked my castle. They would come gladly up on the wings of my imagination, and I would believe that we flew together. But later, on a different day, I would wake to the fact that the light was gone, the song was muted. For they had not really believed in my castle. It was well enough to dream of such a thing, but not to think of translating it into ordinary stone, and wood, and glass and tile. When it came to these matters of reality, a castle was madness; and I should put the thought aside for some real dwelling. Perhaps of poured concrete like the home of my uncle Mathias. With practical vision screen instead of windows, with economic roof, not soaring turrets, and weathered-glassed porches, not open loggias. And so we parted.
But Lisa did not leave me as the others always had when at last I fell in love with her. She soared with me and soared again on her own. And then, for the first time I knew why she was different, why she would never retreat earthward like the others.