“I don’t think Diane liked it.”
“Diane may not wish to be helped—help may be painful, and often people do not. But it is my business to help them if I can, whether or not they wish it.”
“Suppose I don’t want to go?”
“Then I cannot compel you; you know that. But you will be the only patient in this sector who has not seen it, Nicholas, as well as the youngest; both Diane and Ignacio have, and Ignacio goes there often.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“No. Are you afraid?”
Nicholas looked questioningly at Diane. “What is it? What will I see?”
She had walked away while he was talking to Dr. Island, and was now sitting cross-legged on the ground about five meters from where Nicholas stood, staring at her hands. Nicholas repeated, “What will I see, Diane?” He did not think she would answer.
She said, “A glass. A mirror.”
“Just a mirror?”
“You know how I told you to climb the tree here? The Point is where the edges come together. You can see yourself—like on the beach—but closer.”
Nicholas was disappointed. “I’ve seen myself in mirrors lots of times.”
Dr. Island, whose voice was now in the sighing of the dead leaves, whispered, “Did you have a mirror in your room, Nicholas, before you came here?”
“A steel one.”
“So that you could not break it?”
“I guess so. I threw things at it sometimes, but it just got puckers in it.” Remembering dimpled reflections, Nicholas laughed.
“You can’t break this one either.”
“It doesn’t sound like it’s worth going to see.”
“I think it is.”
“Diane, do you still think I shouldn’t go?”
There was no reply. The girl sat staring at the ground in front of her. Nicholas walked over to look at her and found a tear had washed a damp trail down each thin cheek, but she did not move when he touched her. “She’s catatonic, isn’t she,” he said.
A green limb just outside the Focus nodded. “Catatonic schizophrenia.”
“I had a doctor once that said those names—like that. They didn’t mean anything.” (The doctor had been a therapy robot, but a human doctor gave more status. Robots’ patients sat in doorless booths—two and a half hours a day for Nicholas: an hour and a half in the morning, an hour in the afternoon—and talked to something that appeared to be a small, friendly food freezer. Some people sat every day in silence, while others talked continually, and for such patients as these the attendants seldom troubled to turn the machines on.)
“He meant cause and treatment. He was correct.”
Nicholas stood looking down at the girl’s streaked, brown-blond head. “What is the cause? I mean for her.”
“I don’t know.”
“And what’s the treatment?”
“You are seeing it.”
“Will it help her?”
“Probably not.”
“Listen, she can hear you, don’t you know that? She hears everything we say.”
“If my answer disturbs you, Nicholas, I can change it. It will help her if she wants to be helped; if she insists on clasping her illness to her it will not.”
“We ought to go away from here,” Nicholas said uneasily.
“To your left you will see a little path, a very faint one. Between the twisted tree and the bush with the yellow flowers.”
Nicholas nodded and began to walk, looking back at Diane several times. The flowers were butterflies, who fled in a cloud of color when he approached them, and he wondered if Dr. Island had known. When Nicholas had gone a hundred paces and was well away from the brown and rotting vegetation, he said, “She was sitting in the Focus.”
“Yes.”
“Is she still there?”
“Yes.”
“What will happen when the Bright Spot comes?”
“Diane will become uncomfortable and move, if she is still there.”
“Once in one of the places I was in there was a man who was like that, and they said he wouldn’t get anything to eat if he didn’t get up and get it, they weren’t going to feed him with the nose tube anymore, and they didn’t, and he died. We told them about it and they wouldn’t do anything and he starved to death right there, and when he was dead they rolled him off onto a stretcher and changed the bed and put somebody else there.”
“I know, Nicholas. You told the doctors at St. John’s about all that, and it is in your file, but think: Well men have starved themselves—yes, to death—to protest what they felt were political injustices. Is it so surprising that your friend killed himself in the same way to protest what he felt as a psychic injustice?”
“He wasn’t my friend. Listen, did you really mean it when you said the treatment she was getting here would help Diane if she wanted to be helped?”
“No.”
Nicholas halted in midstride. “You didn’t mean it? You don’t think it’s true?”
“No. I doubt that anything will help her.”
“I don’t think you ought to lie to us.”
“Why not? If by chance you become well you will be released, and if you are released you will have to deal with your society, which will lie to you frequently. Here, where there are so few individuals, I must take the place of society. I have explained that.”
“Is that what you are?”
“Society’s surrogate? Of course. Who do you imagine built me? What else could I be?”
“The doctor.”
“You have had many doctors, and so has she. Not one of them has benefited you much.”
“I’m not sure you even want to help us.”
“Do you wish to see what Diane calls ‘the Point’?”
“I guess so.”
“Then you must walk. You will not see it standing here.”
Nicholas walked, thrusting aside leafy branches and dangling creepers wet with rain. The jungle smelled of the life of green thing; there were ants on the tree trunks, and dragonflies with hot, red bodies and wings as long as his hands. “Do you want to help us?” he asked after a time.
“My feelings toward you are ambivalent. But when you wish to be helped, I wish to help you.”
The ground sloped gently upward, and as it rose became somewhat more clear, the big trees a trifle farther apart, the underbrush spent in grass and fern. Occasionally there were stone outcrops to be climbed, and clearings open to the tumbling sky. Nicholas asked, “Who made this trail?”
“Ignacio. He comes here often.”
“He’s not afraid, then? Diane’s afraid.”
“Ignacio is afraid too, but he comes.”
“Diane says Ignacio is important.”
“Yes.”
“What do you mean by that? Is he important? More important than we are?”
“Do you remember that I told you I was the surrogate of society? What do you think society wants, Nicholas?”
“Everybody to do what it says.”
“You mean conformity. Yes, there must be conformity, but something else too—consciousness.”
“I don’t want to hear about it.”
“Without consciousness, which you may call sensitivity if you are careful not to allow yourself to be confused by the term, there is no progress. A century ago, Nicholas, mankind was suffocating on Earth; now it is suffocating again. About half of the people who have contributed substantially to the advance of humanity have shown signs of emotional disturbance.”
“I told you, I don’t want to hear about it. I asked you an easy question—is Ignacio more important than Diane and me—and you won’t tell me. I’ve heard all this you’re saying. I’ve heard it fifty, maybe a hundred times from everybody, and it’s lies; it’s the regular thing, and you’ve got it written down on a card somewhere to read out when anybody asks. Those people you talk about that went crazy, they went crazy because while they were ‘advancing humanity,’ or whatever you call it, people kicked them out of their rooms because they couldn’t pay, and while they were getting thrown out you were making other people rich that had never done anything in their whole lives except think about how to get that way.”