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“Are you sure it was mistaken?” Yeager said. “There is no guarantee you would have won a great and final victory with Straha in command. By what I recall, you were fighting pretty hard as things were.”
“We will never know, will we?” Atvar said. “Could the result have been much worse for my species than what in fact occurred?”
“I think it could have,” Sam Yeager said. “If you had not won, you would have had all the surviving Tosevite not-empires and empires mad for revenge against you. The fighting on Tosev 3 might never have stopped.”
Atvar shrugged. “And so? Even with constant fighting on Tosev 3, we probably would not have had to worry about Tosevites visiting Home.”
“Fleetlord, we really have a problem here, and you need to recognize it,” Yeager said. “If the Race cannot get used to the idea that we Big Uglies are doing things only you have been doing for thousands of years, then the two sides will collide. They cannot help but collide. And that will not be to anyone’s advantage.”
“Better to no one’s advantage than to yours alone,” Atvar said.
“I do not believe an agreement on even terms that everyone adheres to would be to anyone’s disadvantage,” Sam said. “If I am wrong, no doubt you will correct me. I think the Emperor would also want an equitable agreement. That was my impression from my meetings with him. Again, you will correct me if I am wrong.”
“You are not wrong. Where we differ, Ambassador, is in determining what goes into an equitable agreement.”
“An equitable agreement is one where both sides have the same duties and the same obligations,” Sam said.
“Why should that be so, when one side is stronger than the other?” Atvar came back. “Our superior strength should be reflected in any treaty we make.”
Sam used the negative gesture. What he felt like doing was tearing his hair, but he refrained. “First, all independent empires and not-empires have the same rights and duties,” he said. “This is true on Tosev 3, and it used to be true on Home as well. Ask the protocol master if you do not believe me. And second, as I have pointed out before, how much stronger you are is no longer obvious, the way it was when I went into cold sleep. Whether you are stronger at all is no longer obvious, in fact.”
He waited. He had to wait quite a while. At last, Atvar said, “This may not prompt a treaty, you know. This may prompt an effort to exterminate you while we still can.”
“The Race has been talking about that for a long time.” Sam did his best not to show how alarmed he was. “I do not believe exterminating us would be easy or cheap. I do believe you might end up exterminating yourselves in the process.”
“Possibly. But if we could be rid of you without destroying ourselves altogether, the price might well be worth paying.”
“Is this your opinion, the government’s opinion, or the Emperor’s opinion?” Sam asked. The answer to that might tell him where these talks were going-if they were going anywhere. He waited.
“It is my opinion,” Atvar said. “Perhaps I am mistaken. Perhaps peace will prove a benefit to all concerned, and not merely a breathing space in which you Tosevites gather yourselves for a blow against the Race. Perhaps this is a truth. But the evidence from Tosev 3 makes me doubt it.”
“Why am I here, then?” Sam asked. This time, Atvar did not answer him at all.
Atvar had begun to hope he never again saw the park across the way from the hotel in Sitneff. After his talk there with Sam Yeager, he pictured bombs bursting on Tosev 3, and on Home, and on the Empire’s other two worlds. How strong were the Americans? No way to know, not for certain. All he could know was how strong they had been when the latest signals left Tosev 3.
The Race had comfortably run the Empire at light speed for thousands of years. Delays of signals from one planet to the next had mattered little. But Tosev 3 was farther from Home than either Rabotev 2 or Halless 1, which made delays longer, and the Tosevites changed far faster than any species in the Empire, which made those delays more critical.
Maybe there was a good answer to the problem, but Atvar failed to see it.
He was worried enough to telephone the Emperor again. He didn’t get through to Risson. He hadn’t expected to, not at once-things simply didn’t work that way. He did hope the message he left would persuade Risson to call him back. His Majesty’s courtiers knew the Emperor took a keen interest in Tosevite affairs.
Half a day later, Atvar did get a call from Preffilo. That female was on the line again. Atvar assumed the special posture of respect as the Emperor’s image appeared on the monitor. As Risson had before, he said, “Rise, Fleetlord, and tell me what is on your mind.”
“It shall be done,” Atvar said once more, and summarized what he and Sam Yeager had had to say to each other. He finished, “What are we going to do, your Majesty? It strikes me that our choices are to grant the Big Uglies privileges they have not earned and do not deserve, or else to face a devastating war. Neither seems satisfactory.”
“Will the American Tosevites fight if we refuse to make these concessions?” the Emperor asked. “Are they as strong as their ambassador claims?” He didn’t sound the least bit self-conscious at using the old, old word to describe Sam Yeager’s status.
“As for your first question, your Majesty, they might,” Atvar answered. “Pride pushes them more strongly than it does us.” That he might find it harder to recognize the Race’s pride than the Big Uglies’ had never occurred to him. He went on, “As for the second question, how can we be certain where the Tosevites are these days?” He reminded the Emperor of the problem with communicating with Tosev 3.
Risson made the affirmative gesture. “Yes, I know the difficulty. It has always been next to impossible to administer Tosev 3 from Home. As you say, the lag is much more important there than with our other two worlds.”
Back when the Race first discovered the Big Uglies were much more advanced than anyone on Home had thought, the conquest fleet had dutifully radioed the news from Tosev 3 to Home. All those years later-more than twenty of Tosev 3’s turns around its star-detailed orders had started coming back from Home and the bureaucrats here. The only problem with them was, they were ridiculously unsuited to the situation as it had developed. Atvar had had the sense to ignore them. The males and females here had taken a lot longer to have the sense to stop sending them.
“What do you recommend now?” Risson persisted. “Do you believe making the concessions the American Tosevites demand is necessary to ensure peace? Do you believe it will ensure peace, or will it only encourage the Big Uglies to demand more from us later?”
“With the Big Uglies, that second possibility is never far from the surface,” Atvar said. “They have only those dull nails in place of fingerclaws, but they grab fiercely even so.”
“That has also been my impression,” the Emperor said. “If we reject their demands, would they truly fight on that account?”
“I am not certain. I wish I were. In the short run, I am inclined to doubt it. But they would surely arm themselves more powerfully. They would build more starships. We might decide on a preventive war against them. There is no certainty that war would succeed now. The longer we wait, the less our likelihood of victory. That, I would say, is certain.”
Risson hissed unhappily. “You are telling me our best choice would be to order all-out war against them now?”
Our best choice would have been to order all-out war against them as soon as the first round of fighting stopped, Atvar thought grimly. But he couldn’t have done that. It might have left Tosev 3 uninhabitable, and the colonization fleet was on the way.
After muttering Straha’s name under his breath, he said, “When it comes to dealing with the wild Big Uglies, your Majesty, there are no good choices. We have to thread our way through the bad and try to avoid the worst.”
“I see,” the Emperor said. “I always saw, but the coming of this starship has poked my snout in it more strongly than ever.” He paused. “Sam Yeager
struck me as being a reasonable individual.”
“Oh, he is,” Atvar agreed. “But he has his duty, which is to represent his not-empire, and he does that quite well. When you consider that he also views the world from an alien perspective, dealing with him becomes all the more difficult.”
“An alien perspective,” Risson echoed. “We are not used to that. Sam Yeager speaks our language well. He adapted to the ceremonial of the audience as well as a citizen of the Empire could have done.”
“Truth. I was proud to be his sponsor. I do not say he is unintelligent-on the contrary,” Atvar said. “But he is different. His differences are to some degree disguised when he speaks our language. The assumptions behind his thoughts are not assumptions we would make. We believe otherwise at our peril.”
“What are we going to do? Can we annihilate the independent Big Uglies even if we want to?” Risson asked.
