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queried, challenged, the object of rumor and the subject of speculation, before long he found himself regretting that he had ever tried to make a single credit off his unsought relationship with the dead alien poet. Harried and harassed by a pitiless media and a bastard-loving populace, he died sooner than he should have, ennobled by a public whose historical appetite for falsely inculcated minor deities verged on the unbounded. His funeral was a sumptuous, splendid affair, trideed all over the planet as well as to all human and thranx-settled worlds. He would have decried the waste of money.

The monument they placed above his coffin, at least, was something big.

The thranx were less ingenuous. Forced by its exposure to accept on its merits the work of a monstrously antisocial artist who normally would have been resolutely ignored, the highly conservative thranx performance establishment proved unable to repudiate its worth. The power and passion with which the deceased Desvendapur had endowed his compositions would not be denied.

So it was that Cheelo Montoya, who did not want it, was forced to endure the fame that the renegade poet Desvendapur had sought. Offered a shocking amount for his memoirs, he had laboriously transcribed them for the media with the help of a small army of ghost writers. As he told it, the tale of his encounter and relationship with the renegade thranx artist took on a glamorous, heroic mien. Poetic, even, so that while later generations knew that a murderer and a poet were responsible for the forced, accelerated pace of human-thranx contact, the line became blurred as to who was which.

With tentative, cultivated, ceremonial contact shattered by the unscheduled revelations, relations between the species were advanced by perhaps half a century in spite of, and not because of, the exertions of well-meaning, hard-working, professional emissaries. There was precedent. History is often fashioned by insignificant individuals intent on matters of petty personal concern who have motives entirely irrelevant to carefully planned posterity. It was just as well.

Had humankind contacted the next intelligent race they encountered prior to formalizing relations with the thranx, the Commonwealth might very well never have come into existence. As for the duplicitous AAnn, their upset verged on outrage as they saw their traditional competitors for habitable worlds forge an ever-deepening relationship with the militarily strong but mentally unpredictable humans. Bereft of stratagems for countering the seemingly inevitable alliance, the government of the emperor sought the advice of any who might have an efficacious solution to propound.

As it happened, Lord Huudra Ap and Baron Keekil YN stood ready to supply one.

NEXT—DIRGE

Don’t miss the second book in the Founding of the Commonwealth series:

DIRGE

by Alan Dean Foster

Published by Del Rey books.

Look for it at your local bookstore.

For an exciting preview

please read on….

Surrounded by members of the Chagos’s staff, Burgess was staring intently at the tridee. Magnification was visual, not schematic, so he was able to observe the craft that had just joined them in orbit in all its alien glory. It was an impressive ship, at least twice the size of the Chagos. While the prevalent configuration was similar to that of the Chagos and all other vessels equipped with the universal variant of the KK-drive, its design and execution differed in a multitude of significant respects.

“Not ours,” one of the techs seated nearby murmured unnecessarily.

“Not thranx, either,” the first officer added. “Unless they’ve been hiding something from us. Could it be one of those AAnn ships the thranx are always trying to warn us about?”

Burgess looked doubtful. “I’ve seen the AAnn schematics the thranx have provided. This design is much too sleek. Could it be Quillp?” Burgess longed for expertise in an area his crew, through no fault of their own, did not possess.

“I don’t think so, Captain.” Though far from positive, the first officer felt secure in hazarding