Dirge - Alan Dean Foster [95]
“Listen to me.” Mallory chose his words slowly and carefully. “The Pitar are not nice. They are not ever going to be ‘useful.’ They murdered six hundred thousand men, women, and children, for what depraved reasons of their own I can’t say. And if they only had to do it once to get what they wanted or needed, and never do anything like it again, then they will have done worse than what they did. They will have gotten away with it.”
Burriyip was immovable. “I said ‘if,’ Mr. Mallory. No one is ready to discount your theory out of hand.”
“Goddammit, it’s not a theory!” He looked as if he was going to start crying again but pulled himself together with an effort. The hypo wielder held his ground. “Then you won’t confront the Pitar?”
The representative sighed heavily. “I am sorry, Mr. Mallory, but to accuse an entire race of interspecies genocide on the word of one man…We cannot. You have to understand that. You do not have to like it, but you do have to understand.”
“I understand that if you don’t do something you’re going to have humankind dancing and laughing down through the years hand in hand with the worst enemies in its history, and that they’re the ones who are going to be laughing the hardest. If they do laugh, that is.”
“We will do something, Mr. Mallory.” Nadurovina tried her best to mollify him. “We will find out who is lying and who is telling the truth.”
“And most of all,” Rothenburg added, “we’re going to find out who or what was responsible for what happened on Argus V.”
“Not if you don’t ask the right people the right questions.” Closing his eyes, Mallory slumped deeper into the pillows.
Tse held his wrist, not trusting the machines. “That’s enough. He’s only recently emerged from his coma, and this is more activity than he should have to endure.”
Chimbu rose. “Nurse Tse is right. We should leave so he can get some rest.”
“When can we talk to him again?” Despite his professional skepticism, Rothenburg felt concern for the man in the bed.
“Not before tomorrow.” Chimbu began to urge everyone out of the room, an insistent father herding his flock. “If you don’t want to communicate with a mind that might be playing tricks on itself, allow it to rest. If his vitals continue to strengthen and he is willing, we’ll try this again tomorrow.”
“Maybe once he’s rested some more he’ll remember something else,” Rothenburg murmured as he stepped out into the corridor.
“Like who actually committed the atrocity?” Nadurovina followed her colleague down the hall.
“Then you don’t believe his story?” Absently, Rothenburg saluted the two guards who were posted at the far end of the walkway.
“I don’t know. The Pitar as exterminators? And for such an obscure reason? One that might well devolve from some unhappy or repressed childhood sexual experience of the patient’s? I could not find anything in his records, but that does not mean there is nothing of the kind buried deep within his memories.” They entered the hospital lift and stood back from the closing doors. “That does not mean he is not telling the truth. The question remains, is it the truth as it actually is or merely the truth as his traumatized self sees it?”
Rothenburg considered. “Burriyip meant it when he said the government couldn’t confront the Pitar.”
“I know. We cannot, either. Not without a specific directive from above, one that I do not think will be forthcoming. Ever since the first encounter, people have been mesmerized by the Pitar.”
Rothenburg nodded knowingly. “My wife has two outfits inspired by Pitarian design. She’d find the very idea of them killing one human grotesquely laughable, let alone hundreds of thousands. If we challenge or accuse them in any way, there’ll be diplomatic bedlam. Careers will be ruined, or at the very least any hopes for advancement aborted. In that respect Burriyip wasn’t understating the gravity of the situation. Such a confrontation really could bring down