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“Is this an elective medical need?”
There is a simple issue of physical space. It cannot be reasoned with, you understand. The laws of the universe.”
“He’s not supposed to touch people,” the centauroid said. “Not at all?” the bald girl asked. “But why?” “Because if he does, he’ll lose his virginity!” a different human girl said.
“He’ll probably make trouble again,” Vasiht’h said. Jahir opened his mouth to object, and the centauroid pointed. “See? He’s about to start.” Vasiht’h leaned toward her. “We can all spare ourselves frustration if you just switch the room assignments.
inculcated
prurient
“Um, maybe I should make tea. Coffee? Wine?” “Do you have wine?” Lucrezia asked, dry. “No,” Vasiht’h said. “Good,” she said. “Because I wouldn’t give it to someone who’d just hit his head.”
“I have studying to do,” she said, glancing at Jahir. “And since I doubt he’s going to let me seduce him, I might as well do something productive with my night.”
“Well, there you get into the issue of culture. How culture influences the mind, and the chemical constituents of it.” “Or vice versa?” Jahir said. “The body influencing the culture, creating the mind?” “That
“And yet you must begin somewhere, if you wish to affect change,” Jahir said. Vasiht’h grinned. “Affecting change is for third year students.
to use your degree on me without a license?”
“Your psychoanalysis has the subtlety of a hammer.”
“You don’t feel… well… ugly?” “I did in the beginning,” Nieve said. “But then I saw an old lady in the hospital, and she had no hair either. And she had a tattoo of an open sky with swirling birds and leaves on her scalp, and it was the most beautiful thing… and I thought, well, maybe hair isn’t the only beautiful thing you can have on your head.” She thought. “I’d like a hat, maybe. Lots of hats.”
“You cannot be mother, therapist and healer-assist to six children and expect perfection,” Jahir said. “Of course I can,” she answered. She snorted. “I’m a nurse. It’s what we do.”
“Some would say that needing proof of one’s deity is a flaw in one’s faith.”
“I guess people aren’t always ready to hear something,” Vasiht’h said. “You can tell them the exact same thing at different times, and if you tell them too early, they don’t really hear you. They hear something on the inside of their heads.” He nodded. “I understand.”
“Ha!” Vasiht’h said. “Tricky of him. But maybe it’s not the sort of thing that comes up in conversation. ‘Hi, nice to meet you, by the way here’s my curriculum vitae.’”
They remained free of overt menace; for the most part they were things of pale grief.
Why haven’t you been haunting my office the way you usually do?”
“I hardly think it my place to approve or disapprove,” Jahir said. “But I do question how someone who managed to derive any emotional content from my last statement would not be wasted in a laboratory.”
“But it’s pretty close, isn’t it?” Persy said. “When you hugged me, I could tell you were taking it in. You were, weren’t you.” “Yes,” Jahir said. “Then it’s someplace safe,” Persy said. “Nieve’s right.”
Tall, Bright, and Mysterious is careering toward a cliff, is he? Have you told him yet?” “N-o-ooooo,” Vasiht’h said. “He hasn’t made a decision yet. Maybe he’ll change his mind.” “You should discuss it with him. Maybe you’ll talk some sense into each other,” Sehvi said.
“When I was young,” she said, contemplative, “I felt everything like a river, like a wide, wide river running, and I was a twig in it. The problem with that is that a twig is powerless against a river. A life deeply-felt is not so useful to other people as a life spent doing something about those feelings.”
prodding at his own mood.
But the dead were merely separated from the living by the same thin wall that separated dreams from reality.
If he says no, then how will things change?” “Things will change because I’ll have no excuse to keep him in my life,”
“Lucrezia knows her path,” Jahir said. “Her grief is about walking it.”
have mindlines?” “How should I know!” he exclaimed. “I haven’t exactly asked. ‘Say, do you people have the rare habit of bonding mentally to people either by accident because it’s your destiny, or on purpose to serve some grand ideal, thought to thought, heart to heart, forever until death?’ Ugh!”
“I’m not fond of cold, however, and I am so deeply involved with my studies that I’m surprised by such novelties as food and sunlight.”
“Well, therapy is a way of making too,” Vasiht’h said. “It’s just a people-and-community sort of making, not an ideas-and-science making.”
weather that alternated between sullen rain and slush:
“Have I unintentionally initiated a courtship?” “No,” Vasiht’h said. “At least, nothing that formal, not with a bag of coffee beans! But you might have given her hopes.” Jahir shook his head. “I hope not. She seems a sensible woman; hopefully she won’t take it for more than it was.” “I hate to tell you this,” Vasiht’h said. “But there’s almost nothing sensible about love.”
“Yes,” he said. “I wanted to ask your advice on something. I’m starting research for my thesis, and it’s on the effect of dream interventions on mental health.”
There are a lot more hoops to jump through if you want to run studies on patients. We staffers, on the other hand, are used to being abused.”
You figure a molecule’s only got so many ways to react to things. But people?” “That’s what makes people so endlessly engaging,” Jahir said.
“You are running,” she said. “I am not running from clinical,” Vasiht’h answered, flicking his ears back. “No, you’re running from your roommate and from clinical,” she said. “Basically, away from everything that’s making you realize that you can be troubled by your own feelings. Where do I send my psychologist brother to get psychologized?” “That’s not even a word,” Vasiht’h growled.
“This is straying onto rather philosophical ground,” Jahir said. “Of course it is. If you have no philosophical ground for your work, you have no place to stand from which to make decisions. Ethical ones, moral ones. You won’t know the boundaries of your duty, and what you owe your gods—assuming you have any—the world, and your fellow men and women.”
“You’re going to have to suffer some discomfort to grow into your new role, alet. You can choose to do so in a way that minimizes that discomfort… or you can in a way that maximizes the growth. But you can’t have both.”
Very true of my experiences starting new jobs
Jahir’s first session of the Pharmacology class startled him:
A reasonable reaction to the subject
“You were assigned that last class.” They manifestly had not, but Jahir said, “I’m afraid not, sir.”
Your body language is so closed off that it comes across as a flat rejection of everyone around you.
“To be singled out as special is one matter,” Jahir said. “To be called out as, essentially, a freak in comparison to ‘normal’ people….” “I did no such thing,” the Seersa said. “I told people the truth: that you’re a special case because you’ve been trained to lie with your body.” That was so shocking an accusation that he could not move, nor draw breath to defend himself. “That’s what it is,” the Seersa said in response to his silence. “You feel something and you hide it from us all.” “That is the barest courtesy due to others,” Jahir said. “To keep from discomfiting them with histrionics.”
“Do you really think that’s how it works?” the Glaseah said. “That the university would let a professor bully a student and then fail him? That you’d be punished for defending yourself?”
Ours do hahaha
“Oh!” She shivered. “Music is even nicer. You are so lucky!” “Close your eyes,” he said gently. “And I will share my luck with you.”
“It is hard to resist children,”
“Of what, being bruised by mental contact?” Sehvi said. “That’s pretty far beyond anything I’ve heard. Even having hung around doctors most of my life. I gather the important thing is to separate yourself from the overpowering presence and do things that remind you of who you are. You know, centering yourself.” “I see,” Jahir murmured. “Can you think of anything else?” Vasiht’h asked her. She shook her head. “No. Other than it helps to have calm and safe influences around you.
“So that’s him? No wonder you want to keep him. He’s adorable!” “That… wasn’t exactly the word I would have used to describe him,” Vasiht’h said. “But I understand the impulse.”
Hahahahaha
She hasn’t said anything, thankfully. I warned him about it, but I can’t imagine what he’d tell her if he found out for certain.” “Probably something courtly that would make her feel horribly embarrassed,”
“That’s got to hurt,” Leina said, cheek in her palm. “ ‘Hi, we could be holding a grudge, but you’re so unimportant we don’t want to bother subduing you.’ “
“Maybe, but no one thinks of humans as our daddies anymore,”
