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Again fell stillness. Holm looked at his superior, associate, friend of years; and not for the first time, it came to him what strangers they two were.
He found himself regarding Ferune as if he had never met an Ythrian before.
Standing, the Marchwarden was about 120 centimeters high from feet to top of crest; a tall person would have gone to 140 or so, say up to the mid-breast of Holm. Since the body tilted forward, its actual length from muzzle through tail was somewhat more. It massed perhaps 20 kilos; the maximum for the species was under 30.
The head looked sculptured. It bulged back from a low brow to; hold the brain. A bony ridge arched down in front to a pair of nostrils, nearly hidden by feathers, which stood above a flexible mouth full of sharp white fangs and a purple tongue. The jaw, underslung and rather delicate, merged with a strong neck. That face was dominated by its eyes, big and amber, and by the dense, scalloped feather-crest that rose from the brow, lifted over the head, and ran half the length of the neck: partly for aerodynamic purposes, partly as a helmet on the thin skull.
The torso thrust outward in a great keelbone, which at its lower end was flanked by the arms. These were not unlike the arms of a ski
At present, though, the tremendous wings were folded down to work as legs. In the middle of either leading edge, a “knee” joint bent in reverse; those bones would lock together in flight. From the “ankle,” three forward toes and one rearward extended to make a foot; aloft, they curled around the wing to strengthen and add sensitivity. The remaining three digits of the ancestral ornithoid had fused to produce the alatan bone which swept backward for more than a meter. The skin over its front half was bare, calloused, another surface to rest on.
Ferune being male, his crest rose higher than a female’s, and it and the tail were white with black trim; on her they would have been of uniform dark lustrousness. The remainder of him was lighter-colored than average for his species, which ranged from gray-brown through black.
“Khr-r-r-r.” The throat-noise yanked Holm out of his reverie. “You stare.”
“Oh. Sorry.” To a true-born carnivore, that was more rude than it was among omnivorous humans. “My mind wandered.”
“Whither?” Ferune asked, mild again.
“M-m-m… well — well, all right. I got to thinking how little my breed really counts for in the Domain. I figure maybe we’d better assume everything’s bound to be done Ythrian-style, and make the best of that.”
Ferune uttered a warbling “reminder” note and quirked certain feathers. This had no exact Anglic equivalent, but the intent could be translated as: “Your sort aren’t the only non-Ythrians under our hegemony. You aren’t the only ones technologically up to date.” Planha was in fact not as laconic as its verbal conventions made it seem.
“N-no,” Holm mumbled. “But we… in the Empire, we’re the leaders. Sure, Greater Terra includes quite a few home worlds and colonies of nonhumans; and a lot of individuals from elsewhere have gotten Terran citizenship; sure. But more humans are in key positions of every kind than members of any other race — fireflare, probably of all the other races put together.” He sighed and stared at the glowing end of his cigar. “Here in the Domain, what are men? A handful on this single ball. Oh, we get around, we do well for ourselves, but the fact won’t go away that we’re a not terribly significant minority in a whole clutch of minorities.”
“Do you regret that?” Ferune asked quite softly.
“Huh? No. No. I only meant, well, probably the Domain has too few humans to explain and administer a human-type naval organization. So better we adjust to you than you to us. It’s unavoidable anyhow. Even on Avalon, where there’re more of us, it’s unavoidable.”
“I hear a barre
Holm gathered strength to answer. “You know I respect your ways. Always have, always will. Nor am I about to forget how Ythri took my people in when Terra had rotted away beneath them. It’s just… just… we rate respect too. Don’t we?”
Ferune moved forward until he could lay a hand on Holm’s thigh. He understood the need of humans to speak their griefs.
“When he — Chris — when he first started ru
Ferune gestured negative. After Daniel Holm went raging to Lythran’s house, accusations exploding out of him, it had been all the First Marchwarden could do to intervene, calm both parties and prevent a duel.
“No, I shouldn’t have said anything today,” Holm continued. “It’s only — last night Rowena was crying. That he went off and didn’t say goodbye to her. Mainly, she worries about what’s happening to him, inside, since he joined the choth. Can he ever make a normal marriage, for instance? Ordinary girls aren’t his type any more; and bird girls — And, right, our younger kids. Tommy’s completely in orbit around Ythrian subjects. The school monitor had to come in person and tell us how he’d been neglecting to screen the material or submit the work or see the consultants he was supposed to. And Jea
“As far as I know,” Ferune said, “humans who entered choths have as a rule had satisfactory lives. Problems, of course. But what life can have none? Besides, the difficulties ought to become less as the number of such persons grows.”
“Look,” Holm floundered, “I’m not against your folk. Break my bones if ever I was! Never once did I say or think there was anything dishonorable about what Chris was doing, any more than I would’ve said or thought it if, oh, if he’d joined some celibate order of priests. But I’d not have liked that either. It’s no more natural fox a man. And I’ve studied everything I could find about bird people. Sure, most of them have claimed they were happy. Probably most of them believed it. I can’t help thinking they never realized what they’d missed.”
“Walkers,” Ferune said. In Planha, that sufficed. In Anglic he would have had to state something like: “We’ve lost our share, those who left the choths to become human-fashion atomic individuals within a global human community.”
“Influence,” he added, which conveyed: “Over the centuries on Avalon, no few of our kind have grown bitter at what your precept and example were doing to the choths themselves. Many still are. I suspect that’s a major reason why several such groups have become more reactionary than any on the mother world.”