Thrat was still trying to blink it out of her eyes.
“Over there,” Tarsedth said. “We can shelter between the FROB and the two ELNTs.
They don’t look as if they are very active resters.”
But Chat Thrat did not feel like lying still and doing nothing but absorb
artificial sunlight. She had too much on her mind, too many questions of the
kind that could not be asked without the risk of giving serious offense, and she
had found in the past that strenuous physical activity rested the
mind—sometimes.
She watched a steep, low-gravity wave roll in and break on the beach. Not all of
the turbulence in the bay was artificial—it varied in proportion to the number,
size, and enthusiasm of the swimmers. The most favored sport, especially among
the heaviest and least streamlined life-forms, was jumping into the bay from one
of the springboards set into the cliff face. The boards, which seemed to her to
be dangerously high until she remembered the reduced gravity, could be reached
through tunnels concealed within the cliff. One board, the highest of them’all,
was solidly braced and without flexibility, probably to avoid the risk of an
overenthu-siastic diver fracturing its cranium on the artificial sky.
“Would you like to swim?” she asked suddenly. “That is, I mean, if DBLFs can.”
“We can, but I won’t,” the Kelgian said, deepening the sandy trench it had
already dug for itself. “It would leave my fur plastered flat and unable to move
for the rest of the day. If another DBLF came by I wouldn’t be able to talk to
it properly. Lie down. Relax.”
Cha Thrat folded her two rear legs and gently collapsed into a horizontal
position, but it must have beenobvious even to her other-species friend that she
was not relaxed.
“Are you worried about something?” Tarsedth asked, its fur rippling and tufting
in concern. “Cresk-Sar? Hred-lichli? Your ward?”
Cha Thrat was silent for a moment, wondering how a Sommaradvan warrior-surgeon
could explain the problem to a member of a species whose cultural background was
completely different, and who might even be a servile. But until she was sure of
Tarsedth’s exact status, she would consider the Kelgian her professional equal,
and speak.
“I do not wish to offend,” she said carefully, “but it seems to me that, in
spite of the wide-ranging knowledge we are expected to acquire, the strange and
varied creatures we care for, and the wonderful devices we use to do it, our
work is repetitious, undignified, without personal responsibility, invariably
performed under direction, and well, servile. We should be doing something more
important with our time, or such a large proportion of it, than conveying body
wastes from the patients to the disposal facility.”
“So that’s what’s bothering you,” Tarsedth said, twisting its conical head in
her direction. “A deep, incised wound to the pride.”
Cha Thrat did not reply, and it went on. “Before I left Kelgia I was a nursing
superintendent responsible for the nursing services on eight wards. Same-species
patients, of course, but at lettst I had come up through nursing. Some of the
other trainees, yourself included, were doctors, so I can imagine how they—and
you—feel. But the servile condition is temporary. It will be relieved when or if
we complete our training to Cresk-Sar’s satisfaction. Try not to worry about it.
You are learning other-speciesmedicine, if you excuse the expression, from the
bottom up.
“Try taking more interest in the other end of the patient,” Tarsedth added,
“instead of concerning yourself with the plumbing all the time. Talk to them and
try to understand how their minds work.”
Cha Thrat wondered how she could explain to the Kelgian, who was a member of
what seemed to be an advanced but utterly disorganized and classless
civilization, that there were things that a warrior-surgeon should and should
not do. Even though the medical fraternity on Sommaradva could not have cared
less what happened to her, in Sector General she had been forced by
circumstances into behavior that was wrong, in both the negative and positive
sense, for someone of her professional status. She was acting above and below
her level of competence, and it worried her.