"An extremely interesting slang word, by the way," Marshall said. "'Shoot.' Superficially an invitation to violence. I wonder--" A glance from Malone was sufficient. "Getting back to the track, however," he went on, "I should begin by saying that Her Majesty appears to have suffered a shock of traumatic proportions early in life. That might be the telepathic faculty itself coming to the fore--or, rather, the realization that others did not share her faculty. That she was, in fact, in communication with a world which could never reach her on her own deepest and most important level." He paused. "Are you following me so far?" he asked.
"Gamely," Malone admitted. "In other words, when she couldn't communicate, she went into this traumatic shock."
"Nor exactly," Marshall said. "We must understand what communication is. Basically, Sir Kenneth, we can understand it as a substitute for sexual activity. That is, in its deepest sense. It is this attack on the deepest levels of the psychic organism that results in the trauma; and has results of its own, by the way, which succeed in stabilizing the traumatic shock on several levels."
Malone blinked. "That last part began to get me a little," he said. "Can we go over it again, just the tune this time and leave out the harmony?"
Marshall smiled. "Certainly," he said. "Remember that Her Majesty has been locked up in institutions since early adolescence. Because of this--a direct result of the original psychosis--she has been deprived, not only of the communication which serves as a sublimation for sexual activity, but, in fact, any normal sexual activity. Her identification of herself with the Virgin Queen is far from accidental, Sir Kenneth."
The idea that conservation was sex was a new and somewhat frightening one to Malone, but he stuck to it grimly. "No sex," Malone said. "That's the basic trouble."
Marshall nodded. "It always is," he said. "In one form or another, Sir Kenneth; it is at the root of such problems at all times. But in Her Majesty's case the psychosis has become stabilized; she is the Virgin Queen, and therefore her failure to become part of the normal sexual activity of her group has a reason. It is accepted on that basis by her own psyche."