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"So you admire the state," Longshot said. "So do I. But I'm not making demands of people who never did me or my kind any harm."
"It is for the superior to arrange the affairs of the inferior. I only choose favorites to improve."
"Leave if all you want to do is argue and waste my beauty sleep," Duvalier said. "I don't have time for this."
"Quit arguing with the thing; it gets us nowhere," Valentine said. "Let's hear it, then."
"That Kentucky be placed under our protection. We will not take one life from your Alliance lands. Not one. No tribute, no flesh of worm or cow or goat-all we will ask is that it remain strictly neutral in the contest between civilization and progress on one side, and atavism and greed on the other."
"Civilization and progress-" Frat began.
"Oh, you only lack the experience of years, boy."
"You lack the experience of who you should be calling boy," Frat said, reaching for his parang.
"Are we done here?" Valentine asked. "You're giving your offer to the wrong people."
"Mankind has always been a herd. Well, two herds. The larger of the two are the dullards, the grotty masses with their simple pursuits of sex and drink and sport. They are easy to keep and thrive with a minimum of animal husbandry. But among you there is an elite, who appreciate art and culture. It's only the passions of youth that seek the physical gratification rather than the mental that has kept your race from progressing out of its current stage. A little more selective breeding and you would have made the leap to thought-energy manipulation on your own. We will fulfill that potential. But we have the time to see it through. Give us a few more generations."
"Baloney," Valentine said.
"You've been among our better vanguards of the new Homo sapiens lux, David Valentine. Have you not seen it with your own eyes?"
Valentine thought of Fran Paoli-no, that made him too uncomfortable. What about the officers Solon collected? Even at the time Valentine admired them. Intelligent, energetic, committed, organized. Cooperative as ants, brilliant as artists-they came so close to establishing their order in rebellious territory captured only a few months before. . . .
Yes, Valentine had admired them.
How had Valentine's memory latched onto Consul Solon's team so quickly? He'd spent years in the Kurian Zone, and his more recent time with, say, Pyp's Flying Circus was more pleasant to consider. Did the Kurian know what mental cards he was holding? Captain Mantilla had said that one's opponents were almost too eager to give the game away, seek the most comfortable mental path.
Was the Kurian putting a few illuminated markers on that path?
"We would almost take it to be universal," Jack in the Box continued. "On the Grog's world they became two distinct races, the golden and the gray, in their terms."
"Eloi and Morlocks," Chieftain said. "Only you feed on both."
"Does the same apply to your Dau'wa?" Valentine asked, using the old Lifeweaver name for the renegades who practiced vampirism.
"On Kur, the weak and the stupid were consumed long ago," Jack in the Box answered. "The most resourceful of us survived. Then they went after each other. But it provided the necessary lessons. We are all sprigs of a few hardy family trees, tested and tested again."
"Tested or twisted?" Valentine asked.
Who are you, Jack? Some Kurian who came off worse in a contest, looking for a safe place to hide? Valentine played music in his mind as he listened, mental chaff against the Kurian exploring his mind. Childhood nursery rhymes worked well, like the one employed by the Bears in the northeast to calm themselves down. The itsy-bitsy spider . . .
"Where would you put your tower?" Duvalier asked.
"We had in mind the Lincoln birthplace. The architecture is pleasing, the location central yet out of the way. It would suit us."
"How many 'us' would that be?"
"We are the only one. For now. But if the time comes, I may have others of my kind take refuge with me. The deal would remain the same. All we ask is to be left alone and for this land to remain neutral."
"Is there an 'or else' attached?"
"There always is. We have intimations of what our brethren are planning. Only my intervention can stop the whirlwind that is about to sweep across this land."
"This isn't for us to decide," Valentine said. "You need to speak to the Kentuckians."
"Events are not altogether in my control, either. I came to you in the hope that you would have that apostate who goes by the name Brother Mark persuade them into wisdom rather than folly. Our brethren are disappointed in the foolish gesture your cousins made in Owensboro. Tell your Brother Mark that Gall has been specified for Kentucky."
