“But why?” asked Hewlitt. “So far as I can see the creature has done no harm to anyone, the reverse in fact. The hospital is in the business of healing people and so is the virus creature. Why is everybody so worried about it? I wanted to ask O’Mara about that earlier but he didn’t give me the chance. And on Rhabwar they avoided the question.”
Lioren backed into the corridor and waited until Hewlitt had closed the room door behind him before it said, “Regrettably, I must do the same.”
“But why, dammit?” Hewlitt said angrily. “I’m not a patient anymore. You don’t have to keep medical secrets from me.”
“Because we don’t have the answer for you,” Lioren replied. “Your mind will be easier if we do not burden it with the unnecessary weight of our own fears and uncertainties.”
“Personally,” said Hewlitt, “I prefer uneasiness to ignorance.”
“Personally,” said Lioren, “I prefer to expect the worst while hoping for the best, which means that I am never disappointed when a result is less than a total disaster or, as may well be the case here, our concern is unfounded. We must avoid frightening ourselves unnecessarily. And the answer to your earlier question is that there aren’t any.”
“Any what?” said Hewlitt.
“Table manners,” said the Padre. “Nobody will care about your method of ingestion, nor will they mind if you deliberately avoid looking at a table companion to whom you are talking in order to avoid seeing the disgusting messes some of us push into our mouths.
“And now, Patient Hewlitt,” it ended, “we have work to do as well as food to eat.
CHAPTER 26
On Rhabwar he had watched Prilicla weave strands of Earth spaghetti, its favorite non-Cinrusskin dish, into lengths of slim, yellow cable that it had drawn into its tiny mouth while hovering above its platter; and Naydrad, who did not use its hands while eating but buried half of its narrow, conical head in the shredded, oily green stuff it preferred until the bowl was empty; and even the shape-changer, Danalta, who sat on top of or leaned against anything it wished to digest until only the desiccated, inedible remains were left. And earlier he had shared Ward Seven’s dining table with Bowab, Horrantor, and Morredeth. The result, he was pleased to discover, was that he was able to watch the Padre refueling without the slightest trace of abdominal discomfort.
Lioren ate using the fingers of two of its upper, manipulatory appendages, with the tiny hands encased in a pair of silvered, disposable gloves that had arrived, like Hewlitt’s knife and fork, in the utensils pack on its food dispenser tray. The Padre was precise and almost dainty in its movements as the food was lifted to its eating orifice, and the lumps of brown and yellow spongy material being consumed were too strange for Hewlitt to imagine what they might be or to feel repelled by them.
He hoped that the reverse also held true, because his synthesized steak was very good. There was no way of knowing; Lioren had not spoken since they had entered the dining hall.
“We’ve eaten,” said Hewlitt with a glance toward the nearby entrance, where a group of Kelgians intending to dine was dividing around the massive form of a Tralthan who was just leaving, “but so far we haven’t been working. Or did you feel something from somebody that I missed?”
“No,” Lioren replied, and resumed eating.
It sounded irritated and impatient. More than two hundred staff members had walked, slithered, wriggled, or lumbered past their table since they had begun the meal. Like himself, the other might have been beginning to wonder if their ability to detect former virus hosts was mostly imagination or self-delusion.
“Perhaps the feeling, immaterial bond, or whatever it is works only between Tarlans, Earth-humans, and cats who are already well acquainted with each other,” he said, when the silence lengthened, “and we don’t know any of these people well enough for the before-and-after difference to register. Do you think we’re wasting our time here?”
“No,” said Lioren again. It took a moment to clear its plate, then went on, “The staff duty rosters are arranged so that the dining hail will not, in spite of what your eyes and ears are telling you, be overcrowded. But at any given time there is less than five percent of the warm-blooded oxygen-breathing staff using it. The Illensan chlorine-breathers, the Hudiars, the ultra-low-temperature methane life-forms, and the other exotic types have their own arrangements, as also have the patients. You are mistaking an early absence of results for failure.”