Conway moved to the couch and O’Mara fitted the helmet. Then the Major began to talk softly, sometimes asking questions, sometimes just talking. Conway should be unconscious for a multiple transfer, he said, he should in fact sleep for at least four hours for the best results, and he needed sleep anyway. Probably, Q’Mara said, he had thought up this whole, harebrained scheme just to have a legitimate excuse to sleep. He had a big job ahead, the psychologist told him quietly, and he would really need to be in seven places as well as being seven people at once, so that a sleep would do him good…
“It won’t be too bad,” Conway said, struggling to keep his eyes open. “I’ll stay in any one place only long enough to learn a few basic words and phrases that I can teach to the nursing staff. Just enough so they’ll understand when an e-t surgeon says ‘Scalpel,’ or ‘Forceps’ or ‘Stop breathing down the back of my neck, Nurse…'”
The last words that Conway heard clearly were O’Mara saying, “Hang onto your sense of humor, lad. You’re going to need it..
He awoke in a room that was too large and too small, alien in six different ways and at the same time completely familiar. He did not feel rested. Clinging to the ceiling by six pipe stem legs was a tiny, enormous, fragile, beautiful, disgustingly insectile creature that reminded him of his worst nightmares the amphibious cllels he used to hunt at the bottom of his private lake for breakfast, and many other things including a perfectly ordinary GLNO Cinrusskin like himself. It was beginning to quiver slightly in reaction to the emotional radiation he was producing. All of him knew that the GLNOs from Cinruss were empaths.
Fighting his way to the surface of a maelstrom of alien thoughts, memories and impressions Conway decided that it was time to go to work. Prilicla was immediately available for the first test of his idea. He began searching for and bringing up the GLNO memories and experiences, sifting through a welter of alien data for the type of information which is not consciously remembered but is constantly in use-data on the Cinrusskin language.
No, not the Cinrusskin language, he reminded himself sharply, his language. He had to think and feel and listen like a GLNO. Gradually he began to do it…
And it was not pleasant.
He was a Cinrusskin, a member of a fragile, low-gravity, insect race of empaths. The handsome, delicately marked exoskeleton and the youthful, iridescent sheen of Prilicla’s not quite atrophied wings were now things which he could properly appreciate, and the way Prilicla’s mandibles quivered in sudden concern at his distress. For Conway was a member of an empathic race, all the memories and experience of his GLNO life were those of a normally happy and healthy empath, but now he was an empath no more. He could see Prilicla, but the faculty which let him share the other’s emotions, and subtly colored every word, gesture and expression so that for two Cinrusskins to be within visual range was to be unalloyed pleasure for both, was missing. He could remember having empathetic contact, remember having it all his life, but now he was little more than a deaf mute.
His human brain did not possess the empathetic faculty, and it was not bestowed by filling his mind with memories of having had it.
Prilicla made a series of clicking, buzzing sounds. Conway , who had never spoken with the GLNO other than by means of the toneless and emotion-filtering process of Translation, heard it say “I’m sorry” in a voice full of concern and pity.
In return Conway tried to make the soft trill and click which was Prilicla’s name, the true sound of the Earth-human word “Prilicla” being only a clumsy approximation. On the fifth attempt he succeeded in making something which was close to the sound he wanted.
“That is very good, friend Conway ,” Prilicla said warmly. “I had not considered this idea of yours possible. Can you understand me?”
Conway sought the word-sounds he needed, then carefully began to form them. “Thank you,” he said, “and yes.”