In the Balance (34 page)

More coughs rose, Larssen’s among them. His eyes swung back to Hans Thomsen. He doubted he could have been as politely insulting as Molotov, given what the Nazis had done to the Soviet Union. On the other hand, all of humanity was supposed to be joining together to resist the invaders from another planet. If everyone kept remembering what was going on before the Lizards came, the united front would come crashing down. And if it did, that literally handed the Lizards the world.

Thomsen was a trained diplomat. If he noticed Molotov had given him the glove, he never let on. He was smiling as he replied, “There is in English an old saying about the enemy of one’s enemy.”

The interpreter murmured to Molotov. Now the Communist official looked straight back at the German. “It was on this basis, no doubt, that the imperialist powers of Great Britain and the United States allied with the peace-loving people of the USSR against the Hitlerite regime.”

Watch out for this guy
, Jens thought.
He’s dangerous
. Thomsen kept his smile, but it looked held in place by force of will Still, he had a counterthrust ready: “No doubt it was also on this basis that Finland allied with Germany after being invaded by the peace-loving people of the USSR.”

As if at a tennis match, Larssen turned his head to look at Molotov. The match here, though, he thought, used a live hand grenade for a ball. Molotov’s lips might have drawn back from his teeth a millimeter or two. Through his interpreter, the Soviet foreign minister replied, “As we have both noted, the principle admits of broad application. Thus I am willing to discuss our own differences at another time.”

The sigh of relief that filled the dining room was quite audible. Larssen didn’t consciously notice; he was too busy adding to it.

8

The hologram of Tosev 3 hung in space above its projector, just as it had before the Race began to add a fourth world to the Empire. Today, though, Atvar did not urge Kirel to project the image of the ferocious Tosevite warrior with his sword and chain mail that the Race’s probes had brought Home. Like everyone else in the fleet, Atvar had found out more about Tosevite warriors than he’d ever wanted to learn.

The fleetlord turned to the assembled shiplords. “We are met here, today, valiant males, to evaluate the results of the first half-year’s fighting”—he used the Race’s chronology, of course; sluggish Tosev 3 had completed only a fourth of its orbit—“and to discuss our plans for the combat yet to come.”

The shiplords accepted the introduction better than he’d dared hope. When the schedule for the conquest of Tosev 3 was drawn up back on Home, the half-year meeting was the last one included. After half a year, everyone was certain, Tosev 3 would be firmly attached to the Empire. The Race lived by schedules and plans drawn up long before they were carried out. That Atvar’s chief underlings recognized the need for much more work was a measure of how much the Tosevites had shaken them.

“We make progress,” Atvar insisted. “Large parts of Tosev 3 are under our virtually complete control.” On the hologram, portions of the planet’s land area changed color from their natural greens and browns to a bright golden hue: the southern half of the smaller continental mass, much of the southwestern part of the main continental mass. “The natives in these areas, while not as primitive as previously available data led us to believe, have been unable to offer resistance much above the nuisance level.”

“May it please the exalted fleetlord,” Shiplord Straha of the
206th Emperor Yower
said, “but much of this territory strikes me as being that on Tosev 3 least worth the having. True, it’s warm enough to suit our kind, but much of it is so beastly wet that our fighting males break out in molds and rots.”

“Molds and rots are a small price to pay for victory,” Atvar answered. More of the hologram turned gold, so that Tosev 3 itself looked blotched and diseased. “Here are our holdings in the regions where the Big Uglies are most technologically advanced. As you can see for yourselves, valiant males, these have expanded considerably since last we gathered together.” The hologram rotated to give the shiplords a view of the entire planet.

Brash as usual, Straha said, “Certainly we have made great gains. How could it be otherwise, when we are the Race? The question that arises, however, Exalted Fleetlord, is why our gains have not been greater still, why Tosevite forces yet remain in arms against us.”

“May I speak, Exalted Fleetlord?” Kirel asked. At Atvar’s assent, the shiplord of the
127th Emperor Hetto
went on, “The principal reason for our delays, Shiplord Straha, strikes me as obvious to a hatchling still wet from the egg: the Big Uglies’ capabilities are far greater than we imagined while readying the expeditionary force.”

“Oh, indeed, as we have discovered to our sorrow,” Straha said sarcastically, eager to score points off his rival. “But why is this so? How did our probes fail us so badly? How did the Tosevites become a technological species while the Race turned its eye turrets in the other direction?”

Kirel turned to Atvar in protest. “Exalted Fleetlord, the blame for that must surely rest with the Big Uglies themselves, not on the Race. We merely applied procedures which had proved themselves eminently successful on our two previous conquests. We could not know in advance that they would be less effective here.”

“That is so.” Atvar glanced down to check some data on a computer screen. Before Kirel could look too smug at having his commander’s support, the fleetlord added, “Nevertheless, Straha poses a legitimate question, even if impolitely: why
are
the Tosevites so different from us and our two previous subject races?”

Now Straha brightened up. Atvar needed to keep his rivalry with Kirel active; that way both powerful shiplords, and the lesser leaders who inclined to one of them or the other, would continue to labor zealously to seek the fleetlord’s support.

After reviewing his electronic notes once more, Atvar said, “Our savants have isolated several factors which, they feel, cause the Tosevites to be as they are.” A muffled hiss ran through the shiplords as they gave their commander full attention. Some of these speculations had already gone out in bulletins and announcements, but bulletins and announcements flowed from the fleetlord’s ship in such an unending stream that no one, no matter how diligent, could pay attention to them all. Words straight from the fleetlord’s jaws, though, were something else again.

He said, “One element contributing to the Tosevites’ anomalous nature is surely the anomalous nature of Tosev 3.” Now all at once the planet’s immense, innumerable oceans and seas and lakes and rivers glowed bright blue. “The excessive amount of free water serves, along with mountains and deserts, to wall off groups of Big Uglies from one another and allow them to go their own separate ways. This is obvious from one eye’s glance at the globe, and is not too different from our own most ancient days back on Home.”

“But, Exalted Fleetlord—” Kirel began. Not only had he read all the bulletins and announcements, he’d discussed them with Atvar—the advantage of being shiplord to the bannership of the fleet.

“But indeed.” Atvar wanted to lay out this exposition himself, without interruptions. “What follows is more subtle. Because land dominates water on the worlds of the Empire, we have little experience with boats and other aquatic conveyances. That is not the case among the Tosevites, who lavish endless ingenuity upon them. When some Big Uglies stumbled upon technology, they were quickly able to spread its influence—and theirs—by sea to most of the planet.”

“Then why do we not face one unified Tosevite empire, Exalted Fleetlord?” asked Feneress, a shiplord of Straha’s faction.

“Because the Tosevites in the area where the breakthrough took place were already divided among several competing groups,” Atvar answered. “Travel by sea let them all expand their influence outward without consolidating into a single empire.”

The assembled shiplords hissed again, more quietly this time, as implications began to sink in. Back on Home, the ancestral Empire had grown step by small step. That was the only way it could grow, on a normal world where there were no great oceans to let its influence suddenly metastasize in a hundred directions at once. Atvar hissed himself as that word crossed his mind; it seemed the perfect metaphor for the Tosevites’ malignantly rapid technological growth.

“You must also bear in mind the constantly competitive nature of the Big Uglies themselves,” he went on. “As we have recently discovered, they are sexually competitive throughout the year, and remain, in a state permitting sexual excitement even in the long-term absence of any breeding partner.”

Atvar knew he sounded faintly disgusted. Without pheromones from females in heat, his own sexual urge remained latent. He didn’t miss it. On a mission like this, it would have been a distraction. The Rabotevs and Hallessi were like the Race in that regard, which had led its savants to believe all intelligent species followed the same pattern. There as elsewhere, Tosev 3 was proving a theorist’s crematorium.

Straha said, “Exalted Fleetlord, I recently received a shiplord’s-eyes-only report noting that the Tosevite empires opposing us are in fact not empires at all. I find this a contradiction. Granted that the scale of area ruled may vary, but how can there be government without empire?”

“Before I came here, Shiplord, I assure you I found that concept as unimaginable as you do now,” Atvar answered. “Tosev 3, unfortunately, has taught us all a variety of unpleasant new ideas. Of the lot, government without empire may be the most repugnant, but it does exist and must be dealt with.”

The shiplords stirred uncomfortably. Talking about government without empire was worse than talking about sexual interest in the absence of females in heat. For the Race, the latter was just an intellectual exercise, a study in abstraction. Government without empire, though, tore at the underpinnings of a thousand millennia of civilized life.

Feneress said, “Without emperors, Exalted Fleetlord, how can the Big Uglies administer their affairs? I too saw the report to which the senior shiplord Straha refers, but I confess I dismissed it as just another flight of fancy from savants drawing broad conclusions without enough data. You are saying this is not the case?”

“It is not, Shiplord. For my own peace of mind, I wish it were, but the data are irrefutable,” Atvar replied. “Moreover, revolting as it surely seems to us, the Big Uglies in many cases seem proud of their success at ruling themselves without emperors.” The Big Ugly named Molotov had seemed proud of belonging to a band that had slaughtered his empire’s emperor. The very idea still gave Atvar the horrors.

“But how do they administer their affairs?” Feneress persisted. Several other shiplords, males from both Straha’s faction and Kirel’s, made gestures of agreement. Here the whole Race united in finding the Tosevites baffling.

Atvar found them baffling, too, but he had been working hard to understand. He said, “I will summarize as best I can. In some Tosevite, uh, nonempires—the two most powerful examples are Deutschland and the SSSR—the ruler has full imperial power but draws on no hereditary loyalty and affection from his subjects. This may be one reason these two Tosevite areas are ruled with more brutality than most: obedience out of affection being unavailable to them, they force obedience out of fear.”

That made a certain amount of logical sense, anyway, no matter how much it appalled the fleetlord. Since logical sense was hard enough to come by on Tosev 3, he cherished it when he found it Deutschland and the SSSR were models of comprehensibility when set beside some of the other—maybe
lands
was a good word for them, Atvar thought—on Tosev 3.

He went on, “Italia, Nippon, and Britain
are
empires in our sense of the word. Or so they claim, at any rate; nothing the Big Uglies do can be trusted to be what it appears. In the first two empires I mentioned, the emperor serves as a false front for other Tosevites who hold the actual power in their regimes.”

“This phenomenon was also known among the Rabotevs before we integrated them into the Empire,” Kirel noted. “In fact, some of our own ancient records may be interpreted to imply that it occurred among the Race as well, in the long-ago days when the Empire was limited, not merely to one planet, but to a portion of that planet.”