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a
Babylonian schrault. A large, transparent urn sat in front of the
window, with multicolored fish squiggling in the water. What
appeared to be stringed musical instruments hung from the wall on
the room’s north side.
    Cook walked to the north wall and ran his
finger over the strings of a Veshnan lute, producing a wavering,
metallic sound like the tremulous whine of a subspace engine in a
vat of water. The sound was eerie and unsettling, reminding him of
the mood music that accompanied the vid-screen monsters he loved to
watch as a child. It stopped as soon as he removed his hand.
Feeling suddenly self-conscious, he turned to see a red-robed
Veshnan standing at the entrance to the living room. It had the
same pale translucence, the same four-fingered hands, the same calm
serenity about its bearing, as those he had met in the pub. But
this alien was large—almost a foot taller than the others—and its
face was more angular, its features more pronounced.
    This was, the commander guessed, a Veshnan
male.
     
    At the cosmic pace of
distant stars passing in the blackness, the two males waited in
silence for the other to speak. After the first tentative bows and
smiles, Zatar began to feel quite foolish and the ensuing silence
just compounded the problem. The artifacts and scents of home that
filled the senses in the gathering room, so carefully designed to
remind all of them of the worlds they left behind, merely added to
his sense of disarray.
    Curiously, while finding another species in
such a place disturbed his sense of balance, the alien visitor was
hardly the cause of the ambassador’s concern. Slowly, he realized
that his shyness arose largely from his reluctance to make a fool
of himself by butchering the Terran’s mother tongue. This was the
way of cowards, he reflected, but found that he could not help
himself. The mind that could charm the High Council and send those
on the other side of any issue careening into outrage and despair
balked at the prospect of floundering in a sea of alien
phraseology. He was dismayed, as well, to learn that the
well-endowed ego of a High Official of the Grand Alliance did not
take kindly to the thought of communicating by grunts and sign
language.
    The Terran stared at him through circles of
color in a sea of white. Terran eyes were paralyzing, thought
Zatar, at once compelling and hypnotic. The effect was less
pronounced at the negotiating table, where interpreters served as a
buffer, but now Zatar felt a subliminal wariness. It was, he
concluded, a singular advantage for a predator species, yet he
recalled the Terran’s almost gleeful inquisitiveness as earlier he
watched it dart across the room, moving with surprising agility for
such a large creature. Unlike those with proper Veshnan manners, it
was not at all self-conscious about its curiosity. And that was,
thought Zatar, the mark of a civilized man no matter what the women
thought. It was enough to make him wonder how his own species
appeared, when seen through Terran eyes.
    Silently, Zatar studied the costume of
their long-nosed simian visitor. It was a type of uniform worn by
other members of the Terran militia force. “Protectors of the
Universe,” they called themselves—or khasg’a’rhd’h , in their own language. It seemed
a heavier uniform than he had seen before, of coarser material and
cluttered with pockets and flaps. The uniform was also the color of
the sky, which meant that their guest was a military officer of
some sort. Zatar could not guess its rank merely by looking, but
the Terran’s face suggested that their guest was one of some
importance. Except for females and children, most of the people he
had seen on the planet—and many militiamen, as well—covered their
faces with fur. Only those the Terran government had sent to
negotiate with him kept their face fur so closely cropped as to be
invisible.
    And the difference was not congenital, he
knew, for Zatar recalled seeing fur grow on many of the