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his throat. ‘Oh, you’ve heard all this. Bit by bit, we decided the world isn’t so impoverished that men need to kill beings like that for meat and oil.’
    He regarded the other across their table. What he saw was a big man, though not as big as himself, heavy-featured, ruddy, with yellow hair combed down to the shoulders and a close-trimmed red-yellow beard. The Norrman was rather typically clad for an evening out: scarf of imported silk tucked into the open collar of a plaid wool shirt, buckskin trousers, solid half-boots. An ivory ring on his left hand declared him married.
    In this climate Terai dressed similarly, but his clothes were plain and their cut, as well as his appearance, foreign to the diners around. Those, mostly husband-and-wife couples, kept trying not to stare.
    ‘You could decide it on your own account,’ Launy said. ‘Not on behalf of the whole human race. When you started seizing Northwest whaling ships –’
    ‘As we’d long been seizing slave ships. You never objected to that.’
    ‘No. We don’t care for slavery here.’ Launy raised a palm. ‘Wait. We care for freedom. But that means the freedom of people, not horses or chickens. Sure, whales are smart animals, and I’d rather we left them alone. But you’ve never proved they’re more than animals. Be honest; all you have is a theory.’
    He drank and spoke fast: ‘You took it on yourselves, in what you thought was your almightiness, to tell free captains what they could and could not do on the high seas. Maybe you realized whaling’s carried on almost exclusively by members of the Fish Hawk and Polaris Lodges, and you didn’t think the rest of this loose-jointed country would help them with its blood. But of course no Lodge forsakes another; the Mong wars taught us loyalty. Of course we told you busybodies to go Rusha. And when you got violent, why, the Lodges raised men and money, they armed and convoyed, they got violent right back at you.’
    And in pitched battles, as well as raids, you persuaded us we had better not insist,
Terai admitted. He recalled vessels that were the core of the Union fleet at Farallones, steam-powered, steelplated, devoid of catapults but dragon-headed with cannon that fired explosive shells and tubes that launched rockets.
We didn’t understand you. We never guessed – in our, oh, yes, our ‘almightiness
’ –
that anyone would squander resources on that scale, for no larger reason than yours.
    Launy’s voice dropped. He leaned forward. ‘Look, Terai,’ he proceeded earnestly, ‘let’s not squabble. Let me just add one thing, and afterward we can get drunk and sing songs and whatever else we feel like. But look. We need sperm oil for fine lubrication. Sure, I know jojoba oil will do. But we can’t import enough from areas where the jojoba plant grows, because there isn’t enough being raised, nor enough trade with them to stimulate it. As for whale meat and lamp fuel and baleen and such, mainly we sell them to the Mong, and buy stuff they have that we want, like coal or the tolls on our railroads through their nations. After we’ve got our industry really well developed, why, we won’t
need
to go whaling. It won’t
pay
anymore. Instead of bitching about our development and ob – uh – obstructing it every way you can short of provoking a full-dress war … why don’t you encourage us? We’d stop our whaling that much the sooner. Could it be that you – no, not you, Terai, but your politicians, your merchants – could it be that they don’t want anybody,anywhere in the world, to get as important as the Maurai Federation?’
    ‘No!’ Terai denied, and wished for an instant that he were completely sincere.
Well, I am as far as I myself go, I suppose.
‘How often have we said it? We don’t want any single civilization lording it over the rest, nor any industry that damages the planet –’
    Launy threw back his head and interrupted his guest with a shout of laughter.