Tolar was a patchwork quilt of independent provinces, a
pastoral world of technologically-backward people, a pre-industrial culture of scholars
and artisans. Earth’s partners in the Trade Alliance had at first tried to warn
Central Command away from making contact with the Tolari – and Smithton did
have to admit they had a point. A world that could not yet mass-produce
anything was a poor candidate as a trading partner for any star-faring race. Earth
had sent a research vessel to investigate anyway, and the researchers had
gotten the shock of their lives when they scanned one of the Tolari cities.

The Tolari were humanoid. So humanoid, in fact, that it was
possible to dress them in human clothing and drop them into the middle of New
York City, and no one would look twice. Parallel evolution! It was all over the
interplanetary news networks. Central Command responded by putting the system
off-limits to private and commercial vessels – only Earth Fleet ships like the Bellerophon were allowed within two
light years of Tolar’s star, Beta Hydri. The media whined as much as it dared,
and a few entrepreneurs disappeared under mysterious circumstances, but the
interdict stuck.

He had been named Earth’s Ambassador to Tolar. Their
language was of such fiendish difficulty that it had taken him an exhausting
year of intensive study to master it, even using vocabulary implants provided –
for a steep fee – by Earth’s nearest neighbors in the Trade Alliance, the
insectoid Terosha Federation. Tolari was a complex, tonal language, in which
the difference between a polite greeting and an exhortation to stick a hand in
a jar full of sea water was determined not just by whether the speaker’s tone
was rising or falling, but by how far it rose or fell. Subtle inflections
indicated whether the speaker was addressing a superior, an equal, or an
inferior. It was, Smithton was quite happy to admit to anyone who asked, a
damned nightmare of a language to learn, and that was the major reason why he
was the only person on the ship who could speak it with any degree of fluency.

And now, the Tolari were calling. The Tolari, according to
the Terosha, never called.