Starliner(34)

Wanda shrugged. She was looking out the holographic panel that mimicked the curve of the starliner's bow. "That'll be a problem, sure. But right now, I just wanted you to see what it's like to land on Nevasa."

She glanced around the bar. She wore her hair in a brilliant blond swirl today. Ran liked blondes, but he thought Wanda probably looked her best as the brunette her genes had made her. "That's what everybody's here for," she explained. "People who've landed on Nevasa before or talked to somebody who has."

"Oh . . ." murmured a dozen throats.

Ran looked through the clear forward bulkhead. The sky around the Empress of Earth was beginning to fluoresce.

Streaks of bubbling color rippled through the stratosphere, similar to Earth's auroras but momentary and a thousand times brighter. The Empress was dropping slowly, at a shallow angle, so she made about as much motion forward as down. The light bloomed from her magnetic motors and those of the eight tugs which coupled the starliner in orbit, streaming back over the ship and her wake through the disturbed air.

It was perhaps the most beautiful thing Ran had ever seen in his life.

"Nevasa's atmosphere has a high proportion of noble gases," Wanda explained. "A high-density magnetic flux excites them. It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life."

A cold, green flare bathed the vessel, covering the bulkhead like a lambent curtain. Passengers gasped in awe and delight.

Wanda looked at Ran. "The thing I don't understand," she said, "is . . ."

Her voice trailed off as three pulses of topaz yellow followed the green, drawing her eyes by reflex.

"Is . . . ?" Ran said softly.

"Is how they can live here and rush into a war, not that the war's all their fault," she said to complete the thought

"I suppose," Ran said as he stared wide-eyed at a light show the size of a continent, "they don't see things the way outsiders do. . . ."

* * *

"This war," cried Miss Oanh from the center of the family room, paneled with painted screens, "is evil!"

"War with Grantholm," said her father gently, "is probably inevitable and certainly morally right."

Mr. Lin knew his long service in Nevasa's Ministry of External Affairs was the cause of many of his family problems. His daughter had spent half of her eighteen years on foreign worlds with him. The three years on Earth, where Mr. Lin had been ambassador before being brought back to the ministry, had been particularly unfortunate in forming Oanh's attitudes regarding planetary honor—and filial piety.

Lin cleared his throat and went on, "I realize that you feel you have a right to your own opinion, but please keep it to yourself for the time being. I become a plenipotentiary when I arrive on Tellichery. So long as we remain on Nevasa, I do not have the prerogative of overruling the security services."

Mr. Lin's aides in the open, adjacent rooms which served as Lin's home office discretely avoided staring. The squad of gray-clad guards seemed equally focused on people other than the minister and his daughter. They watched the aides and the petitioners waiting in the outer office. Many of the latter were foreign nationals.

The three-meter area cleared around the perimeter of the family room's open doors was a result of the civilians' nervousness about the guards' openly carried weapons.

Almost certainly some of the guards were members of the Counterintelligence Bureau. The chances were good that one or more of the personnel from Lin's own ministry reported to the bureau as well.

"It's never morally right to kill other human beings!" his daughter snapped.

Lin sighed inwardly. Oanh hadn't wanted to leave Earth, where her friends were, and she was even angrier to be uprooted again in less than six months. He would have preferred to leave her on Nevasa, since in most senses she was capable of looking out for herself—

But Oanh's anger at the situation came out in the form of statements that were likely to be viewed as treasonous if war with Grantholm broke out.

When war broke out. Mr. Lin wouldn't have been sent on this mission were war not inevitable and alliance, military alliance, with Tellichery not a crucial factor in that war's outcome.

"There may be no war," he said aloud, in the calm voice that he knew grated on his daughter's nerves worse than a shriek would have done. Lin couldn't help it. In a tense argument he became preternaturally calm, which was a reason for his career success . . . but had driven his wife into the arms of a grain merchant on Skeuse and was looking as though it might drive his daughter away as well.

Oanh sniffed.

"And in any case," her father continued, "the behavior of the Grantholm military leaves it open to question whether they can be considered human."