“I am Lioren,” he said.
It was obvious that they already knew who and what he was. The patients who had been sitting or lying on the nearby beds rose quickly to their feet and gathered around him, and those further along the ward hurried to join the others until he was completely encircled by still and silent Cromsaggar.
A sharp, clear memory of his first meeting with one of them rose in Lioren’s mind. It had been a female attacking him in defense of an imagined threat to infants sleeping in another part of its dwelling, and even though its body had displayed the discoloration and muscle wastage of disease and malnutrition, it had come close to inflicting serious injury on him. Now he was surrounded by more than thirty Cromsaggar whose bodies and limbs were well-muscled and healthy. He knew well the damage that those horny, long-nailed feet and hard medial hands could inflict because he had seen them fighting each other not quite to the death.
On Cromsag they had fought with ferocity but total control, with the intention of inflicting maximum damage short of killing, and with the sole purpose of stirring their near-atrophied endocrine systems into sufficient activity to enable them to procreate and survive as a species. But Lioren was not another Cromsaggar and would-be mate; he was the creature responsible for countless thousands of their deaths and of all but destroying their race. They might not want to control the hatred they must feel for him, or the urge to tear his body apart limb from limb.
He wondered whether the distant Hellishomar was still influencing the minds of the guard and the two nurses, for normally they could not have helped seeing the crowd closing in around him and would have attempted a rescue. He wished that the
Groalterri would not be so thorough in its mind control because suddenly he did not want his life to end in this or any other fashion, and then he realized that his thoughts were clear to Hellishomar and he felt an even greater shame.
That which he was about to do and say was shameful enough without adding to it the dishonor of personal cowardice. Slowly he looked at each one of the faces surrounding him and spoke.
“I am Lioren,” he said. “You know that I am the being responsible for causing the deaths of many thousands of your people. This was a crime too great for expiation and it is only fair that the punishment should lie in your hands. But before this punishment is carried out, I wish to say that I am truly sorry for what I have done, and humbly ask your forgiveness.”
The feeling of shame at what he had just done was not as intense as he had expected, Lioren thought as he waited for the onslaught. In fact he felt relieved and very good.
CHAPTER 27
THE Monitor guard insists that he did not see you enter the ward,” the Chief Psychologist said in a quiet but very angry voice, “and the nurses did not know you were there until the Cromsaggar were suddenly standing around and shouting at you. When the guard went in to investigate you told him that he should not be concerned, that they were having a religious argument which he was welcome to join, although he says that he had heard quieter riots. Tarlans are not noted either for their sarcasm or their sense of humor, so I must assume you spoke the truth. What happened in that ward, dammit? Or have you imposed another oath of secrecy on yourself?”
“No, sir,” Lioren replied quietly. “The conversations were public and confidentiality was neither asked for nor implied. When you sent for me I was preparing a detailed report for you on the whole—”
“Summarize it,” O’Mara said sharply.
“Yes, sir,” Lioren said, and tried to find a balance between accuracy and brevity as he went on. “When I identified myself, apologized, and asked forgiveness for the great wrong I had committed against them—”
“You apologized?” O’Mara broke in. “That — that was unexpected.”
“So was the behavior of the Cromsaggar,” Lioren said. “Considering my crime, I expected a violent reaction from them, but instead they—”
“Did you hope that they would kill you?” O’Mara broke in again. “Was that the reason for your visit?”
“It was not!” Lioren said sharply. “I went there to apologize. That is a shameful enough act for any Tarlan to perform because it is considered to be a cowardly and dishonorable attempt to diminish personal guilt and avoid just punishment. But it is not as shameful as escaping that punishment by deliberately ending one’s life. There are degrees of shame, and from my recent contacts with patients I have discovered that there are feelings of shame that may be misplaced or unnecessary.”
“Goon,” O’Mara said.
“As yet I do not fully understand the psychological mechanism involved,” Lioren replied, “but I have discovered that in certain circumstances a personal apology, while shameful to the entity making it, can sometimes do more to ease the hurt of a victim than the simple knowledge that the offender is receiving just punishment. It seems that vengeance, even judicial vengeance, does not fully satisfy the victim and that a sincere expression of regret for the wrong committed can ease the pain or loss more than the mere knowledge that justice is being done. When the apology is followed by forgiveness on the part of the wronged entity, there are much more beneficial and lasting effects for both victim and perpetrator.
“When I identified myself in the Cromsaggar ward,” Lioren went on, “there was a strong probability that lethal violence would ensue. It was no longer my wish to die, because the work of this department is very interesting and there may be more that I can do here, but I felt strongly that I should try to ease the hurt of the Cromsaggar with an apology, and did so. I did not expect what happened then.”
In a very quiet voice O’Mara asked, “You are still insisting that you, a Wearer of the Blue Cloak of Tarla with all that that implies, apologized?”
The question had already been answered so Lioren continued. “I had forgotten that the Cromsaggar are a civilized race forced by disease to wage war. They fought with great ferocity because they had to try their hardest to engender the fear of imminent death in each other if their formerly impaired sex-involved endocrine systems were to be stimulated to the point where they would become briefly capable of conceiving children. But while fighting they learned to exercise strict mental and emotional control, and refuse to surrender to anger or hatred, because they loved and respected the opponents they were trying so hard to damage almost to the point of death. They had to fight to insure the continual survival of their species, but the wounds they inflicted and sustained were personal to themselves. They could not have continued to fight and respect and love each other if they had not also learned to apologize for and forgive each other for the terrible hurts they were inflicting.
“On Cromsag the ability to forgive is what enabled their society to survive for so long.”
Suddenly Lioren was seeing and hearing again the Cromsaggar patients who had crowded around him, and for a moment he could not speak because his emotions were being involved in a way that any self-respecting Tarlan would have considered to be a shameful weakness. But he knew that this was another one of the minor shames that he was learning to accept. He went on. “They treated me as another Cromsaggar, a friend who had done a very great wrong and inflicted much suffering in an attempt to save their race and, unlike themselves, I had succeeded.
“They — they forgave me and were grateful.
“But they were also fearful about the return to Cromsag,” he continued quickly. “They understood and were grateful for the rehabilitation program the Monitor Corps had planned for them and said that they would cooperate in every way. It is a psychological problem involving a disbelief in their own ability to exist without severe and continuous stress, coupled with a belief that fate, or a nonmaterial presence whose precise nature was the subject of much argument, might not intend them to live lives of contentment in the material world. Basically it was a religious matter. I told them about the racial memory of the Gogleskans, the Dark Devil which tries to drive them to self- destruction, and how Rhone is besting it. And about the problems of the Protectors of the Unborn, and gave what other reassurance I could. My report will cover everything that transpired in detail. I do not foresee the Corps psychologists having serious trouble with the problem. An ensuing religious debate, which the Cromsaggar engage in with great enthusiasm, was interrupted by the arrival of the guard.”