Birthright

resort colonies. Once there, I checked in at the fanciest hotel I could find and spent the next few days

just soaking up sunlight and alcohol. One night, after I had been there a week or so, I decided to take a walk around the city. I was never much for conducted tours, so I just set out on my own. I never had much sense of direction, and I was soon totally lost. I wandered into the alien quarter of the city and suddenly, within sight of the towering peak of my hotel, I found myself surrounded by almost unimaginable squalor and poverty. The living conditions were absolutely shocking. There were corpses littering the street, and garbage was piled up in front of all the dwellings. The water was so foul I could smell it from two hundred meters away. To my untrained eye, I felt that many of the Polluxans were in dire need of medical attention.

When I finally got back to the hotel I found our ambassador-in-residence and complained to her of the outrageous conditions I had seen. In fact, I literally begged her to send a medical team to the alien quarter—after all, the Polluxans were oxygen-breathing humanoids, and I felt that even nonspecialized human medics might be able to alleviate their suffering to some degree. The ambassador replied that the Polluxans were happy the way they were and that it wasn't our business to interfere with them. Her comments were that the Polluxans couldn't ingest pure water, but instead required the numerous minerals that were found in the foul-smelling stuff that came from their lakes. She also stated that, far from neglecting their dead, they were simply unemotional and irreligious, and that the bodies would be carted off and incinerated by the next morning. And she also opined that, since the alien quarter was centuries old, they obviously felt no inclination to repair it or institute a program of sanitation and hygiene—and since Man was a virtual newcomer to the planet, we had no right to impose our values on the native inhabitants.

Her answers made a great deal of sense, but I decided to look into the problem a little further anyway. I discovered that she was correct about the corpses, but that everything else was either a deliberate lie or a gross misinterpretation of the situation. For example, the Polluxans do indeed require certain minerals that are not to be found in pure H2O—but the water they were drinking contained not only the requisite minerals but massive amounts of industrial waste, enough to increase their death rate by three hundred percent. As for the sanitary conditions, they had been placed in what amounted to a reservation, and were not allowed to leave it, even to dump their waste and garbage on an empty plain beyond the city. The only time it got removed was when the stench became so great that it reached the resort area and annoyed the guests. It was then thatThe Steel Boot began to take shape in my mind. I spent the next year touring a number of planets we had recently assimilated into the Oligarchy, and found conditions deplorable on a great majority of them. Frequently we didn't even know we had harmed the aliens in any way, but that didn't alter the facts. We used populated alien worlds to dump deadly radioactive wastes, to test new weapons of war, to experiment with various ecological systems and mutations. We even had some sentient chlorine and methane breathers in our multi-environmental zoos. Everywhere I looked, Man had ground the dignity and self-respect of intelligent alien races into the dirt. Usually there was no malice intended but occasionally such actions were a result of a carefully thought-out and programmed policy. For example, during the years 5300 through 5500 we signed 10,478 treaties with alien races. Do you know how many we broke? THORRIN: No.

NIIS: All but sixty!

THORRIN: As the author of the best-selling book of all time, what effect did the success of the book have on you personally?

NIIS: First of all, it made me and the next few generations of my family incredibly wealthy. And, to be