The Expanse - J.M. Dillard [36]
Degra was but one of ten Xindi at the table. Beside him sat his aide, Mallora; the two were flanked on one side by a pair of reptilians, on the other by a pair of slow-moving, heavily furred marsupials. Between the former and latter, two insectoids sat, and a pair of aquatics undulated in a water-filled tank.
Externally, Xindi politics were complicated, with myriad parties separated according to species; ethnic tension was the rule, with different groups occasionally forming alliances in order to seize control from the others. Theoretically, most of the governments on the divided homeworld were republics.
True rulership, however, had always belonged to the sanctum. It had been thus for millennia, long before the emergence of representative governments; Degra’s position of power was a legacy from his ancestors. He had been groomed for it since childhood, as had all the others surrounding him.
And like the others, he had learned upon entering the sanctum to leave all racial tensions and preconceived ideas outside. Indeed, a sense of equality was encouraged here; for such reason, the table was round.
Things had certainly not been equal outside, in the Xindi world. From an evolutionary perspective, the aquatics had attained intelligence first—but not being land-based had led to theirs being a relatively peaceable society. They demanded a political voice only when the land-based races began to despoil their waters.
Degra’s race, with its primate ancestry, had been next to attain a very high degree of intelligence; it troubled him, for a reason he could not fathom, to discover that, of all the Xindi species, his resembled the people of Earth most closely.
The primates had, for eons, ruled most of the Xindi world; they had been ruthless in their oppression of the other land species, and in their dogma that the other races were inferior. Although they had, over the past few centuries, abandoned that belief (ostensibly, at least), they were still hated by the others, most notably the reptilians and the insectoids.
To date, Degra’s people still controlled most of the planet ... but the reptilian warrior class was rapidly gaining power, and the quickly reproducing insectoids had become the most populous group. Originally, Degra and most primate politicians had thought these things a tragedy; certainly, they could only lead to more racial wars of the sort that had nearly torn the planet apart. The oft-stated belief shared by the primates was that the reptilians (their intelligence having evolved from only their brain stems and basal ganglia) thought with their spinal cords ... and the insectoids, of course, didn’t think at all. And the marsupials ... well, the marsupials thought, all right; they thought about napping upside down in trees.
Now, with the threat of annihilation from Earth, Degra’s perspective had changed. He was grateful to the warriors for their willingness to sacrifice themselves; their ferocity in combat could now be put to good use.
In a way, he was even grateful to the people of Earth, for giving the Xindi a new group to hate. It was a most unifying experience. For a time, only the ten members of the sanctum had been privy to the information concerning the future destruction of the planet—but they voted, after lengthy discussion, to inform the entire population. At once, petty wars and local rioting stopped; even the notoriously skeptical insectoids put their support behind the anti-Earth efforts, and presented lavish donations to the little reptilians orphaned by their warrior-father, who had manned the probe.
Today, however, the atmosphere in the sanctum was charged with conflict. Degra, made wise by his fifty journeys around his homeworld