Sky So Big and Black

At least I don't have to pretend I'm a scientist. I can admit I'm an artist. And a cop. I do have to admit that I'm a cop. I raise my glass to my own reflection in the mirror by my door; lately this is as close as I get to drinking with a colleague. There might be a couple of hundred of us shrinks, nowadays, in all the parts of the solar system where there's any reason for us to existhere on Mars, over on the Moon, out on the twenty-some settled asteroids, hunkered down in the Jovian moon colonies. Right now, during the emergency, I doubt they can afford any of us on Titan or Mercury, but there's probably someone with the training, currently emptying bedpans, cooking soup, mining methane, or something, and if an occasion came up I guess they could shift them to cover. There might be seventy shrinks on the Moon, many of them exactly the kind of expert that Teri's case needs, and if anyone upstairs had had any sense that's where we'd have sent the poor kid in the first place, a whole Mars year ago, once we knew what was going on. But they didn't; the district officers decided that it could all be dealt with right here, so that they wouldn't have to arrange transportation for Teri, so that nobody above them would have to look at the case seriouslyoh, sure, reports went up the bureaucratic pyramid, but nothing alarming, nothing with the big red stamp of invasion possible or we've got trouble. And now there's this new problem. Maybe I should keep it from the district officers, just deal with it here and send them a report later. That would teach them a lesson. Last time they insisted that I cope with Teri all by myself; maybe this time I just will. I wonder if cases like Teri's are happening a lot. I wouldn't necessarily know. People don't tell me things. I run up against walls of secrecy all the time. Almost anything might be being kept from me. So maybe cases like Teri's current situation are happening three a week, or something, ever since the Sunburst, and all being kept quiet. It's possible. I don't know. I'm not a scientist and I don't pretend to be. I'm not even a very good cop. But at my art...well, now that's an interesting question. I think I'm good. Conscious thoughts are indices of deeper internal states. So thinking I'm good at what I do is an index. Is this particular index an observation, a delusion, or symptom? It would also be so very much easier if I didn't like Teri. I should have been able to manage objectivity, I think, or maybe even to get really cop-ish and detest the brat. But, no, I wince when I think the word brat" about her. She's anything but, really. Unless you say that all roundita girls are brats, and I've been working here too long to think that; what they are, is confident. And what water is, is wet. I laugh at that. It's a habit, laughing at my own feeble jokes. The kind of habit a man gets when he has drunk too much by himself too often for all his adult life. Teri is brash and rude and aggressively ignorant, but she's also tender-hearted and trusting and exuberantly young despite everything that's happened to her, so of course I like her. Besides, liking her is part of the art. To get to where you have at least some dim understanding of what it's like to be the person sitting across from you, you really have to find a way for you to like the suspect, or the patient, or the rogee, or whatever the term that we're allowed to call them currently is. (Way down here in this frontier town, I only have to go through standards and practices review every few groundyears, and in between I don'tBarnes, John is the author of 'Sky So Big and Black' with ISBN 9780765342225 and ISBN 0765342227.