Ernu said, “Yes, as a matter of fact, they do. Pigs and chickens have to be treated humanely, even when they're slaughtered for food.”
“As are Hronan young,” the Hronan said. “We have no desire to treat anyone inhronanely. As a purely practical matter, the increase in parents’ intelligence happens only when the child is nurtured, and it takes several years to reach the point of diminishing returns. Only then are the surplus children eaten, usually at feasts celebrating one or another aspect of Hronan culture. The children live perfectly comfortable lives right up to the end.”
“An end that comes tragically soon,” Ernu said. “If all of them were nurtured, all could become intelligent, thinking beings.”
“And therein lies my story,” said the Hronan. “When humanity first discovered our world, we had enjoyed a stable population and stable politics for millennia. Much as humanity has enjoyed more recently. Our leaders led us wisely, and the general populace enjoyed their lives. Occasionally someone would get the urge to increase their intelligence beyond the average level and would nurture several children to breeding age, but that was rare enough that it seldom mattered. Higher intelligence allowed them to see the consequences of their actions, and they would stop before things got out of hand.
“But when human explorers reached us, the humans were appalled at what they found. They equated our children to human babies, which apparently develop intelligence whether they breed or not. They wouldn't rest until they had destroyed the system that led to these children's ‘murder,’ as they called it.”
The Hronan paused, whether to allow its words to have their effect or merely to collect its thoughts, I couldn't tell. I looked to my newspad, which showed an image of an ancient survey ship. It was mostly fuel tanks and engines, by the look of it.
“There is no system so stable that a lever can't be found to move it. The humans were a new thing, and everyone paid attention to them. When they said that developing to maximum capacity was everyone's right, my people took them seriously. Especially seeing their great starship in the sky night after night. We had gone to space in generations past, traveling to other planets in our solar system, but none of those worlds were habitable and our leaders had decided the costs were too great to push outward to other stars.
“Yet the humans told us the stars could be ours if we threw off the tyranny of our social compact and nurtured every child to its own independence.”
The Hronan looked out the window at the distant stars. “You can imagine the bloodshed. The leadership tried to reason with the masses, but the masses hadn't the wisdom to understand the truth. All they saw was the inequity. They rose up and slaughtered the leadership in an orgy of violence unparalleled in our entire history.
“Then came starvation. It takes time for intelligence to develop, and we were without it for many years. Plus we were supporting more population with every season. And in times of social upheaval, increased intelligence merely makes for more clever exploitation of others. The first of the new elite swept through the remains of our civilization like a fire, consuming everything in their path, leaving only more destruction in their wake.
“We murdered the humans, of course, but that was too little too late. The revolution brought our entire planet to the brink of disaster. Starvation and illness wiped out half our population. Looting wiped out our cities, our universities, our libraries, our museums. The mortality rate was so high that few people could nurture a child long enough to gain the benefit in intelligence. We nearly lost the ability to write. Religion arose among some of the survivors.” The Hronan snorted. “They of course worshipped the great moving light in the sky.”
“The human starship,” said VanDerWendt.
“Correct. The irony was not lost on the generations to follow. For we did begin to recover, despite the high mortality rate. In a way, that was what saved us. The population dropped so dramatically that competition eventually dropped with it, and diseases died out for lack of hosts. After the rest of our ecosystem recovered, mere animals could once again raise families, and thus become intelligent again. It took many generations for enough knowledge to accumulate to let us begin reconstructing a true civilization, but we did so. Archaeologists sifted the ruins of the past and learned how our society had once flourished for so long. We bred a new dynasty of leaders, and rebuilt our cities.”
We humans had been listening quietly, perhaps afraid to interrupt. I had heard some of this history before, but not with the intensity this Hronan told it. It had happened long before my time, or the time of anyone yet alive.
I said, “An apology may seem insignificant compared to the offense, but as a human, I feel compelled to—”
“I am not finished,” said the Hronan. “For humanity was not finished with us. We recovered sufficiently to reinvent the telescope, and pointed it at the ‘god’ that watched over us. Imagine our chagrin to learn that our watchful deity was a conglomeration of metal habitat modules and fuel tanks.
“It took several more generations to develop the technology to reach it. Those who did gained entry and found it partially functional. The communication system, in particular, allowed them to contact the spacecraft's homeworld.”
My newspad flickered at the corner of my eye. I glanced down to see a large moon in orbit around a gas giant. The characteristic white clouds of a habitable world graced the moon's day side.
“This was before the invention of hyperdrive,” the Hronan said, waving a four-fingered hand at the dining hall around us, and by implication the ship beyond. I noticed that there were no other conversations now. Everyone was listening to the Hronan's story. “Their signal took years to travel to a place called Sagan. It was years before we received a response. And it was years after that before another human delegation arrived. But that arrival was inevitable. It would eventually have happened even if my people had not summoned them. Humanity was expanding outward. The first wave had passed, but there would have been more behind them.
“We had only the dimmest of memories of the first human contact. It had been too brief, and the revolution too soon after for much to have survived in the archeological record. So we accepted the human envoys with open arms, and held a great feast in their honor.”
“Oh, no,” said VanDerWendt.
“Indeed,” said the Hronan. “You grasp the essence of it. We, of course, did not. Not even when the humans told us that our system was immoral. It was a new system, barely three hundred years old. We thought perhaps our archaeologists had uncovered an older stratum by mistake, and we had adopted an ancient form of barbarism without fully understanding it. Our leaders knew, of course, but they were few, and the humans told us they were wrong.
“And now we had two starships in our sky, while we could barely reach orbit. Humanity clearly had the better system. They were wildly successful. They had to be right.
“So we accepted their words as truth. We overthrew our government and began nurturing all our children to adulthood. And in short order, we—”
“I get the picture,” Ernu said. Her skin was pale. Her breakfast lay uneaten on her plate.
“You do not,” said the Hronan. “You apprehend a small portion of the picture. The bottom stratum, for that was millennia ago. Humanity has contacted us seven times since then. And each time, the humans have been appalled by our biology.”
“I would think—” I began, then stopped myself. “I mean no offense. You know your people. I am simply trying to understand. But I would think you would eventually see that following human mores led to disaster.”
“The wise ones among us saw that, of course. The lesser ones, the ones who spent most of their time watching entertainments devised to keep them content, could not. They only heard that they were denied what was rightfully theirs. And so they revolted, again and again and again.”
I touched the stud on the bottom of my empty juice glass and waited for it to refill halfway, then downed it in two gulps. “Again,” I said, “I wish to apo
logize.”
“Accepted, with thanks,” the Hronan said. “Perhaps your homeworld will be spared. But the Sol system, the ancestral home of humanity, shall not be so lucky.”
“What have you done?” VanDerWendt said, scooting back from the table and standing behind the Hronan to prevent it from rising. “Security!”
The Hronan looked askance at him. “I have done nothing.”
“He's probably planted a bomb on board. Hyperdrives use a lot of energy; if he breaches an antimatter pod while we're docked, the explosion could destroy a planet's biosphere.”
The Hronan made a repetitive clicking sound. I thought it might be laughter. “Bombs? After what humanity did to us? I think not. We've bred far wiser leaders than that. I am merely here to observe the damage that's already been done.”
“The revolution,” Ernu said. “You caused the revolution.”
“Nonsense, of course,” the Hronan said. “The people of Sol system are overtaxed. Their leaders spend too much on education. Most of your major planetary governments allow abortion as a family planning practice. All this must change. I hear people shouting it from as far away as my homeworld. The revolution was inevitable. As is its outcome.”
The Hronan clicked again. Tk-tk-tk. “Humanity's home system is already dead. I merely come to observe the carrion feed on the corpse.”
It stood effortlessly, forcing VanDerWendt backward and nearly pushing him over. It steadied him with a sure hand on his shoulder, then said, “I shall be in my stateroom if you wish to muster a phalanx of villagers with pitchforks.” Then it walked out of the dining hall, leaving stunned silence in its wake.
VanDerWendt sat back down. He and I and Ernu exchanged glances. For perhaps the first time in my life, I had nothing appropriate to say. Could the Hronan be right? Humanity had enjoyed stability for so long, revolution was a new thing to us. How resilient would our social institutions be in the face of mindless violence? How far could we fall?
Ernu found her voice first. “They eat their children,” she said.
“They deserved what they got,” VanDerWendt said.
I gathered up my newspad. “Excuse me,” I told them. “I have much to think about.” I left the dining hall and walked the long, carpeted corridor to my stateroom, wondering what, if anything, I could do.
Copyright (C) 2012 Jerry Oltion
[Back to Table of Contents]
* * *
Short Story: FOLLOW-UP
by Stephen L. Burns
Everything involves trade-offs. . . .
Dr. Sissy Alvarez knocked back the dregs of coffee-flavored energy drink, then crushed the disposable cup.
“Please admit the next patient,” she said as she tossed the cup into the waste bin and stepped up to the scrub station.
“Admitting next patient.” Aidmit, the system that controlled her unit, spoke in a crisp, only faintly artificial newsreader's voice. It was easy to hear over the almost criminally innocuous mashuclassical music playing quietly in the background. The music evoked pastoral vistas, but did nothing to soften the industrial sterility of her surroundings.
Sissy glanced back over her shoulder as the self-guided gurney glided in, rolled to the center of the unit, and transferred her next patient to the operating table. As she watched, the scrubber chimed, letting her know that she was now properly antiseptic for her next procedure.
As she stepped back the hut quivered at the sound of a distant explosion. She ignored it, just like she'd ignored all the others she'd heard that day. She was so used to them as the other background music for her work that it took debris pinging off the roof over the unit to make her look up.
“Let's see what we've got,” she said.
Aidmit had already collected the data from the gurney. “Patient is male, age twenty-two. Present status: stabilized by field medic; fluids and Schedule A analgesics administered, along with Unipress and TourniQuit to control bleeding. Pre-op has anesthetized patient, removed field dressings, and set up fluid and salvage tanks.” A pause. “Report on patient injuries?”
“I can see them, unless there are any surprises,” Sissy said, shaking her head as she looked over the figure atop the table, automatically categorizing the injuries presented in order of severity. They were all, of course, severe. The human body being punctured by chunks of metal and ceramic traveling at high velocity guaranteed brutal trauma. Any lesser wounds would have been treated at the front.
Already the order in which the patient's injuries would be addressed had taken shape in Sissy's mind. Not so much from conscious deliberation, but from having made such dire choices so many times before. Fifteen years in a downtown Detroit ER, and now the time she had spent here, had given her a terrible and bloody knowledge base to draw upon.
“Let's get to it. Scan and prep.”
“Working,” Aidmit replied.
The Experimental Field Surgical Unit filled the hut, and Sissy was as much inside it as her patient. Inside the hut you were inside the guts of the EFSU—everybody called it eff-sue—and the expectation was that one of the two people inside would emerge in far better shape than they'd been in when they entered.
There was a muted hum as the scanhead built into the operating table's top began to move, starting at the patient's bare feet and tracking up toward his head, sending the information it gathered to the Cellular Resolution Hybrid Tomograph. A crawling blue laser line projected from above indicated the progress of the scan. Off to Sissy's left the two-meter-tall screen began displaying results.
Once the scan was complete, four spidery articulated arms swung down from the cruciform gantry over the table and went to work. There was a faint whiff of an almost-vanilla scent as the sprayer arm applied a mist that reduced the ballistic polymer fabric of the soldier's fatigues and underclothes to a viscous liquid that was vacuumed away by a suction device on the second arm, leaving bare skin in its wake.
The third arm laid down a molecule-thin layer of nanotic cleanser and antiseptic. The fourth arm's spinnerets spun out a sterile white covering over the body.
This process took just a couple of minutes, time Sissy spent studying the results of the scan.
There were no surprises.
She had been doing this long enough to have seen just about everything at least once.
“Type P,” Sissy said, holding out her hand.
“Type P,” Aidmit repeated as an applicator was placed on the palm of her hand by the dispenser bot's dangling arm.
The most critical of the soldier's injuries was a classic sucking chest wound. Sissy knew just by looking that the damage had been inflicted by a bayonet or similar large knife. The blade had entered between two ribs and punctured the lung. Guided by the scan, and imagery sent by the built-in picocam, she inserted the applicator's blunt needle into place.
“Apply.” Inside the patient's chest a cloud of specialized Medical Nanoscale Devices and primed replicells, the engineered biomaterial that was a distant relative of stem cells, dispersed and settled on the torn lung tissue. The MNDs scurried to the first of their programmed tasks, moving around replicells and lung tissue scavenged from the area surrounding the trauma to begin repairing it. Alveolar damage and the rent in the lung wall filled in quickly with a blend of MNDs and replicells. Next a percentage of the MNDs settled in place over the repair to act as an extra layer of protection, the rest tracking back up the puncture, sealing tissue and then skin as they exited.
The skin over the wound was partially restored when Sissy said, “Inflate lung.”
“Inflation begun.” Air was gently pushed through the self-extruding tube in the patient's nostril.
The repair performed as expected. Function was immediately returned to only three percent less than that of the lobe which hadn't been holed. Over the next few hours the replicells would transform into genetically matched replacement tissue, and the restoration would be complete. It would be like the wound had never happened.
“Looks good,” Sissy said.<
br />
“Looks very good,” Aidmit agreed.
She ignored the compliment. It was just noise, part of Aidmit's programming, interaction written in to supposedly help keep a surgeon working long solo hours from going batshit. The syrupy music had been expressly created to perform the same function. Almost everything about the surgical program was experimental.
Aidmit's personality got at best a B grade, the music a D. Flat, of course.
Sissy stopped, frowning.
She stood there just staring long enough that Aidmit, used to her normal speed and efficiency, spoke up.
“Is there a problem, Doctor?”
She heard the question, but it didn't register any more than the distant muted thump of another explosion.
The third severe injury the soldier had suffered was a wound in his left outer thigh. A chunk of shrapnel had punched out a fist-sized hole that went all the way to the bone. The femur had been chipped, but not broken.
It wasn't the wound that made her stop and stare. It was what peeked out at her from the edge of the sterile covering surrounding it.
A tattoo.
Tattoos weren't unusual. These were soldiers, and body art was a part of the lifestyle. This one was not particularly large, about as big around as the English muffin she'd had for breakfast. The artwork was first class, finely detailed and subtly colored. The center of the circular image was a beautifully rendered picture of Dorothy and Toto from the original Wizard of Oz movie, Dorothy holding Toto in her arms, both of them looking wistfully back up at Sissy. Behind them an ethereal rainbow touched down on the edge of the Emerald City. Surrounding all that, repeated three times in neat calligraphy, were the words THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE HOME.
“I've seen this before,” she whispered, lifting her gaze and staring upward with a perplexed expression. “Not that long ago, either. It was just . . .”
There was a memory there, but it was as insubstantial as fog, eluding her attempts to grasp it.
Analog SFF, April 2012 Page 12