Siviar can do that and starts negotiating the price.

Mahan heads for the tent and then stops outside. "What's your etiquette for walking in on people when they might be busy?"

"You hit the door, if we have doors. For the tents, you learn which are sleeping places and which are working places. Working places just go in. It will be different when we have buildings."

He pushes back the tent flaps and greets the doctors - they're all wearing the red cross on their clothes, anyway - inside. There isn't much furniture except a makeshift row of cribs holding a bunch of babies.

He talks to them in English for a moment, "----- Mahan -----, ------..."

And then, "Mahan, this is Doctor Christopher, Nurse Camden, and Nurse Emile. Nurse is... Not a doctor yet. Not enough learning. They're glad to meet you."

"I brought notes from a Milliways medical textbook. Had them shielded from knowledge mages before I took them out of Milliways, you're most of the people who have access to them right now." He offers a thick stack of pages of notes to Doctor Christopher.

Christopher takes them and pages through a little bit, noticing that they're all in Hari. He neatens them up and holds them, smiling at Mahan and chattering, sounding kind.

"I'll translate those for him later. They say, uh, they bless you... Which means they think God approves of what you're doing, sort of... And the Order of Mercy doesn't keep secrets that could help people. Do you mind that they don't want to keep things they learn from your notes secret? They also say that the... Not quite human man? An inventor who drinks blood? Gave them a medical book that's in English, do you want a copy?"

"They can do what they want with them, that's why I'm giving them the notes and not just letting them look. I wouldn't say no to a copy but I don't read English and if it's the one I think it is I've read half a Hari translation already."

"Maybe I could translate the rest for you when I knew a few more words. Right now, they want to talk about medicine and death mages, with me to translate. I don't mind. You want to?"

"Sure. Do they need a death mage now or just want to plan for the future?"

"...A few people are sick but we have - small thing killing medicine for them, and hot food and rest. So just planning right now I think."

"Well, I'm not far if you need me. I'm on the imperial payroll so there's a handful of things I do for free, by the way, if I ever charge you for rabies treatment you can complain to the government. I don't know what other planning you need to do."

They want to know all about local diseases and tell him about ones that might have followed along with them. They want to know what other species tend to suffer from, maybe they know something that can help. They want to know if he can kill specific parts of the human body, so that they can target cancerous cells.

"There are a lot more diseases than I can list from memory but the ones the imperial government worries about are rabies, white death, caralendar pox, distemper and this one that has dozens of regional names that I know of as Erasi fever. Besides rabies none of them make humans sick but we can carry a couple others and spread them. Humans here mostly get this one thing that makes your throat hurt but isn't very dangerous, but sometimes something another species has learns to get us too. I haven't had any practice treating cancer and you probably want to go to the mainland for a specialist if you need anything really delicate done to a cancer in an internal organ. What exciting new diseases do you think you've brought?"

They had rabies, they had a vaccine for it too. Do they do vaccines here?

The Flu, maybe. And something that is spread by sex and is painful and unpleasant but rarely deadly.

Could he kill a very very specific part of, say, a brain or a blood vessel or some other organ without surgery? With the help of a knowledge mage, perhaps. Sometimes insane people, or those who have seizures a lot, are a little bit diminished or forget some things but are otherwise fine after a tiny, malfunctioning brain piece is removed. If they can understand and consent, or if they're too far gone, if their families consent to the treatment, that is.

"I don't touch brains, I have one year of medical training and none of it covered doing things to brains. I mean to keep training but there are people who already know more than I do about that kind of thing. We don't have the thing you're talking about, no, but we do get immunity from exposure so it'd probably be useful if you'd like to teach us how you do that. We do have diseases that're similar to your flu and we can get things from sex, they're neither of them all that common but at least they won't be a shock when they start spreading here."

Well, they're hoping to cure their STDs before they start spreading here. It'd be irresponsible to do otherwise. And vaccines are extremely useful. They're going to want to recreate the rabies vaccine they had, and get samples of white death, caralendar pox, and Erasi fever to try and vaccinate against. People were working on one for distemper but it was a low priority before. It's definitely not low priority now, beluli are suffering daily from it, they presume.

"We can have someone make a trip to the mainland for samples, they have them but not here. Distemper's under control but in a way where we have to keep curing it over and over, it'd be nice if people could avoid getting it."

Do any of the other diseases he listed manage to kill people or permanently damage them on a regular basis? Those will be the top priority. Are any of them bacterial? They can manufacture penicillin and other such chemicals. Or just tell structure mages about it.

They'll probably send someone to a local medical school if those exist as soon as they can afford it. They'll probably study and verify what the otherworldly textbooks say and publish any of it that is useful at all, once they have a proper clinic built. (It's third on the list, after the church and the utilities building that are going up.) There's a lot to do. They're going to be able to help so many people, God willing, but carefully and patiently.

"So I'd say more than two-thirds of new cases of those get caught before they're more than a little cough or a bad day. When they don't it's usually because there's no death mage handy, which isn't common anywhere there's more than a couple dozen people, so when they don't get handled fast enough they still don't spread much. The diseases that death mages don't have under control are the ones that aren't infectious, vaccines'll be really great but we need precise, safe insulin dosing and early diabetes diagnosis lot more."

Oh! They know about diabetes, too, it's just that vaccines were on the mind. They hadn't learned to treat it themselves, but the notes he gave them have something about diabetes, they can verify and publish that when they're a little more established. Do they do blind clinical trials with placebos here, to verify that the effect of a drug is real and not people feeling better just because they got a pill?

"We do tests, like getting some people treated and some not, but I've never heard of lying to people about it before! That sounds like the kind of thing I didn't think you guys did!"

They explain the placebo effect! Giving someone a sugar pill and saying it's a pain killer makes them feel less pain. It's very very weird but it's real! They checked lots of times! There are ethical standards of when you do this sort of trial and you pay everyone involved, but it's important that medicine actually do something, forgetting about the placebo effect is how you get Chinese people feeding leaves that do nothing but taste bitter to each other for thousands of years.

"That's good to know, I'll use that if I ever do any studies. Oh, you know what, we shouldn't be assuming we're exactly the same kind of human as each other and the people who wrote these foreign books, it'd be good to check that. With blatant lies. For science."

For science! They could do some basic, common sense checks right now, asking him about the humans he knows and doing a physical examination. Entirely for science, and he is entirely free to refuse, of course.

"I can't tell if you mean that or you're flirting but it is a good idea."

Kenneth freezes.

"Please don't flirt with them? Or me? Right now?" He asks, trying to make it sound like he missed something in the translation, looking slightly terrified. "This place, these people... Is medical. Professional."

"Thanks, couldn't tell, it's hard to read foreigners. Like I said, I agree, it'd be a lot better to notice any differences now than to get called here when someone's sick and have it come up then."