James White - The Genocidal Healer

It was not a bare-handed attack.

From the number of kitchen implements lying on the tabletop nearby it had snatched up a knife, which it swung at Lioren’s chest. The blade was long and pointed, serrated along one edge and sharp enough to leave a deep scratch in the fabric of Lioren’s heavy-duty space suit. But the creature was a quick learner, because the second blow was a straight-armed jab which might have penetrated if Lioren had not grasped the creature’s wrist in two medial hands and used a third to prise the weapon from its fingers, taking a small, incised wound to one of his own digits in the process, while at the same time holding off its two upper hands, which seemed intent on tearing holes in his face.

The violence of its attack sent Lioren staggering backward into the other room, and he had a glimpse of the diminutive Dracht-Yur diving at the creature’s legs and wrapping its short, furry arms tightly around them. The creature overbalanced and all three of them crashed to the floor.

“What are you waiting for, immobilize it!” Lioren said sharply. Then with a sudden feeling of concern for the being, he said, “As yet I am unfamiliar with your internal physiology, and I trust that the weight of my body against your lower thorax is not causing damage to underlying organs.”

The creature’s response was to struggle even harder against the Earth-human, Orligian, and Tarlan hands holding it down, and only a few of the sounds it was making were translatable. Looking at the obviously confused and terrified being, Lioren spoke silent and highly critical words to himself. This, his first contact with a member of a newly discovered intelligent species, had not been handled well.

“We will not harm you,” Lioren said, trying to sound reassuring in a voice louder than that of the creature and those of the three children in the other room, all of whom were awake and contributing their own untranslatable sounds. “We will not harm your children. Please calm yourself. Our only wish is to help you, all of you, to live out your lives free of war and the disease which is affecting you …”

It must have understood his translated words, because it had grown silent as he was speaking, but its struggle to free itself continued.

“But if we are to find a cure for this disaster,” Lioren went on in a quieter voice, “we will have to isolate and identify the pathogen within your body causing it, and to do this we require specimens of your blood and other body fluids …”

They would also be needed to prepare large quantities of safe anesthetics, tranquilizing gases and synthetic food suited to the species metabolism if the war as well as the disease was to be checked with minimum delay and loss of life. But this did not seem to be the right moment to tell it all of the truth, because its efforts to break free had intensified.

Lioren looked at Dracht-Yur and indicated one of the native’s medial arms where muscle tension and elevated blood pressure had caused one of the veins to distend, making it an ideal site for withdrawing blood samples.

“We will not harm you,” Lioren repeated. “Do not be afraid. And please stop moving your arm.”

But the large, glittering, and multibarreled instrument that the Nidian medic had produced, while absolutely painless in use, was not an object to inspire confidence. If their positions had been reversed, Lioren knew, he would not have believed a single word he was saying.

WITH a few violent exceptions, the subsequent contacts with the planet’s natives, whose name for their world was Cromsag, went more easily. This was because Vespasian’s transmitter had matched frequencies with the Cromsaggar broadcast channels to explain in greater detail who the off-world strangers were, where they had come from, and why they were there. And when the great capital ship landed and began to disgorge and erect prefabricated hospitals and food-distribution centers for the war’s survivors, the verbal reassurances were given form and substance and all hostility against the strangers ceased.

But that did not mean that they became friends.

Lioren was sure that he knew everything about the Cromsag-gar, with the exception of how their minds worked. From recently dead cadavers abandoned in the war zones he had obtained a complete and accurate picture of their physiology and metabolism. This had enabled their injuries to be treated with safe medication and their war to be ended ingloriously under blankets of anesthetic gas. The scout ship Tenelphi had been pressed into service as a fast courier vessel plying between Cromsag and Sector General. It carried specimens requiring more detailed study in one direction and the findings of Head of Pathology Thornnastor, which more often than not agreed with Lioren’s own, in the other.

But the Cromsaggar disease was proving difficult for even Diagnostician Thornnastor to isolate and identify. Living rather than dead specimens were required for study, if possible displaying the symptomology from onset to the preterminal stage of the condition, and Rhabwar, the hospital’s special ambulance ship, was dispatched to obtain them. And even more baffling than the plague, to which the victims invariably succumbed before reaching middle age, was their mental approach to it.

One plague victim had agreed to talk to Lioren about itself, but its words had merely added to the Surgeon-Captain’s confusion. He knew the patient only by its case file number, because the Cromsaggar considered their written and spoken symbol of identity to be the most important of personal possessions, and even though this one was close to termination it would not divulge its name to a stranger. When Lioren asked it why many of the Cromsaggar had attacked off-worlders with any weapon that came to hand, but fought among themselves only with teeth, hands and feet, it said that there was no honor or gain in killing a member of one’s own race unless it was with great effort and extreme personal danger. For the same reason they always stopped short of killing a very sick, severely weakened, or dying adversary.

Taking the life of another intelligent entity, Lioren firmly believed, was the most dishonorable act imaginable. In his position he should respect the beliefs of others, regardless of how strange or shocking they might be to one of his strict Tarlan upbringing, but he could not and would not respect this one.

Changing the subject quickly, he asked, “Why is it that after you fight, the injured are taken away to be cared for while the dead remain untouched where they fall? We know that your people have some knowledge of medicine and healing, so why do you allow the dead to remain unburied, to risk the spread of further pestilence into your already plague-ridden population? Why do you expose yourselves to this totally unnecessary danger?”

The ravages of the disease, which had covered the entire epidermis in patches of livid camouflage, had left the patient very weak, and for a moment Lioren wondered if it was able to reply, or even if it had heard the questions. But suddenly it said, “A decomposing corpse is indeed a fearful risk to the health of those who pass nearby. The danger and the fear are necessary.”

“But why?” Lioren asked again. “What do you gain by deliberately subjecting yourselves to fear and pain and danger?”

“We gain strength,” the Cromsaggar said. “For a time, for a very short time, we feel strong again.”

“In a very short time,” Lioren said with the confidence of a healer backed by all the resources of Federation medical science, “we will make you feel well and strong without the fighting. Surely you would prefer to live on a world free of war and disease?”

From somewhere within its wasted body the patient seemed to gather strength. It said loudly, “Never in the memories of those alive, or in the memories of their ancestors, has there been a time without war and disease. The stories told of such times, when the planetwide ruins of towns and cities were populated by healthy and happy Cromsaggar, are stories told only to comfort small and hungry children, children who soon grow large enough to fight and to disbelieve these stories.