Federation World

Chapter 21

I have a feeling that we’re going to become seriously involved with that being,” Beth said when the lander was climbing through the cloud blanket.

“We are,” Martin said enthusiastically. “He’s just about perfect! An important person, a local medic, with a great many people obligated to him, who is in a tearing hurry and needing but not wanting our help. Are we under radar surveillance?”

“No,” Beth said, and added, “The missile they sent after us wasn’t radar-directed, either. Looks as though the aimers have to eyeball the targets.”

The ground scanner’s image showed a picture of the mainland end of the bridge and, about fifteen miles inland, a heavily wooded depression in an area which the sensors declared to be uninhabited. Their Keidi and his mount were a moving black knot on the thin, wet thread of roadway linking the bridge with the woods.

“That looks like a good pickup spot there,” Martin said, “where the road runs through these trees.”

Half an hour later the lander was in a small clearing about two hundred yards from the edge of the road, and Martin was trying to shelter from the rain which was gust ing into the open entry port while he listened for the sound of the Keidi’s approach. But when he did hear the corsa’s hooves, he realized that for some reason the rider had increased speed. Swearing, he jumped to the ground and ran stumbling and slipping in the darkness under the trees to the edge of the readjust as the rider emerged from the curtain of rain.

Too breathless even to speak, he staggered into the middle of the road, waving his staff awkwardly to attract the other’s attention.

He succeeded.

The rider leaned sideways in the saddle and swung his staff in a wide arc. Martin dropped to his knees as the metal tip whistled past the top of his head. Then the Keidi checked his mount, turned, and came galloping back to the attack.

“Stop it!” Martin yelled, jumping back to the rougher ground of the roadside. “I mean you no harm.”

This time the Keidi did not swing the staff as he went past. Instead, he calmed his mount and returned at a walking pace.

“Oh, it’s one of the Galactics,” he said in obvious anger, looking from Martin to the dimly seen outlines of the lander. “That was a stupid thing to do. Don’t you know that if anyone wanted to take me or my animal, this is the place they’d try to do it? But no, you know nothing. I’m in a hurry. Why did you stop me?”

“I’m sorry,” Martin said. “We know you’re in a hurry, and the reason for it. We offer you a fast and comfortable ride to the First’s Estate.”

“So you know,” the Keidi said, tightening his grip on the staff. “But in my home you pretended to know nothing. I do not want to know your reasons for lying then or for interfering now. Stand clear!”

“Wait, please,” Martin cried, squinting up at the rain-blurred image. It was like trying to hold an important conversation while taking a shower. Carefully, so that the movement would not appear threatening, he raised both arms to shoulder level in front of him and tapped his wrist.

“We didn’t He to you back there,” he said, “and we didn’t know anything until you began talking on the radio. This is a communications device linked to the mother ship’s translation computer. It enables us to understand any kind of intelligence bearing sounds regardless of how they are produced. Since it is programmed to handle every system of other-species communication, it had no trouble changing your simple verbal code so that we received it in clear.”

Still the other did not respond. Martin brushed the rain from his face and went on quickly, “The message in voice code was to the effect that a pregnant female directly descended from the First, was overdue by twenty-three days, and that skilled assistance was urgently required because of extreme debilitation and consequent inability to complete the birth process. The First wants you and nobody else. All obligations of time and material incurred during your trip to Frontier Camp Eleven would be personally accepted by the First, and discharged threefold.

“Until I overheard that message and saw your treatment room on the way out,” Martin added, “I didn’t know that you are a doctor.”

“Obstetrician,” the Keidi said.

“I guessed as much,” Martin said. “And I thought that you would want to reach your patient with minimum delay. So as not to risk compromising you with your people in the city, I thought it better to pick you up where we would not be observed. Our sensors show this area to be inhabited only by small animals.”

He gestured towards the lander. “It’s a small vessel, so we are unable to take your mount. But you could be attending your patient within the hour.”

“Within the hour,” the Keidi said, “we could all be blown out of the sky by one of the First’s missiles.”

Martin shivered in his lightweight suit, thinking that he had never in all his life felt so wet and miserable. Carefully, he said, “I don’t think we would be shot at if we matched communications frequency and explained our intentions. Given the circumstances, the First might even feel obligated to us. But if missiles are sent against us, we can take evasive action and land you as close as is safe to the camp so that a ground vehicle can be sent to pick you up. Either way, we’ll be safe and you will be there much sooner.”

The Keidi was silent for a moment, then said quietly, “Is it your intention, then, to place die First and myself under an obligation to you?”

“Yes, I suppose so,” Martin said, trying to stop his teeth chattering. “I mean, it wouldn’t do any harm to make friends.”

“Always provided you choose them carefully,” the Keidi replied, dismounting. He ran a hand through the sodden fur covering the corsa’s small, cone-shaped head, and went on, “Very well, I am obligated for the ride with you. And don’t worry about Brown Bag, here. I’ve rid den it many times and it knows its way home a lot better than I do.”

Within a very few minutes they were inside the ship with the control deck’s air conditioning blow-drying their wet clothing. The lander was already high above the rainclouds and Beth was trying to raise the Estate.

“Frontier Camp Eleven,” she was repeating quietly, “this is Federation vessel Three Three Three Nine Five. Come in, please…”

The response, when it came, was harsh and unfriendly.

“This is Camp Eleven. Are you the intruder which violated our airspace earlier today? If so, you will withdraw immediately or risk…”

“We apologize for the intrusion,” Beth said pleasantly, “and were unaware of the violation until you fired a warning shot at us…”

“A warning shot!..” began the other in an incredulous voice.

“…This is the lander of an orbiting hypership, a small vessel with no offensive armament. We carry a crew of two plus one passenger, the doctor you requested, who is being given rapid transportation to your camp. With your permission we will arrive…”

“Permission denied!” the voice responded sharply. “You will not overfly this area again, and you will be destroyed should you try to do so. Is this understood?”

“It is not understood,” Beth replied, in a much less pleasant tone. “We are not hostile and our intention is simply to assist…” She broke off because their passenger was waving his hands at her, then added, “The doctor wishes to speak to you.”

“Very well,” the other said. “Voice code only, please.”

The Keidi glanced at Martin’s wrist unit and said, ‘That would be a complete waste of time. I want to speak directly to the First. While you’re arranging that, remember that a personal three-to-one obligation was offered to anyone helping me get to the patient quickly. Naturally, we didn’t expect a couple of passing Galactics to take up the offer, but they did and they can get me there a hell of a lot faster than a corsa and your clapped-out land vehicles. So check with the First before you say or do anything you might regret.

“In the meantime,” he went on, “I want a detailed report on the patient’s condition. Has that jumped-up ward attendant you call a medical officer done anything for her and if so, what?”

“Maintain your present position,” came the reply.

There was a long, hissing silence from the speaker, broken by Martin who said impatiently, ‘That isn’t necessary. They don’t have radar and so won’t know if we close to a distance where we can respond quickly if they decide to let us land. What do you say, Doctor?”

“You are a stranger here,” the Keidi replied. “The First owns and has civilized the largest stretch of territory on this, our only temperate continent, and he maintains a screen of lookouts well beyond his borders. If they reported sighting you it could make everybody very nervous. The First has a very large, well-disciplined, and personally obligated organization, and has maintained and strengthened it by not taking chances. But he has dreams of continued territorial expansion and the return of the jobs owing after his death. In short, he dreams of founding a dynasty and that, because of some as yet undefined prenatal complications, is die reason why I was sent for.”

The Keidi was slumped comfortably in the supernumerary’s post ion, looking relaxed and half-asleep in the warmth of the control deck. Martin reminded himself that this was a very old, tired, and talkative Keidi, and there might never be a better chance to have questions answered.

“It seems to me that the Estate is better organized and has more amenities than your city,” Martin commented, “and the First would be glad to have you. Wouldn’t you be more gainfully employed, and be able to help many more patients, if you moved to the Estate?”

The doctor opened his eyes and stared at him for a long moment without speaking, then he said, “And it seems that the only thing you people want is information. Now, quite apart from the First’s obligations in this matter I, personally, am obligated for what you are trying to do for me. So far you have accepted two staves from me. How many questions must I answer before the remainder of my obligation to you is discharged?”

Martin started to laugh, then changed it quickly to a cough. The Keidi might not be joking. He said carefully, “Is the value of the answer set by the questioner or the questioned? If you were to answer as many questions as there is time for before we land, would that be considered fair? And if the First isn’t there, can a subordinate act in his absence?”

That is four questions,” the doctor said. “Do you wish me to begin answering them?”

“Please.”

“Very well,” the Keidi said. “My reasons not joining the First are ethical and economic. He has obligated a number of self-styled and largely self-trained medics, but their reputations are such that his people try very hard not to return duty and obedience obligations, which would involve the risk of serious injury. If he had a fully trained, pre-Exodus surgeon on his establishment, the First would mount, and his people accept, more highrisk operations. By remaining in the city and contracting for special jobs like this one, I like to think that his soldiers will take greater care and sustain fewer casualties, so I’m doing everybody a favor. Myself included, since the discomfort, uncertainty, and personal freedom of living in the city far outweigh the tight security and severely limited choices of action offered by the First. The economic advantage is that, as a visiting specialist, I command a greater job than any member of-the First’s so-called Family who may already be under a life obligation.”

“I begin to understand!” Martin said excitedly. ‘The tiny fraction of the original population remaining on Keida was too small to support the pre-Exodus financial structures, so you adopted an exchange and barter system. Your own specialist experience is exchanged for the First’s fuel oil, out-of-season food, or whatever else you need. But that makes you a very important person back there. Quite apart from the medical service provided to your own people, you are one of the city’s prime resources…”

The Keidi held up one hand. “You may deduce the answers to your own questions if you wish, but they will still count. Well?”

“Please go on,” Martin said.

“The First is certainly there,” the doctor went on, “because the mother-to-be is second generation by direct descent, so he would not be anywhere else. Almost certainly the delay is due to his trying to decide whether or not to place himself under an obligation to a couple of Galactics.

“After what the Federation did to Keida,” he continued, ‘‘they do not like you people. That should not surprise you. They would like nothing better than that you leave this world alone. I’m surprised your offer of help wasn’t rejected at once. The condition of the female must be serious.”

“But surely they know that we want only to help,” Martin protested, “that we won’t insist on them honoring their obligation because, well, they have nothing we want.”

‘They have information,” the Keidi reminded him.

Martin was silent. Over the past two decades such blind, unreasoning hostility had become completely foreign to his experience, not only among the Citizens of the Federation World but also on the planets whose intelligent and visually frightful inhabitants he had learned to understand. Some of the Teldins and the Blind Ones had displayed hostility, until the reason for it was understood and the misunderstandings in speech and behavior which had caused it were modified.

But he was forgetting that the tiny remnant of the population left on Keida was not normal people. They — were the antisocial elements, the beings who had failed to pass the very liberal requirements for citizenship, the Keidi predators-in short, the wolves who now had only other wolves instead of sheep on which to prey. They were the Undesirables.

But was this aging medic, whose cloak and staff were still dripping rainwater onto the deck at his feet, and who was trying to bring aid to an expectant mother, was he an Undesirable? And would the soon-to-be-born offspring of the First’s grandchild he was visiting inherit the mother’s Undesirability? And what about the descendants of all the other Undesirables on this mutilated planet?

For the first time since he had been given this ill-defined assignment, Martin felt seriously troubled. The Federation, surely the most philosophically and technologically advanced structure conceivable by mortal minds, should not be responsible for a situation which was so grossly unfair and morally wrong. Was the Federation simply the end result of major population surgery, and a refusal to even consider the fate of the Undesirables, discarded and still proliferating on their denuded homeworlds?

The answer, based on his knowledge of the induction procedures used on many worlds, was yes. But then why had he been sent here? Was it to investigate the situation and try to devise a method of separating children and grandchildren from their Undesirable elders, and somehow influence them into induction centers for testing before they became so tainted by environmental and behavioral influences as to be unsalvageable?

Surely not, Martin thought, that would be a cruel and even more undesirable answer.

The Keidi had stopped talking and was waiting for more questions.

Beth, whose thought processes paralleled Martin’s to closely that he sometimes wondered if she was telepathic, said, “Judging by your friendly approach to us and the very laudable work you intend to do after what should have been a long, uncomfortable, and probably dangerous journey, I have difficulty in believing that you are an Undesirable or that…”

She broke off as the muscles around the Keidi’s horn tightened suddenly into spasm. Then they relaxed slightly and he said, “You will never use that word to any Keidi. You will not use it to me again.”

Red-faced with embarrassment, Beth was opening her mouth to apologize when the speaker came suddenly to life.

“Intruder, Camp Eleven,” the voice said briskly. “You may proceed. Your passenger will indicate the landing area on arrival. A vehicle will await him. No others will leave the ship, nor will they appear at an open exit port. Is this understood?”

“Understood,” Beth responded. “We’re on our way.”

When Camp Eleven was below them, Martin told the doctor that the hypership’s library included physiological and clinical data on all Federation World species, and that the Keida material was instantly available if needed. But the doctor did not respond other than to point out the landing area. Plainly he was still angry at being called an Undesirable, and it seemed that the First’s people did not want to speak to them either because the camp transmitter was also silent.

They were watching the vehicle carrying the doctor as it was heading toward the perimeter fence, when Beth said “I’m sorry. I had no intention of hurting his feelings. But he is old enough to have been one of the original Undesirables, and must be fully aware of the reasons why they were left behind, so I don’t understand his extreme sensitivity to the use of the word. Have I messed up your contact?”

Martin thought for a moment, then said, “Don’t worry about it. If you hadn’t used the word I would have, sooner or later, with the same result. But I’m pretty sure that our friend is not, in fact, one of the original Undesirables.”

He could well imagine the tiny minority of Keida’s rejects convincing themselves that they were superior rather than inferior beings. They had been left to survive as best they could on a virtually empty, scarred, and exhausted world, with only the unwanted scraps of their old technology and culture remaining to them, while their soft, comfort-loving fellows left for the Federation World. They had survived and adapted and reorganized, well enough for the supervisor to assign Beth and Martin to find out what was happening on Keida. So a certain pride in their inferiority, even an intense reverse snobbery and anger toward the soft outsiders who considered them to be inferior, was understandable.

But their Keidi doctor did not fit that neat psychological pigeonhole.

He had been the only person in his city to speak to diem, and give advice and information. He had not been over friendly, but neither had he been blindly hostile like the First’s people, and he had known about many other-species life forms. The mural depicting these life forms could only be seen inside the induction centers, from which Undesirables were automatically excluded.

“You’re thinking out loud again,” Beth said suddenly. “If he isn’t an Undesirable, what is he?”

“A potential Citizen who chose not to go through the induction procedure,” Martin replied. “Maybe he had an aversion to following the crowd, or the crowd going to the Federation World contained the usual proportion of medics while the Undesirables who remained had few, if Any. I’m beginning to like this Keidi.”

As they watched the doctor’s vehicle moving along the old, neatly repaired roadways between the rows of long, low buildings, Martin decided that Frontier Camp Eleven was what it had always been, a military base. Such establishments were not needed on the Federation World so they had been left on Keida, untouched and unoccupied except by the warrior Undesirables-as opposed to the civilians temporarily in uniform-who felt at home in them. The taller, windowless buildings grouped around the landing area would once have contained aircraft and surface vehicles, and possibly still did, although the people qualified to maintain them had a dying breed.

When the vehicle stopped at what was obviously the administration center, their Keidi entered quickly and without any hesitation moved deep inside the building- obviously he knew his way around-to stop finally in a large, long room containing a line of beds, only one of which was occupied. Excluding the doctor, there were eight other people in the ward.

They could follow his movements because the sensor display had the doctor tagged, but the others were just hazy, insubstantial shapes standing deep inside a structure whose corridors, rooms, and walls showed as ghostly transparencies. As the others were identified in conversation they, too, would be tagged.

“I’m getting something now,” Beth said.

They heard the doctor asking the patient how she felt and, interspersed with untranslatable sounds of pain, the female’s reply. Another Keidi, a medic judging by the language, joined the conversation with a fuller, more clinical description of the case history.

“She’s in very bad shape,” Beth said. Her concern for another female at a time like this, regardless of species, was reflected in her voice.

“That she is,” Martin said. “But I think our friend is talking to the First. He’s pointing his horn at that Keidi who is standing alone halfway down the ward. Listen!”

If it was the First he was addressing, then the doctor was sounding both insubordinate and very, very angry.

“This patient’s condition was described to me with minimum accuracy and maximum optimism,” he was saying. “Not only was such behavior professionally inexcusable, it means that had I come here by the usual method my journey would have been wasted, because the patient and unborn would have died long before my arrival. Distasteful as it is to all of us, the obligation to the Galactics is truly a major one. Now will all nonmedical personnel please withdraw.”

A bitter argument broke out among the people who had left the bedside to join the First during which, as is the way with all eavesdroppers, the listeners heard nothing good about themselves. They were hated, intensely and bitterly, by all Keidi for no other reason than their identity,

“The First shows some grandparental concern, at

least,” Beth said after one particularly vicious outburst. “I’m trying to tighten the sensor focus on him, but there’s some interference which… Oh, no.”

Figures and graphics chased each other across the sensor screen for a moment, then she looked up with the color draining from her face. Dully, she said, “The First has been in recent proximity to shielded fissionable material.”

“That’s impossible!” Martin burst out. “Are you tell-(.T ing me that there are nuclear weapons in the Camp? And

-· if so, why the blazes didn’t your sensors spot them at I… once?”

r “Three reasons,” Beth replied angrily. “I did not expect to find radiation, so the sensors were not instructed: to look for it, and they haven’t spotted it now because it “; isn’t here. The original source of contamination is some-f where beyond the range of the lander’s sensors. The hypership is scanning for it now.”

.. It was the Federation’s policy to forbid all nuclear power sources and weaponry to Undesirables and, long. before an Exodus was complete, die supporting technology and fissionable material were invariably dismantled and buried beyond all possibility of recovery by the limited technical resources of those left behind. This was done because of another inflexible rule, that a species which had developed such dreadful and long-acting mass-destruction weapons was required to keep them on-planet as a constant reminder to the Undesirables remaining of the principal reason why they had been rejected as Federation Citizens.

Atomic weapons in the hands of Undesirables was something which just could not happen. But it had somehow happened here.

“The radiation dosage is minimal,” Beth went on. ‘ “Not enough to have any but very long-term effects. Could that be the reason why the First stayed so far; away from the patient? Out of consideration for his unborn great-grandchild.”

The possibility that a group of Keidi Undesirables was in possession of nuclear armaments, or even a single.device, had driven all thought of the patient from Mar-; tin’s mind. But before he could reply, the argument which had been raging in the ward died away to be replaced by a single authoritative voice.

The First had reached a decision.

“Degrading and abhorrent as it is to all of us,” he began, “I am heavily obligated to these Galactics, and I see no other course than to try to discharge this obligation as quickly as possible.” He swung his horn to point at the doctor. “Can a meeting be arranged?”

“Ask them,” said the doctor, looking up briefly from his patient. “They seemed quite happy for me to discharge my obligation by supplying information. Now get out of here.”

“A meeting with the First,” Martin said grimly, “can most certainly be arranged.”