Intern

by Temple Cloud

Sector General prides itself on being an anti-racist employer. But there are limits...

I suppose I don't have much to complain about. During my internship at Sector General, I found the best friends I have ever known: friends who have adopted me into their family, and helped me to find a whole new direction in life.

Nonetheless, I am disappointed – and angry. Disappointed, because exotic life-forms are my passion, and I would have loved to have more opportunity to study the many species represented there. Angry, because of the hospital's attitude to me. In my brief time working there, I healed two patients who had been written off as incurable, one of whom was close to death. People used words like 'miracle' – until they found out who had produced the miracle cure in question. After that, they not only didn't wouldn't to stay, but, after a patient's grateful family invited me to join them, the hospital authorities didn't trust me enough to want to allow us to leave, either. Frankly, I can only attribute their attitude to racism.

As far as the average Federation citizen is concerned – be you oxygen-breathing Earth-human, chlorine-breathing Illensan, water-breathing Chalder or methane-breathing Vosan – I am the enemy, the monster you were born to fight. My kind, you have all been warned, are invisible hunters, visible only by the damage we inflict, immune alike to holy symbols, silver bullets, or antibiotics. And if, unlike the creatures resembling me that you met on your home planets, I am intelligent, that only makes me all the more terrifying.

There is some truth in this. My distant ancestors were indeed ruthless predators, so thoughtless that sometimes they wiped out the very animals they fed on – which was why only those who were flexible enough to learn to eat different prey survived. But then, how many people's ancestors were much better? Even Tralthans didn't start out as pure vegetarians – and if it comes to that, I imagine that many sapient vegetables, when they first come to work at Sector General, have nightmares about whether a passing vegetarian Tralthan or Kelgian might want to eat them.

In my view, my race were different only in that they learned to cultivate instead of hunting simply as a result of evolutionary pressures, before they evolved intelligence. But again, you have double standards. The fact that you evolved is a sign of progress. The fact that I did makes me a mutated horror – and the fact that I can change my form at will, to adapt to different environments, is still worse. Of course, your Dr Danalta is also a shapeshifter – but Danalta is big enough for you to see, and therefore Danalta is someone you can recognise as a person and a colleague, rather than as a disease.

It was the same when I first visited Sector General, years before, after a disagreement with the patient I then served as a personal physician. He was unsatisfied with the treatment I had been giving him, and intended to dismiss me for failing to keep him in perfect health. I sincerely hoped that he would not – and not only because I would be sorry to lose my job and, since I was his live-in medical attendant, my home. Mainly, I was distraught at the thought of losing the only friend I had ever had.

As far as I know, I am the first of my kind to evolve intelligence. I suppose I am a kind of gestalt, though I have only very hazy memories of who the different parts of me were. When we encountered another being like ourselves, if it was hostile and threatened to harm the beasts we tended, we fought it to the death. But if it was another one that could help protect the beasts, we combined with it. But, every time 'I' and 'you' became 'we', that 'we' soon became an 'I' again – just an 'I' with more knowledge and experience. So I still didn't have a friend – someone who was separate from myself, but an intelligent person whose company I enjoyed, instead of a farm animal – until he came along.

(Yes, I know that you at Sector General consider it good practice to refer to any alien as 'it', so as to preserve clinical distance. As a personal physician whose method depends on forming an intimate relationship with a patient, my code of practice is different from yours.)

He was an alien, visiting my planet, and at first I encountered him only because my riding-animal happened to bite him. Looking back now, I'd say that it was only common decency to heal the bite, and just good manners to do some repairs to his digestive and circulatory system. But I didn't think in those terms at the time. Logically, it was also in my interests to ally myself with a powerful, long-lived being, but I wasn't really thinking about that, either. What happened, frankly, was that I fell in love.

I don't mean sexually, of course. Until recently, I didn't even understand what sex was, nor budding, spores, or any of the other means by which creatures reproduce themselves. This has led to misunderstandings since then, but with this entity, it wasn't a problem, as he had taken a vow of childlessness many hundreds of the orbit of his planet before I met him.

I was physically attracted to him, certainly. I wanted his body, wanted to explore every cell of it, and to cherish that body forever, to fine-tune every blood vessel, to keep his tentacles firm and the teeth in all his mouths strong and sharp. But what I fell in love with was his mind. He was the most intelligent, compassionate, interesting person I had ever met. Admittedly, at that point he was also the only person I had ever met, but I haven't changed my estimation of him since then.

He was also the first host – and until recently, the only one – who noticed me. Most of the hosts I had had before him were animals with very low intelligence, so had no reason to notice that, with me as a symbiote, they recovered from injuries surprisingly fast. If I didn't cause them direct discomfort, they paid no attention to me.

But this host realised quickly that something had invaded his body. We couldn't actually talk to each other, since neither of us was telepathic. But I could sense his anxiety, then curiosity, and then, after he had carried out a few tests and established that my presence was beneficent, friendliness and welcome. He had been lonely, and grieving – I couldn't access his memories in much detail, but I gathered he had had a companion before, who had died. And I had never had a friend before, and now we could be together for the rest of our lives – which, with me maintaining my host in prime condition, I intended to make a very, very long time indeed.

We had our misunderstandings, yes. I could sense his frustration when I couldn't keep his body in perfect condition. But I had no way of communicating to him: 'Hey, I'm trying to keep your scales from falling off!' And, since the rejuvenation treatments he had used before had left him with memory damage, even the limited access to his memories that I had would not have told me that moulting scales was normal for his species. But I could sense that he wanted to get rid of me, and that was what led to my having to knock him unconscious in self-defence, which led to the officers who discovered us assuming that he must have murdered me. After all, he had mentioned in his journal that he had eaten me, and I wasn't in a position to explain that this was with my consent.

I didn't know all this at the time. I can sense people's emotions only when I'm inside them, so I had no idea why strange creatures were trying to restrain my patient. I didn't know that there were healers who worked from outside the body, not from inside like me, so I didn't know that the chemical that was being introduced to my friend's body – our body, as I had come to think of it – was meant to cure his skin problem. All I knew was that some kind of poison was being introduced, and I had to let my patient regain semi-consciousness, at least long enough to fight his attackers off before they injected any more, while I analysed the poison and prepared an antidote. Normally, I would have preferred to stop his hearts while I neutralised the poison, to stop it spreading, but he was too weak already, and under attack from predators unlike anything I had encountered before. I couldn't afford to take the risk.

He wasn't conscious enough to know where he was. I could feel his speaking-mouth pulsing to emit the air vibrations that large non-telepaths use to communicate with each other. I couldn't hear the air vibrations, but I could feel his mind screaming, and my own, both shouting: 'Help me! Help me!' But we were saying it to each other, not to the strangers.

The attacks grew worse. Instead of injecting any more of the toxin, the attackers tried to tear off my patient's skin, and it was all I could do to hang onto it. Then, worst of all, they tried to stab him. I couldn't even waste my resources on the loose scales any longer. I had to concentrate all of myself on the place where the main attack was, forming a bony plaque that nothing would be able to get through.

And then, something cut me out. The lump of flesh that I was attached to was carved away, and my patient was left there, sick and wounded and beset by enemies, and I wasn't there to protect him. It wasn't the first time I'd lost a host – try as I might to keep my hosts healthy enough to outrun any danger, I had passed from prey to predator every time one of my hosts got eaten, and it had always been fun to explore a new body. But this was a person, this was someone I loved, and I was so terrified for him that I didn't even think to be afraid of what might happen to me. It wasn't until later on, after everything had calmed down, that it occurred to me that I could have thought, resentfully, 'Well, you wanted to get rid of me, didn't you? Now you've got your wish, and it serves you right!' As it was, I was just desperate to get back to him, and furious with myself for being stupid enough to be tricked. I wanted to plead, 'Take me back! Whatever I did that was wrong, I'm sorry! I promise I won't leave you, ever again!'

I had never had real friends before I met this patient, but it had never occurred to me to feel lonely, either, because I didn't know what loneliness was. Now, I did.

Well, as you'll know if you've read Sector General history – and as I found out in due course – we didn't really have any need to worry. My patient's scale shedding was natural, his problems were only because of my attempts to hang onto the scales, and he recovered quickly enough while I was temporarily removed. All the same, once he re-ingested me, I was glad to be able to repair the scarring from the wound where I'd been cut away. The staff at Sector General had patched it up as cleanly as possible, but macro medics just don't have the finesse to handle something like that.

Unless you are a part of a gestalt, it's hard to explain how we felt at being reunited. Let's just say it was like being with your life-mate and grooming each other's fur (or wrapping your limbs around each other, if you are a species with not much fur), except that I was cuddling and being cuddled from the inside. Without words, we promised each other that we loved each other, that we were glad to be back together, that we were sorry for our mistakes, that we forgave each other, and that we were together for life.

Neither of us could know how short a time that would be.

Then, of course, the war came. I didn't know what the danger was, but I knew we were in danger. My host punctured his own skin, and for once I didn't try to stop him or to heal the wound, because I could feel him urging me to pour myself out, NOW. It wasn't remotely like when he had considered getting rid of me before. I could feel how much he loved me, and how frightened for me he was, and how much he hoped that I might survive. He was like a parent putting its child into the one available escape pod.

I wanted to refuse, because I could feel how frightened he was for himself, knowing that he was going to die, and how sad he was that so much good work that he could have done would now be left undone. I wanted to stay and heal him of whatever damage he was about to suffer, if I possibly could.

If there had been any chance that I could have helped, I'm sure he'd have let me face the danger with him. But I had no idea what we were facing. The only kind of host-death I had experienced before was when my hosts were eaten and I infected the predator. It had been easy enough, when none of my hosts had been people I cared about, but this time I wouldn't have wanted to spend the rest of my life maintaining the health of the person who had murdered my best friend. And I didn't know that nobody wanted to eat him, only to kill him, and that it would be far beyond my powers to save him when he had been incinerated by a direct hit from a nuclear missile.

In the lonely time after that, sometimes I wished I could have died with my friend. Maybe I should explain here that I'm not a pure virus. I do have a body of my own, made up of amoeboid cells, so I wasn't just left in suspended animation when I left my host's body. There was food in the escape pod, enough to last me a hundred orbits. I had sensed hope – hope for me, not for himself – in my friend's last message, so I guessed that he must have set the pod to open when the food ran out, and after that, I would be able to climb out and look for a new host. But I knew I would never find anyone like my friend again, and in the meantime, until it was time for me to emerge, there was nothing to do except wait and think, and grieve.

(Everyone assumed that I changed because I was affected by nuclear radiation. Perhaps I was. But I think that being bored and lonely all those orbits, with no-one to look after, changed me a lot more.)

I wasn't trapped for as long as I expected. My container was broken by something crashing into it – no, not something, I realised, but someone. Another being, smaller than my old host, deeply unconscious and giving out the life-signs of a being who was close to death. I climbed inside through a cut where the broken shards of my pod had slashed its skin, and investigated. It had been poisoned, and suffered traumatic injuries. I only later understood the story behind this: that it – no, he, as I had learned to think of him by then – had climbed a tree and eaten poisonous fruit, become violently ill as a result of the poisoning, and fallen out of the tree. At the time, I just set about neutralising the poison, and then investigated the anatomy as I set about healing it.

It was a strange creature, unlike any I had been in before – though apparently it was typical of the commonest species of aliens living on the planet, and quite similar in physiology to the dominant native species. It had a soft outer skin, but an internal framework of linked bones, some protecting the brain and the bundle of neurons leading to the brain, some offering limited protection to the heart and lungs (though not the gut), and some projecting into four bony, limbs, upon which the creature apparently walked, not being equipped with a foot-muscle for gliding on, as my previous host had been. Or rather – as I realised when it regained consciousness – it preferred to balance on the rear two limbs, so as to leave the upper ones, which were equipped with long, jointed bony digits, free to use like tentacles for grasping objects.

When it landed, it had hit the bony plates surrounding the brain, not hard enough to break them, but hard enough to jar the brain and knock it unconscious. So as not to alarm my new patient, I decided to keep it unconscious until I had finished healing its injuries, while ensuring that it was breathing healthily. As it – he – regained consciousness, I began to learn more about him. He was a young child, and wasn't supposed to wander away from his parents. I didn't know what parents were – my old host hadn't been in contact with any member of his own species for hundreds of orbits, and none of the animals I had lived in before had much familial instinct – but I gathered that he normally lived with beings who protected him, and that his affection for them was something like the relationship between host and symbiote. He felt lonely without them – which I could certainly identify with. On the other hand, he remembered how he had been feeling bored and frustrated with having to stay indoors where he'd be safe, and how exciting it had been to get outside and explore. After being trapped in my protective pod, and then getting out and having the chance to explore him, I could identify with that, too. Perhaps he would be a friend, I thought – different from my former friend, but still a friend.

It didn't work out quite like that. For one thing, he wasn't aware of my presence. For another, he already had companions. There were his two parents, but his favourite companion was a member of a different species, a furry creature who, like himself, was young and playful and too reckless for its own good. The first time specks of tissue from the creature's fur flew up his nose, I was alarmed and stopped his breathing for a moment while I analysed the tissue to see whether it was dangerous. I sensed my host's fear at having his breathing stopped – and also his surprise and annoyance, as his companion's fur had never done anything like this before. I quickly ascertained that the flecks of matter didn't constitute a risk, so after this, I never interfered in their interaction again.

It was shortly after this that his companion, in turn, became seriously injured while playing outside, and was close to death. I didn't know much about what this organism was, other than that it had fur and sharp claws, but I could feel my host's grief and anger at the thought of his friend's death. I wondered whether, even if I couldn't make him notice me by protecting his own health, I might be able to do so by healing someone he cared about. So, as he cradled his injured companion in his arms, I crawled out through the pores in his hands and into his companion's body.

It turned out to be a creature very similar to himself – not just in molecular structure, suggesting that they had evolved on the same planet and were vulnerable to the same pathogens, but in anatomy, suggesting that they begun by evolving along the same branch of the evolutionary tree. Like him, it was warm-blooded and bilateral, with two pairs of limbs, and a head at one end containing the brain, sensory organs, and orifices for eating and breathing, with a tube leading down to orifices for expelling waste food and water at the far end of the body, along with other organs whose purpose I had not identified. In the companion's case, these organs were rather different in shape (probably because this was a female) and bore cleanly healed scars suggesting that they had been mutilated by a surgeon rather than by a predator or some accidental injury. The only other noteworthy differences were that it was smaller, walked on all four limbs (which was probably what my host's ancestors had done), was covered in fur all over, was adapted for a carnivorous rather than an omnivorous diet, and had the line of bone rings down its back protruding beyond the hind legs into a mobile body part which it could swish about. Possibly its distant ancestors had been aquatic and used this limb for swimming, and, when they evolved into land animals, had either lost it (like my young host) or learned to use it for other purposes, such as displaying emotion or deterring parasites.

At the moment, this tail, along with most of the rest of the creature, was badly crushed and unable to move. It was in great pain, and frightened at being helpless, even though it was not intelligent enough to be able to think, 'I am going to die.' I healed its fresh and life-threatening injuries, and, while I was there, rewrote its genetic code to edit out a few genes which would have fated it to die within the next fifteen orbits. I wondered what to do about the mutilated unidentified organs. As they did not appear to be important to the creature's survival, I did not attempt to restore them, but merely smoothed out the scar tissue for aesthetic reasons.

When I had finished, I returned to my host, wondering why he was so attached to his furry companion. It was more amiable than most of the animals on my home planet, but still thoroughly self-absorbed, and didn't have anything like the emotional commitment to my host that he did to it. I felt rather jealous that he could love it, and yet have no feelings for me other than annoyance and confusion when I had to stop his body functioning while I analysed an unknown substance that had been introduced to it. Admittedly, most of these substances turned out to be harmless in small doses, but I wished he could at least see that I had his best interests at heart, and be grateful. Still, he was only a child, I told myself. Maybe things would change when he grew up.

They didn't – or at least, they didn't improve. Admittedly, he had rather a tragic life, for a juvenile of a social species. First, his parents died in an accident. I wish I had had the chance to crawl out of him for long enough to heal them, but I was too busy healing my host's own injuries, and by the time I had finished, it was too late for me to reach his parents – and besides, he wasn't in physical contact with them, which would have made my journey much harder. Next, he had to move to his ancestors' home planet, and was separated from his furry companion (who was much more attached to the house where they lived than to him). I wanted to be able to tell him that I understood about grief and loneliness, but that moving to a new world was fun, and that at least we still had each other for company. But he didn't even know I existed.

As he neared adulthood, he began to change. I wondered whether his body would metamorphose and whether he would need to pupate. Instead, he remained the same physiological type, but his glands began producing a different set of hormones. Some of these I could see were for growth, but others began promoting strange behaviour – such as the urge to emit body tissue. Admittedly, the cells he had the urge to get rid of were defective, in that they were the result of a botched splitting process and contained only half the DNA that would be found in a normal cell. But there was no reason why they could not simply be broken down and the matter that comprised them re-absorbed into the body.

After some consideration, I concluded that his urge to expel them must have a psychological origin, as it was a behaviour that mostly occurred when he was in contact with females of his species. I wondered whether the memory of transmitting me into his pet – who had also been a female – had convinced him that emitting something into females was a good idea. Somehow, it had escaped him that his friends were not ill and did not need healing, and that his own body cells were not intelligent and would not be able to find their way back into him.

When he tried to expel his body tissue into the body of a female friend, I physically restrained him from doing so. Unavoidably, this caused him some physical discomfort, and great frustration and embarrassment. I felt sorry at having to distress him, but it was my duty to protect him, not to make him happy. Not being a psychiatrist, I had no way of curing him of his psychosis, but after a while he learned to manage the problem by avoiding the company of females – and, soon, by avoiding having much social contact with anyone. But he was unhappy, and I wished I didn't have to put him in this situation just to protect him from himself.

Of course, I could have solved the problem simply by excising the organs that produced the cells that he suffered from a compulsion to get rid of, after which he should have been able to live a normal life. Presumably, this was what had been done to his pet, for the same reason. But I didn't want to risk damaging any body part until I found out what its purpose was.

As he grew more and more discontented with his life – with his loneliness, and with my interventions to protect his health – he became convinced that there was something wrong with him. And so, like my previous host, he came to Sector General.

To be honest, I was becoming tired of him, too. I wanted to be loyal, but I had been putting up with his constant ingratitude for thirty orbits, and I was starting to wonder whether he was right to think that he didn't really need me. After all, the many times I had treated him for cases of possible poisoning had all turned out to be false alarms, and he was otherwise thoroughly healthy. I longed for the chance to meet an alien from a different world, preferably one who was injured and in need of my help.

Not surprisingly, in a multi-species hospital, I soon had my wish granted. One of my host's fellow patients was suffering from an injury which left her unable to communicate her feelings – which would leave her doomed to be a recluse for the rest of her days. My first host had chosen to leave his home planet because he was bored with the company of his own species, and my second had chosen to be solitary because of his sexual problems, but this one would have isolation forced on her, simply because no-one would trust people whose feelings were not clearly shown in their fur. So, when my host touched what remained of her fur, I flowed into her and set about repairing the damage. This time, I decided not to return when my work was done. My host didn't want me back, and by now I had learned my lesson about outstaying my welcome. I didn't want to stay in my new patient for longer than I was needed, but I could wait there until the next life-form came along.

The next life-form was presumably a member of staff, as he didn't have any obvious physical injuries apart from some old scars, which I repaired. Unfortunately, there wasn't much I could do about the oppressive feelings of guilt and shame in his mind. I liked him, and wouldn't have minded spending more time with them if there had been anything I could do to help. But I could also sense, more sharply than his own emotional troubles, his anxiety about a dying patient. I decided to monitor his feelings, on the assumption that they would be strongest when he was actually visiting this patient. Then, I crossed.

This patient was a radiation-eater – and frankly, I was very lucky that he was ill enough to be neither too hot nor too cold for my last host to lay a hand on him. As soon as I got inside, I had to reconfigure myself to adapt to this very different metabolism from all the oxygen-breathers I had lived in before, before I could even begin healing what was wrong with my patient. While I was still adapting myself, I heard him ask me, 'Who are you?'

Never before had anyone spoken to me directly. Well, 'spoken' is the wrong word – being a Telfi, Cherxic is a telepath, even though he could use spoken language to communicate with outsiders like Padre Lioren, the being from whom I had just crossed. But, now that I had reconfigured myself, I had become a telepath as well, and could communicate mind-to-mind with Cherxic – at least while I was in physical contact with him.

Not that I could answer his question, exactly. I had never had a name. My first real friend had only ever thought of me as 'my physician', and nobody before or after him had even been aware of me as a person.

'So you've been lonely nearly all your life,' said Cherxic, as he became aware of my thoughts. It was gradual, then, as I was only just becoming telepathic. Now, it's more like an instant awareness of everything in each other's minds, just as Telfi can have with each other. At the start, it was more like a partial exchange of information – like the spoken conversations that Cherxic could have with a non-telepath such as Lioren, or such as most non-telepaths have with each other, or like – as I now understand – my first host's diary that confused the staff at Sector General into believing that he had murdered me.

But as I was becoming more telepathic, Cherxic was making me aware of his life: how he had been born as part of a gestalt of creatures who are constantly touching each other, constantly in telepathic contact, and how now he was ill and unable to absorb radiation, so that he felt cold and hungry inside as warmth remained on his skin and light bounced off him, and how he had had to cut himself off from his family to protect them from sharing his pain, so that he had no choice but to die alone.

'You have now,' I said – and Cherxic, of course, knew exactly what I meant. I was already setting him to rights, and I could feel the warmth – which would have been lethally hot if I hadn't been able to reconfigure myself to it – as he began to absorb radiation once more.

So then, we made plans. For now, I was going to live with Cherxic and his family. I would like them, he assured me. I knew I would. I'd encountered them all in Cherxic's memory, after all.

But the long-term plan was even more exciting. For now, most beings can only live on a planet as long as the star it orbits is stable. But stars don't know how to burn slowly and conserve their fuel, so sooner or later they either explode into supernovas, or swell to become red giants and then shed their outer layer. So the inhabitants of neighbouring planets, unless they are advanced enough to have interstellar travel, just die.

With me to tend a star properly, we could stop that happening.

Cherxic and I couldn't be sure whether I could do anything to affect a star, or whether I could survive even trying. I'd survived being close to a nuclear explosion, yes, but that wasn't the same as actually living in a nuclear reactor. So I experimented with going into the hospital's nuclear reactor and fiddling around with it, which didn't exactly make us popular. But at least we knew the principle was sound, and in the meantime, it was time for Cherxic's family to collect us both. I passed between each of them in turn. It was easy to recognise their minds from Cherxic's memory of each one. Telepaths don't have any illusions about each other.

Of course, getting away wasn't as simple as I'd expected. The hospital thought I was lying about what I planned to do – as if I could lie to a telepath, or lie to anyone when I was communicating by telepathy! I had been back into Padre Lioren and the patient who had brought me to Sector General, an Earth-human whose name, I now found out, was Hewlitt. I had wanted to do this mainly to say goodbye to them, but also to explain what I was planning to do next. Hewlitt passed on my message that I wanted to populate the stars (I knew this because Cherxic, whose body I was inhabiting, could hear the conversation).

But for some reason, the people in charge didn't believe that I meant what I said. They were convinced that I had left parts of myself behind in Hewlitt and Lioren, and in Morredeth, the Kelgian woman I had treated earlier, and in Hewlitt's cat, Fudge. They thought I wanted to turn myself into a plague that could infect every person on every planet in the galaxy. They wanted to quarantine everyone who had ever been in contact with me, to stop me spreading.

I wouldn't have understood what they were talking about before, but now I was coming to understand. After all, I had been in the members of Cherxic's family, and shared their memories of reproduction. Now I understood why Hewlitt objected to my stopping him having sex, and why Lioren, though he personally (like all Tarlan doctors) had taken vows of celibacy, thought it sad that Morredeth would probably never have the chance to marry. I had seen Lioren's memories of devastating, planet-wide plagues that debilitate even when they don't kill outright, and Hewlitt's childhood memories of his Etlan neighbours, nearly all of whom were scarred or crippled by biological weapons sent against them by their own government.

And now, people thought I was a plague like that, when I had never done anything but tend and heal. Yes, I had made mistakes sometimes, but – and I'm sorry to hurt Lioren's feelings, if he's reading this – all doctors make mistakes, and at least mine had never been fatal or caused more than temporary inconvenience. Most of the best stories are about mistakes that aren't fatal, and having inhabited the mind of a member of the Sector General staff, I've heard most of the hospital lore of the past forty years or so. So, let's just say: first contact with a Drambon roller, supposedly 'rescued' from an 'out-of-control' spaceship, which caused him to suffer a near-fatal circulatory failure? First contact with a metamorphosing Ian, which, if it hadn't been for a quick-thinking Earth-human and an empathic Cinrusskin, would have led to the patient being horrifically maimed in an attempt to cure it? First contact with a Rhiim ship, which initially mistook the crew for parasites and their domestic animals for the crew? We ET doctors all have to rely on a mixture of deduction, intuition and guesswork when encountering a new species for the first time – and for me, as someone who has no mouth or ears and until recently was not a telepath, the only way to investigate was to climb into someone's body and have a good look around.

Under the circumstances, I think I did as good a job as most of the doctors at Sector General. With proper training, I could have done even better. But you don't trust me – because when it comes down to it, you enlightened, civilised medics at Sector General are just as xenophobic as the Etlans who murdered my friend Lonvellin in the first place.

I'll just have to accept the fact. No doctor wants a virus running around a hospital – even an intelligent, well-qualified virus with a reference from Lonvellin.