Free Strangers From the Sky by Margaret Wander Bonanno Page B

what would you suggest, my son? That we abandon our efforts to learn of them?”
    Sorahl’s eyes came up to meet hers, barely masking the fire behind them in time.
    “Not at all, Mother. Rather that we take the first step to which all our research has been leading. That we make first contact.”
    T’Lera hid her bemusement at his eagerness behind a careful sternness.
    “Forgive my inability to follow your logic, Sorahl- kam , but if this is as you suggest a violent, unready, or—to use your word—primitive species, of what benefit would revealing our presence be to them? Would they not resort to precisely the violence you suggest in order to protect themselves from that for which they are unready?”
    “I do not think so,” Sorahl said quickly.
    Curious, his mother dropped her pretense of sternness.
    “Please explain.”
    “A recent paper by the political scientist Sotir…” Sorahl began carefully, watching his mother’s face. Between them they always referred to his father and her former consort as an impersonal entity. There was a certain irony in this, Sorahl thought, in that much of his childhood had been spent under his father’s care while T’Lera was off on yet another space voyage, but to refer to another’s divorce, even within the family, was a serious breach of the proprieties. “…promulgates the theory that benevolent intervention in the evolution of a less advanced culture may actually spare another species the aggressions and loss of life which we as a species endured before finding the Way. In short—”
    “Logic suggests that there are as many theories as there are theorists,” T’Lera said abruptly. “And Sotir has never been offworld.”
    This fact among others, she did not need to say, had been one of the reasons for their estrangement.
    “Does this necessarily mean his theory is without validity?” Sorahl asked with a familiar stubbornness his mother always found curiously satisfying. It was not Sotir’s stubbornness, which could be both pedantic and strident, but her own and Savar’s, a stubbornness that was nonaggressive, invisible until challenged, but then immovable.
    “Any theory logically arrived at possesses its own validity,” T’Lera admitted, masking her pride in her willful offspring. “Nevertheless, one is not free to test it on unsuspecting outworlders.”
    “Then why are we here?” Sorahl demanded with the impatience of youth, which even a Vulcan could fall prey to. “Why study these Earthmen for most of my grandfather’s life and all of yours yet refrain from the logical next step?”
    “It is not yet time,” T’Lera said, in a tone that indicated the topic was not open for debate.
    “In whose opinion?” Sorahl dared to ask, where one who knew his mother not quite as well might hesitate. “Yours, or Prefect Savar’s?”
    Destruction before detection. It was not Sorahl’s question that gave his mother pause but the manner in which it had been asked. She had had cause herself to question whether after a lifetime under the aegis of that principle she could separate her own motivation from her father’s.
    “Savar and I are as one in our ‘opinion,’” T’Lera said quietly, believing it. Her far-seeking eyes had gone hard. “But you, it would seem, prefer T’Kahr Sotir’s ‘interventionist’ theory?”
    Sorahl’s jaw tightened imperceptibly beneath the full brunt of his mother’s irony.
    “I believe,” he began, as if he had rehearsed it, expecting challenge, “that if Earthmen, or any intelligent species, were offered incontrovertible proof that it is possible to abandon violence and live by logic, millions might be spared the need to destroy each other. They could not help but see the advantage of our way.”
    “Despite their ‘primitivism,’” T’Lera added.
    “Mother, I am not suggesting that we are superior to them.” Sorahl’s voice had risen despite his best efforts and he lowered it forcibly. “Merely that we are