“But who would ask questions about religion,” Cha Thrat asked, “when it is a subject everyone is supposed to avoid? It causes arguments that nobody wins. Is it the terminal patient, Mannen, who might ask these questions? If it needs help of that kind, I wonder at it asking you rather than a member of its own species. But I understand your reticence.”
Allowing another person to arrive at a wrong conclusion was not the same as lying, Lioren told himself.
Cha Thrat made a Sommaradvan gesture the significance of which Lioren did not know, and went on, “Speaking clinically, Lioren, I would say that you have been forgetting to eat as well as sleep. You can call up that stuff on your room console as well as from here. I cannot help you where Earth-human beliefs are concerned, but let us go to the dining hall and I will tell you all about the religions — there are five of them altogether — of Som-maradva. It is a subject about which I can speak with full knowledge if less than complete conviction.”
During their meal and continued discussion in Lioren’s quarters, Cha Thrat did not press him for information that he was unwilling to give, but he did not have such an easy time at his next visit to Mannen.
“Dammit, Lioren,” the ex-Diagnostician said, who seemed no longer to be troubled by breathlessness, “Seldal tells me that you have been talking to the Groalterri, and it to you, for longer than anyone else in the hospital, and that you refuse to tell anyone about it. And now you want me to give you an ethical justification for your silence without telling me the reason why you won’t speak.
“What the hell is going on, Lioren?” it ended. “Curiosity is killing me.”
“Curiosity,” Lioren said calmly, looking at the age-wasted body and face with its youthful eyes, “would only be a contributing factor.”
The patient made an untranslatable sound. “Your problem, if I understand it correctly, is that during your second and much lengthier visit to the Groalterri you were given, presumably in exchange for personal data on yourself and information regarding the worlds and peoples of the Federation, a large amount of information about the patient, its people, and its culture. Much of this information is impersonal and clinical and extremely valuable both to the physician in charge of the Groalterri’s treatment and to the cultural-contact specialists of the Monitor Corps. You, however, feel that you have sworn yourself to secrecy. But surely you know that neither you nor the patient have the right to conceal such information.”
Lioren kept one eye directed toward the biosensors, watching for signs of respiratory distress following that long speech. He did not find any.
“The personal stuff, yes,” Mannen went on. “My earlier attempt to get you to shorten my waiting time here was not to become general knowledge, for it affected only myself and had no bearing on the treatment of a patient of a new species or that culture’s future relations with the Federation. The clinical or otherwise nonpersonal information you have been able to gather or deduce is pure knowledge that you have no right to keep to yourself. It should be available to everyone just as the operating principles of our scanners or the hyperdrive generators are available to those able to understand and use them without risk, although for a while in the bad old days the hyperdrive was considered to be a top secret, whatever that meant. But knowledge is, well, knowledge. You might just as well try to keep secret a natural law. Have you tried explaining all this to your patient?”
“Yes,” Lioren said. “But when I suggested making the non-personal sections of our conversation public, and argued that it would not be breaking a confidence because it was clearly impractical to ask every single Groalterri in their population for their permission to reveal this information, it said that it would have to think carefully about its reply. I’m sure it would like to help us, but there may be a religious constraint, and I would not want to cause an adverse reaction through impatience. If it became angry, it is capable of tearing a hole through the structure and opening the ward to space.”
“Yes,” Mannen said, showing its teeth. “Children, no matter how large they happen to be, can sometimes throw tantrums. Regarding the religious aspect, there are many Earth-humans who believe that—”
It stopped speaking because suddenly the small room was being invaded, first by Chief Psychologist O’Mara, followed by Senior Physicians Seldal and Prilicla, who flew in and attached itself with spidery, sucker-tipped legs to the ceiling, where its fragile body would be in less danger from unguarded movements by its more physically massive colleagues. O’Mara nodded in acknowledgment of Lioren’s presence and bent over the patient. When it spoke its voice had a softness that Lioren had never heard before.
“I hear that you are talking to people again,” O’Mara said, “and that you especially want to talk to me, to ask a favor. How do you feel, old friend?”
Mannen showed its teeth and inclined its head in Seldal’s direction. “I feel fine, but why not ask the doctor?”
“There has been a minor remission of symptoms,” Seldal responded before the question could be asked, “but the clinical picture has not changed substantially. The patient says that it is feeling better, but this must be a self-delusion and, whether it remains here or goes elsewhere in the hospital, it could still terminate at any time.”
O’Mara’s mention of the patient wanting a favor worried Lioren. He thought that it was the same favor Mannen had asked of him, except that now it would be a more public request for early termination, and he felt both sorrow and shame that it should be so. But the empath, Prilicla, was not reacting as Lioren would have expected to such an emotionally charged situation.
“Friend Mannen’s emotional radiation,” Prilicla said, the clicks and trillings of its voice like a musical background to the words, “is such that it should not cause concern to a psychologist or anyone else. Friend O’Mara does not have to be reminded that a thinking entity is composed of a body and a mind, and that a strongly motivated mind can greatly influence the body concerned. In spite of the gloomy clinical picture, friend Mannen is indeed feeling well.”
“What did I tell you?” Mannen said. It showed its teeth again to O’Mara. “I know that this is a fitness examination, with Seldal insisting that I am dying, Prilicla equally insistent that I am feeling well, and you trying to adjudicate between them. But for the past few days I have been suffering from nonclinical, terminal boredom in here, and I want out. Naturally, I would not be able to perform surgery or undertake any but the mildest physical exertion. But I am still capable of teaching, of taking some of the load off Cresk-Sar, and the technical people could devise a mobile cocoon for me with protective screens and gravity nullifiers. I would much prefer to terminate while doing something than doing nothing, and I—”
“Old friend,” O’Mara said, holding up one digit to indicate the biosensor displays, “will you for God’s sake stop for breath!”
“I am not entirely helpless,” Mannen said after the briefest of pauses. “I bet that I could arm-wrestle Prilicla.”
One of the Cinrusskin’s incredibly fragile forelimbs detached itself from the ceiling and reached down so that its slender digits rested for a moment on the patient’s forehead. “Friend Mannen,” Prilicla said, “you might not win.”
Lioren had strong feelings of pleasure and relief that the favor Mannen was asking would reflect neither shame nor dishonor on the ex-Diagnostician’s reputation. But there was also a selfish feeling of impending loss, and for the first time since the others had entered the room, Lioren spoke.