The Uplift War

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To Jane Goodall, Sarah Hardy, and all the others who are helping us at last to learn to understand.

And to Diane Fossey, who died fighting so that beauty and potential might live.

How strange, that such an insignificant little world should come to matter so much.

Traffic roared amid the towers of Capital City, just beyond the sealed crystal dome of the official palanquin. But no sound penetrated to disturb the bureaucrat of Cost and Caution, who concentrated only on the holo-image of a small planet, turning slowly within reach of one down-covered arm. Blue seas and a jewel-bright spray of islands came into view as the bureaucrat watched, sparkling in the reflected glow of an out-of-view star.

If I were one of the gods spoken of in wolfling legends… the bureaucrat imagined. Its pinions flexed. There was the feeling one had only to reach out with a talon and seize…

But no. The absurd idea demonstrated that the bureaucrat had spent too much time studying the enemy. Crazy Terran concepts were infecting its mind.

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