“So that’s what happened to me,” said Hewlitt. Sheer relief that an explanation, no matter how incredible, had been found for his lifetime of apparent hypochondria made him laugh out loud. “Are you telling me that it wasn’t a disease that ailed me, it was a bloody doctor?”
CHAPTER 23
“I was fairly sure that is what happened to you,” Prilicla replied, “when I made the connection between the incident of your childhood teeth and Lonvellin’s scales, which also grew rootlets and refused to come loose. If we now accept that everything you have told us was true, let us fit the facts to our new theory. Consider.
“When you climbed that tree, ate the toxic fruit, and fell into the ravine,” Prilicla said, “you should have died. Probably as the result of trauma associated with a fall from that height, and certainly from the quantity of poison you ingested. Instead, the virus creature’s survival pod was ruptured and it invaded your damaged body. Discovering that you were a suitable host who was terminating, it sustained you while it repaired the physical damage and stimulated the natural detoxification mechanism of your body to neutralize the poison. It was able to do so quickly, I assume, because at the time your body mass was about one-twentieth that of its previous host. How and why this was done we cannot know until we devise a method of communication more precise than empathy.
“My own feeling,” it continued, “is that the virus entity cannot exist for long on its own, that its continued survival depends on it occupying the largest and potentially the most long-lived creature it can find and, by abstracting the necessary data from the genetic cell material, extending both their lifetimes by maintaining the host in optimum physical health. But the creature is not infallible. It did not realize that there are times when a host body should not be maintained without change because some of the changes are normal and healthy. Lonvellin’s problem with the aging scales it could not discard and your teeth that refused to loosen, plus your long history of allergic reactions to all forms of medication, are proof of this.
“But there is also evidence that the virus creature is under the partial control of its host,” said Prilicla, and paused.
For a moment Hewlitt thought that it might be a pause to allow one of the others to comment, but there was no response. He wondered whether the empath was taking time to choose the right words or simply needed to rest its speaking organ.
“For example,” Priicla resumed, “there is the incident with the injured cat. You had a strong, emotional attachment to this entity, so much so that you took it to bed with you in the childish hope of nursing it back to health. So intense was your need to make it well again that the feeling caused the virus creature to invade the kitten, repair the multiple trauma, and restore it overnight to full health before returning to what it must have known was a more long-lived host.
“And many years later,” it continued, “when you became friendly with Patient Morredeth and were affected by the distress it was suffering and would continue to suffer for the rest of its life because of its damaged fur, you made close physical contact with it and the same thing happened.”
“But I wasn’t expecting anything to happen,” Hewlitt protested. “It was accidental-I just pushed my hands against its fur.”
“Even though the injury was not life-threatening,” Prilicla went on, “Morredeth was restored to nominal physical condition, its disfigurement cured as completely and thoroughly as were the injuries to your cat. Unlike the case of your household pet, the virus creature did not return to your body after completing its work. Why not?”
Hewlitt took the question to be rhetorical and remained silent, as did the others.
“It is natural for any organism to evolve,” Prilicla went on, “and for one with intelligence to learn and seek new experience. I feel sure now that Lonvellin’s former personal physician has evolved over the past quarter of a century. Perhaps the change came about as the result of proximity to a nuclear detonation, although normally that would inhibit organic growth, or it could be a normal process of evolution, whatever that may be in a collection of viruses. Either way there is evidence of increasing sensitivity both to empathic direction and reaction to external events. It was only three child-teeth that refused to loosen. Subsequent teeth behaved normally, and many of the later conditions were temporary and did not recur. This caused your symptoms to be attributed, wrongly as we now know, to an overactive imagination. Quite rightly, none of your medics on Earth or in Ward Seven would risk readministering medication that had already produced an allergic reaction. If they had, and your symbiote had learned enough about your metabolism by then to realize that the foreign material was harmless, your response to a second dose might have been normal.