There was a faint trembling in Prilicla’s limbs as it nerved itself for the effort of telling another person that he was wrong.
“Friend Hewlitt has a long history of nonspecific illnesses,” it said, “all of which responded negatively to treatment. For that reason, diagnosis has been uncertain and the strange succession of symptoms displayed was initially and perhaps mistakenly thought to have a purely psychological basis. Our provisional diagnosis is that he suffers from a wide-ranging, hyperallergic reaction to all forms of medication used so far. We are fairly sure that the condition is not life-threatening, except when an attempt is made to administer medication orally, by subcutaneous injection, or by external application and massage into the dermis. It is a clinically confusing picture.”
Stillman shook his head, then pointed at the torpedo. “And is this thing helping to reduce your confusion?”
A faint tremor shook the empath’s body as if someone, perhaps Prilicla itself, was generating unpleasant emotional radiation. Instead of answering the question, it said, “Friend Stillman, I have been feeling your hunger and that of the others since I refused the Tralthans’ offer of hospitality at the house. My reason for doing so is that Rhabwar’s food synthesizer was recently reprogrammed by Chief Dietitian Gurronsevas himself, and we could do a better job of satisfying it on the ship. Would you like to dine with us on board, now?”
“Yes, please,” said Stillman.
“I am also detecting feelings of negation and intense curiosity from one of the team. Friend Fletcher, is there a problem?”
“The problem is this soft-landed vehicle,” the captain replied. “I would like to have a closer look at the actuator mechanism controlling the piston. It seems to be unnecessarily sophisticated for the simple job it had to do, but I prefer to keep the structure intact and undisturbed. For that I need Danalta to extrude the specialized limbs and digits that will enable us to examine and disassemble the actuator from inside. I have no wish to be insubordinate, Doctor, but from me you must be feeling intense curiosity rather than hunger.”
Prilicla gave a low, trilling sound that did not translate before it said, “Very well, the two of you are excused. Friend Murchison, do you wish to join the mutineers?”
The pathologist shook her head. “I can do no more here,” she said. “The coating on the fragments is a synthesized nutrient material suited to the needs of a wide range of warm-blooded oxygenbreathers. There are a number of unidentified organisms present; they may belong to the original contents of the flask or they may be native to Etla, or both. A full analysis isn’t possible with this portable equipment, so it will have to wait until we return to the ship, and after lunch.”
With its iridescent wings catching the sunlight and seeming to reflect every color in the spectrum, Prilicla rose high above the edge of the ravine to disappear in the direction of the ship, leaving Fletcher and Danalta to complete their investigation and the others to return as they had come.
The empath seemed to be in an awful hurry, Hewlitt thought. It was the first time he had seen the Cinrusskin act in a manner verging on the impolite.
“There are times,” Stillman said to Murchison, who was climbing beside him, “when I wish I could fly. Or better still, that I hadn’t allowed myself to become so three-dimensional in my old age.”
Murchison smiled politely but remained silent until they reached the top; then she said, “Surgeon-Captain Stillman, will you answer a question?”
“You sound very formal and serious, ma’am,” the other replied, “which means the question will be the same. I will if I can. “Thank you,” said the pathologist. She took three long, swishing steps through the long grass and went on, Something very strange must have happened here during the rebellion. I know the accounts and dispatches are not secret, but when I tried to brief myself on the subject I discovered that the Monitor Corps would make them available only to accredited historians and scholars, who, it turned out, were in no hurry to publish.
“The reason given,” she went on, “was that the former worlds of the Etlan Empire were being assimilated into the Galactic Federation and it would hamper the process if all the reasons for the rebellion on this world in particular were made available to the merely curious, or worse, to those wishing to abstract the more dramatic incidents to produce shallow and insensitive treatments for the mass-entertainment channels. The natives here, I was told, are still troubled by the war crimes committed against them by their emperor and must not be reminded of them.
“But what exactly were those crimes?” she continued. “Was chemical warfare or biological experimentation on sapient beings among them? It might aid our investigation if we knew. Or are you, too, forbidden to talk?”
Stillman shook his head. “No, ma’am. I can talk to people who will not misuse the information. It will be given on a patient confidentiality basis, because the emperor, and the exclusive families who were the hereditary imperial advisors, were very sick people.
“Have you another question, ma’am?” he added, smiling. “A nice, simple one that will not need a couple of hours and a very nasty slice of history to answer properly?”
Murchison did not reply until they were about to ascend Rhabwar s boarding ramp.
“Yes,” she said. “Do you know if Fudge ever went exploring in Hewlitt’s ravine?”
Captain Fletcher and Dr. Danalta, whose curiosity regarding the object in the ravine was still outweighing their hunger, were listening on their communicators to Stillman giving his long answer to her first question because they, like Hewlitt, had not been present during the single, epic, and only multiple-ship engagement of the war, the climactic battle for Sector General.
“For political reasons,” Stillman was saying as he loosened his kilt’s waistband to relieve the pressure on his recently expanded stomach, “the Monitor Corps does not refer to the Etlan conflict as a war. The idea of a fifty- world empire tucked away in a hitherto unexplored galactic sector opening undeclared hostilies on a totally unprepared Federation was, well, destabilizing to say the least, and had to be played down.
“There has been only one interstellar war,” he continued, “the one between Earth and Orligia, whose cessation brought about the formation of the Galactic Federation. Since then it has been generally accepted that interstellar warfare for economic or territorial gain is logistically and economically impossible. It costs too much and there are too many uninhabited planets just waiting for colonization. If the belligerent culture or its rulers were sufficiently demented to be motivated by hatred alone rather than the expectation of gain, their victim worlds could simply be detonated or otherwise rendered uninhabitable. But a culture does not develop the technology to get into space, much less to mount successful interstellar colonization projects, without learning the basic lessons of civilization, that is the ability to understand, cooperate, and live together in peace. So it was axiomatic that any new species we discovered that had an interstellar-travel capability had to be highly civilized as well as technically advanced.
“Where the Etlan Empire was concerned,” he went on, “the Monitor Corps had to consider the possibility that it was the exception to that rule. But until we were sure, everything possible was done to conceal the locations of the Federation worlds from them while we found out all we could about their culture and at the same time played down the true gravity of the threat. That is why we, as the Federation’s executive and law-enforcement arm, prefer to think of it as a large-scale police action…
“Doctor,” said Naydrad, its fur tufting into spikes of irritation, “with hundreds of armed ships dogfighting all around us and non-nuclear torpedoes blowing chunks out of the hospital’s outer hull, it felt like a war, not a riot! Were you there?”
“Yes,” said Stillman. In the quiet, serious tone of one who is recalling unpleasant memories, he went on, “I was the junior medic on Vespasian when she collided with that Etlan transport, and helped move the casualties into the hospital. When Conway, who was the senior surviving medic by that time, saw that I had escaped with only a few bruises, he told me that they were desperately short of staff and put me to work in an other-species ward somewhere. The hospital’s translation computer had been knocked out and trying to communicate was… Anyway, it might have felt like a war but officially it is recorded as a police operation involving organized and heavily armed lawbreakers.
In the silence that followed, Hewlitt looked from Stillman to Murchison to Prilicla, who were all reacting in characteristic fashion to their memories of a terrible experience they had shared. He felt excluded, but for the first time in his life he was grateful for being an outsider.
Stillman gave an abrupt shake of his head and continued, “The trouble began when one of your ex-patients, a very high-powered entity called Lonvellin, discovered what it called Etla the Sick Planet…
