With aliens, we have to rethink everything from the ground up. An alien delegation to Earth will be housed together, right? Wrong, if the aliens are the Aleriona:
"The Aleriona overlords who comprised the delegation could not be housed together. They never lived thus at home; to offer them less than total privacy would have been an insult, and perhaps risky of all their lives. So they must be scattered around Earth." (p. 56)
How might housing them together risk their lives? At any rate, it must be avoided. But they must communicate at a distance if they are to function as a delegation and indeed as members of a rational, technological species.
This makes life easier for Heim. When he and his men raid Ascension Island, they render the Peace Control guards unconscious and are in no danger either of harming any other Aleriona by accident or of abducting the wrong one.
Heim's men bring:
"No lethal weapons; he'd hang before he killed humans doing their duty." (ibid.)
That reminds us of something. The Marvel Comics vigilante, the Punisher (like the Batman except that he is not masked and he kills), kills crooked security men, i.e., guys in uniform who shoot first before challenging an intruder, but surrenders as soon as he is surrounded by New York cops. (In prison, he cannot join the Nubian Brotherhood and refuses to join the Aryan Nation.)
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
That bit about high caste Aleriona being unable to live closely together is something of a strain to accept.
Ad astra! Sean
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