The Resident, plump and slow-moving and at least twenty years older than Stiamot, was a conventional, cautious man, and beneath his caution Stiamot thought he could detect a weariness, a bleakness of spirit, a thwarted sense that he had hoped for more out of life than a career as District Resident in an unimportant and backward rural district. But he did not seem unintelligent. He listened carefully to Stiamot’s questions and responded in abundant detail, and when Stiamot had returned once too often to the subject of the Metamorphs Kalban Vond said, “You keep coming back to them, don’t you? They must interest you very much.”
“They do. It’s nothing of an official nature, you understand. Just my own curiosity. We could say that I’m something of a student of them.”
The Resident’s sleepy blue eyes turned suddenly bright. “A student? What interests you, may I ask, about those sneaky, nasty savages?”
Stiamot, startled, caught his breath. But he showed his displeasure only by the slightest quirk of his lips. “Is that how you see them?”
“Most of us do, out here.”
“Be that as it may, we have to consider that we share the planet with them. They were here first. We thrust ourselves down among them and shoved them aside.”
“So to speak,” said Kalban Vond primly. “Majipoor’s a big place. There’s plenty of room for both races, wouldn’t you say?” Stiamot managed a faint smile. “I wonder if they see it that way. But in any case, problems are brewing, and it’s necessary to give some thought to them. Our population is growing very rapidly, and I don’t just mean the human population. Ghayrogs—Hjorts—the other non-human groups also—”
“Room for all,” Kalban Vond said, sounding a little nettled. “A very big world. We’ve lived side by side with them fairly peacefully for thousands of years.”
“Side by side, yes. And fairly peacefully, I suppose. But, as I say, there are more of us than ever before. The world is big, but it isn’t infinite. And those thousands of years have gone by, and have they become our friends? Are we heading toward any sort of real rapport with them? You know as well as I do that there have been some very unpleasant incidents, and it’s my impression that those incidents are becoming more frequent. They hate us, don’t they? And we fear them. They put up with our settling on their world because they have no choice, and here in this valley you live next door to them wondering how long they’ll continue to maintain the peace. That’s so, isn’t it?”
“Perhaps you put it a bit extremely,” the Resident said. “Hate—fear—”
“A moment ago you called them ‘sneaky, nasty savages.’ Which one of us is being extreme? Is that how you usually speak of your friends, Resident?”
“I never claimed they were my friends, you know,” said Kalban Vond. “You’re the one who used the word.”
Stiamot could make no response to that. In the chilly silence that followed the Resident turned aside to open a second bottle of wine and refill their bowls. Something of a confrontational tone was creeping into the conversation, and perhaps this was meant as a calming gesture. They were drinking a surprisingly fine wine, a blue one from Stoienzar in the south. Stiamot had never expected to be offered anything so good here, or to have the Resident be so generous with it.
After a moment he said, a little more gently, “I think we both agree, at any rate, that we’re not making much progress toward developing a more harmonious relationship with them. Not making any at all, in fact. But we need to. As our population grows, so does their resentment of our presence here. If we don’t come to some sort of understanding with them soon, we’ll find ourselves in a state of constant collision with them. Warfare, in fact. I’ve heard the rumors.”
“Well, Prince Stiamot, at least here we agree.”
“It can’t be allowed to happen. We need to head it off.”
“And do you have a plan? Does Lord Strelkimar?”
“It’s not something his lordship has spoken of with me. But I assure you the Council has been discussing it.”
Kalman Vond sat up alertly, and his eyes were once again gleaming. All that weariness and self-pitying sadness had fallen from him in a moment. Stiamot saw the man’s unabashed eager excitement: it must seem to him that he was about to be made privy to intimate details of the deliberations of the Council. Sitting here sipping wine with one of the Coronal’s close advisors was surely the biggest thing that had happened to him in all the years since he had been posted to this dreary province, and the thought that he would very shortly be playing host to the Coronal himself in his very own home must be dizzying.
But no revelations of court deliberations were going to be forthcoming tonight. Stiamot said, “We’ve been speaking about the Metamorphs only in the most general way, so far. Everyone agrees that we need to examine the whole problem much more thoroughly than ever before. And, as I said, my interest in them is a matter of mere personal curiosity. They fascinate me. Now that I find myself in a district where Metamorphs actually live, I hope to get a chance to learn something more about them—some details of their culture, their governmental structure, their religious beliefs, their art—”
“You ought to talk to Dr. Mundiveen about all that,” said Kalban Vond.
Of course Stiamot’s interest in the Metamorphs was much more than a matter of mere personal curiosity, but there was no reason why he had to explain that to the District Resident. The Metamorph problem had been central to Council discussions for the past several years, and, though nothing whatever had been heard from the Coronal on the topic, it surely had to be on his mind as well.
By and large, the Metamorphs kept to their secluded forest homes and the people of the cities and farming districts of Majipoor to the territories they occupied, and each group did its best to pretend that the other was not there, or was, at least, invisible. But there had been a good many ugly incidents. Wherever Metamorph and human interests overlapped, difficulties arose. The Metamorphs held certain places sacred, but who knew which ones they were, until a trespass had occurred? The ever-expanding human population of Majipoor, and its constantly increasing non-human adjuncts, kept pushing outward into new lands where the Metamorphs would abide no intrusion. Reports trickled to the capital of occasional outbreaks of conflict, of kidnappings and killings, of skirmishes, of massacres, even. Information took so long to reach Stee from outlying regions, and arrived in such uncertain form, that no one at the capital could be completely certain of what was taking place; but plainly there was friction, there was violence, and neither side was wholly without blame. Now and again Metamorphs, erupting out of nowhere in the night, had slaughtered human settlers venturing into places that should not have been ventured into. Humans, coming upon some tempting locality that invited settlement, had driven its Metamorph population out by force, or simply destroyed them. There had, of course, been such incidents throughout all the thousands of years since the first emigrants from Old Earth had come to this world. But as the cities spread outward and the agricultural settlements that supported them multiplied, they appeared to be increasing in number, and there were those at court who felt that sooner or later some great precipitating event would touch off an all-out war between the Metamorphs and the humans of Majipoor, and that event could not be many years away.