A Study in Starlight—Chapter Twenty-eight
Continuing this serialised novel, in which Holmes and Watson find themselves very far indeed from Victorian/Edwardian London
Watson
“Course I hafta go. It’s brave of John to offer, but it hasta be one of the Tri.”
I looked at her. I hardly needed to think; I knew she was right. Her speech at the settlement had been acclaimed by almost everyone; she’d laid out the arguments any ‘ambassador’ would need to deploy. There was nothing for me to say except, “Then we’re both going.”
“You sure? Doctor’s harder to replace’n head of Ops. Eri can step into my shoes, and Aurel can do her job.”
“I’m sure.” I smiled. “Rocksure.”
“What does Dahab say?”
“I haven’t told her yet.”
#
I could see that Dahab Merhawi was dismayed, but, being the woman she was, she merely took a moment to compose herself and then said, “I see.”
Her quiet acquiescence made me doubt my resolve more than any amount of protest or argument would have. At once I felt I had to explain myself. “I think I have to, Dahab. Mary’s taking a huge weight on her shoulders. You know what’s at stake.” The whole future of our world.
“I understand,” said she; still, there was a ‘but’ in her tone; and I knew well enough what it implied: but what about your patients?
I could not ignore that. I was a doctor; I’d taken medical oaths twice, three and a half centuries apart. But I’d taken another kind of oath twice, too; one might be called ‘marriage vows’ and the other ‘partnership pledges’, but they stood equal in my mind.
Some people might have tried to weigh the greatest good of the greatest number, but I had already dismissed that. Some people on Trevallan might suffer, in the short term, if the number of qualified practitioners available were halved. It was even possible that someone might die; and if that did happen I knew it would haunt me for the rest of my days. But it was equally true that the prosperity, well-being and happiness of everyone, in the longer term, would be very much affected by the results of Mary’s mission to Earth; and all of those things were well-known to have impacts on health. How was I supposed to weigh a short-term deficit in curative treatment against long-term prevention? Impossible. There were too many unknowns, too many factors which resisted easy quantification. Even the QuasI would—probably—be foxed.
Hadn’t this, I wondered, always been the fundamental problem with utilitarianism? The idea was entirely sound in principle, but, even at the scale of our tiny ‘nation’, how could you ever have certainty about what truly constituted the greatest good for the greatest number? Two people, both with the very best of intentions, could still reach entirely different conclusions. That was, in fact, exactly what was happening with Dahab and me.
It grieved me deeply to be at odds with Dahab. After Mary, she was the person who had done most to give me a place in this time, in this community. She had never grudged the time and energy, in an already busy life, to further my retraining.
I knew that if I voiced any of this to Mary she would unhesitatingly tell me to stay; so I kept it from her. I didn’t like having secrets; indeed it felt a little like an offence against my partnership pledge; but it also felt like the lesser of the two evils. (Bringing us back to ‘greatest good’, on a much smaller scale).
Perhaps the question boiled down to: if the two were truly in conflict, which oath had precedence? Medical or partnership?
But I had no answer to that either, or nothing better than what my heart (or my intuition) told me.
I could not burden Mary, and my failure to see eye to eye with Dahab was the root of the problem, so I took the question to the next most likely person I could think of.
“Of course you want to support Mary,” said Robin with barely a second’s thought. “And I’m sure it’s the right thing for everyone in the long term.” Clearly ve had fewer scruples than I about picking a solution to the utilitarian conundrum.
“I dare say you’re right; but it still feels perilously close to shirking my responsibility as a doctor. My sworn responsibility.”
“Didya ne’er have a holiday afore?” asked Aurel.
“Yes, but I was always available for emergencies.”
“Was your medical oath any less rigorous in the nineteenth century?” asked Robin.
“Not materially.”
“I know for a fact you took time away from your practice on a number of occasions.” Ve smiled; I’d said more than once, as a somewhat barbed jest, that ve probably knew my first life better than I did.
“But I always arranged a locum, or for a neighbouring practitioner to cover.”
“Though your absence in The Final Problem was longer than planned or provided for.… But anyway, let’s see what we can do to give you some cover. I know I’ve heard you say Gabrem could handle three-quarters of what you do day-to-day.” Gabrem was our clinic nurse, and an excellent one; far more competent in almost every respect than I had been eight, perhaps even four, years ago. “And how much of what Gabrem does could I do, with a bit of guidance?”
Less than half, I thought; but maybe not too much less. However… “You already have a job, Robin.”
Ve shrugged. “It’s a lot less interesting than it used to be, when we were still compiling people—and less time-consuming. And you know police work really doesn’t take up much of my time.”
“I have field medic trainin,” said Aurel. “If I can follow a QuasI’s instructions to set a broken arm on a ship, I can do it in your clinic.”
“But you’re taking Mary’s place at Ops.”
Ve shrugged. “Not twenty-four/seven. And I can think of a coupla others…”
I looked at the two of them. “I’m more grateful than I can say. We’ll have to talk to Dahab, of course—and Gabrem—but you’ve considerably relieved my conscience.”
I squeezed Aurel’s hand, then Robin’s.
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