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Authors: David Gerrold,David Gerrold

Tags: #Science Fiction, #Fantasy, #Humour

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BOOK: Chess With a Dragon
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“Hmf,” said the Ambassador noncommittally. “Do we have any offers from Smallpox, Leprosy or Psoriasis?”

“Just a moment,” said Kasahara, thumbing quickly through the stack of papers in front of him. “I'll look—”

“Nori,” the Old Man reached over and put a hand on Kasahara's arm. “That was a joke.”

“A joke?” Kasahara blinked. “Oh. A joke.”

“It's all right, Nori. You can look them up later. Please go on. Do you have any others to present?”

“Just two more, sir—the Rhwrhm have inquired if our planet is available for colonization; payment proportional to the number of colonists allowed to settle. Uh, the Rhwrhm are carnivores, sir. Very
large
carnivores. They eat Dragons.”

“Yes, I see. And the other offer?”

“That's from the Rh/attes. They're suggesting something very unusual—unusual for the InterChange, that is. They don't need any service that we can provide; nothing important, that Is—although they're willing to buy a couple of million tons of corn per year; but that's mostly a courtesy—a gesture of friendship from one mammalian species to another. What they're suggesting instead is that we assume
their
indenture.”

“I beg your pardon?—” The Old Man took off his glasses and began to clean them with his handkerchief. “I don't think I heard you right.” He returned his spectacles to his face and peered owlishly through them at the younger man. His eyes seemed very large and bright. “There. That's better. Now, try that on me again.”

“They want us to assume a piece of their indenture,” repeated Kasahara.

“That's what I thought you said.” The Ambassador looked surprised. He glanced down the table to Miller, the head of Analysis Section. “Has your section had a chance to consider the implications of that?”

Miller shook her head. “It doesn't make sense to us. We're in much bigger trouble than the Rh/attes. We can't pay our own bills, let alone theirs. What do they gain here? Assuming we find a way to avoid defaulting, the only guarantee we can give them is that we're not going to sell them to anyone for food, incubation, or sex; nor will we sell them for biological experimentation without their consent. I don't see that that's strong enough to justify putting their fate in our hands. They can guarantee that by themselves right now. We have no real use for them; apparently no one else does either. So, the alternative is that there's some advantage for them to be indentured to a species that defaults.”

“I'll bet a nickel I know what it is,” put in Larson.

The Ambassador looked down the table at her. “Yes, Anne?”

“It's really very simple—if we assume their indenture, we assume the total burden of their debt. When we default, we have to work off their debt as well as ours—and they go free. It's an easy way for them to wipe out their debt all at once.”

“Interesting,” said the Ambassador. “And quite clever in its own way. Hm. Let me consider the other side of that question for a moment. Is there any advantage in it for us? Could we—excuse me for asking this—structure the deal so that we could . . . ah, create some advantage here?”

“You mean, could we sell them as food, fuel, slaves, sex or guinea pigs?” Larson shook her head. “The Rh/attes are considered almost as undesirable as we are by the reptilian and insectoid species. Their debt isn't as large because they never downloaded as heavily as we did. On the other hand, neither have they ever come up with a service that the InterChange considers valuable; so they might be in just as tenuous a situation as we are. But they've been around for nearly five hundred years, so the real question is
why
hasn't the InterChange foreclosed on them? What service do the Rh/attes provide that justifies their current status?”

“You have some idea?” the Old Man asked.

Larson shrugged. “I'm not sure that this is a useful avenue of exploration, but if we knew how they had lasted five hundred years, it might shed some light on the details of their offer to us.” She sighed tiredly. “I'm sorry, sir, but knowing that the Rh/attes are mammalian, I'd distrust them more than all the others put together. I know how nasty and greedy mammals can be.

“Unfortunately, I'm inclined to agree with you,” the Ambassador said. He looked to Kasahara. “Is that it?”

“I'm afraid so, sir.”

“All right—” The Old Man did not look beaten. “Let's do it this way. We'll break the offers down into four categories—” He began to tick them off on his fingers. “Totally Unacceptable, Not Bloody Likely, Need More Information, and Let's Talk. We'll break into committees; each committee will evaluate three proposals and then validate the work of two other committees—”

A Quiet Objection

“Excuse me, sir!”

“Eh?” The Ambassador looked down the table. “Is there an objection?”

“Yes sir, there is.” Madja Poparov stood up. “I object to this whole proceeding. We are talking about the future of the human species.”

“Yes, Ms. Poparov, we are. What is your point?”

“That
is
my point. Are we qualified to do this job—to make these decisions?”

The Ambassador nodded politely while he considered her question. At last he looked across the table at her and responded in a quiet tone of voice.

“Whether we're qualified or not is irrelevant. The responsibility is still ours. I grant you that none of us here sought out or even desired this responsibility; most of us thought we were merely signing on for diplomatic research; but the circumstances have changed dramatically in the past few days. So have our jobs. Now, we have only
one
decision to make. Are we going to accept the responsibility that's been thrust upon us or shirk it? If we choose not to accept the responsibility, we must still accept the consequences of that choice.”

“I do not dispute that,” said Madja. “Idiot I am not. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics does not send fools to the front. I know that the choice must be made here, if for no other reason that there simply is not
time
to send back home for a decision. The issue I am raising, Mr. Ambassador is this one: how can we justify this discussion at all? How can we give any seriousness to these proposals? They are
all
unacceptable because of the context that acceptance of any of them would create.”

She paused, as if waiting for applause.

There was none.

Madja Poparov brushed her hair back off her forehead and continued. “The trouble with you capitalists is that you are too damned pragmatic. We are sitting here and calmly discussing a set of possibilities that reduce human beings to the status of draft animals—or worse!

“We are talking about selling our brothers and sisters—
Our comrades in the human adventure!
—into slavery as food or guinea pigs or hosts for parasitical life forms! And zoo animals, no less!

“The best of these offers that Mr. Kasahara has read to us is the one that at least gives us the dignity of a common farm laborer—and even that one is unacceptable because it says that human beings have not the wit to do anything more than follow someone else's instructions. I say that we cannot consider seriously any course of action that would establish that human beings are anything less than a noble species. This is the real issue. We must let them know that we deserve nothing less than the highest respect! Or—” Madja looked grim and unhappy, “—we
shall be condemning ourselves and our children to a future of slavery and despair for untold generations to come.”

This time there was applause.

But only from Yake.

He clapped loudly in the silence—and his applause was clearly intended as a sarcastic response to the melodramatic style of Madja's presentation.

Everybody else just looked uncomfortable.

Madja glared down the table at Yake. “You think this is funny, Mr. Yake Singh Browne?”

“The situation, no. The speech, maybe.”

“You do not like what I said?”

Yake shrugged. “I question whether such speeches make much of a difference in the long run.”

“The difference is whether we live as a free people or as slaves! Is that not difference enough?”

Yake shrugged again. “I won't argue the question. I do find it . . . amusing that the distinction should be coming from you, Ms. Poparov. That is, from a representative of the Soviet Union.”

Madja frowned at Yake.

Madja Poparov's frown was a formidable expression.

Indeed, Madja Poparov's frown had been known to wither a rose bush at thirty meters.

She now turned the full force of it on Yake Singh Browne, a smug, self-satisfied, hot-blooded young parasite of the imperialistic ruling class of the degenerate societies of the western hemisphere—

Yake returned her stare, nonplussed.

The Old Man cleared his throat then; he allowed himself a drink of water, then cleared his throat again. He looked down the table at the two of them. “Yake—did you want to address the issue here? Ms. Poparov raised the issue of contextual repositioning inherent in the offers . . .?”

Yake regretted having to tear his eyes away from Madja. Actually, she had very nice eyes. But—reluctantly, he turned to the head of the table and said, “Well, yes sir, I did—”

Everyone at the table turned to face him. Yake could understand their curiosity. He too wondered what he was about to say. “It seems to me that Madja here—pardon, I mean, Ms. Poparov—has raised a very critical point. Um. One that is worthy of considerable . . . uh, consideration.” Yake realized he was about to start sounding stupid. He caught himself and began again, “What I mean is—I think Madja is right.”

The Ambassador did not look pleased with that response. Clearly he had been hoping for a different sort of rebuttal.

Yake continued quickly, “If I were going to take the usual
pragmatic
view of the situation, I might say that we should choose the least unacceptable of these possibilities and make the best of a terrible situation. I could remind Ms. Poparov that we are a mammalian species and that as it has turned out in the grand scheme of things, mammalian intelligence is not a common occurrence, but only the occasional fluke of evolution that occurs when some disaster interrupts the natural trend to intelligence in reptilian and insect species. On our own world, a comet smacked into the planet 65 million years ago and the resulting nuclear winter killed off the dinosaurs. There's a lot of evidence to suggest that Hadrosaurs were just reaching the threshold
of sentience. Who knows what they could have become? But primitive mammalian species, like the Therapsids, evolved to fill the dinosaurs' ecological niches way too quickly and the dinosaurs never got the chance to reestablish themselves. To most of the species in the InterChange, we're the descendants of ecological interlopers—uh, we're Darwinian carpetbaggers.

“The membership of this InterChange is proof enough of that: two thousand and seventeen species, and only twelve of them are identifiably mammalian in nature—the rest are reptilian or insectoid or otherwise unclassifiable.

“We may not like it,” Yake said, “but the evolutionary patterns have been documented and confirmed by our own computers. As life climbs toward intelligence, the reptilian and insect species have the advantage—and on most of the worlds, that's who gets there first. The mammals never get a chance; we stay in our trees and our burrows while the thunder-lizards conquer the sky. We are tree shrews, we are rats, we are spider-monkeys with delusions of grandeur.” He looked to Madja Poparov regretfully, “It's difficult for me to listen seriously to talk about ‘our comrades in the human adventure' when all of the evidence suggests that at best, we are little more than accidents of evolution.”

Madja Poparov sniffed. She looked like she wanted to reply, but Yake cut her off with a raised finger—

“If talking snakes and slugs and spiders are shocking and offensive to us, then consider what we must look like to them. We are egg-suckers and parasites and disease-spreaders, standing up on our hind legs and demanding a place at
their
banquet table; and they—despite their own charter—are horrified by us. They are as horrified as we would be if spirochetes and crab lice demanded representation at the United Council.

“The politest comparison I could make—” and here Yake spread his own brown hands before him, “—and I apologize for saying it, but it is still true—is that mammals, human beings in particular, are the ‘niggers' of the galaxy.” He bowed to the woman on his east and added with elaborate politeness, “Or perhaps if Ms. Poparov did not understand that, I could say that we are the Ukrainians here in this cosmic Politburo—only it's even worse than that analogy suggests. There is no
chance
of respect for us here—and very likely, not even for what we can bring to the membership of this body, because this body is not prepared to see us or deal with us as equals.


That
is what I would say if I were going to be
pragmatic
.”

Yake hesitated for effect; he looked around the room, meeting all of their eyes deliberately—even the Ambassador's. He held up one forefinger to note that he had one more point to make, the most significant point of all. “
But
if I were going to be
truly
pragmatic, I would look again at these choices before us and I would ask myself what problems will we be creating for ourselves if we accept
any
of these circumstances? What would be the consequences?

“The first thought that occurred to me was that we would be letting others determine the future of our species, not ourselves. It would be very difficult for human beings to maintain our sense of direction, our sense of responsibility under such disempowering circumstances—and for that reason, I was considering voicing my own objections. I say ‘considering' because my arguments were based on the intangible considerations of how we might ‘feel' about these options; and, I admit it, I was thinking that our feelings in the matter might be the kind of illogical factor which throws the whole equation off. While I was sitting here pondering that dilemma, Madja spoke up and I saw that she had gone straight to the beating heart of the matter.”

BOOK: Chess With a Dragon
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