“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.