“That hasn’t happened yet.”
“Not here.”
“Tell me something you saw that happened.”
“You mean, like somebody’s sister was going to get married, don’t you? That’s what the girls where I was mostly wanted to know. Or were they going to go home; mostly it wasn’t like that.”
“But sometimes it was?”
“I guess.”
“Tell me one.”
Nicholas shook his head. “You wouldn’t like it, and anyway it wasn’t like that. Mostly it was lights like I never saw anyplace else, and voices like I never heard any other time, telling me things there aren’t any words for, stuff like that, only now I can’t ever go back. Listen, I wanted to ask you about Ignacio.”
“He isn’t anybody,” the girl said.
“What do you mean, he isn’t anybody? Is there anybody here besides you and me and Ignacio and Dr. Island?”
“Not that we can see or touch.”
The monkey called, “There are other patients, but for the present, Nicholas, for your own well-being as well as theirs, it is best for you to remain by yourselves.” It was a long sentence for a monkey.
“What’s that about?”
“If I tell you, will you tell me about something you saw that really happened?”
“All right.”
“Tell me first.”
“There was this girl where I was—her name was Maya. They had, you know, boys’ and girls’ dorms, but you saw everybody in the rec room and the dining hall and so on, and she was in my psychodrama group.” Her hair had been black, and shiny as the lacquered furniture in Dr. Hong’s rooms, her skin white like the mother-of-pearl, her eyes long and narrow (making him think of cats’ eyes) and darkly blue. She was fifteen, or so Nicholas believed—maybe sixteen. “I’m going home,” she told him. It was psychodrama and he was her brother, younger than she, and she was already at home, but when she said this the floating ring of light that gave them the necessary separation from the small doctor-and-patient audience, ceased, by instant agreement, to be Maya’s mother’s living room and became a visiting lounge. Nicholas/Jerry said, “Hey, that’s great! Hey, I got a new bike—when you come home you want to ride it?”
Maureen/Maya’s mother said, “Maya, don’t. You’ll run into something and break your teeth, and you know how much they cost.”
“You don’t want me to have any fun.”
“We do, dear, but nice fun. A girl has to be so much more careful—oh, Maya, I wish I could make you understand, really, how careful a girl has to be.”
Nobody said anything, so Nicholas/Jerry filled in with, “It has a three-bladed prop, and I’m going to tape streamers to them with little weights at the ends, an’ when I go down old thirty-seven B passageway, look out, here comes that old coleslaw grater!”
“Like this,” Maya said, and held her legs together and extended her arms, to make a three-bladed bike prop or a crucifix. She had thrown herself into a spin as she made the movement, and revolved slowly, stage center—red shorts, white blouse, red shorts, white blouse, red shorts, no shoes.
Diane asked, “And you saw that she was never going home, she was going to hospital instead, she was going to cut her wrist there, she was going to die?”
Nicholas nodded.
“Did you tell her?”
“Yes,” Nicholas said. “No.”
“Make up your mind. Didn’t you tell her? Now, don’t get mad.”
“Is it telling, when the one you tell doesn’t understand?”
Diane thought about that for a few steps while Nicholas dashed water on the hot bruises Ignacio had left upon his face. “If it was plain and clear and she ought to have understood—that’s the trouble I have with my family.”
“What is?”
“They won’t say things—do you know what I mean? I just say, ‘Look, just tell me, just tell me what I’m supposed to do, tell me what it is you want,’ but it’s different all the time. My mother says, ‘Diane, you ought to meet some boys; you can’t go out with him; your father and I have never met him; we don’t even know his family at all; Douglas, there’s something I think you ought to know about Diane; she gets confused sometimes; we’ve had her to doctors; she’s been in a hospital; try—’ ”
“Not to get her excited,” Nicholas finished for her.
“Were you listening? I mean, are you from the Trojan Planets? Do you know my mother?”
“I only live in these places,” Nicholas said. “That’s for a long time. But you talk like other people.”
“I feel better now that I’m with you; you’re really nice. I wish you were older.”
“I’m not sure I’m going to get much older.”
“It’s going to rain—feel it?”
Nicholas shook his head.
“Look.” Diane jumped, bunny-rabbit clumsy, three meters into the air. “See how high I can jump? That means people are sad and it’s going to rain. I told you.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Yes, I did, Nicholas.”
He waved the argument away, struck by a sudden thought. “You ever been to Callisto?”
The girl shook her head, and Nicholas said, “I have; that’s where they did the operation. It’s so big the gravity’s mostly from natural mass, and it’s all domed in, with a whole lot of air in it.”
“So?”
“And when I was there it rained. There was a big trouble at one of the generating piles, and they shut it down and it got colder and colder until everybody in the hospital wore their blankets, just like Amerinds in books, and they locked the switches off on the heaters in the bathrooms, and the nurses and the comscreen told you all the time it wasn’t dangerous, they were just rationing power to keep from blacking out the important stuff that was still running. And then it rained, just like on Earth. They said it got so cold the water condensed in the air, and it was like the whole hospital was right under a shower bath. Everybody on the top floor had to come down because it rained right on their beds, and for two nights I had a man in my room with me that had his arm cut off in a machine. But we couldn’t jump any higher, and it got kind of dark.”
“It doesn’t always get dark here,” Diane said. “Sometimes the rain sparkles. I think Dr. Island must do it to cheer everyone up.”
“No,” the waves explained, “or at least not in the way you mean, Diane.” Nicholas was hungry and started to ask them for something to eat, then turned his hunger in against itself, spit on the sand, and was still.
“It rains here when most of you are sad,” the waves were saying, “because rain is a sad thing, to the human psyche. It is that, that sadness, perhaps because it recalls to unhappy people their own tears, that palliates melancholy.”
Diane said, “Well, I know sometimes I feel better when it rains.”
“That should help you to understand yourself. Most people are soothed when their environment is in harmony with their emotions, and anxious when it is not. An angry person becomes less angry in a red room, and unhappy people are only exasperated by sunshine and birdsong. Do you remember:
The girl shook her head.
Nicholas said, “No. Did somebody write that?” and then, “You said you couldn’t do anything.”
The waves replied, “I can’t—except talk to you.”
“You make it rain.”
“Your heart beats; I sense its pumping even as I speak—do you control the beating of your heart?”