James White - The Genocidal Healer

In spite of having to eat and speak with the same orifice, the Earth-human kept up a continuous dialogue with Cha Thrat, during which they both left conversational gaps enticingly open so that Lioren could join in. Plainly they were doing their best both to put him at ease and keep his attention from the nearby tables where everyone was watching him, but, with a member of a species who had to make a conscious mental effort not to look in every direction at once, they were having little success. It was also plain that he was undergoing psychotherapy of a not very subtle form.

He knew that Cha Thrat and Braithwaite were fully informed about his case, but they were trying to make him repeat the information verbally so as to gauge his present feelings about himself and those around him. The method they were using was to exchange what appeared to be highly confidential and often personal information about themselves, their past lives, their personal feelings about the department and toward O’Mara and other entities on the hospital staff with whom they had had pleasant or unpleasant contact, in the hope that Lioren would reciprocate. He listened with great interest but did not speak except in answer to direct questions from them or from staff members who stopped from time to time at their table.

Questions from the silver-furred Kelgians he answered as simply and directly as they were asked. To the shy well-wishings of a massive, six-legged Hudlar whose body was covered only by a recently applied coat of nutrient paint and the tiny ID patch of an advanced student nurse he replied with polite thanks. He also thanked an Earth-human called Timmins, wearing a Monitor Corps uniform with Maintenance insignia, who hoped that the Tarlan environment in his quarters had been properly reproduced, and said that if there was anything else that would make him feel more comfortable he should not hesitate to ask for it. A Melfan wearing the gold-edged band of a Senior Physician on one crablike arm stopped to say that it was pleased to see him making use of the dining hall, because it had wanted to speak to the Tarlan but that, regrettably on this occasion, it was due in ELNT Surgery. Lioren told it that he intended using the dining hall regularly in the future and that there would be other opportunities to talk.

That reply seemed to please Braithwaite and Cha Thrat, and when the Melfan Senior left them they resumed the conversation whose gaps Lioren steadfastly refused to fill. If he had chosen to speak and reveal his feelings just then, it would have been to say that, having been condemned to live for the terrible crime he had committed, he must accept as part of the punishment these constant reminders of his guilt.

He did not think they would be pleased to hear that.

The members of the Psychology Department, Lioren discovered, were free to move anywhere within the hospital and talk to or question, at any time which did not adversely affect the performance of the individual’s professional duties, everyone from the lowest trainee nurse or maintenance person up to the near godlike Diagnosticians themselves, and it came as no surprise that their authority to pry into everyone else’s most private and personal concerns made them very few friends among the staff. The surprises were the manner in which these multispecies psychologists were recruited and their prior professional qualifications, if any.

O’Mara had joined Sector General shortly before it had been commissioned, as a structural engineer, and the work it had done among the original staff and patients that resulted in its promotion to major and Chief Psychologist was no longer open for study, although there was a rumor that it had once wet-nursed an orphaned infant Hudlar unaided and without benefit either of heavy-lifting machinery or translation devices, but that story Lioren considered to be too wildly improbable to have any basis in fact.

From the words spoken and unspoken it seemed that Lieutenant Braithwaite’s career had begun in the Corps’s Other-Species Communications and Cultural Contact Division, where initially it had shown great promise and an even greater impatience with its superiors. It was enthusiastic, dedicated, self-reliant, and intuitive where its work was concerned, and whether its intuition proved trustworthy, as happened in the majority of cases, or unsafe, the result was deeply stressful to those in authority. Its attempt to expedite the First Contact procedure on Keran by circumventing the philosophically conservative priesthood caused a citywide religious riot in which many Keranni were killed and injured. Thereafter it was disciplined before being transferred to a number of subordinate administrative positions, none of which proved suitable either to Braithwaite or its superiors, before coming to Sector General. For a short time it was attached to the Maintenance Department’s internal-communications section until, in an attempt to rewrite and simplify the multispecies translation program, it knocked down the main computer and left the entire hospital staff and patients unable to do anything but bark, gobble, or cheep unintelligibly at each other for several hours. Colonel Skempton had been less impressed by what Braithwaite had hoped to do than by the havoc it had caused, and was about to banish it to the loneliest and most distant Monitor Corps outpost in the Federation when O’Mara had intervened on its behalf.

Similarly, Cha Thrat’s career had been beset by personal and professional difficulties. It was the first and so far only Som-maradvan female to qualify and practice as a warrior-surgeon, a position of great eminence in a profession which was otherwise exclusively male. Lioren was unsure of what a warrior-surgeon of that planet was supposed to be or do, but it had been able to treat successfully a member of an off-planet species, an Earth-human Monitor Corps officer very seriously injured in a flier crash, that Cha Thrat had encountered for the first time. Impressed by its surgical skills and flexibility of mind, the Corps had offered it the opportunity of training in multispecies surgery at Sector Twelve General Hospital. Cha Thrat had accepted because, unlike on its home world, the other-species doctors there would judge it on professional merit without caring whether it was male or female.

But the intense dedication and rigorous clinical disciplines of a warrior-surgeon of Sommaradva, which in many respects resembled those of Lioren’s own Tarlan medical fraternity, were not those of Sector General. Cha Thrat did not go into the details of its misdemeanors, suggesting instead that any member of the staff would be eager to satisfy Lioren’s curiosity in the matter, but the impression given was that as a trainee it had exercised its clinical initiative too freely, and too often proved its nominal superiors wrong. After one particular incident during which it had temporarily lost one of its own limbs, no ward in the hospital would accept it for training and it, like Braithwaite, had been transferred to Maintenance until a major act of insubordination warranted by the clinical situation at the time brought about its dismissal. And, again like Braithwaite, it was O’Mara who had kept Cha Thrat from leaving the hospital by recruiting it for the department.

As the conversation that was designed both to inform and to draw him out continued, Lioren felt a growing sympathy for these two entities. Like himself they had been cursed with too much intelligence, individuality, and initiative and had suffered grievously thereby.

Naturally, their crimes were insignificant compared with Lioren’s own, because they were psychologically flawed misfits rather than criminals and not fully responsible for the wrongs they had done. But were they confessing those misdeeds to him in the form of an apparently unimportant exchange of gossip, ostensibly so that he would better understand them and the situation within the department? Or was it an attempt to assuage their own guilt by trying to help him? He could not be sure because they were concealing their true feelings, unlike himself, by talking too much rather than by remaining silent. The thought that they might not be suffering at all, that their efforts to help Lioren and their other department duties made them forget their past misdeeds came to trouble him, but he dismissed the idea as ridiculous. One could no more forget a past crime than one’s own name.