James White - The Genocidal Healer

O’Mara paused for a moment; then, in a softer voice, it continued. “I shall do everything that I can to help you. Truly, you have suffered and are suffering a great mental anguish, and laboring under a burden of guilt greater than any I have encountered in the literature or in my own long experience; a load so heavy that any other mind but yours would have been utterly destroyed by it. I am greatly impressed by your emotional control and horrified at the thought of your present level of mental distress. I shall do everything possible to relieve it and I, too, who am in the best position of anyone other than yourself to understand the situation, offer you my sympathy.

“But sympathy,” it went on, “is at best a palliative treatment, and one which diminishes in effect with repeated application. That is why I am applying it on this one and only occasion. Henceforth, you will do exactly as you are told, perform all the routine, menial, boring tasks set you, and you will receive no sympathy from anyone in this department. Do you understand me?”

“I understand,” Lioren said, “that my pride must be humbled and my crime punished, for that is what I deserve.” O’Mara made an untranslatable sound. “What you think you deserve, Lioren. When you begin to believe that you might not deserve it, you will be well on the way to recovery. And now I will introduce you to the staff in the outer office.”

As O’Mara had promised, the work of the office was routine and repetitious, but during the first few weeks it was still too new for him to find it boring. Apart from the periods spent sleeping, or at least resting, or using his room’s food dispenser, Lioren had not left the department, nor had he exercised anything but his brain. His concentration on the new duties was total, and as a result the quality, quantity, and his understanding of the work increased to the point where it drew praise from both Lieutenant Braithwaite and Trainee Cha Thrat, although not from Major O’Mara.

The Chief Psychologist never praised anyone, it had told him, because its job was to shrink heads, not swell them. Lioren could not make any clinical or semantic sense of the remark and decided that it must be what the Earth-human DBDGs called a joke.

Lioren could not ignore his growing curiosity about the two beings with whom he was spending so much time, but the psych files of departmental personnel were closed to each other, and they neither asked personal questions nor answered any about themselves. Possibly it was a departmental rule, or O’Mara had told them to keep a rein on their natural curiosity out of consideration for Lioren’s feelings, but then one day Cha Thrat suggested that the rule did not apply outside the office.

“You should forget that display screen for a while, Lioren,” the Sommaradvan said as it was about to leave for its midday meal, “and rest your mind from Cresk-Sar’s interminable student progress reports. Let’s refuel.”

Lioren hesitated for a moment, thinking about the permanently crowded dining hall for the hospital’s warm-blooded oxygen-breathers and the people he would have to meet in the busy corridors between. Lioren was not sure if he was ready for that.

Before he could reply, Cha Thrat said, “The catering computer has been programmed with a full Tarlan menu, synthetic, of course, but much better than that tasteless stodge the room dispensers dish out. That computer must be feeling hurt, ag- grieved, even insulted at being ignored by the only Tarlan on the staff. Why not make it happy and come along?”

Computers did not have feelings, and Cha Thrat must know that as well as he did. Perhaps it was making a Sommaradvan joke.

“I will come,” Lioren said.

“So will I,” Braithwaite said.

It was the first time in Lioren’s experience that the outer office had been left unattended, and he wondered if one or both of them were risking O’Mara’s displeasure by doing so. But their behavior on the way to the dining hall, and the firm but unobtrusive manner in which they discouraged any member of the medical staff who seemed disposed to stop him and talk, made it plain that they were acting with the Chief Psychologist’s approval. And when they found three vacant places at a table designed for the use of Melfan ELNTs, Braithwaite and Cha Thrat made sure that he remained between them. The other occupants, five Kelgian DBLFs noisily demolishing the character of some unnamed Charge Nurse as they were rising to leave, could not be avoided. Nothing was proof against Kelgian curiosity.

“I am Nurse Tarsedth,” one of them said, turning its narrow, conical head to point in Lioren’s direction. “Your Sommaradvan friend knows me well, since we trained together, but does not recognize me because it insists that, in spite of having four eyes, it cannot tell Kelgians apart. But my questions are for you, Surgeon-Captain. How are you feeling? Does your guilt manifest itself in bouts of psychosomatic pain? What therapy has O’Mara devised for you? Is it effective? If not, is there anything I can do to help?”

Suddenly Braithwaite started making untranslatable sounds, and its facial coloring had changed from pinkish yellow to deep red.

Tarsedth looked at it briefly, then said, “This often happens when the food and air passages share a common entrance channel. Anatomically, the Earth-human DBDG life-form is a mess.”

Anatomically, Lioren thought as he tried hard to concentrate on the questioner in an attempt to avoid the pain that its questions were causing, the Kelgian was beautiful. It was physiological classification DBLF, warm-blooded, oxygen-breathing, multi-pedal, and with a long, flexible cylindrical body covered overall by highly mobile, silvery fur. The fur moved continually in slow ripples from its conical head right down to the tail, and with tiny cross-eddies and wavelets appearing as if the incredibly fine pelt were a liquid stirred by an unfelt wind. It was that fur which explained, and excused, the other’s rude and direct approach to what it must know to be a sensitive subject.

Because of inadequacies in the Kelgian speech organs, their spoken language lacked modulation, inflection, and any emotional expression, but they were compensated by the fur, which acted, so far as another Kelgian was concerned, as a perfect but uncontrollable mirror of the speaker’s emotional state. As a result the concept of lying or being diplomatic, tactful, or even polite was completely alien to them. A Kelgian said exactly what it meant or felt because its fur revealed its feelings from moment to moment, and to do otherwise would have been considered a stupid waste of time. The opposite also held true, because politeness and the verbal circumlocutions used by many other species simply confused and irritated them.

“Nurse Tarsedth,” Lioren said suddenly, “I am feeling very unwell, but on the psychological rather than the physical level. The therapy O’Mara is using in my case is not yet clear to me, but the fact that I have visited the dining hall for the first time since the trial, even though accompanied by two protectors, suggests that it is beginning to work, or that my condition may be improving in spite of it. If your questions are prompted by more than mere curiosity and the offer of help intended to be taken as more than a verbal kindness, I suggest that you ask for details of the therapy and its progress, if any, from the Chief Psychologist.”

“Are you stupid?” the Kelgian said, its silvery pelt tufting suddenly into spikes. “I would not dare ask a question like that. O’Mara would tear my fur off in small pieces!”

“Probably,” Cha Thrat said as Tarsedth was leaving, “without benefit of anesthetic.”

Their food trays slid from the table’s delivery recess to the accompaniment of an audible signal that kept him from hearing the Kelgian’s reply. Braithwaite said, “So that’s what Tarlans eat,” and thereafter kept its eyes averted from Lioren’s platter.