James White - The Genocidal Healer

In spite of the numerous bites and digitally inflicted wounds covering the bodies, they were able to identify them as three dead males and one female whose life expectancy would be measured in seconds. Dracht-Yur pointed suddenly to the ground nearby where two separate trails of crushed and blood-spattered grass converged toward the open door of one of the buildings.

The advantage of a longer stride meant that Lioren went through the entrance seconds ahead of the Nidian, and his first sight of the two writhing, bloody bodies locked together in mortal combat on the floor reinforced the anger and disgust he felt at such animal behavior between supposedly intelligent beings. Moving forward, he quickly interposed his medial arms between the tightly pressed bodies and tried to push them apart. Only then did he make the disconcerting discovery that they were not, as he had first thought, two males fighting each other to the death but a male and female indulging in a sexual coupling.

Lioren released them and backed away quickly, but suddenly they broke apart and launched themselves at him just as Dracht-Yur arrived and blundered into his rear legs. The weight of the combined attack toppled him over backward so that he sprawled flat on the floor with the two Cromsaggar on top of him and the Nidian somewhere underneath. Within moments he was fighting for his life.

After the first few days on Cromsag had shown the natives to be too severely weakened by the plague to warrant the use of heavy protective suits, all Corps personnel had taken to wearing their cooler and less restrictive shipboard coveralls, which gave protection only against the sun, rain, and insect bites.

It was with a sense of outrage that Lioren realized that for the first time in his life the hands — not to mention the feet, knees, and teeth — of another person had been raised in anger against him. On Tarla disputes were not settled in this barbaric fashion. And even though the number of his limbs equaled the total of theirs, they did not behave like plague-weakened Cromsaggar. They were inflicting serious damage to his body and causing him more pain than he had ever thought it possible to feel.

As he fended off the more disabling body blows and tried desperately to keep the two Cromsaggar from pulling off his dirigible eye-supports, Lioren was aware of Dracht-Yur wriggling from underneath him and crawling toward the door. He was pleased when his attackers ignored it, because the Nidian’s small, furry limbs had neither the muscle power nor the reach to make a useful contribution to the struggle. A few seconds later he caught a glimpse of the Nidian’s head enclosed by a transparent envelope, heard the expected soft explosion of a bursting sleep-gas bulb, and felt the bodies of his attackers go suddenly limp and collapse on top of him before rolling slowly onto the floor.

For the few moments that the bodies, covered as they were by livid patches of discoloration and the oozing sores characteristic of preterminal plague victims, made heavy and almost intimate contact with him, it was a great relief to remember that one world’s pathogens were ineffective against the members of off-planet species.

Designed as it was for maximum effect on the Cromsaggar metabolism, the anesthetic gas produced similar if less immediate results on other warm-blooded oxygen-breathers. Lioren was unable to move, but he was aware of the Nidian growling and barking urgently into its headset while it applied dressings to the worst of his wounds. Presumably it was telling the pilot of their flier to send for medical assistance, but his own translator pack had been damaged in the struggle and he could not understand a word. This did not worry him unduly, because the intense discomfort of his many injuries had faded to the mildest of irritations and the hard floor beneath him felt like the softest of sleeping pits. But his mind was clear and seemed unwilling to follow his body into sleep.

Interrupting the two Cromsaggar in the sex act had been a serious mistake, but an understandable one because none of his people had witnessed the occurrence of anything like a sexual coupling since arriving on Cromsag, and everyone, himself included, had assumed that the species had become too physically debilitated by the plague to make much of such activity possible. And their reaction, the sheer strength and ferocity of their attack, had surprised and shocked him.

During the very short breeding season on Tarla such activity, especially among the aging who had been lifemates for many years, was a cause for celebration and public display rather than a matter for concealment — although he knew that many species within the Federation, races who were otherwise highly intelligent and philosophically advanced, considered the mating process to be a private matter between the beings concerned.

Naturally, Lioren had no personal experience in this area, since his dedication to the healing arts precluded him indulging in any pleasure which would allow emotional factors to affect the clinical objectivity of his mind. If he had been an ordinary Tarlan male, an artisan or a member of one of the noncelibate professions interrupted in similar circumstances, there would have been a verbal impoliteness, but certainly not violence.

Distressing and distasteful as the incident had been, Lioren’s mind would not rest in its search to find a reason for such an unreasonable reaction, however alien or uncivilized that reason might be. Could it be that, gravely ill and seriously injured as they had been in the fighting outside, they had crawled into the house to seek a moment of mutual pleasure together before dying? He knew that the coupling must have been by mutual agreement, because the Cromsaggar mechanics of reproduction were physiologically too complicated for the attentions of one partner to be forced on another.

That did not rule out the possibility that the coupling was the end result of the fighting, the bestowal of a female’s favor on a warrior victorious in battle. There were many historical precedents for such behavior, although not, thankfully, in the history of Tarla. But that reason was unsatisfactory because both male and female Cromsaggar fought, although not each other.

Lioren made a mental note to prepare a detailed report of the incident for the cultural contact specialists who would ultimately have to produce a solution to the Cromsaggar problem, if any of the species survived and it was invited to join the Federation.

The four separate images of the room, including the one of Dracht-Yur working on the other casualties, that his immobilized eyes were still bringing him dimmed suddenly into blackness, and he remembered a feeling of mild irritation before he fell asleep in midthought.

Dracht-Yur confined him to the sick bay on Vespasian until the worst of his injuries healed, reminding him, as only a hairy, small-minded, and sarcastic dwarf of a Nidian could, that until then the relationship between them was one of doctor and patient and that in the present situation it was the Surgeon-Lieutenant who had the rank.

It could not, however, no matter how often it stressed the advisability of post-trauma rest and mental recuperation, bind Lioren’s jaw closed or keep him from setting up a communication system by his bedside.

Time passed like a pregnant strulmer climbing uphill, and the medical situation on Cromsag worsened until the daily death rate climbed from one hundred to close on one-fifty, and still Tenelphi did not come. Lioren sent a necessarily brief hyper-space radio signal to Sector General, prerecorded and repeated many times so that its words could be reconstructed after fighting their way through the interference of the intervening stars, requesting news. He was not surprised when it was ignored, because the expenditure of power needed for a lengthy progress report would have been wasteful indeed. All that he was telling them was that he and the medical and support personnel on Cromsag were beginning to feel so helpless and angry and impatient that the condition verged on the psychotic, but the hospital probably knew that already.