Nicholas asked Diane, “Why shouldn’t I go?”
“I’m not going. I went there once anyway.”
“I took her,” Dr. Island said. “And I’ll take you. I wouldn’t take you if I didn’t think it might help you.”
“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
“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?”
