Mind Changer

CHAPTER 16

The room had provision for seating three hundred diners, he saw from the entrance, and even though there were only about two hundred and fifty passengers present, there were no single or empty tables. Instead there were rows of long, twenty-place tables with species-suitable furniture that could be moved around if different physiological classifications wanted to eat and talk together, which many of them were doing. The Orligian headwaiter-or, since it was fully dressed, possibly headwaitress-came forward to lead him to an unoccupied space at a table.

It was probably ship regulation dress, but he thought the black trousers and the hairy head and hands projecting from the neck and cuffs of the stiff, white tunic made it look ridiculous as well as feel very uncomfortable because Orligians usually wore nothing but a light harness that allowed the air to penetrate their fur and cool their bodies.

He was shown to a table containing fourteen Kelgian passengers, a Nidian, two Melfans, and one from Earth, and, inevitably, given the place opposite the Earth-human female.

She was dark-haired, young, and slim, and wore the minimum of jewelry on her head and ears and on the front of her highcollared, formal dress, which fitted her like a thin coat of black paint. Back at the hospital the Earth-human nurses had taken to wearing their whites very tight because, they insisted, it aided them in making fast changes into their other-species environmental protection suits, even though the style did not suit some of them. With this one it did.

O’Mara gave her a brief nod and did the same to the few other-species diners who had turned to look at him, then sat down quickly and fixed his eyes on the menu display. Doubtless Craythorne would have said and done something different, but he just wanted to eat and not talk. That was not to be.

“Good evening, Lieutenant,” she said pleasantly. “I’m afraid it’s a fixed menu on the first night out, and for the rest of the time too, as a matter of fact, although the Earth-human food they serve is usually quite good. If you don’t like it or have any special preferences, you’ll just have to starve.”

“I am starving? said O’Mara, looking up at her, “and I’ve no special preferences. Food is just fuel.”

The Kelgian in the seat beside him spiked its fur in shock and said, “A culinary barbarian! But what else can one expect of a large, over-muscled carnivore. Probably a messy eater, too.”

The young woman looked suddenly concerned. She said quickly, “Lieutenant, please don’t feel offended, Kelgians always say

… exactly what they feel, ma’am? O’Mara finished for her. He tried to smile, an exercise to which his facial muscles were long unused, then glanced toward the Kelgian and added, “I don’t have mobile fur to show you how I feel, friend, but right now I am feeling very hungry but not, I think, hungry enough to eat you.

“There is doubt in your mind?” said the other.

Before O’Mara could reply there was a quiet, triple chime that came from somewhere inside their table, the place panel in front of him slid aside, and the first course rose into sight.

“Saved by the bell? said the Kelgian as it bent its over its own platter.

O’Mara didn’t have to speak again until the meal was finished, by which time he was pleasantly distended and feeling well disposed toward everyone in general but not, he told himself firmly, toward anyone in particular.

“You’re looking much happier, Lieutenant,” said the young woman. “What do you think of the ship’s food now?”

“It’s still only fuel? said O’Mara, “but premium grade.”

“That is a very large and energy-hungry body you have there,” she said. “But I’d say, even before we get to see you in a swimsuit, that you are a heavy energy user as well because you don’t seem to store any of it as fat. Do you like to swim?”

“The water restrictions on space service don’t allow it,” he replied. “I can’t swim.”

“Then I’d be happy to teach you,” she said, “just for the company. It isn’t a big pool, but the Kelgians, who make up most of the passenger list, don’t like getting their fur wet and the Melfans just sink and crawl about on the bottom so they say they might as well stay in air. We’re the only Earth-humans on board and will have the place to ourselves most of the time. There wouldn’t be many otherspecies onlookers to embarrass you if you didn’t do well at first. I’ve never taught anyone to swim before so it might be fun. Are you called anything else besides Lieutenant, Lieutenant?”

“O’Mara,” he said. “But about the pool, I’m not sure that I could…

“Joan? she said.

“Kledenth? said the Kelgian beside him, “if anyone is interested.”

“I don’t want to sound pushy? she continued, “but believe it or not, you’re the first Earth-human we’ve had on this trip and I’m dying to talk with someone who doesn’t need a translator. And of course you could swim, or at least stay afloat. If y~u take a deep breath and don’t quite empty your lungs, you won’t sink, and if you did get into trouble, I’d be there to grab you and hold your head above water. All you really need to swim is a bit of confidence?

O’Mara didn’t reply.

“Alternatively? she went on, “there’s the exercise machinery if you want to get hot and sweaty, unless you prefer playing table games like chess or scremman. Or there’s the observation gallery, where you can guzzle umpteen varieties of different other-planetary booze until you begin to see things crawling about in hyperspace outside. Which reminds me, do you know what Chorrantir, our only Tralthan passenger, said about alcoholics on its home world? It said that eventually they begin seeing pink Earth-humans.”

“Oh, God? he said, and smiled in spite of himself.

“Come on, Lieutenant O’Mara? Joan persisted. “That uniform looks good on you, but everybody on the ship knows by now that we have a Monitor on board, so you should relax and take it off What do you say?”

“This conversation? said Kledenth suddenly, “is much more interesting than the endless talking from my friends down the table about other-world legends and the heroic, or sometimes utterly reprehensible, figures who populate them. To some of these people it has become a religion rather than a hobby. Well, what do you say, O’Mara?”

“Nothing,” he said uncomfortably. “I’m still thinking about it.”

“But there’s nothing to think about? Kledenth went on, its fur rippling in small, uneven waves. “I know that you Earthhumans don’t have our ability to outwardly express inner feelings without ambiguity but, even to me, in this situation the bare words are more than adequate. The female concerned is young and probably physically attractive to you-although as a Kelgian I consider it to be an unsightly life-form whose wobbly chest lumps give it a ridiculous, top-heavy look-and plainly feeling bored and possibly sexually frustrated because she was the only member of ~ species among the passengers. Now a same-species male has come among us and the situation has changed for the better. Again I cannot speak with authority, O’Mara, but presumably you, too, are beautiful or have other male attributes which she finds attractive…

O’Mara felt his face growing warm. He tried to halt the other with an upraised hand, but either it didn’t know the significance of the gesture or was simply ignoring it.

… To me it is clear? Keldenth went on, “that this invitation to widen your experience by learning to swim will, I understand, require you to divest yourselves of all or most of those ridiculous body coverings, and place you in a situation of close physical intimacy which is also, if my understanding of Earth-human sexual practices is correct, the usual prelude to mating. I can foresee you having an interesting and enjoyable voyage. So what do you say, O’Mara?”

He looked away from Kledenth’s narrow, cone-shaped head with its tiny, bright eyes and the rippling neck fur and toward Joan, trying to find the right words to apologize for the embarrassment that the other must have been causing her. But she was staring intently at him, half-smiling and plainly not at all embarrassed but enjoying his obvious discomfit.

“I’m sorry, Lieutenant O’Mara,” she said, “but Kledenth is quite right. After spending six weeks with a shipload of Kelgians, their habit of straight talking begins to rub off, so I’m beginning to say exactly what I feel. But it is wrong in thinking that I’m sexually frustrated. It’s same-species conversation and a pool partner I need, not sex. At the risk of sounding repetitious, what do you say?”

O’Mara looked at her but he couldn’t say anything. Suddenly she looked mortified.

“I know it isn’t usual with space service officers? she said, “but have you got a wife already, or a serious woman-friend somewhere?”

He could easily have lied his way out of trouble, but in Kelgian fashion she was being completely, and to Kelgians one always told the truth.

“No? he said.

“Then I don’t understand why you won’t…” Joan began, then stopped.

For a long moment she stared at him while her face slowly deepened in color. In the light of the preceding conversation, O’Mara would not have been surprised at anything she said or did, but he had never expected to see her blush.

“Looking closely at you? she continued, doing just that as her eyes moved from his chest and arms that filled the large uniform to the still young but lived-in face that stared out of his shaving mirror every morning, “I find this very difficult to believe, and I don’t want to give offense, but have I made a serious mistake? Do you not find my company attractive because I’m, well, the wrong gender?”

“No? said O’Mara seriously, “the wrong species.”

She stared at him openmouthed and aghast.

Kledenth said, “Are you getting therapy for it?”

Slowly she began to laugh, loudly and long. O’Mara stared at her without changing his expression until the laughter subsided into a broad smile.

“You sounded so, so serious when you said that? she said, “and you look so dour and unapproachable that I never suspected that you could have a sense of humor. But don’t ever make a joke like that in the pooi or you’ll be the one responsible for drowning me.”

In the event, neither of them drowned, although the enthusiasm she displayed while making sure he stayed afloat made the process feel like a bout of mixed wrestling. And while they were sitting on loungers at the edge of the pool before or after a swimming lesson it was worse, or better, because she could see that he was attracted to her. She kept telling him to relax, to be less serious about everything and to remember that he was, after all, on leave. It was obvious that he was becoming a challenge to her. But he wasn’t playing hard to get, just feeling too embarrassed and uncertain about himself to play at all. He kept trying to find e,~cuses to return to his cabin to avoid being alone at the pool with ler for too long.

He was, after all, only human.

In the dining room, on the recreation deck, and in the big observation lounge, where there would be nothing to look at but each other until Kreskhallar emerged from hyperspace, the soft assault continued although attimes it became less frontal. In the lounge there was nothing to do but talk, usually about and often with the other passengers, and drink various other-world concoctions that were intended to lower his resistance and/or remove his inhibitions, which they didn’t. She said very little about herself other than that she had recently graduated top of her year-she didn’t mention her specialty-and that to celebrate her parents had paid for this five-world, star-traveling convention that would enable her to visit worlds she was never likely to see otherwise while indulging her hobby among people of like mind.

O’Mara told her even less about himself, because the uniform, which he had taken to wearing on every social occasion like a suit of green armor, told her what he did in real life.

But there was one evening, when the ship was ten hours out of Traltha’s planetary capital, Naorthant, and the stars and myriad moons of the Tralthan system had been shining into the darkened observation lounge, when he had returned alone to his cabin with his resistance very low indeed.

Angrily he wondered why he was acting like some stupid knight errant from the legends that the passengers discussed endlessly among themselves. What was he trying to prove? She was an intelligent and very desirable young women, so much so that he couldn’t understand why she had any time for a coarse, ugly person like himself at all. And there was no way that it could become a permanent commitment, because it would end when Kreskhallar returned her to Earth in four weeks’ time. Nobody in Sector General would ever know about it, whatever “it” turned out to be, and if they did find out, neither Craythorne nor anyone e>~ would care. He was on leave, after all, and he had been told by his chief to relax and enjoy himself.

He wasn’t being unfaithful, he told himself again and again as he tossed sleepless in his bunk while in the darkness of the cabin pictures formed of Joan wearing even less than she had worn in the pool. It was utterly stupid, probably even insane, to feel that he was being unfaithful to someone who didn’t even know he was alive.