“Nurse tells me that you ordered the voice recorders switched off,” it said before Lioren could speak, “and the earlier conversations with the patient to be erased. You exceeded your authority, Lioren, which is a bad habit of yours that I thought you had given up after the Cromsag business. But you have spoken with the patient at greater length than all of the medical staff combined since its arrival. What did it say to you?”
Lioren was silent for a moment, then he said, “I cannot tell you exactly. Much of the information is personal and I have not yet decided what can and cannot be divulged.”
Seldal gave a loud, incredulous cheep. “This patient must have given you information that will help me in its treatment. I cannot order a member of your department to reveal psychosen-sitive information about another entity, but I can request O’Mara to order you to do so.”
“Senior Physician,” Lioren said, “whether it was the Chief Psychologist or any other authority my response would have to be the same.”
The Hudlar nurse had moved away so as to absent itself and avoid embarrassing its department head by overhearing an argument that entity was losing.
“May I assume that I still have your permission to continue visiting the patient?” Lioren asked quietly. “It is possible that I might be able to obtain information arrived at by observation and deduction and the detection of facts, material of nonper-sonal nature about itself or its species which would assist you. But great care is needed if it is not to take offense, because it places great importance on the contents of its mind and the words used to reveal it.”
Seldal’s feathers were again lying like a bright and unruffled carpet around its body. “You have my permission to continue visiting. And now I presume you have no objection to me talking to my own patient?”
“If you tell it that the speech recorders will remain switched off,” Lioren said, “it might talk to you.”
As Seldal departed the Hudlar nurse returned to its position on the monitors. Quietly, it said, “With respect, Lioren, the Hudlar organ of hearing is extremely sensitive and cannot be turned off other than by swathing it in a bulky muffling device, the need for which was not foreseen in this ward and so it was not available to me.”
“Did you hear everything?” Lioren asked, feeling a sudden anger that the patient’s confidence had been breached and that Seldal, from whom he had been keeping the conversation a secret, would shortly be able to hear it all on the hospital grapevine. “Including the crime it is supposed to have committed prior to its arrival here?”
“I was instructed not to hear,” the Hudlar said, “so I did not hear, and cannot discuss what I did not hear with anyone other than the entity who forbade me to hear.”
“Thank you, Nurse,” Lioren said with great feeling. He stared for a moment at the other’s identification patch, which bore only the hospital staff and department symbols because Hudlars used their names only among the members of the family or those whom they proposed to mate, and memorized it so that he would know the nurse again. Then he asked, “Do you wish to discuss some aspect of that which you did not hear with me now?”
“With respect,” the Hudlar said, “I would prefer to make an observation. You appear to be gaining the patient’s confidence with remarkable speed, by speaking freely about yourself and inviting an exchange in kind.”
“Go on,” Lioren said.
“On my world and, I believe, among the majority of your own population on Tarla,” the nurse said, “it would not matter because we believe that our lives begin at birth and end with death, and we do not distinguish between the forms of wrongdoing which seem to be troubling the patient. But among the Groalterri, and in many other cultures throughout the Federation, you would be treading on dangerous philosophical ground.”
“I know,” Lioren said as he turned to leave. “This is no longer a purely medical problem, and I hope the library computer will give me some of the answers. At least I know what my first question will be.”
What is the difference between a crime and a sin?
When he returned to the department, Lioren was told that O’Mara was in the inner office but had left instructions not to be disturbed. Braithwaite and Cha Thrat were about to leave for the day, but the Sommaradvan held back, plainly wanting to question him. Lioren tried to ignore its nonverbal curiosity because he was not sure what, if anything, he could allow himself to say.
“I know that you are seriously troubled in the mind,” Cha Thrat said, pointing suddenly at his screen. “Has your distress increased to the level where you are seeking solace in … Lioren, this is uncharacteristic and worrying behavior in a personality as well integrated as yours. Why are you requesting all that study material on the Federation’s religions?”
Lioren had to pause for a moment to consider his answer, because it was suddenly borne in upon him that, since he had become involved with Seldal and its patients, he had spent much more time thinking about the troubles of Mannen and the Groalterri than his own. The realization came as a great surprise to him.
“I am grateful for your concern,” he replied carefully, “but my distress has not increased since last we spoke. As you already know, I am investigating Seldal by talking to its patients, and the process has become ethically complicated, so much so that I am uncertain of how much I can tell you. Religion is a factor. But it is a subject about which I am totally ignorant, and I should not want to be embarrassed if I were to be asked questions about it.”
“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
