He was not surprised, really, although the humans seemed to have been astonished. Oppuk’s monstrous behavior had its roots in long-standing Narvo customs, true, but roots were not leaves and branches. Over the years, as his unsanity grew, he had become more of a caricature of Narvo than its exemplar.
If the humans had been astonished when they discovered Llo’s kochan affiliation, they had, in turn, astonished the Jao with their response. Aille as much as any.
Ben Stockwell, working with his fellow regional governors around the globe, had cobbled together an organization they called the “United Nations” to serve as an overall coordinating body for their work. Apparently it was some sort of council that had once existed, before the Jao conquest, which they intended to resurrect—although, Stockwell had privately told Aille, he intended to see to it that it had “more teeth” than its predecessor. Specifically, he proposed to place all jinau troops under the authority of the UN rather than the regional administrative entities.
Aille had found the expression peculiar, coming from a species whose dentition was so pitiful compared to Jao, much less a true predator. The Jao expression for the same thing was logical: “more mass.” But, by now, he had grown accustomed to the fractured human way of looking at things.
Aille had not objected. It would make the situation easier for him, after all, to have a single body to oversee instead of the existing welter of regional districts. And, beneath the surface, he had seen the lines of association growing between humans, interwoven with Jao. It was a potentially dangerous situation, to be sure, since a single authoritative human governing body would enhance their abilities in the event of an outright rebellion. But Aille had faced the truth squarely: no matter what, if the Jao could not find proper association with the humans, a reconquest of the planet would be needed. And it would be much more difficult than the initial one, which had been very difficult to begin with.
For all practical purposes, Jao control over Terra now depended almost entirely on Aille’s own prestige and popularity with the human masses. Should that be lost, for whatever reason, Aille had no doubt at all that the jinau forces under Kralik would no longer be controllable—just as he had no doubt at all that, in his private negotiations with Wiley and other leaders of the Resistance who had come to St. Louis, Kralik had given as well as taken. The humans had been very circumspect about it—circumspect enough that Aille had chosen to ignore the matter—but the traces picked up by Jao orbital monitors were clear enough: Kralik was quietly seeing to the storage of weaponry in secure and hidden redoubts in the mountains.
And not just the mountains of this continent, either. Kralik had also been negotiating a peaceful settlement with Resistance leaders from China, as well, where the Resistance had been as strong as it had been in North America. The volume of seagoing traffic on this planet was enormous, far too great to be monitored directly by the Jao themselves. Aille was certain that the North Americans were secretly transferring weapons to the Chinese, and other moieties they considered potentially militant allies in the event of a new outbreak of war.
The situation was potentially explosive. It was for that reason, even though he personally found the custom strange, that Aille had immediately approved of the UN’s first official action: the adoption of what humans called “the highest medal for valor” and the awarding of the individual variant to Llo krinnu Gava vau Narvo. The group variant had been awarded to the entire crew of the ramming submarine.
After much squabbling—humans seemed incapable of deciding upon any course of action without squabbling first—they decided to call the first variant the “Star of Terra” and the other the “Solar Unit Citation.” The Star of Terra was then presented, with much fanfare in the human public communication system—what they called, with equal illogic, “the media”—to the Narvo Association Hall in Oklahoma City.
The Narvo representatives who accepted the little metallic symbol were even more puzzled by the custom than Aille himself. Humans seemed to find it a great honor to be recognized “posthumously,” as they put it, whereas Jao could see no point beyond pure superstition in presenting what amounted to a bau carving to an individual who no longer existed—and, in Llo’s case, had never possessed a bau to begin with. She had been a pilot, not a commander.