Dirge - Alan Dean Foster [139]
How awful for a noble Pitar to have to live in a cosmos swarming with lesser humans and thranx, Quillp and AAnn, Unop-Patha and other debased species. But having confined themselves to their two perfect worlds, they could not begin to cleanse their portion of the galaxy until they had significantly increased their numerical strength. It was decided that a naïve, biologically similar humankind would unknowingly provide the means. And might have, had not a single sullen and solitary human succeeded in escaping the holocaust with proof of what had taken place.
The armada was disbanded, its constituent vessels returning to Earth or to their respective colony worlds. The vast majority of surviving stingships were decommissioned—but not all. Mindful of the expanding empire of the AAnn, who had watched the conflict with the Pitar with pitiless, impenitent interest, an active fleet and its buttressing reserve was maintained. The thranx returned to their own interests.
Following an initial outpouring of human gratitude for the insectoids’ assistance in defeating the Pitar, there came a gradual return to normalcy, to the business of living lives and devoting time to more insular concerns. Colonies continued to expand, and potential colonies continued to develop. Worlds such as Wolophon III and Amropolus that technically fell within the human sphere of exploration but were too redolent of greenhouse effect for human comfort were conceded to the busy thranx, while humankind’s chitinous friends willingly turned over to the more cold-tolerant bipeds information on planets they found too frigid to conveniently accommodate their kind. Given an extensive technological effort, each species could colonize the other’s preferred worlds, of course, but the mutual trade-off in climatological comfort zones made infinitely more sense. Interstellar distances being what they were, there was no real perception of one species intruding on the space of another.
The AAnn watched these developments unhappily. Unable to challenge the maturing human-thranx axis directly, they pondered less confrontational means of impeding the resolution of a deeper, stronger alliance. There were many ways of doing this, at which the insidiously artful AAnn were masters. Their advantage lay in the fact that a great many humans and thranx remained ultimately suspicious of one another, and of any expansion of intimate contact.
With a little luck, and much shrewd manipulation of opportune circumstances, sagacious AAnn nobles and their skillful xenologists felt it might even be possible to bring both transient allies into open conflict with one another.
The AAnn set to work.
By Alan Dean Foster
Published by The Random House Publishing Group:
THE BLACK HOLE
CACHALOT
DARK STAR
THE METROGNOME AND OTHER STORIES
MIDWORLD
NOR CRYSTAL TEARS
SENTENCED TO PRISM
SPLINTER OF THE MIND’S EYE
STAR TREK® LOGS ONE–TEN
VOYAGE TO THE CITY OF THE DEAD
…WHO NEEDS ENEMIES?
WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE…
MAD AMOS
THE HOWLING STONES
PARALLELITIES
IMPOSSIBLE PLACES
DROWNING WORLD
THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK
LOST AND FOUND
The Icerigger Trilogy:
ICERIGGER
MISSION TO MOULOKIN
THE DELUGE DRIVERS
The Adventures of Flinx of the Commonwealth:
FOR LOVE OF MOTHER-NOT
THE TAR-AIYM KRANG
ORPHAN STAR
THE END OF THE MATTER
BLOODHYPE
FLINX IN FLUX
MID-FLINX
REUNION
FLINX’S FOLLY
SLIDING SCALES
The Damned:
BOOK ONE: A CALL TO ARMS
BOOK TWO: THE FALSE MIRROR
BOOK THREE: THE SPOILS OF WAR
The Founding of the Commonwealth:
PHYLOGENESIS
DIRGE
DIUTURNITY’S DAWN
Praise for Alan Dean Foster’s Founding of the Commonwealth
PHYLOGENESIS
Book One
“Foster does a fine job with his misfit heroes and even with his minor characters (such as the reptilian Aann). He shows his usual mastery of narrative