Vilcabamba

One of the men with whom the President had gone to finishing school was the grandson of an important official in the DEA. No one in the United States these days, free or occupied, worried about enforcing human drug laws. No one had time for that kind of nonsense. But Ommat--he even had a Krolpish name--knew how to get his hands on snarfar, and how to slip it discreetly over the border. Grelch got his chew. He didn’t bother Harris Moffatt III for a while.

As far as Moffatt was concerned, that was all to the good. He had other things to worry about. The Krolp in St. Louis announced that they were going to send an embassy to Grand Junction. Not that they wanted to send one, but that they were going to. Asking permission of humans wasn’t a Krolpish habit.

The U.S. Army still had a few tanks that ran. It had plenty of machine guns. And it had several dozen Krolpish weapons, which cut through a tank’s armor as if it weren’t there. As soon as one of those weapons hit it, it wasn’t.

Several suits of Krolpish body armor had fallen into American hands, too. The only trouble was, humans had no way to adapt those to their own shape. Nothing people knew how to do would cut or weld the transparent stuff. The tools . . . The science . . . The engineering . . .

Harris Moffatt III received the envoy and his retinue with a mixture of human and Krolpish ceremonial. The Stars and Stripes and the Maple Leaf flew behind him. He wore a polyester suit and tie and shirt from the days before the invaders came. Bugs and moths ignored polyester. They sure didn’t ignore wool or linen, the independent USA’s usual fabrics.

A star shone over the President’s left shoulder. That sort of display was standard among the Krolp. With them, as far as human observers and savants could tell, it was a real star, even if a tiny one. And it hung in the air with no means of support at all, visible or otherwise. The Krolp routinely did things that drove human physicists to drink.

Humans . . . imitated and improvised. This star was made from LEDs surrounding a battery pack. It hung from invisibly fine wires. It wasn’t as good as one of the originals, but it showed Harris Moffatt III claimed sovereign status. (Its weakness might say he didn’t deserve it, but he refused to dwell on that.)

A star followed the Krolp envoy, too. His name, Moffatt had been given to understand, was Prilk. His star was brighter than the human-made simulacrum, but did not float so high. He was a representative, not a sovereign.

Prilk’s overlord wasn’t the Krolpish governor of North America. He was the ruler of the Krolp, back on their home planet. He wasn’t exactly a king or a president or an ayatollah. Not being a Krolp, Harris Moffatt III didn’t understand exactly what he was. He was the boss: Moffatt understood that much. Krolp here could petition him. So could humans. Letters took months to reach the homeworld. Decisions took . . . as long as they took. Answers took more months to come back. Once in a blue moon, those answers made things better for people, not worse. It wasn’t likely, but it did happen.

Prilk’s guards kept a wary eye on the American soldiers carrying Krolpish hand weapons. Those were dangerous to them and to the envoy, unlike almost any merely human arms. Reading Krolpish body language and expressions was a guessing game for people. Harris Moffatt III’s guess was that the centauroids thought humans had no business getting their hands on real weapons. Well, too bad.

The envoy surprised Moffatt: he said, “I see you, Mr. President,” in slow, labored English.

“And I see you, Ambassador Prilk,” the President replied, also in English. He hadn’t expected to use his own language at all in this confab. He smiled broadly.

Then the envoy went back to his own harsh tongue: “I see you, Moffatt.” In Krolpish, he didn’t waste time with any polite titles. That he’d done it in English was remarkable enough.

“I see you, Envoy Prilk,” Harris Moffatt III answered, in Krolpish this time. He might not grant special honorifics to any of the renegades who were such uncomfortable guests here, but he had to give the ruler’s representative his due. The Krolp often acted as if humans offended them by existing, and especially by refusing to become Krolpified. They only got worse when they discovered real reasons for affront.

“Good,” Prilk said, continuing in his own language. Chances were he didn’t truly speak English at all: he’d memorized a phrase or two to impress the natives. And impress them he had. Now he could get down to business. He could, and he did: “We want something from you, Moffatt.”

“You can’t have the renegades. They’re under my protection,” the President said. They were what Prilk was most likely to want, as far as he could see. The Krolp didn’t like it when free humans learned from them, although their finishing schools and other academies taught people in the broad occupied zones quite a bit.