Chapter 39

Trying to explain Miller's bizarre behavior to the natives proved extraordinarily difficult. As soon as the incident was over Joe had approached Meiersdottir with a host of questions. She tried dismissing them with the blanket statement that the major's mind had been occluded, but found this simply evoked a new avenue of inquiry. In short order she realized that the discussion was going to take considerable time, and rather than take away further from the forthcoming ceremony—already delayed and somewhat marred by what had just transpired—she told Joe they would talk of it more the next day.

For a time she was able to put it out of her mind and give her full attention to Zo's and Hill's wedding and the subsequent celebration. But afterwards her mind kept returning to what she might say to the alien; and though she lay awake late pondering that, the morning found her no better prepared than she'd been before.

"What the hell do I tell him, them?" she asked her husband in frustration.

Igwanda shrugged. "I can think of little other than that Miller was several bricks shy of a load," he said.

"Sure, he was a nutcase," she agreed. "That's what I said yesterday when Joe first asked. But you know they don't let anything go so easily, he started peppering me with questions about why, what made him so, why aren't others the same, on and on, and I had no idea how to answer. I still don't."

"Mmm," he said. "You know, there is a comparison to be drawn here. Think back to their emotion-laden behavior when the two groups nearly came to war. They displayed little more rationality then than Miller did yesterday."

"The two things aren't—"

"I know, are not directly comparable," he finished for her. "Even so, there are significant elements of similarity relating to mental state, are there not? Perhaps sufficient to outweigh the differences in detail."

She was silent for a minute, thinking. "I kind of hate to bring that up again," she said slowly. "It seems sort of like rubbing their noses in it. Well, their muzzles. Whatever. You know."

The colonel shook his head in disagreement. "Amanda, your sensitivity is laudable, but I think it is misplaced. The point is to learn from one's mistakes, is that not correct?"

"Well ... yes."

"One cannot learn from one's mistakes if one is allowed to brush them under the carpet, to simply forget them as though they never happened. I do not suggest assigning fault or blame, but if we are asked to explain or excuse what happened yesterday, is it not reasonable to point out the relationship between that and their own actions of only a few months ago?"

She was already nodding before he was done. "You're right, darling, I'm going overboard about being compassionate. It's not the whole explanation, but it'll go a long way toward helping them understand, won't it?"

When Joe approached later that morning, Meiersdottir had the broad outlines of her response laid out. She began as she had the day before, saying Miller wasn't in his right mind, but again was pressed on how did such a thing happen.

"There can be many causes," she explained. "Some of them are physiological, the brain itself isn't working the way it's supposed to. I'm not sure, but does that ever happen to you?"

"Sometimes there is one who cannot think together with us," answered Joe. "It is not often that this happens. When it does we try to care for that one but it does not go well. Either the one will die soon or will leave when can to go with others of same kind." So much, she thought, for that idiot holo interviewer who tried to persuade me they were insensitive about the handicapped. "But you say only some are from this cause, how else may it happen?"

"Many ways," she said. "People may lose contact with others, other humans. Or even if they have such contact, there may be part of their minds, part of their thinking, that they don't share. And in their isolation they begin to see things in a different way, a way that isn't real, and to believe that the way they see things is actually real in a way others don't see. It's separation from the thinking of others."

"It is the illness of singles, then."

"Not just singles," she said, venturing firmly into hitherto unexplored territory. "Joe, think back to what was happening when my baby and I were imprisoned in the nest in the other place."