Chapter 7

"Well, madam?"

Due courtesies had been extended; he'd answered her knock quickly, had politely taken her coat and hung it up, had ushered her to a chair that was ostentatiously positioned on the opposite side of the hotel room's sole table from the only other, which he took. She accepted the pleasantries with evident appreciation, but no other words had been spoken by either.

For a time they simply studied each other. He found her unusually attractive, only a few centimeters shorter than his 1.85, blonde and pale-skinned with a healthy makeup-free complexion, unusually voluptuous of figure so far as he could tell from the severe cut of her clothing, and with level intelligence brimming in a pair of the prettiest and bluest eyes he had ever seen. A pity if we are to be antagonists, he thought. But it is the mission that matters.

She saw a proud, self-confident man, clearly well-muscled under his clothing, with chiseled features set off by his dark complexion. But it was his uniform, his strict military bearing, that drew the most of her attention. Another damn soldier, ran through her mind. Does he think, or is it beaten out of all of them during their training?

Lovely man, though, her thought continued idly. Wish I'd met him in another context.

Still she delayed as her eyes wandered about the room, taking in its minimal accouterments and Spartan tidiness. She returned her eyes to Igwanda himself, who sat stiffly across the table that divided them.

"I expect you hung your towel up neatly, too," she murmured.

"Madam, this is not a social occasion," he said bluntly. "And I am of little inclination toward small talk, and less, in the circumstances, toward humor. I require you to explain your statement."

"Ah. That I might seek to abort the mission."

"Yes."

"First, may I ask, do you doubt I could do so? You seem to be aware that I have a great deal of prestige in my field, a great deal of recognition not only academically but publicly. I don't pretend to be worthy of such honors—"

He shook his head and made a noise in his throat.

"Very well," she said. "If I withdraw from this mission with full publicity, and give as my reason that I am dissatisfied with the military participation, what would happen?"

He paused to consider. "The mission would lose much impetus," he said slowly.

"And if I followed that withdrawal by helping to organize those who oppose it now, for whatever reasons, in a public campaign against it, what then?"

"Why would you do such a thing?" he asked.

"First, let me ask you a question: how serious were you today when you said a failure of our mission might lead to some sort of retaliatory visit aimed at crippling or destroying the civilization we're seeking to contact?"

"I do not believe I would go so far as to use the word 'civilization' in connection with—" he began.

She waved him away. "Call it what you will. How serious?"

He considered. "Such a viewpoint does exist," he said. "It is, as I said this morning, a minority one—a very small minority at present, though a vocal one. Should our mission fail to return, or return with heavy casualties, however ... well, that would certainly lend support to it. That is all I can say to you now."

"That's unacceptable."

He surveyed her across the table. "Clarify?" he snapped.

There was only a small pause. "I actively sought an invitation to join this mission because of my excitement about making contact with another intelligent species—the only other such species in the universe, so far as we now know. I felt that my background, my studies, my talents such as they are"—Igwanda gestured impatiently—"have equipped me to make such a contact."

She paused, but he did not interrupt.

"It's my goal, so far as I'm able, to avoid what I see as the mistakes of the previous expedition and help establish a meaningful and mutually beneficial relationship with these aliens. We have so much to offer them! So many blunders of our own history we can help them avoid! And how much might we learn from them!"

The colonel nodded. "To be sure," he said quietly.

"But can we initiate such a relationship immediately?" she asked rhetorically. "Will there be problems, especially at the start? Almost surely. Bluntly, I think I'm good at what I do, and my colleagues as well. Even so, we can screw it up. The aliens are clearly prepared to defend themselves, even at great cost as they exhibited in the Argo attempt to make contact, and I can't guarantee or even expect a hundred percent instant success.

"This morning, though, you suggested that to the military mind nothing else would be acceptable—that any other outcome might result in a follow-up mission with the purpose of destroying what the natives have achieved and either knocking them back to barbarism or wiping them out entirely as a species. And I can't live with that. I'll be part of a mission with life-or-death consequences to myself, that's understood. But I won't accept the same life-or-death conditions for an entire species of intelligent alien life. So if my—if our—failure to complete this mission to everyone's satisfaction is to be a death sentence on a species that no still-living human has yet met, I opt out; and I'll put all the weight I have behind trying to kill the mission before I risk their lives as a species against the arbitrarily applied technological might of warlike humans who'd rather destroy than understand."

"Hmh," grunted Igwanda as she showed she was done. There was a long silence before he spoke. "I owe you, after all, more explanation," he said finally.

"This morning I said quite accurately that there is sentiment for destroying the Edenites. The sentiment is an extremist view. There have always been those who cannot abide anything except absolute submission to their own point of view. Romans 'Romanicized' every people with whom they came in contact, or destroyed them; the Mayas and Aztecs either conquered or annihilated competing tribes; fundamentalist religious groups throughout history took the view 'submit or die'; and so on."

"I don't believe I need a history lesson, Colonel," she said dryly.

"Yes, madam, I think you do, because you have evidently forgotten the most important motive for its study: because, as Kierkegaard said, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. History shows quite clearly that threats to peace can best be defused by nipping them in the bud. But we learn that lesson inconsistently, as our past shows. On Eden we are confronted by a species that has thus far shown itself innately and implacably hostile to our own—"