The female took over for him. “You must understand, Ryo, that we are simply scientists, observers. We are here to study and learn and to teach. We do not set policy, though we may make recommendations.

“I am not a bureaucrat, but I think I can say with confidence that your proposal is more than simply premature. There has not been even preliminary formal contact initiated between our species. Yet you sit there and calmly propose not a mere alliance or expression of friendship, but an actual exchange of territory and colonists.”

“Let me try and put it more graphically,” the younger man said, “and excuse me if I use terminology that seems indelicate. The idea of perhaps a million of your own kind, a million giant, armor-plated, glow-eyed bugs, actually settling down on Earth, is one that would be very hard for its general population to accept.”

“No more so,” Ryo responded, having anticipated the objection, “than it would be for the people of the Hive of Chitteranx, who dwell directly below the plateau I told you of, to gaze every day up its cliffs knowing that hundreds of thousands of giant, fleshy, flexible aliens were building machines and lives up there.”

“Then you are as subject to the racial paranoia your psychtechs accused us of as we may be,” said Kibwezi.

“Not at all. We are discussing now deeply ingrained cultural fears and ancestral emotions. You may loathe my appearance, my people may loathe yours, but unlike you, we do not loathe each other’s. We have not fought among ourselves for thousands of years. Your history, which I have studied, is full of devastating internal conflicts of appallingly recent date.”

“We’re getting away from your proposal,” Rijseen put in. “I don’t see how—”

Ryo risked censure by interrupting, though, he reminded himself, that did not carry the disapproval here that it would have among his own people. “Think of the knowledge to be gained by both sides, the advances that would surely be made, not to mention the necessity of striking a military alliance against the AAnn.”

“That may not be as vital as you seem to believe,” Bhad- ravati noted. “You insist it was an AAnn vessel that attacked the Seeker, but we have no way of confirming that. You could be trying to smooth over a mistake by your own government.”

“The AAnn exist. They attacked your ship and killed your people and are every bit as dangerous as I’ve told you.”

“You’ve told us that these AAnn once attacked your own home town,” Kibwezi said softly. “That they killed your friends and relatives.”

“That is also truth.”