A willowy blonde with the old-fashioned Esperancian taste for simplicity in clothes, Eve Davisson made a pleasing contrast to Philippe Rochefort, as both were well aware. He was a tall, rather slender young man, his bearing athletic, his features broad-nosed, full-lipped, and regular, his hair, kinking itself into a lustrous black coif over the deep-brown skin. And he stretched to the limit the tolerance granted officers as regards their dress uniforms — rakishly tilted bonnet bearing the sunburst of Empire, gold-trimmed blue tunic, scarlet sash and cloak, snowy trousers tucked into low boots of authentic Terran beef-leather.

They sat in an intimate restaurant of Fleurville, by a window opening on gardens and stars. A live sonorist played something old and sentimental; perfumed, slightly intoxicant vapors drifted about; they toyed with hors d’oeuvres and paid more serious attention to their champagne. Nonetheless she was not smiling.

“This world was settled by people who believed in peace,” she said. Her tone mourned rather than accused. “For generations they kept no armed forces, they relied on the good will of others whom they helped.”

“That good will didn’t outlive the Troubles,” Rochefort said.

“I know, I know. I shan’t join the demonstrators, whatever some of my friends may say when they learn I’ve been out with an Imperial officer. But Phil — the star named Pax, the planet named Esperance are being geared for war. It hurts.”

“It’d hurt worse if you were attacked. Avalon isn’t far, and they’ve built a lot of power there.”

Her fingers tightened on the stem of her glass. “Attack from Avalon? But I’ve met those people, both races. They’ve come here on trade or tour or — I made a tour there myself, not long ago. I went because it’s picturesque, but was so graciously treated I didn’t want to leave.”

“I daresay Ythrian manners have rubbed off on their human fellows.” Rochefort let a draft go over his palate, hoping it would tingle away his irritation. This wasn’t supposed to be a political evening. “Likewise less pleasant features of the Ythrian personality.”

She studied him through the soft light before she said low, “I get an impression you disapprove of a mixed colony.”

“Well… in a way, yes.” He could have dissembled, facilely agreed to everything she maintained, and thus improved his chances of bedding her later on. But he’d never operated thus; and he never would, especially when he liked this girl just as a person. “I believe in being what you are and standing by your own.”

“You talk almost like a human supremacist,” she said, though mildly.

“To the extent that man is the leading race furnishes most of the leaders — in Technic civilization, yes, I suppose you’d have to call me a human supremacist,” he admitted. “It doesn’t mean we aren’t chronically sinful and stupid, nor does it mean we have any right to oppress others. Why, my sort of people are the xenosophont’s best friend. We simply don’t want to imitate him.”

“Do you believe the Terran Empire is a force for good?”

“On balance, yes. It commits evil. But nothing mortal can avoid that. Our duty is to correct the wrongs… and also to recognize the values that the Empire does, in fact, preserve.”

“You may have encountered too little of the evil.”

“Because I’m from Terra itself?” Rochefort chuckled. “My dear, you’re too bright to imagine the mother system is inhabited exclusively by aristocrats. My father is a minor functionary of the Sociodynamic Service. His job caused us to move around a lot. I was born in Selenopolis, which is a spaceport and manufacturing center. I spent several impressionable years on Venus, in the crime and poverty of a planet whose terraforming never had been quite satisfactory. I joined the navy as an enlisted rating — not out of chauvinism, merely a boyish wish to see the universe — and wasn’t tapped for pilot school for two-three years; meanwhile, I saw the grim side of more than one world. Sure, there’s a cosmos of room for improvement. Well, let’s improve, not tear down. And let’s defend!”

He stopped. “Damn,” he said frankly. “I’d hoped to lure you out of your seriousness, and fell into it myself.”

Now the girl laughed, and raised heir glass. “Let’s help each other climb out, then,” she suggested.

They did. Rochefort’s liberty became highly enjoyable. And that was fortunate, because two weeks after he reported back from it, Ansa was ordered into deep space. Light-years from Pax, she joined the fleet that had been using immensity as a mask for its marshaling; and ships by the hundreds hurled toward the Domain of Ythri.

The conference was by phone. Most were, these days. It went against old Avalonian courtliness but saved time — and time was getting in mighty short supply, Daniel Holm thought.

Anger crackled through clearly enough. Two of the three holographs on the com board before him seemed about to climb out of their screens and into his office. No doubt he gave their originals the same impression.

Matthew Vickery, President of the Parliament of Man, wagged his forefinger and both plump jowls and said, “We are not under a military regime, may I remind you in case you have forgotten. We, the proper civil government, approved your defense measures of the past several years, though you are aware that I myself have always considered them excessive. When I think of the prosperity that tax money, those resources, could have brought, left in private hands — or the social good it could have done in the public sector — Give you military your heads, and you’d build bases in the fourth dimension to protect us against an invasion from the future.”

“We are always being invaded by the future,” Ferune said. “The next part of it to arrive will not be pleasant.”

Holm crossed his legs, leaned back, blew cigar smoke at Vickery’s image, and drawled, “Spare us the oratory. You’re not campaigning for re-election: here. What’s made you demand this four-way?”

“Your entire high-handedness,” Vickery declared. “The overflow quantum was that last order, barring non-Ythrian ships from the Lauran System. Do you realize what a trade we do… not merely with the Empire, though that supports many livelihoods, but with unaffiliated civilizations like the Kraokan?”

“Do you realize how easy it’d be for the Terrans to get a robotic job, disguised, into low orbit around Avalon?” Holm retorted. “Several thousand megatons, touched off at that height when skies are clear, would set about half of Corona afire. Or it might be so sophisticated it could land like a peaceful merchantman. Consciousness-level computers aren’t used much any more, when little new exploration’s going on, but they could be built, including a suicide imperative. That explosion would be: inside a city’s force shields; it’d take out the generators, leaving what was left of the city defenseless; fallout from a dirty warhead would poison the whole hinterland. And you, Vickery, helped block half the appropriation we wanted for adequate shelters.”

“Hysteria,” the president said. “What could Terra gain from a one-shot atrocity? Not that I expect war, if only we can curb our own hotheads. But — well, take this ludicrous home-guard program you’ve instigated.” His glance went toward Ferune and Liaw. “Oh, it gives a lot of young folk a fine excuse to swagger around, getting in people’s way, ordering them arrogantly about, feeling important, and never mind the social as well as the fiscal cost of it But if this navy we’ve been building and manning at your loud urging, by straining our production facilities and gutting our resources, if this navy is as advertised, the Terrans can never come near us. If not, who has been derelict in his duty?”

“We are near their sector capital,” Ferane reminded him. “They may strike us first, overwhelmingly.”