They were as placid as a herd of cows, regardless of the veiled insults the men and women of the U.N. had dropped from time to time.

    If she hadn’t met the Sumpturians on Venus, hadn’t gotten to know Anka as she had, she would’ve believed they simply didn’t feel any emotion. As it was, she’d begun to wonder if everything she’d seen on Venus was a charade devised by Anka and ably performed by the men and women under his command.

    The impression she’d gotten was that they were as similar to humans as if they’d been human and were simply people of a different race and culture. At the festival, she’d seen them dance together and interact just as a group of Earth born young people might, laughing, apparently teasing and joking with one another, flirting shyly or outrageously as their personality dictated. Anka had behaved so human-like that he’d completely disarmed her.

    And yet there he stood among the Sumpturian dignitaries as stone faced as all the rest, betraying nothing of his thoughts, his demeanor cool but completely relaxed, his gestures the same. There was no sign of tension whatsoever, no stiffness that might betray anger or uneasiness-nothing for them to pick up on.

    They knew they were being watched and analyzed, she realized abruptly.

    Powell was right. They were playing a game of poker with a race of people that knew them as well as they knew themselves, perhaps even better than they knew themselves, could effortlessly and accurately interpret every eye twitch, every gesture, every word without giving an inkling of what they were thinking or how they felt.

    She didn’t know if that sudden insight was more unnerving or the fact that it was clear that Anka indeed had a great deal of influence among his peers. Their political leaders deferred to him as often as not and generally consulted with him on matters that were clearly not even vaguely military in nature. She could understand the former. It had become abundantly clear that he was the commander of their forces, not merely of the base on Venus, or he was at least the highest ranking military officer that was part of the Sumpturian enclave. It was surprising but understandable that they’d want him to make any of the military decisions. As for the rest… either they were unsure of themselves insofar as dealing with Earth people, or the hierarchy of the Sumpturian culture differed drastically from their own.

    The President and the members of the U.N. certainly consulted with military command, but they made it clear that it was only advice they wanted. They would make the final decisions themselves. More accurately, the President of the U.S. called the shots. Global economic disaster had hit everyone, including the U.S., but the U.S. was still on the top of the heap and grimly determined to stay there.

    There were interpreters for the U.N. members. None for the Sumpturians, and they were completely unconcerned about how much it unnerved the Earth enclave that they openly and freely discussed their views in their own language.

    Meachum was getting nastier by the day. If he was any indicator of how the talks were going, and she thought he was, then the Sumpturians were trouncing their opponents hands down. The first week after they’d arrived the Sumpturians had reviewed the terms so carefully drawn up by committee and rejected all of them-not surprisingly since the government was up to its usual tricks, compiling huge tomes of rambling discourse, interspersed with ‘hidden’ propositions that had little or no relation to the subject supposedly under discussion. They’d actually edited the agreement, removing all of the neat little extras the politicians had thought up to throw in, hoping the Sumpturians wouldn’t notice.

    The U.N. delegation had been livid, of course, the Sumpturians unmoved. They’d explained with patience that they had terra-formed and claimed both Pluto and Venus and had the right, by Earth laws, of first conquest. They’d also claimed water and mineral rights of the Kuiper belt, mineral rights of Mercury, and the planet Jupiter for fuel exploitation rights and waste disposal.

    No one had apparently anticipated that the treaty would entail a division of so-farunclaimed real estate across the solar system. The U.N. delegation scrambled to catch up, drawing up a second agreement which included proprietary rights of the Earth people to everything else in the solar system, apparently deciding to slug the division out among themselves at a later date. They’d had to send for a group of scientists to help them draw it up to make certain they didn’t leave anything out that might be of some importance in the future.

    In the end they’d claimed the inner asteroid belt-all rights-all the moons, even those circling planets the Sumpturians had claimed, Mars and Earth, of course, and the remaining planets the Sumpturians hadn’t lain claim to. They also wanted waste disposal rights on Jupiter.

    The Sumpturians graciously agreed to disposal rights as long as they were allowed to monitor what was disposed of on Jupiter and refused to give up the moons circling any of the planets they’d claimed, pointing out that they had plans to introduce a moon into Venus’ orbit to help to stabilize the planet’s eco-system and also that they intended to monitor Jupiter and would need to have bases there to do so.

    The U.N. fell to haggling over the ‘choice’ outer moons for future colonization or strategic bases of their own at least. By the end of the second week, they’d managed to reach an agreement regarding the disposition of every stone in the solar system. The Sumpturians seemed completely satisfied and, because they were, the Earth people decided they’d been screwed. They weren’t sure how, but they were certain the Sumpturians wouldn’t have been so damned satisfied if they hadn’t come out on top of the battle for the prime real estate. It didn’t matter that they had lain claim to parts of the solar system they hadn’t even had the chance to reach and probably wouldn’t be able to for generations. What mattered was that they didn’t like interlopers. They wanted the opportunity to look it over at their leisure and appropriate or discard it according to worth.

    They entered the third week of talks with an agreement hammered out, which hit a new hitch when the members of the U.N. pointed out that they would expect to be able to build an embassy on Venus once it was possible to do so in order to maintain the treaty. The U.S. wanted their own Embassy and also petitioned for a military base there.

    The two issues were discussed exhaustively but the Sumpturians finally agreed to allow it, both the Embassy and the base, once the President had offered to pay to lease the area set aside as ‘American’ soil. The actual haggling began when the President discovered that they didn’t consider American dollars of any value to them. They would take payment in trade. They pointed out that, since they already had access to pretty much any raw materials they could possibly want and their technology far surpassed any technology on Earth, the Earth people really had nothing to offer but food.

    That was a painful negotiation. Nobody wanted to admit that there were already food shortages on Earth, however, due the climate change. They might as well have. They haggled more furiously about the food than they had over the planets. An agreement was finally reached, however, when the Sumpturians agreed to take part of the payment in DNA samples that would allow them to accelerate the development of flora and fauna on Venus.

    As relieved as Sybil was that they’d managed to hammer out a treaty, particularly when it had seemed for a while that they wouldn’t be able to, she was so depressed over the knowledge that Anka would soon be leaving that it was all she could do to pretend she was pleased about it.