“I look into the contacts they’ve had with beings from these dimensions,” he said. “Friends, business associates, relatives—and so on. And,” he went on, lifting the paper again, “I look, generally, into the idea of other dimensions as well.” He went to the floor again, and came over to me, holding the paper in one hand. He gave me the paper, and went back to the chair near me. “The fact is, Knave, very little about the universe is certain. It’s a good idea to check everything you can—however odd it seems to do so.”
It’s an attitude I’m very fond of, and one I never expect to meet in anybody else—except Master Higsbee, of course. I nodded at him. “The damnedest things do turn up,” I said.
“Exactly,” he said.
CHAPTER SIX
“Before we go on,” I said, “and I do want to go on with this, if you’ve got the time—tell me a little bit about—well, about you. About the Gielli. And about what a non-human being is doing practicing as a psychiatrist for humans. It seems just a little strange, and I’d like to know, so to speak, who I’m talking with.”
He smiled at me. The beak did move, a little, but the effect was mostly eyes and cheeks. “It’s a consequence of Troutman’s Theorem,” he said, “which you don’t know, and don’t want to hear about. Psychological Statics. But I can put it, more or less, into standard speech.”
“By all means,” I said.
“Most psychiatric work with patients is built on the very ancient idea—among humans—of transference. That is, the patient treats his doctor, his psychiatrist—they used to be called psychoanalysts, you know, long before rigid methods of analysis were even possible, before Psychological Statics really existed—”
“Before the Clean Slate War.”
“So I understand,” he said. “The term’s a little threatening, for many patients, and we don’t use it now. ‘Analyst’ has rather menacing overtones, and ‘anal’, which some patients respond to without being fully conscious of the fact, is of course even worse. ‘Psychiatrist’ is comparatively neutral.”
“You were saying something about transference.”
“So I was,” he said. “In a transference, the patient treats his doctor the way he’d treat—his mother, his father, his brother or sister—someone close to him during an early period of his life, when attitudes were being formed.”
I nodded. “I see,” I said. Always let an expert be an expert.
“Some psychiatrists use the transference, for all sorts of purposes,” he said. “Good ones. We have little use for it among ourselves—the Gielli are—strongly empathic, you might say. We’re interested in attitudes rather than objects; it might be put that way.”
“Not an unusual kind of interest for a psychiatrist,” I said.
“You might say that the Gielli were born to be psychiatrists, though less often for, or among, ourselves,” he said. “But to go on: in transference, among humans,” he said, “there are difficulties—it’s hard to establish the distance you need for treatment. You’re always juggling the doctor-patient relationship and the transference relationship, whatever that transference relationship is.”
“Human doctors seem to manage it,” I said.
“They do,” he said, and nodded. “But it’s always a difficulty—and if the doctor is—non-human, deep transference is less likely to occur. Other means develop, and are in fact as useful.”
“So a non-human doctor—”
“Is much less likely to have to deal with the difficulties of deep transference,” he said. “Distance is easier to establish, and work becomes much simpler. Of course, there is the question of initial trust—very important—but humans seem to find us likeable people. We are trustworthy, and it’s our good luck that we also seem to be trustworthy.”
“And your patients don’t—well, confuse you with these alien beings they’re in contact with?”
He laughed. “We’re not aliens,” he said. “We’re Gielli. We’re a known quantity, now.” He paused, and smiled once more. “We’re not extensive travelers, you know—we’ve had space-four travel for a few hundred of your Standard years, but we’ve never been much for exploring. We ran into a human ship—whose pilot was exploring, scouting a new area a few light-years from the inhabited planet humans call Rimshot— forty-four Standard years ago, and began talks. Some of us decided to settle here on Ravenal fifteen years ago; our physical requirements are similar to yours, though at home we do have a lighter gravity. The weight here is a bother, but not a great bother.”
“I’d never heard of you people,” I said.
“Well,” he said, “we’re really rather quiet sorts.”
And then he gestured at the paper.
“Do take a look,” he said. “You may notice something interesting.”
“Before I do that,” I said again, “let me go back to all this about dimensions. We might not be looking at a question of different dimensions at all.”
“You’re assuming that this being was telling lies?” Euglane said. “It’s possible—of course it is. But as a primary assumption—”
My turn to interrupt. “I’m assuming he said exactly what he meant, and nothing else,” I said. “He didn’t say he was coming from other dimensions.”
“But surely—”
“There is a lot of empty space,” I said. “Even in crowded places, there’s a lot of empty space.”
“Between the atoms, to so speak,” he said.
“Everything we know,” I said, “is nine-tenths nothing. There are forces traveling that nothing, from one particle to another. But there doesn’t seem to be anything else. Ten per cent of the space has particles in it—speaking loosely. Quarks, subquarks, and all the things built of quarks—protons and electrons and so on, right up to us. The other ninety per cent—nothing.”
He nodded, very slowly. “I do see the point,” he said.
“It’s not a new idea,” I said. “It’s been out of fashion the last few centuries—space-four, which does call for a fourth spatial dimension, started people looking in another direction, so to speak. But even back before the Clean Slate War, some people had theories involving something, God knows what, existing in the empty space between what we can detect. In the ninety per cent.”
He stared at me. “How very ingenious,” he said. “Not at all the sort of thing a Giell would think of. An actual, physical universe, co-existing with this one, and undetectable by it.”
“At least,” I said, “there may have been such theories. Everything got so damn scrambled when the War happened—”
“So I understand,” he said. “A shame, to let such destructive emotions loose. But I do understand that humans are like that.”
“Some of us, and some of the time,” I said, and he nodded again. “Not ‘other
