Mind Changer

CHAPTER 14

For the first few minutes the sensations were exactly the same as ose he had felt after Councillor Davantry had administered that first Kelgian mind tape. There was the same feeling that he was looking at a strange office from a distance too high above the floor, and the same sensation of vertigo because he was balancing on two long, Earth-human legs rather than the twelve stubby ones possessed by Kelgians. But the disorientation and dizziness passed quickly and were replaced by something much worse. It was so bad that he was forced to sit down and fight desperately to retain control of the personality that was O’Mara.

Poor Thornnastor, he thought, if this is what it has to contend with. He tried not to think Poor me because the reason he was feeling this way was nobody’s fault but his own.

Unlike the Tralthan, he did not believe that he had a brilliant, stable, and well-integrated mind. But he had always had the reputation for being as stubborn as a mule, or one of its off-world equivalents, and he had never, ever allowed another person to do his thinking, or in this case his feeling, for him. Gradually but not completely he began to regain control over his mind.

Now he could understand why Thornnastor wouldn’t talk to him. A combination of the Tralthan’s professional pride and that of its even prouder mind partner precluded that, together with the emotional distress that had spilled over from Marrasarah’s tortured mind. In spite of its physical and mental suffering, the Kelgian’s mind had been sane when it had donated the tape. And it, too, had been a fighter and every bit as stubborn as O’Mara. But it had been suffering then, just as Thornnastor and himself were suffering now, but without the option of having its intensity of sorrow, anger, bitter personal loss, and a mess of associated emotions erased. Marrasarah had not deserved to be caught in that accidental lab fire that had destroyed much of its fur, but then history was full of nice people who got what they didn’t deserve and nobody, including himself, could do anything about that except feel bad.

But Thornnastor wasn’t history, at least not yet, and it was O’Mara’s job to do something about that if the Tralthan was not to become a minor entry as a promising failure in the annals of Sector General.

He began walking around the office because regular, noncerebral activity had always helped his mind to work better, and now it was working overtime. He stopped only long enough to call Mannen, who fortunately could see him immediately, and to leave a message for his chief saying that he was going to talk to the senior tutor regarding the Thornnastor assignment.

Craythorne would have no worries about that, but if he had told the other what he had just done and about the idea for treatment he would be trying to sell Mannen, the major would have been worried sick.

As soon as he entered, Mannen looked up from his desk and pointed at a chair that was suitable, but not comfortable, for Earthhuman occupation and waited.

“About Thornnastor. -” O’Mara began.

“So you’ve discovered what’s wrong with my star trainee?” Mannen broke in. “That’s good.”

“Yes” said O’Mara, “but it isn’t good.”

Mannen was trying unsuccessfully to hide his disappointment. He said, “We’d hate to lose that one, Lieutenant. But go on.

O’Mara was choosing his words with care so that he could hide the truth without actually telling a lie as he said, “Thornnastor was completely uncooperative during our interview and refused to tell me, except briefly and in the most general terms, why the Kelgian mind tape was causing it such intense emotional distress. With some patients we find an initial lack of cooperation, even outright hostility, and allowances are made for this, especially when the reason for the behavior is fully understood. But hostility in a patient doesn’t preclude us attempting to treat it or—”

“WaiC’ Mannen broke in. “Just now you told me that Thornnastor wouldn’t talk, except in general terms, about its troubles or its mind partner. How then did you come to fully understand its behavior? Did Major Craythorne allow you to take the same mind tape? And isn’t that, well, unusual?”

Obviously, thought O’Mara, I didn’t choose my words carefully enough to hide anything, or the other was smart enough to see right through them. He said, “I couldn’t think of any other way of helping Thornnastor with its problem. The major doesn’t know I’ve taken the tape. It isn’t unusual, it’s forbidden.”

“I knew that,” said Mannen, “but it isn’t any of my business what rules you break. But did you hint back there that curative therapy is possible? If so, what will the treatment entail, and will Thornnastor be able to perform its operation by noon tomorrow?”

“The treatment is radical, untried, and, well, risky,” O’Mara replied. “But if it goes as I expect it will, your star trainee, who is my patient, should be able to operate.”

There was an edge of sarcasm in the other’s voice as he said, “You are going to tell me what you intend to do?”

“Yes, sir,” said O’Mara. “But the pride Thornnastor has in its professional ability, and the intense embarrassment it is feeling over what it believes is its impending failure, is the reason for its silence. A similar degree of pride, plus a truly horrendous load of despair, anger, and deep, personal sorrow, it has inherited via the Kelgian Educator tape. Thornnastor has an unusually powerful mind that is also extremely sensitive. If it had been less sensitive to the medical condition it is sharing through its mind partner, and had less of that resultant fellow-species sympathy it feels toward its forthcoming Kelgian patient, it might have been able to ignore the nonmedical material in Marrasarah’s mind tape and we would have had no trouble. But, well, as things stand I shall tell it that no report of this case will ever appear outside the department’s confidential files, and there will be no future verbal discussion among the parties concerned. Naturally, I’ll have to make a detailed report on the case to Major Craythorne, which will probably land me in trouble, but I don’t want to do that until the therapy is complete. Sir, can I ask you not to—”

“Of course,” Mannen broke in. “Until then my lips are sealed. But what the hell are you intending to do?”

As O’Mara began telling him the other’s mouth opened to interrupt him and remained open without speaking until he had finished. Then Mannen closed his mouth so hard that his teeth came together with an audible click. He shook his head. O’Mara hoped it was in silent puzzlement rather than complete negation.

“Let me be sure I understand you, O’Mara” he said finally. “Thornnastor is having problems with its first mind transfer, so you want to give it three mind tapes to contend with?”

“Three more,” O’Mara corrected. “It will be four tapes altogether. And if you know the kinds of patients Thornnastor is most likely to have assigned to it in the near future, I’d like your advice on the species concerned so that the process will serve as a brief introduction to its mind partners to be. This is a matter of simple mathematics as well as psychology. With four tapes occupying its mind at once, the effect of their extraneous emotional material will be diluted to a quarter, especially during the op when it will have to concentrate on abstracting only the required medical information. Following the operation the tapes, all of them, will be erased and Thornnastor’s mind will be back to normal with its pride intact and without it having suffered any professional embarrassment. I think it is a simple, direct, elegant solution to the… ”

Mannen held up one hand. “The word that comes most readily to my mind” he said dryly, “is ’simpleminded? Thornnastor has expressed a special interest in performing Melfan, Illensan, and Earth-human surgery. Those are the mind tapes it is most likely to need in the future, if it has a future here. Dammit, you could totally wreck Thornnastor’s sanity,”

“In my opinion no, sir” said O’Mara. “The Tralthan’s mind is strong, well balanced, and highly adaptable. Besides, the otherspecies mind partners, unlike Marrasarah, will not be long-term visitors. There won’t be enough time for it to be seriously influenced by them.”

Mannen was silent for a long moment, then said, “Right. I’m becoming suspicious about my own sanity, but you’ve talked me into it. There is one condition.”

“Sir?”

“You must be present during the operation,” Mannen said firmly, “in case Thornnastor becomes mentally unstable and we need your help in pacifying it, because OR isn’t the best place for an outsized and overmuscled surgeon to run amok. Agreed?”

O’Mara hesitated. “I’ve no medical training?”

“We’ll be hip deep in medics down there,” Mannen said. “What we’ll need is someone to treat a disturbed doctor, not the patient. If Thornnastor does go unstable on us, what will you do?”

“Talk to it first and try verbal pacification,” O’Mara replied. “If that fails I’ll shoot it with an anesthetic dart gun previously concealed in the OR. Can you make sure that the dart is sharp and the anesthetic is strong enough? Tralthans have tough skins and a lot of body mass so we will need, I mean we might need, something that works fast.”

“Another one of your simple, direct solutions,” Mannen said. “Right, I’ll see to it.”

“I’d like to thank you, sir,” said O’Mara gratefully, “for cooperating in this unusual form of therapy?”

“You can do that by giving me back a fully sane and functioning Thornnastor,” said Mannen. “I’m almost afraid to ask, Lieutenant, but is there anything else you need from me?”

“Yes, sir,” said O’Mara, smiling. “I believe one of the otherspecies trainees is giving you some cause for concern. You can pick a likely candidate. Its condition is fictional, of course, but an element of hypochondria and the ability to talk about itself for long periods would be an advantage. It would have to be interviewed in its quarters, or in an empty lecture hall or anywhere but the Psychology Department during the hour preceding Thornnastor’s op. I will be impressing the three extra mind tapes then and can’t afford to have the major walking in and asking awkward questions?”

Mannen put his forehead into his hands and spoke to the top of his desk.

“Right,” he said. “But please go now before you destroy all my illusions, and confirm my worst fears, about what goes on in the Psychology Department.”

O’Mara smiled and left quickly. He had to talk to Thornnastor again and sell it on the multiple-tape idea before it retired for the night. It might take a long time and he as well as the Tralthan might lose a lot of sleep. But that, at least, would cut down on the volume of snoring in the area.

The glass-walled OR was in readiness when Thornnastor and O’Mara arrived outside punctually the next day. As it was primarily an examination of the surgeon’s procedure as well as an attempt to rectify serious traumatic damage to the patient, the room was more crowded than usual. The patient was already anesthetized and the other members of the operating team, two Melfans and one Earth-human, were standing by the table to assist, as were, not quite as close, Mannen and a Nidian tutor. Before they entered, O’Mara put a hand against the Tralthan’s leathery flank.

“Wait,” he said worriedly. “How are you feeling?”

Softly, for a Tralthan, Thornnastor growled, “How should a person with a quadruply split personality feel? I think I’ll be all right.”

O’Mara nodded and followed it inside; then he moved across the room to stand between Mannen and the other tutor.

“Recorders on?” said Thornnastor calmly. “Very well, I’ll begin. This is patient Murrenth, physiological classification DBLF, a shipboard technician in the Kelgian space service. It presented with internal injuries sustained as the result of being trapped briefly by shifting cargo, briefly because fellow crew members were able to rescue it within a few minutes. Initially it was thought that no serious trauma had occurred because the patient, perhaps for psychological reasons including the fact that the accident was partly its own fault, did not report any physical discomfort. Two days later it began losing fur mobility over the back and one side of the body. Its condition was reclassified to DBLF Emergency Three and it was rushed here.”

One of the Tralthan’s tentacles rose to pull down the scanner attached to the ceiling by a telescoping arm until it was positioned above the operative field. It curled an eye toward the wall-mounted diagnostic screen which was showing a massive enlargement of the scanner image.

“It was discovered that serious trauma had in fact occurred,” Thornnastor continued, “but too subtle for detection by the equipment available on the patient’s ship. The temporary pressure of the cargo that fell on Murrenth’s back and side caused a minor constriction of the blood flow through the capilliary system in those areas. This caused micro-clots to form which reduced the blood supply to the delicate muscles and nerve network controlling fur mobility. The condition has been worsening, an immediate surgical intervention is indicated, and…

“And the prognosis is lousy,” Mannen said softly to O’Mara.

“I’m afraid this is going to be an examination for surgical technique, not for a successful result?

“Care must be taken” Thornnastor was saying, “to comb the fur carefully from both sides of the entry-wound position before making the incision. Each individual strand of fur is a delicate part of the body to which it belongs, and the possession of its living and undamaged fur has immense psychological and interpersonal social significance for the being concerned…”

What it was not saying, O’Mara knew, was that to any Kelgian even the slightest blemish on their beautiful, silvery body fur or the smallest area of restricted mobility was the ultimate physical disfigurement, one that caused them to withdraw voluntarily from all social contact with their fellows as if they had been old-time Earth-human lepers. The fur motions were a completely involuntary process that could not be halted or modified in any way. This meant that the deep, helpless sympathy and revulsion that a whole Kelgian felt for such a disfigured one could not be hidden either, so that withdrawing from society was the only option short of suicide.

The mind-tape donor, the brilliant and gifted Kelgian surgeon Marrasarah, whose physical beauty had been surpassed only by the brilliance of her mind and warmth of her personality, had been driven to resign a promising career because of fur damage. Almost certainly a similar fate awaited patient Murrenth, so it was no wonder that its Kelgian mind partner had affected Thornnastor’s own mind so deeply. In many respects the personalities of the patient and surgeon were the same-and, now that he was so intimately aware of Marrasarah’s mind, feelings, and personality, O’Mara was finding it difficult at times to think of her as an “it”.

Even though Marrasarah was a living and suffering person in the minds of Thornnastor and O’Mara, it was simply a recording and nothing at all could be done for it. But here and now, if he understood the Tralthan’s feelings and motivation correctly, Thornnastor needed to cure Murrenth to stop that awful tragedy from happening again. It was a matter of professional pride but it was also deeply personal. The patient and the mind partner had become one. In its own mind Thornnastor was trying to cure both of them, and if the Murrenth procedure was as unsuccessful as all the medical probabilities insisted it would be, O’Mara hated to think of what it would do to the Tralthan surgeon.

“Field viewer set to fifty magnifications” said Thornnastor calmly. “Stepped-down scalpel and retractor to reduction factor ten. Ready? We will begin…

The magnifier slid forward on its telescoping arm and was interposed between the operative field and two of Thornnastor’s dirigible eyes as it picked up a knife whose large handle contained the mechanism which could deliver a cut ranging between a deep, sixinch, surgical slash to an incision so tiny and precise that it could only be seen by a microscope. With this procedure very precise work was possible, O’Mara knew as he turned his attention to the big diagnostic screen on the wall, provided the surgeon had rock steady hands or, in this case, tentacles.

On the screen the individual strands of fur looked like the slim, curving trunks of palm trees that were being bent slowly apart to reveal the heavily wrinkled organic ground surface from which they grew. A blade appeared, looking incredibly massive under the high magnification, and made an incision which cut cleanly between the parted trunks without touching much less damaging a single one of them. It went deeper, revealing the thin rootlets with their individual systems of tiny muscles that gave every hair its mobility, and these it avoided, too.

Like a thick, curving length of cable, one of the blocked capillaries appeared on center screen. A tiny longitudinal incision was made and a fine probe with a thickened tip inserted carefully into the opening. There was very little bleeding, just a few droplets which looked under the high magnification to be the size of footballs.

O’Mara closed his eyes briefly so as to shut out his view of the screen and to remind himself that Thornnastor was working inside a capillary not much thicker than a hair while it tried to find and dissolve a clot without blasting a hole in the affected blood vessel and undoing all its previous, meticulous work.

There were many such blood vessels and many clots. But there was something about the surgeon’s work that was not quite right.

“This is microsurgery of a very high order” he said quietly to Mannen, “but I don’t recognize the procedure.”

“I didn’t know you had medical training” said Mannen, then nodded. “Of course, I forgot that you have the Marrasarah mind tape, too. What’s wrong with it?”

Thornnastor cleared its breathing passages and made a loud, disapproving sound.

“As the being O’Mara has just observed” it said, “my procedure departs from normal Kelgian practice because I have made a synthesis of the surgical knowledge and experience of the three other mind partners that are available to me. The work is delicate and requires concentration. Apart from the necessary verbal contact between the operating team, I would appreciate absolute silence.”

Mannen, the Nidian tutor, and O’Mara maintained a complete and, in his own case, an admiring silence until Thornnastor withdrew, closed, and stood back.

“As you can see” it said, curling one eye toward the wall screen, “the interrupted blood supply to the root muscles has been corrected and the connective nerve network that controls fur movement is intact. But the patient must be massively sedated and its fur rendered motionless until the area has a chance to recover completely from the recently inflicted surgical trauma, and heal.”

Suddenly it stamped its two medial feet, a habit of Tralthans who were in the grip of strong emotion, making all the loose equipment in the room rattle.

“Thank you, everyone,” it ended. “I believe we have an optimum result.”