Good, Katy Romanova thought with satisfaction. At last they were starting to grasp the situation, and were reluctantly grappling with it. It was late, so late, for them to be entering this game seriously—to stop trusting the Terran Ambassador and the Narsatian delegate to the Commonwealth Diet to take care of their world’s interests, when neither of those personages had a solid commitment to anything except the welfare of their own financial accounts—but Narsai’s leaders were trying now, and they were intelligent people.
Basically decent people, too, or their world would not be the peaceful and orderly place that it was. That it had been for centuries now, even its total population holding stable in a way that no other human-inhabited planet had ever managed to achieve.
“So what do you think, Katy? Should we join the Rebs, and kick the Terrans to hell out of our sector?” That was Cabanne Barrett, representing the medical profession on Narsai. That she had treated the gen called Rachel Kane had not been mentioned, and wouldn’t be. A doctor’s movements through the community were a confidential matter, that was a basic principle of Narsatian privacy right along with the lack of pattern recorders in the public teleport system and the lack of tracer technology in the community-garaged aircars. Narsatians trusted one another, in a manner that was inconceivable to those reared elsewhere.
Learning to be suspicious had been Katy Romanova’s most difficult adaptation to life among non-Narsatians. She sometimes thought, now, that one reason George Fralick had attracted her so strongly in her youth was that he played the duplicitous games that were foreign to her so skillfully and with such outward charm.
She answered, “If you’re asking me what’s the morally correct side to be on, I’d have to say it’s the Rebs’ side. I hate what the Commonwealth’s becoming under Inner Worlds domination, Cab. I hate a system that can treat a human being’s body like a factory for reproductive cells, and that can deny a young woman like the one I’ve described to you her freedom and her right to bear her own children—just because she was made to order in a lab, instead of being conceived the usual way by a pair of lovers. The way Commonwealth worlds are using gens is slavery, no matter what name you use to dress it up, and it’s as hateful now as it was hundreds of years ago when wars were fought on Terra to get rid of it.”
She glanced around the circle, saw that every other person in it was still listening, and continued. “I hate throwing people out of their service careers because they didn’t graduate from the Academy, as if that were the only measure of loyalty that could possibly mean anything. And I hate it that after generations of encouraging Morthan men to leave their homes and devote their lives to taking care of us humans, now we’re going to force them all to go back where they came from because Terra is running scared of any and all nonhumans living among its own people.”
This last announcement was news here, she could tell. And while Narsai had never developed any real dependence on Morthan healers, as the strong guild headed by Cab Barrett attested, still that news caused heads to shake in puzzlement and voices to murmur in disbelief.
“Insane,” Cabanne Romanova said flatly. “They can get away with dismissing the healers from the Star Service, of course; that’s a discrete population, and it operates on strict top-down orders because of its nature as a military organization. But how do they propose to get rid of all the Morthans on staff at hospitals and clinics on all the Inner Worlds? If they could do that, who would replace those healers? And what would Mortha do with them, once they all arrived back there?”
“I’ve asked those questions, of someone who should have had the answers; and he didn’t have them.” Katy remembered Willard Tanaka’s impassive golden face, seen via holo-transmission not all that many hours ago, and she shook her head. “What I can tell you, though, is that it’s no new thing for a civilized society to decide that a sub-group is dangerous and to eject all that sub-group’s members even though the society actually needs them. Repeatedly in ancient Europe, nation states ejected their Jewish populations. One in the twentieth century actually attempted to murder every Jew they couldn’t manage to deport from their territories, and they came damnably close to succeeding.”
She glanced toward her father for confirmation, and Trabe Kourdakov nodded. “She’s right,” he said. “I can give you other examples. Ancient British landlords shipping the food grown by Irish peasants away from their country, and leaving their tenant farmers to starve literally to death. African tribal leaders cutting off food supplies to their enemies’ civilian populations, and then calling the result a ‘famine.’ It’s horrible to think that people today could do the same thing, but when you consider how most of even us here feel about Morthans….”
“I believe the term is ‘mindfucker.’” Lincoln Casey spoke up uninvited, and in spite of his wife’s warning thought just before he did so. His voice was soft, but it carried just as well as hers had; he, too, had given many orders on the bridge of an embattled starship.
“Not you,” Cabanne Romanova said gently. “You can’t probe our minds in this circle, Linc, and all of us know that. But if you could, we’d find you frightening—and we can’t help that.”
“I know. But I’m telling you why I don’t find it surprising at all that this is happening. I’m only surprised that it didn’t happen any sooner.” Casey’s thoughts touching his wife’s mind were bitter. That he could be accepted as nonthreatening by this group of full humans, because he was crippled by Morthan standards, was not the comforting thought that Katy’s mother seemed to believe it should be. Even she, kind soul, could not comprehend that instead it was the most galling of insults.
Katy comprehended it, though, and although she still wished her husband had stayed silent she pressed his hand with consoling tenderness. Then she said to the circle, “I’ve probably committed treason, espionage, illegal disclosure of confidential information—and who knows how many other different crimes, by talking with you the way I have today while I’m a flag-ranked officer on active duty in the Star Service. But I’m also a daughter of Narsai’s founders, I’m in the middle of everything that’s happening right now and that’s going to happen, and I honestly don’t know where my real duty lies. For a little while I thought I knew, when accepting recall meant I could take control of that ship up there in orbit; but that was before the damnable corporate marshal got his hands on Rachel Kane and Dan Archer, before I had to start thinking of myself as an accessory to their crime.”
“Rachel Kane?” A young commissioner tilted her dark, curly head thoughtfully.
“Yes, that’s her name. The gen I told you about, the woman who’s pregnant with Dan’s three babies.”
The gen had a name. Clearly that hadn’t entered the minds of most of these people, and it just as clearly made them uncomfortable because having a name made her seem real to them.
“We can’t solve the war question this morning, not when this is the first time we’ve even discussed it in session,” Trabe Kourdakov announced, and now his philosopher’s debating voice penetrated every one of his listener’s distracted minds and brought them back to the present. “But we have to deal with the matter of this corporate marshal, so-called, causing destruction of Romanov ancestral property. And we may wish to deal with his being able to come to our world and make off with four people to whom his employers mean to do harm. Lincoln Casey and Daniel Archer are citizens of Terra, and Rachel Kane is in legal terms a piece of property rather than a human being; but my daughter Katy is a Narsatian citizen, and I will be damned if I’ll let her status as an officer in the Star Service be the reason I give her up to that corporate jackal.”