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.
“Lioren,” Braithwaite said suddenly. “You are not eating and neither are you talking to us. Would you prefer to return to the office?”
“No,” Lioren said, “not immediately. It is clear to me that this visit to the dining hall was a psychological test and that my words and behavior have been closely observed. You have also, almost certainly as part of the test, been answering questions about yourselves without my having to ask them, some of them personal questions which I would have considered it most impolite to ask. Now I will ask one question directly of you. As a result of these observations, what are your conclusions?”
Braithwaite remained silent, but with a small movement of its head indicated that Cha Thrat was to answer.
“You have heard and will understand,” the Sommaradvan said, “that I am a warrior-surgeon forbidden to practice my true art and am not yet a fully-qualified wizard. For this reason the spells that I cast lack subtlety, as your words have already shown, and are quite transparent. There is a risk that my observations and conclusions, too, may be oversimplified and inaccurate. They are that my spell aimed at bringing you out of the seclusion of the office and your quarters to the dining hall was unsuccessful in that you reacted calmly and with no apparent emotional distress to the entities who approached you. It was unsuccessful in that it did not overcome your unwillingness to reveal personal feelings, which was another and more important purpose of the test. My conclusion is that any future visits to the dining hall should be unaccompanied unless the accompaniment be for social rather than therapeutic reasons.”
Braithwaite nodded its head in the Earth-human gesture of silent agreement. “As the subject of this partially successful test, Lioren, what are your own conclusions about it? Express your feelings about that, at least, freely as would a Kelgian, and do not spare ours.”
Lioren was silent for a moment, then said, “I feel curious as to why, in this age of advanced medicine and technology, Cha Thrat considers itself to be a wizard, unqualified or otherwise. I also feel surprise and concern regarding the personal information you have revealed to me. At the risk of being grossly offensive, I can only conclude that … Is the Psychology Department staffed with insubordinate misfits and entities with a history of emotional disturbance?”
Cha Thrat made an untranslatable sound and the Earth-human barked softly.
“Without exception,” Braithwaite said.
CHAPTER 7
NEVER in all his long years as a student on Tarla and during his advanced training at Sector General had Lioren been given such a woolly-minded and imprecise set of instructions.
Surely Major O’Mara, who was reputed to possess one of the finest and most analytical minds in the hospital, should not be capable of issuing such instructions. Not for the first time Lioren wondered if the Chief Psychologist, charged as it was with the heavy responsibility of maintaining the mental health of close on ten thousand medical and maintenance staff belonging to sixty-odd different species, had been affected by one of the non- physical maladies it was expected to treat. Or was it simply that Lioren, as the department’s most recent and least knowledgeable recruit, had misunderstood the other’s words?
“For my own mental clarification and to reduce the possibility of misunderstanding,” Lioren said carefully, “may I repeat my instructions aloud?”
“If you think it necessary,” the Chief Psychologist replied. From Lioren’s growing experience of reading Earth-human voice sounds and the expressions on their flabby, yellow-pink faces, he knew that O’Mara was losing patience.
Ignoring the nonverbal content of the response, Lioren said, “I am to observe Senior Physician Seldal, for as long and as often as the subject’s duty schedule and my other work allows, without drawing attention to the fact that it is under observation. I am to look for evidence of abnormal or uncharacteristic behavior even though you are aware that, to a Tarlan BRLH like myself, normal and characteristic behavior in a Nallajim of physiological classification LSVO would appear equally strange to me. I am to do this without any prior indication of what it is that I am to look for or, indeed, if there is anything to look for in the first place. If I am able to detect such behavior,
