Dirge - Alan Dean Foster [35]
Indicating confusion, Joshumabad turned to Nilwengerex for clarification. “What is she talking about?”
“These humans,” the specialist informed him. “They are indeed technologically advanced. Even a cursory study of their history shows that they have overcome extraordinary odds and exceptional difficulties to reach the place where they are today, having successfully preserved their own world while settling many others. In spite of this, what the senior female says is indisputable. One does not have to be a qualified xenologist to see it.”
“See what?” Joshumabad demanded impatiently.
Nilwengerex regarded the visitor quietly. “That they are not happy.”
6
Minister Saluafata was not nervous about meeting his Pitarian counterpart. Having on occasion dealt with the eminently reasonable yet harrowingly grotesque-looking thranx, he anticipated no difficulty in sitting down at the table with one or more nonhumans who resembled tridee luminaries more than visiting aliens. He looked forward to the forthcoming interaction. Only the outcome concerned him.
This was to be no ordinary meeting. Much more was at stake today than superficial agreements on cultural exchange or travel rights. Such matters could be, and were being, handled by assistant ministers and second-echelon diplomats. Only for something as important as this was someone of Saluafata’s stature personally involved.
That stature extended to his physical as well as mental proportions. Though not particularly rangy, the minister was huge. A legacy of his chiefly forefathers, he was almost as wide as he was tall, and very little of it was fat. A walking door plug, some of his colleagues and underlings had called him. More adept at plugging crises than doorways, Saluafata was used to disarming initially intimidated adversaries with a smile as wide as the lagoon that framed his island home. When that failed to soothe nervous opposites, a song or two sung in his startlingly accomplished falsetto inevitably produced grins and delighted laughter.
Like a whale that had been subjected to reverse evolution and had reclaimed its hind legs, he settled himself into the chair at one end of the table. His personal secretary Ymir sat down on his left while the prim and always correct second undersecretary for Extraterrestrial Affairs, Mandan HoOdam, assumed the empty seat on his right. Carafes of chilled water were positioned in front of the delegates, along with small cobalt crystal bowls of assorted nuts. The Pitarians, it had been learned, had developed a liking for such terrestrial food.
A guard stood at either end of the room. Neither of them carried visible weapons—the operative word, Saluafata knew, being visible. The meeting place was a cheerful hemisphere with a single wide window that overlooked the placid tropical sea beyond. Set high on a Balinese hillside, the carefree beaches of Sanur were visible in the distance. They were filled with visitors cavorting in the warm waters, none of whom were aware of the somber significance of the meeting that was about to take place. All but a few were employed by the planetary government in the service of extraterrestrial relations. Overdeveloped Bali had long since ceased to be a stopping point for gallivanting tourists.
The entire facility needed to be moved, Saluafata mused. With the increase in deep space exploration and expansion, it had outgrown the available site. Nor did he suspect that he was the only diplomat or worker who felt uneasy laboring in the shadow of the periodically active volcanoes that dominated the island and this part of the world. Already, bureaus and agencies in need of additional room were being shifted southward, to the east coast of the southern continent. There was a surplus of flat, empty land there, and an enormous shuttleport