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CHAPTER THREE

Looking north from Lookout Mountain, the Front Range of the Rockies extended into infinity, curving away into the distant haze. To the right, the Great Plains stretched eastward into the same haze, which was thicker where Denver lay under its characteristic smog. But to the left, the remoter ranges climbed into realms of crystalline clarity, range piled atop snow-capped range into the uttermost west.

Svyatog'Korth liked this view for its sheer exoticism. His homeworld of Harath-Asor was older and more geologically mature than this one. It had ceased to have scenery like this long before his colonizing ancestors had arrived. Its worn-down mountains were lower than this, despite its lesser gravity, and their foothills merged insensibly into the lowland plains with their sluggishly flowing rivers.

But it was time to stop sightseeing. Svyatog gave the low whistling that was the equivalent of a human sigh and severed the connection which was feeding these sensory impressions directly into his brain. He removed the headpiece of open latticework and was back in the physical actuality of his office, gazing through the transparency at a quite different landscape.

No question about it, this eastern part of the continent had a more homelike aspect, for all the oddness of its vegetation, whose green lacked the proper bluish undertone. At the present season of the planet's year, the coloration was even odder: reddish or golden browns which had caused the first Lokaron observers to wonder if the local plant life was infected with some disease. Westward, ghostly bluish in the distance, rose the gently rounded mountains of the Shenandoah National Park, whose northernmost end overlooked this political subdivision called Fauquier County, Virginia. (Svyatog prided himself on his ability to remember all this unpronounceable native gibberish without calling on the database implanted in his skull, which could have fed the names directly to his optic nerve as visible symbols.)

Had the local rulers had their way, the Enclave would have been located in the region Svyatog had just been virtually touring, or one even more remote from the continent's population centers. Gev-Tizath, whose explorers had first happened onto this system, probably would have gone along; the Tizathon, while basically fine fellows, tended to be altogether too accommodating. But Gev-Harath (Svyatog unconsciously swelled a bit with pride in belonging to the richest, most powerful gevah of them all) had more experience in dealing with natives, and understood the necessity of firmness. Its representatives had insisted on a location close to the capital city. But they'd permitted a face-saving concession. There would be no intrusive alien presence among the teeming urban multitudes. Rather, the Enclave would be in a rural area, a short air-car hop from the capital yet out of sight of all but a few. Thus the corrupting effect on the common people's belief systems would be minimized. (Natives were funny that way.)

A message appeared, the angular characters seemingly floating in midair a few inches in front of his face. Yes, it was time. He stood up and left his office, proceeding along an airy, sunlit passageway past occasional others who worked here in the Hov-Korth building. He could have resumed the light openwork helmet and entered into a shared virtual-reality hookup with Huruva'Strigak. But it wasn't far, and the Harathon government's resident commissioner was something of a traditionalist. That traditionalism was reflected in his office's appointments, and in the courtesy with which he rose to greet the new arrival.

As well he might, Svyatog told himself. As chief factor of Hov-Korth—the preeminent hovah, or merchant house, operating on this entire segment of the wave front of Lokaron expansion—Svyatog was as important as Huruva, despite the latter's official status. After all, he thought, it's the hovahon—especially Hov-Korth—that provide the revenue which pays the government's expenses . . . including Huruva's salary. It was no accident that the commissioner's office was here in this tower, where Hov-Korth had graciously placed a suite at his disposal.

Nevertheless, Svyatog reciprocated the administrator's courtesy. Huruva and his like were indispensable, if only as mediators among the hovahon. Industrial feudalism had been tried. . . . Svyatog's mind recoiled in distaste from what he'd once learned in history classes.

"Thank you for coming, Factor," Huruva said as they settled into their loungers. "May I offer you refreshment? Some coffee, perhaps? With a drop of something to give it an edge."

"With pleasure." Like most Lokaron, Svyatog had taken to the mildly stimulating local beverage; it had become a profitable item of the luxury trade. But, also like most, he preferred it with a slug of voleg. (Alcohol, like caffeine, affected Lokaron and human nervous systems similarly.) Some insisted the native brandy served just as well as voleg. The Rogovon were especially vocal on that point . . . but what could one expect of barbarians like them?

Huruva touched a signaling device, and a steward entered with a tray. The servitor was a Tharthacharon, standing slenderly erect on four legs but with an upright torso whose shoulders provided leverage for the two arms. The top of its head rose to a height shorter than the human average and therefore considerably shorter than the Lokaron. It was covered with thin brownish fur, in which feature it resembled this planet's higher animals but which made it even more exotic in Lokaron eyes. Huruva had brought it from his last posting, which had been on its homeworld. Traditionalism again. The commissioner was old money, and regarded the use of robotic devices for domestic service as . . . as . . . The useful local word tacky came to mind.

Svyatog had been both amazed and amused by some of the imaginary aliens that populated this planet's science fiction. The humans were sophisticated enough to realize life might arise on other worlds by nonsupernatural evolutionary processes. But they hadn't grasped the corollary that evolution tended toward similar basic shapes for life-forms occupying similar ecological niches. For excellent reasons, most higher animals were bilaterally symmetrical quadrupeds; hexapods like the Tharthacharon ancestors were a distinct minority. And there was only one logical way to liberate one of a quadruped's pairs of limbs for tool using. So the Lokaron, like humans, were erect bipeds, not many-tentacled blobs. Some humans had been bitterly disappointed.

The servant withdrew, and Svyatog and Huruva sipped in pleasurable silence for a few moments. Then the commissioner set his cup down with an air of getting to business. "Now, then, Svyatog, I asked you to come here today because I need your advice. Not just as the representative of Hov-Korth, but also as a friend—a friend whose counsel has always proven sagacious."

"I do what I can," Svyatog said graciously. He actually did like Huruva, for all the latter's tendency toward stuffiness. And promoting the success of a commissioner representing Gev-Harath's present governing coalition, in which Hov-Korth was the dominant member, was part of his job. "How can I be of assistance?"

"I need your advice," Huruva repeated, "on how best to forestall a potentially grave development. You see, it's come to my attention that there is a danger of the natives learning that we are not a single, monolithic political entity."

Svyatog had been expecting some question involving interhovah protocol, or some minor personnel matter. So Huruva's words caught him flat-footed. They implied a breach of a principle so fundamental to the Lokaron interaction with this planet's natives that any departure from it had become unthinkable.

When the explorers from Gev-Tizath had turned up this system, they'd realized at once that they had something special on their hands. Tool-using non-Lokaron races were no great novelty. But bronze-working had represented the highest technology, and city-states the highest sociopolitical organization, yet encountered . . . unless one counted the occasional crumbling ruins on certain planets where something more advanced had once existed. Here was a living civilization—admittedly not in the best of health at present—whose attainments bore comparison with those of the Lokaron homeworld merely a century or so before it had achieved interstellar flight. A civilization that could provide a market for Lokaron technology and offer more than curios and rare minerals in exchange.

But the Tizathon had known better than to hope they could keep the discovery to themselves. Their gevah—young and relatively unimportant, for all its brash expansionism—was a minor player even in this region. The great powers had begun to gather, like hzuthon circling around a lesser predator and its kill. So the Tizathon had proposed that the marvelously promising new system be open to all four of the powers active in the region: themselves, Gev-Lokarath, Gev-Rogov and, of course, ubiquitous Gev-Harath. They'd also proposed that all four present a united front, not even revealing to the natives that they were separate sovereignties. The others had agreed, partly because the arrangement defused a potential bombshell of intergevah rivalry, and partly because nobody wanted to see the natives bargaining the prices of Lokaron goods downward by soliciting competing bids from competing gevahon. (The humans weren't as stupid as they looked.) And there was enough potential business here for everybody, wasn't there?

So Svyatog's response was the natural one. "Commissioner, I must have misunderstood you—"

"No, you didn't," Huruva cut in with uncharacteristic bluntness.

"But, Commissioner," Svyatog temporized, "surely there can't be any danger of the natives seeing through the deception. After all, it's one which they're predisposed to believe. Their science fiction always portrays technologically advanced aliens as being politically unified. And it's only natural that they should think this way." Svyatog belatedly recalled that Huruva did not share his own in-depth knowledge of the local history, so he elaborated, carefully skirting the edges of being patronizing. "A hundred-and-twenty-odd local years ago, when their `First World War' broke out, the natives began to experience warfare at the levels of intensity the Industrial Revolution permitted. At the same time, they displayed a truly awe-inspiring incompetence at managing the violence they'd suddenly acquired an unprecedented capacity for inflicting on themselves. The results were as one might expect. They've never really gotten over it. So they've come to think any higher civilization must have a unitary state, capable of enforcing peace, or else it would have destroyed itself. We've merely been telling them what they want to hear . . . or, more accurately, what they expect to hear. Even if they stumbled onto evidence of the actual state of affairs, they'd rationalize it away."

"No doubt," Huruva agreed. "But the danger of which I speak isn't the natives ferreting out the truth by their own efforts. Rather, I have reason to believe that . . . certain parties among us may be leaking the information to their native contacts."

"Gev-Rogov," Svyatog stated rather than asked.

Huruva said nothing, shrinking from undiplomatic bluntness. But his expression was answer enough.

As he looked across the desk at Huruva, Svyatog suddenly saw the commissioner in a different light: not simply as a Lokar with certain individual characteristics (average height, distinguished looking if a little out of shape) and the basic features they all shared in common (a crestlike ridge running from back to front of the head, ending just above the practically lipless mouth, where it formed the equivalent of a human's nasal bridge; large, elaborately convoluted ears; upward-slanted brow ridges over slit-pupiled eyes that ranged from amber to pale yellow), but as a fellow member of Gev-Harath. One normally took one's own ethnic characteristics for granted. But the thought of the Rogovon brought them into focus. Huruva's hairless skin was a good Harathon shade of blue, and he had the right kind of slender body build, and. . .

While browsing among this world's scientific speculations, Svyatog had encountered the concept of terraforming. The Lokaron had never for a moment considered such a hideously expensive idea as altering a world for colonization, given the relatively trivial cost of altering the colonists themselves. Out of the genetically engineered subspecies planted on various worlds, the gevahon of today had grown. And Lokaron expansion had entered a second phase, for many of the gevahon were forging outward from the worlds they'd settled, seeking still newer frontiers as outlets for their tradition of pioneering. The now-variegated Lokaron species was pushing outward in all directions, filling a sphere of space that was now becoming oblate as its top and bottom came up against the limits of the galactic disc. The expansionist gevahon jostled for advantage, sometimes warring with each other. But all were conscious of their common Lokaron heritage, of belonging to the only known race ever to have discovered the secret of interstellar flight.

Still . . . as Svyatog thought of the Rogovon, a single emotional reaction rose uppermost in his mind: ugly!

He forced the feeling down. Think with your brain, not with your gut, he ordered himself. "Commissioner, I'll grant you that the Rogovon resent Gev-Harath's primacy, and are constantly scheming to undermine us—"

"They are rather tiresome about it," Huruva put in.

"—but I can't believe they'd do anything that might cause our united front to come unraveled. It benefits everybody's business."

"Ordinarily, your point would be well taken," Huruva conceded in his ponderous way. "Unfortunately, I have reason to believe that Gev-Rogov is no longer interested in the ordinary conduct of business."

A grim silence fell. What the commissioner was referring to had always been a possibility, the Rogovon being what they were. But Svyatog had hoped it could be avoided. Everything's been going so well, his rather plaintive thought ran. Why would anyone want to spoil it?

But, then, foreigners will be foreigners.

He was about to speak when Huruva's communicator buzzed for attention. The commissioner activated it and spoke irritably. "I gave instructions I was not to be disturbed except for an emergency."

His confidential secretary—Lokaron, of course—looked out of the screen, apologetic but unabashed. "I'm afraid this falls into that category, sir. A trade delegation in the local city of New York has been attacked. A Harathon delegate was killed."

Svyatog leaned hastily forward into the pickup. "Is this general knowledge?"

The secretary knew him by sight. "It could hardly be suppressed."

Svyatog turned heavily toward Huruva. "I believe, Commissioner, that a general meeting must be called."

At times like these, Huruva's traditionalism was appropriate. Virtual reality was out of the question for a conclave of mutually distrustful parties. So all the Enclave residents who counted packed their physical bodies into the seldom-used auditorium.

Behind a raised table at one end of the hall sat the four resident commissioners of the gevahon represented here. All were equal by diplomatic fiction, though everyone recognized that Huruva'Strigak of Gev-Harath was primus inter pares. They were dressed formally, with open-fronted sleeveless robes over the double-breasted, open-necked tunics that were ordinary business dress.

Facing them was a crowd of merchants belonging to various hovahon. Sitting in the front row as befitted Hov-Korth's stature, Svyatog could feel as well as hear the unease behind him. The merchants were behaving pretty much as per stereotype—voluble Lokarathon, stolid Rogovon, boisterous Tizathon, and (Svyatog told himself) steady, imperturbable Harathon. But all were worried and angry. Many had been availing themselves of the nearby wet bar.

Huruva called the meeting to order and set forth the facts, thus defusing the wilder rumors. "And now," he concluded, "we must decide on our course of action in response to this outrage. All views will be heard; but inasmuch as this involves diplomatic relations with the local rulers, it is ultimately a governmental decision. I therefore ask that the hovah representatives restrain their understandable indignation until after the resident commissioners have spoken."

Against a low grumbling sound from the floor, Valtu'Trovon motioned to be recognized, rubbing the cilia that grew along his cranial crest much as a human might have cleared his throat. Huruva spoke formally. "We will hear the resident commissioner for Gev-Rogov."

Valtu, descended from ancestors who'd been genetically modified for a higher-gravity planet than the original Lokaron world, was short, thick and squatty. (Not unlike the humans, come to think of it, Svyatog reflected. But the humans were supposed to look that way.) His green skin was an unintended concomitant of the Rogovon genotype, as was the basso voice that now filled the auditorium.

"Am I correct in gathering," he addressed Huruva, "that the attack was a professionally mounted assassination?"

"That is believed to be the case. Local law enforcement could doubtless have dealt with an angry mob of unarmed civilians."

"In that event," Valtu rumbled, "our course is clear. We should retaliate immediately, targeting their capital city with kinetic strikes from orbit. Afterwards, we should present them with a deadline, by which they must turn over the perpetrators to us, along with an indemnity, or else face further punishment."

Despite Huruva's injunction, a hubbub of talk arose, some of it aghast but much of it approving, in certain cases vociferously so. The Tizathon resident commissioner gestured to Huruva and was recognized.

Jornath'Gorog at least looked right. Gev-Tizath was a secondary colony, sprung from Gev-Harath, and the colonists had required little modification. Relations between parent and child had had their ups and downs, but they were currently allies. Belonging to essentially the same subspecies doubtless helped. Jornath's blue skin was now dark with anger. "This is outrageous! We don't know for certain that the local government was implicated in the attack. It could have been some very well-equipped and well-led renegade group, or some other human government, or—"

Valtu interrupted him rudely. "Whether the local rulers were behind the attack or not is unimportant. Even if they weren't, they're in the best position to find out who was."

"But we can't use mass violence against them before even presenting our demands!"

"Violence is the only thing natives are capable of understanding!" Valtu turned dismissively away from Jornath and faced Huruva. "I recognize that this is primarily a matter for Gev-Harath, inasmuch as the victim was Harathon. Nevertheless, such terrorism constitutes a threat to all Lokaron on this planet. Gev-Rogov will be honored to lend whatever assistance we can in any military response you decide to undertake."

The implication couldn't have been much clearer. Gev-Harath normally maintained the preponderant military force in orbit overhead. The Tizathon and Lokarathon contingents were mere tokens—as the Rogovon one had been until recently, when one of their deadly Rogusharath-class strike cruisers had arrived. It was enough to place their military presence in a class of its own, for it outclassed the largest single Harathon ship on hand. It had, however, avoided the provocative gesture of taking up low Earth orbit. Instead, it orbited in the leading-Trojan position of Earth's moon, ostensibly to conduct certain training exercises in private.

There were a few more exclamations of approval from the floor, from the duller or more drunken individuals present. Svyatog ignored them, as he watched Huruva glare at Valtu. The commissioner had clearly decided his earlier suspicions had been correct: the Rogovon wanted the standing arrangement on this planet to break down, and be replaced by an outright annexation in which they had a share. And, Svyatog reluctantly found himself concluding, Huruva is right.

There were things besides their appearance that he found unpleasant about the Rogovon. Long in a state of arrested sociological development as they'd struggled to tame a harsh environment, they still had a centralized government that seemed to most Lokaron an archaic survival—as did the nakedly militaristic quality of their expansionism. They'd been pariahs until they'd adopted civilized commercial practices. But it's only skin-deep, Svyatog thought. Their hovahon are little more than disguised government agencies. They exist at the government's sufferance, rather than the other way around. Unnatural!

But however anomalous and even distasteful its system might be, Gev-Rogov was too big to ignore. Gev-Harath was even bigger, and far richer, but to stay in first place militarily it found itself forced into expenditures that elicited howls of anguish from the hovahon that footed the bills.

Huruva was still glaring in silence when a rather supercilious voice broke the tension. "Before we rush to a decision," said Branath'Fereg, the resident commissioner for Gev-Lokarath, "I, for one, would like more information on the Americahon—excuse me, American—power structure. I suggest we solicit the input of those with the best sources of information on local conditions." He inclined his head toward Svyatog.

Svyatog returned the gesture. Branath's suggestion was a reasonable one. The military was the province of the gevah governments—indeed, it was perhaps the primary function for which the hovahon had set them up. But the megacorporations insisted on keeping for themselves the business of intelligence gathering. They were too jealous of their many secrets to be willing to entrust anyone else with that particular capability. Hov-Korth, as the biggest operation here, was careful to be the best informed. And, in addition to his hovah's intelligence apparatus, Svyatog had a carefully guarded private source.

Still, Svyatog couldn't help wishing Huruva had solicited his help in this matter, rather than letting Branath take the lead. He didn't altogether trust the Lokarathon commissioner . . . or any of the Lokarathon, come to that. Their gevah was unique in not being descended from a colony, for it comprised the original Lokaron home system and its immediate interstellar environs. They had never entirely gotten over the colonial subspecies' effrontery in going their own ways. They've paid a price for their affectations, Svyatog told himself. They've been insisting so long that the home system is the only place where it's possible to lead a truly civilized life that by now they believe it themselves. It's hampered them in interstellar competition almost as much as their location, as far from the frontiers as you can get. These thoughts ran through his mind as he looked at Branath's rather satiny bluish-white skin and narrow features—the true Lokaron genotype, the Lokarathon smugly asserted, to the others' intense irritation. Indeed, the other gevahon denied Gev-Lokarath's pretensions almost as assiduously as they copied its fads and fashions.

Not that Svyatog was prejudiced. He prided himself on his fearlessly enlightened views. He didn't even mind the fact that Branath was a primary male, in accordance with Gev-Lokarath's abandonment of traditional gender roles. Even Gev-Harath was tending in that direction.

"I'll do my best to help, Commissioner," Svyatog said, then paused to gather his thoughts. "The local power structure is difficult to make sense of. By our standards, it's arcane: a centralized, self-perpetuating caste of career functionaries, responsible to no one, insensately hostile to any social institutions that interpose themselves between the individual and the government. In fact, they lay contributions directly on individuals—taxation, they call it." A mutter of incredulous distaste ran around the room. "It's these functionaries we've always dealt with—layers and layers of them. They all claim to be working for the President."

"The what?" Recollection awoke in Branath's face. "Oh, yes, I remember now: the high priest."

"Not precisely, Commissioner. But it's true that he's merely a figurehead. The real ruler is an entity called the Central Committee—a group, not an individual. The functionaries are coy about it, insisting when pressed that it isn't part of the government. This seems to be accurate; it just tells the government what to do."

"Incredible," Valtu muttered. Never noted for his sense of humor, he'd completely missed the dig hidden in Svyatog's remarks about centralization. And, to be fair, not even Gev-Rogov really approached the humans' oppressive, cumbersome, labyrinthine farrago of a government

"If this Central Committee is so shadowy," Branath inquired with his Lokarathon air of faint superiority, "are you certain it exists?"

"Quite certain, Commissioner." Svyatog forebore to reveal the special source of information that enabled him to be so certain. Instead, he gave an explanation that was, as far as it went, factual. "You see, we've learned that nine local years ago the reigning President was opposed to signing the trade treaties with us. Publicly opposed, in defiance of custom. But the Central Committee went ahead anyway."

"Why?" inquired Jornath.

"At first, it was simple realism: they'd learned they couldn't resist us militarily, and generations of science fiction had filled their heads with images of rapacious, all-destructive monsters from space, avid for their females—"

"Whatever for?" Jornath was genuinely puzzled.

"Er . . . never mind. At any rate, they signed. And since then, we've become one of the pillars of their power. As the sole organ through which we deal with Earth, they control the flow of modern technology, not only for their own people but for the whole planet. And they use for their own purposes some of the items they've outlawed for everyone else." The rapid-fire clicking sound of Lokaron laughter ran around the room. "The point is, the real rulers here have no interest in antagonizing us. It is my considered judgment that neither they nor anyone allied with them were behind this terroristic act."

"Then who was?" growled Valtu.

"Presumably some group of socially marginal xenophobic fanatics, outside the government and therefore lacking the capability to threaten us here in the Enclave."

Valtu continued to glare, but he said nothing, and a sound of relief rose from the majority. Jornath, however, looked worried. "But what about the human semiskilled workers you Harathon have employed? What if some of them are sympathetic to this terrorist group you're postulating? Couldn't they constitute a . . . a . . . ?"

Fifth column, Svyatog recalled from his studies of the idiom-rich local language. But Huruva spoke up, apparently deciding it was time to reassert his control of the meeting. "The beings to whom you refer are carefully screened, and kept under equally careful surveillance—in both cases, by means beyond their civilization's understanding."

Svyatog frowned at that last. He wasn't so sure about the humans' inability to visualize the capabilities of the technologies involved. In fact, for reasons he couldn't reveal, he knew Huruva was indulging in wishful thinking. We're so used to equating "non-Lokaron" with "primitive" that we haven't yet adjusted to what we're dealing with here. The humans are just advanced enough to be able to accept the notion of a still more advanced civilization. They know our technology isn't magic, even if they can't duplicate it. But Huruva spoke on, in tones intended to bring the meeting to a close.

"For the present, our security will be tightened. In particular, the resident human employees will be subjected to added restrictions. In the meantime—tomorrow, in fact—I will communicate with our human contacts in their State Department and demand a meeting with high-level officials. Rest assured, there will be reparations. And now, if there is nothing further, the meeting is adjourned."

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Framed