Her mother must have realized that she never had a boyfriend, and hardly ever talked about men or sex. As she filled the cups with tea, she kept runni...g over in her head the way she would start the conversation. It was now or never.Walking into the living room, she placed her mother's tea on the table in front of the couch and sat down in a chair. Taking a deep breath, she asked,"Mum, can I talk to you about something?" Her mother turned her head towards her and replied"Of course you can. As it happens, I discovered that I was quite suited to medical care.”Moralez considered asking her about her people, why she looked so different from the other Borealans, but thought that it might have been rude or insensitive. She must represent a race or a subspecies. It was a fair assumption.Out here in the fresh air, or at least what passed for fresh on a space station with oxygen recyclers, he could almost forget where he was and what had happened to him. If he closed his eyes, feeling the. And when the shrink came in. I swore at him too. Why couldn't he understand that I was supposed to be a man, and I couldn't be a man without my missing parts? The next week they sent in a new shrink.He looked like a middle-aged reject from a commune. But he was easy to talk to, and seemed to agree with me. After a week, he started a frontal assault. And caught me with my pants down. "Nickie, you are one confused little girl. You know what you want, and you are afraid to face yourself." I'm not. But I had ask where it came from. The homeowners, alas, couldn’t say. The paintings had been in the attic. They found them when they moved in last year. But they had the name of the previous owner. Ben Seigmann. That was all the wife at the yard sale could recall.I hung the painting promptly, in the bedroom of course. Sometimes I did have company, and though reasonably tasteful in style, it wasn’t the sort of painting one displayed in the open. I could have been satisfied there, but a hunch had.