unlike on EARTH, the reproduction process is quite unpleasant.'
'What makes it unpleasant?'
'It is a very painful procedure.'
Ah, I thought, a breakthrough: Mr. 'prot' very possibly suffers some sort of sexual terror or dysfunction. I quickly pursued this lead. 'Is this pain associated with intercourse itself, with ejaculation, or merely with obtaining an erection?'
'It is associated with the entire process. Where the seactivities result in pleasurable sensations for beings such as yourself, for us the effect is quite the opposite. This applies both to the males and females of our species and, incidentally, to most other beings around the GALAXY as well.'
'Can you compare the sensation to anything else I might be able to understand or identify with? Is it, like a toothache, or-'
'It's more like having your gonads caught in a vise, except that we feel it all over. You see, on K-PAX pain is more general, and to make matters worse it is associated with something like your nausea, accompanied by a very bad smell. The moment of climax is like being kicked in the stomach and falling into a pool of mot shit.'
'Did you say mot shit? What is a `mot'?'
'An animal something like your skunk, only far more potent.'
'I see.' Unforgivably I began to laugh. This image coupled with the dark glasses and suddenly serious demeanorwell, as they say, you had to be there. He grinned broadly then, apparently understanding how it must have sounded to me. I managed to regain my composure and carry on., 'And you say it is the same for a woman?'
'Exactly the same. As you can imagine, women on KPAX do not strive very hard to reach orgasm.'
'If the experience is so terrible, how do you reproduce?'
'Like your porcupines: as carefully as possible. Needless to say, overpopulation is not a problem for us.'
'What about something like surgical implantation?'
'You are distorting the importance of the phenomenon. You have to bear in mind that since the life span for our species is a thousand of your years, there is little need to produce children.'
'I see.. All right. I'd like to get back to your own childhood. Can you tell me a little about your upbringing? What were your parents like?'
'That's a little difficult to explain. Life on K-PAX is quite different from that on EARTH. In order for you to understand my background, I will have to tell you something about our evolution.' He paused at that point, as if wondering whether I would be interested in hearing what he had to say. I encouraged him to proceed. 'Well, I suppose the best place to start is at the beginning. Life on KPAX is much older than life ' on EARTH, which began about two-point-five billion years ago. Homo sapiens has existed on your PLANET for only a few tens of thousands of years, give or take a millennium or two. On K-PAX, life began nearly nine billion of your years ago, when your WORLD was still a diffuse ball of gas. Our own species has been around for five billion of those years, considerably longer than your bacteria. Furthermore, evolution took a quite different course. You see, we have very little water on our PLANET, compared to EARTH-no oceans at all, no rivers, no lakes-so life began on land or, more precisely, underground. Your species evolved from the fishes; our forefathers were something like your worms.'
'And yet you evolved into something very much like us.'
'I thought I explained that in our previous discussion. You could check your notes'
'This is all very interesting-uh-prot, but what does paleontology have to do with your upbringing?'
'Everything just as it does on EARTH.'
'Why don't we proceed with your childhood, and we can come back to this relationship later if I have any questions about it. Would that be all right?'
He bent over the notebook again. 'Certainly.'
'Very well. First, let's talk about some of the fundamental items, shall we? For example, how often do you see your parents? Are your grandparents still alive? Do you have any brothers or sisters?'
'Gene, gene, gene. You haven't been listening. Things are not the same on K-PAX as they are on EARTH. We don't have `families' as you know the term. The whole idea of a `family' would be a non sequitur on our PLANET, and on most others. Children are not raised by their biological parents, but by everyone. They circulate among us, learning from one, then another.'
'Would it be fair to say, then, that as a child you had no home to go to?'
'Exactly. Now you've got it.'
'In other words you never knew your parents.'
'I had thousands of parents.'
I made a note that prot's denying his father and mother confirmed my earlier suspicion of a deep-seated hatred of one or both, possibly due to abuse, or perhaps he had been orphaned, or neglected, or even abandoned by them.
'Would you say you had a happy childhood?'
'Very.'
'Can you think of any unpleasant experiences you had as a child?'
Prot's eyes closed tightly, as they often did when he tried to concentrate or to recollect something. 'Not really. Nothing unusual. I was knocked down by an ap a couple of times, and squirted by a mot once or twice. And I had something like your measles and mumps. Little things like that.'
'An 'ap'?'
'Like a small elephant.'
'Where was this?'
'On K-PAX.'
'Yes, but where on K-PAX? Your own country?'
'We don't have countries on K-PAX.'
'Well, do elephants run around loose there?'
'Everything runs around loose there. We don't have zoos.'
'Are any of the animals dangerous?'
'Only if you get in their way.'
'Do you have a wife waiting for you back on K-PAX?' This was another toss from left field, again to determine the effect of a key word on the patient's state of mind. Except for a barely perceptible shift in his chair, he remained calm.
'We don't have marriage on K-PAX-no husbands, no wives, no families-get it? Or, to put it more correctly, the entire population is one big family.'
'Do you have any biological children of your own?'
'No.'
There are many reasons why a person decides not to have children. One of these has to do with abuse by or hatred of his parents. 'Let's get back to your mother and father. Do you see them very often?'
He sighed in apparent frustration.
'No.'
'Do you like them?'
'Are you still beating your wife?'
'I don't understand.'
'Your questions are phrased from the point of view of an EARTH person. On K-PAX they would be nonsense.'
'Mr prot'
'Just prot.'
'Let's establish some sort of ground rules for these sessions, shall we? I'm sure you will forgive me if I phrase my questions from the point of view of an Earth person since, in fact, that is what I am. I could not phrase them in K-PAXian terms even if I wanted to because I am not familiar with your way of life. I am going to ask you to humor me, to bear with me in this. Please try to answer the questions in the best way you can, using Earth expressions, which you seem to be quite familiar with, whenever possible. Would that be a fair request under the circumstances?'
'I am happy you have said that. Perhaps we can learn from each other.'
