Driven by Naydrad and with Danalta and Wainright flanking it, the litter was
already moving off. But Pathologist Murchison was hanging back, its face deep
pink and wearing an expression that Cha Thrat could now read and understand.
“Don’t be too hard on it, Prilicla,” Murchison said. “1 think it did a very good
job, even if it is inclined to forget who’s in charge at times. I mean, well,
let’s just say that with Cha Thrat, Maintenance Department’s gain was the
medical staff’s loss.”
As Murchison turned abruptly to hurry after the litter, Cha Thrat watched it
from three different and confusing viewpoints and with three sets of very mixed
feelings. To her Sommaradvan mind it was a small, flabby, and unlovely DBDG
female. To the Gogleskan mind it was just another off-planet monster, friendly
but frightening. But from her Earth-human viewpoint it was an altogether
different entity, one that for many years she had knownto be highly intelligent,
second only to Thornnastor in its professional standing, friendly, sympathetic,
fair-minded, beautiful, and sexually desirable. Some of these aspects of its
personality had just been demonstrated, but the sudden physical attraction Cha
Thrat felt toward it, and the associated mind-pictures of horrible alien
grapplings and intimacies, frightened her so badly that the Gogleskan part of
her mind wanted to call for a joining.
Murchison was a female Earth-human and Cha Thrat was a female Sommaradvan. She
had to stop feeling this stupid attraction toward a member of another species
who was not even male, because in that direction lay certain madness. She
remembered the discussion about Educator tapes with the wizard, O’Mara, and her
own experience of sharing her mind with those of Kelgians, Tralthans, Melfans
among others.
But that was not her experience, she reminded herself firmly. She was and would
remain Cha Thrat. The Gogleskan and Earth-human who seemed to be occupying her
mind were guests, one of them a particularly troublesome guest where thoughts of
the entity Murchison were concerned, but they should not be allowed to influence
her personal feelings. It was ridiculous to think, or feel, otherwise.
When the disturbing figure of Murchison had disappeared into the middle distance
and Cha Thrat was feeling more like herself than two other people, she said,
“And now, I suppose, comes the pinning back of the ears of a big-headed and
grossly insubordinate technician with delusions of medical grandeur?”
Prilicla had alighted on the roof above Khone’s doorway so that its eyes would
be on a level with Cha Thrat’s. It said gently, “Your emotional control is
excel-lent, friend Cha. I compliment you on you But your supposition is wrong.
However, your obvious understanding of the Earth-human terms you have just used,
and your earlier behavior during a very tricky clinical situation, leads me to
speculate about what might possibly have happened toyou.
“I am merely thinking aloud, you understand,” it went on. “You are not required,
in fact you are expressly forbidden to say whether my speculations are accurate
or not. In this matter I would prefer to remain officiallyignorant.”
It was evident from the first few words that the empath knew exactly what had
happened to Cha Thrat, even though its certainties were mentioned as suspicions.
It suspected that Cha Thrat had shared minds with Rhone, that the Gogleskan’s
mind had previously been shared with that of Conway, and it was the
Diagnostician’s medical expertise and initiative that had surfaced before and
during the birth of Khone’s child. For this reason the Cinrusskin was not
offended by the incident —a Senior Physician was far outranked by a
Diagnostician, even one who was temporarily in residence within the mind of a
subordinate’. And neither would the other team members feel offended if they
were to suspect thetruth.
But they must not suspect, at least until Cha Thrat was safely lost in the
maintenance tunnels of Sector General.
“From your recent emotional radiation,” Prilicla went on, “I suspect that you
had strong if confused feelings of a sexual nature toward friend Murchison that
were not pleasant for your Sommaradvan self. But consider the intensity of
Murchison’s embarrassment if it suspected that you, an entity of a completely
different physiologi-cal classification forced by circumstances to work in close