“I can stop my breath.”
“Can you stop your heart? Honestly, Nicholas?”
“I guess not.”
“No more can I control the weather of my world, stop anyone from doing what he wishes, or feed you if you are hungry; with no need of volition on my part your emotions are monitored and averaged, and our weather responds. Calm and sunshine for tranquillity, rain for melancholy, storms for rage, and so on.
This is what mankind has always wanted.”
Diane asked, “What is?”
“That the environment should respond to human thought. That is the core of magic and the oldest dream of mankind, and here, on me, it is fact.”
“So that we’ll be well?”
Nicholas said angrily, “You’re not sick!”
Dr. Island said, “So that some of you, at least, can return to society.”
Nicholas threw a seashell into the water as though to strike the mouth that spoke. “Why are we talking to this thing?”
“Wait, tot; I think it’s interesting.”
“Lies and lies.”
Dr. Island said, “How do I lie, Nicholas?”
“You said it was magic—”
“No, I said that when humankind has dreamed of magic, the wish behind that dream has been the omnipotence of thought. Have you never wanted to be a magician, Nicholas, making palaces spring up overnight, or riding an enchanted horse of ebony to battle with the demons of the air?”
“I am a magician. I have preternatural powers, and before they cut us in two—”
Diane interrupted him. “You said you averaged emotions. When you made it rain.”
“Yes.”
“Doesn’t that mean that if one person was really, terribly sad, he’d move the average so much he could make it rain all by himself? Or whatever? That doesn’t seem fair.”
The waves might have smiled. “That has never happened. But if it did, Diane, if one person felt such deep emotion, think how great her need would be. Don’t you think we should answer it?”
Diane looked at Nicholas, but he was walking again, his head swinging, ignoring her as well as the voice of the waves. “Wait,” she called. “You said I wasn’t sick; I am, you know.”
“No, you’re not.”
She hurried after him. “Everyone says so, and sometimes I’m so confused, and other times I’m boiling inside, just boiling. Mum says if you’ve got something on the stove you don’t want to have burn, you just have to keep one finger on the handle of the pan and it won’t, but I can’t, I can’t always find the handle or remember.”
Without looking back the boy said, “Your mother is probably sick, maybe your father too; I don’t know. But you’re not. If they’d just let you alone you’d be all right. Why shouldn’t you get upset, having to live with two crazy people?”
“Nicholas!” She grabbed his thin shoulders. “That’s not true!”
“Yes, it is.”
“I am sick. Everyone says so.”
“I don’t; so ‘everyone’ just means the ones that do—isn’t that right? And if you don’t either, that will be two; it can’t be everyone then.”
The girl called, “Doctor? Dr. Island?”
Nicholas said, “You aren’t going to believe that, are you?”
“Dr. Island, is it true?”
“Is what true, Diane?”
“What he said. Am I sick?”
“Sickness—even physical illness—is relative, Diane, and complete health is an idealization, an abstraction, even if the other end of the scale is not.”
“You know what I mean.”
“You are not physically ill.” A long, blue comber curled into a line of hissing spray reaching infinitely along the sea to their left and right. “As you said yourself a moment ago, you are sometimes confused, and sometimes disturbed.”
“He said if it weren’t for other people, if it weren’t for my mother and father, I wouldn’t have to be here.”
“Diane . . .”
“Well, is that true or isn’t it?”
“Most emotional illness would not exist, Diane, if it were possible in every case to separate oneself—in thought as well as circumstance—if only for a time.”
“Separate oneself?”
“Did you ever think of going away, at least for a time?”
The girl nodded, then as though she were not certain Dr. Island could see her said, “Often, I suppose, leaving the school and getting my own compartment somewhere—going to Achilles. Sometimes I wanted to so badly.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“They would have worried. And anyway, they would have found me, and made me come home.”
“Would it have done any good if I—or a human doctor—had told them not to?”
When the girl said nothing Nicholas snapped, “You could have locked them up.”
“They were functioning, Nicholas. They bought and sold; they worked, and paid their taxes—”
Diane said softly, “It wouldn’t have done any good anyway, Nicholas; they are inside me.”
“Diane was no longer functioning: she was failing every subject at the university she attended, and her presence in her classes, when she came, disturbed the instructors and the other students. You were not functioning either, and people of your own age were afraid of you.”
“That’s what counts with you, then. Functioning.”
“If I were different from the world, would that help you when you got back into the world?”
“You are different.” Nicholas kicked the sand. “Nobody ever saw a place like this.”
“You mean that reality to you is metal corridors, rooms without windows, noise.”
“Yes.”
“That is the unreality, Nicholas. Most people have never had to endure such things. Even now, this—my beach, my sea, my trees—is more in harmony with most human lives than your metal corridors; and here, I am your social environment—what individuals call they. You see, sometimes if we take people who are troubled back to something like me, to an idealized natural setting, it helps them.”
“Come on,” Nicholas told the girl. He took her arm, acutely conscious of being so much shorter than she.
“A question,” murmured the waves. “If Diane’s parents had been taken here instead of Diane, do you think it would have helped them?”
Nicholas did not reply.
“We have treatments for disturbed persons, Nicholas. But, at least for the time being, we have no treatment for disturbing persons.” Diane and the boy had turned away, and the waves’ hissing and slapping ceased to be speech. Gulls wheeled overhead, and once a red and yellow parrot fluttered from one palm to another. A monkey running on all fours like a little dog approached them, and Nicholas chased it, but it escaped.
“I’m going to take one of those things apart someday,” he said, “and pull the wires out.”
“Are we going to walk all the way round?” Diane asked. She might have been talking to herself.
“Can you do that?”
“Oh, you can’t walk all around Dr. Island; it would be too long, and you can’t get there anyway. But we could walk until we get back to where we started—we’re probably more than halfway now.”
“Are there other islands you can’t see from here?”
The girl shook her head. “I don’t think so; there’s just this one big island on this satellite, and all the rest is water.”
“Then if there’s only the one island, we’re going to have to walk all around it to get back to where we started. What are you laughing at?”
“Look down the beach, as far as you can. Never mind how it slips off to the side—pretend it’s straight.”
“I don’t see anything.”
“Don’t you? Watch.” Diane leaped into the air, six meters or more this time, and waved her arms.
“It looks like there’s somebody ahead of us, way down the beach.”
“Uh-huh. Now look behind.”
“Okay, there’s somebody there too. Come to think of it, I saw someone on the beach when I first got here. It seemed funny to see so far, but I guess I thought they were other patients. Now I see two people.”