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.
Chapter 3
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.