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initiative."
"Is that a proposal?" Wellesley asked. "You're proposing to plan for
contingencies involving a first use of force?"
"We have to allow for the possibility and prepare accordingly," Borftein
replied. "Yes, it is."
"I agree," Howard Kalens murmured.
Wellesley looked at Slessor, who, while still showing. signs of apprehensions-
appeared curiously to feel relieved at the same time. Wellesley nodded
heavily. "Very well. Proceed on that basis, John. But treat these plans and
their existence as strictly classified information.
Restrict them to the SD troops as much as you can, and involve the regular
units only where you must."
"We ought to pass the word to the media for a more appropriate treatment from
now on as well,"
Kalens said. "Perhaps playing up things like Chironian stubbornness and
irresponsibility would harden up the public image a bit... just in case. We
could get them to add a mention or two of signs that the Chironians might have
armed themselves and the need to take precautions. It could always be
dismissed later as overzealous reporting. Should I whisper in Lewis's ear
about it?"
Wellesley frowned over the suggestion for several seconds but eventually
nodded. "I suppose you should, yes."
Sterm watched, listened, and said nothing.
CHAPTER SIX
HOWARD KALENS SAT at the desk in the study of his villa style home, set amid
manicured shrubs and screens of greenery in the Columbia District's
top-echelon residential sector, and contemplated the porcelain bottle that he
was turning slowly between his hands. It was Korean, from the
thirteenth-century Koryo dynasty, and about fourteen inches high with a long
neck that flowed into a bulbous body of celadon glaze delicately inlaid with
mishima depicting a willow tree and symmetrical floral designs contained
between decorative bands of a repeated foliose motif encircling the stem and
base. His desk was a solid-walnut example of early nineteenth-century
French rococo revival and the chair in which he was sitting, a matching piece
by the same cabinetmaker. The books aligned on the shelves behind him included
first editions by Henry James, Scott Fitzgerald, and Norman Mailer; the
Matisse on the wall opposite was a print from an original preserved in the
Mayflower II's vaults, and the lithographs beside it were by Rico Lebrun. And
as
Kalen's eyes feasted on the fine balance of detail and contrasts of hues, and
his fingers traced
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teryear.txt the textures of the bottle's surface, he savored the feeling of a
tiny fraction of a time and place that were long ago and far away coming back
to life to be uniquely his for that brief, fleeting moment.
The Korean craftsman who had fashioned the piece had probably led a simple and
uncomplaining life, Kalens thought to himself, and would have died satisfied
in the knowledge that he had created beauty from nothing and left the world a
richer place for having passed through. Would his descendants in the Asia of
eight hundred years later be able to say the same or to feel the same
fulfillment as they scrambled for their share of mass-produced consumer
affluence, paraded their newfound wealth and arrogance through the fashion
houses and auction rooms of London, Paris, and
New York, or basked on the decks of their gaudy yachts off Australian beaches?
Kalens very much doubted it. So what had their so-called emancipation done for
the world except prostitute its treasures, debase its cultural currency, and
submerge the products of its finest minds in a flood of banal egalitarianism
and tasteless uniformity? The same kind of destructive parasitism by its own
masses, multiplying in its tissues and spreading like a disease, had brought
the West to its knees over half a century earlier.
In its natural condition a society was like an iceberg, eight*ninths submerged
in crude ignorance and serving no useful purpose other than to elevate and
support the worthy minority whose distillation and embodiment of all that was
excellent of the race conferred privilege as a fight and authority as a duty.
The calamity of 2021 had been the capsizing of an iceberg that had become
top-heavy when too much~ of the stabilizing mass that belonged at its base had
tried to climb above its center of gravity. The war had been the price of
allowing shopkeepers to posture as statesmen, factory foremen as
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