Striking the Balance

“I have no answers to these questions, either,” Atvar said. Unlike the Polish army, he at least sensed the possibility of change. It frightened him even more than it had frightened the pious Jews who tried to turn their backs on Voltaire and Darwin and Marx, Edison and Krupp and the Wright brothers. The fleetlord went on, “I have to be certain this world will be intact and ready for settlement by the males and females of the colonization fleet.”

“The question you must ask yourself, Exalted Fleetlord,” Moishe said, “is whether you would sooner have part of the world ready for settlement than all of it in ruins.”

“Truth,” Atvar said. “But there is also another question: if we let you Tosevites retain part of the land surface of this world on your own terms now, for what will you use that base between now and the arrival of the colonization fleet? Do we end one war now but lay the eggs for another, larger one later? You are a Tosevite yourself; your people have done little but fight one war after another. How do you view this?”

Moishe supposed he should have been grateful the fleetlord was using him for a sounding board rather than simply disposing of him. Hewas grateful, but Atvar had given him another essentially unanswerable question. He said, “Sometimes war does lead to war. The last great war we fought, thirty years ago now it started, sowed the seeds for this one. But a different peace might have kept the new war from happening.”

“Might,” the fleetlord echoed unhappily. “I cannot affordmight. I must have certainty, and there is none on this world. Even you Big Uglies cannot come into concord here. Take this Poland where you lived, where Zolraag was provincelord. The Deutsche claim it because they had it when the Race came to Tosev 3. The SSSR claims half of it because of an agreement they say the Deutsche violated. And the local Tosevites claim it belongs to neither of these not-empires, but to them alone. If we leave this Poland place, to whom shall we in justice restore it?”

“Poland, Exalted Fleetlord, is a place I hope you do not leave,” Moishe said.

“Even though you did everything you could to undermine our presence there?” Atvar said. “You may have the egg, Moishe Russie, or you may have the hatchling. You may not have both.”

“I understand that,” Moishe said, “but Poland is a special case.”

“All cases on Tosev 3 are special-just ask the Big Uglies involved in them,” Atvar answered. “One more reason to hate this world.”

XVI

Vyacheslav Molotov gulped down yet another glass of iced tea, pausing halfway through to swallow a couple of salt tablets. The heat of Cairo was unbelievable, enervating, even deadly dangerous: one of his aides, an NKVD colonel named Serov, who spoke the Lizards’ language as fluently as any human being in the Soviet Union, had collapsed of heatstroke, and was now recovering in an air-conditioned hospital suite the English had set up to treat similarly afflicted folk of their own nation.

Neither the Semiramis Hotel, in which the Soviet delegation and other human diplomats were staying, nor Shepheard’s, in which the negotiations were being conducted, enjoyed the benefits of air-conditioning. Here, the Soviets kept enough fans going at all times to make paperweights mandatory to prevent a blizzard of documents from blowing around the suite. Even if it did move, the air the fans blew remained hot.

No fans blew during the negotiations. The Lizards, as Molotov had discovered to his dismay when he was first flown up to one of their spaceships to discuss the war with their fleetlord, reveled in heat. Before Colonel Serov was renderedhors de combat, he’d reported that the Lizards here continually talked about how fine the weather was-almost like their home, they said.

As far as Molotov was concerned, they were welcome to it.

He reached in the drawer and pulled out a dark blue necktie. As he fastened the collar button of his shirt, he allowed himself a small, martyred sigh: here in Cairo, he envied the Lizards their body paint. Knotting the tie, he reflected that he still had an advantage over most of his colleagues. His neck was thin, which let air circulate under his shirt. A lot of the Soviets were beefy types, with double chins and rolls of fat at their napes. For them, closed collar and cravat were even worse torment.

Just for a moment, he wondered how the USSR’s Lizard prisoners enjoyed the labor camps northeast of Leningrad and up in the northern reaches of Siberia. He wondered how they would enjoy them come February.

“As much as I enjoy Cairo now,” he murmured, checking in the dresser mirror to make sure the tie was straight. Satisfied, he put on his hat and went downstairs to wait for the Lizard vehicle that would take him to today’s negotiating session.