Mike Resnick - Birthright

your position.”

They agreed with everything he said. The Bureau would make the task of contacting other races infinitely easier, and certainly they had nothing against Man, who had freed them, ages ago, from the tyrannical yoke of the Lemm. But, on the other hand, those few other races they had been in contact with felt that a gesture must be made against Man's ironfisted control of the galaxy, and while they personally had only the highest regard for Man, they would not go against the will of the majority, especially in a situation such as this, where they were physiologically prohibited from gaining a full appreciation of the problem. They intended no offense, but under the circumstances... And so it went, on world after world, with race after race. By the time he visited the twentieth alien planet, he found out that he was far from the only emissary of the Commonwealth trying to persuade the aliens to reconsider their stand. He struck paydirt on the twenty-seventh planet, Balok VII, only to have his work undone when the Commonwealth began putting economic sanctions on all alien worlds that had not yet come back into the fold. The Balokites, who had been all set to rejoin the Bureau, dug in their heels and again withdrew their support. The Setts actually went to war with the Navy, and held their own for almost a month before they were totally exterminated. As failure after failure greeted Man's efforts, work nonetheless proceeded on the Bureau. Foundations were laid, walls and facades erected, environmental systems laid in, communication and translation systems set up, food synthesis laboratories installed, medical centers created, decorations and furniture imported.

Within a decade the Bureau was complete, a huge, proud, unbelievably complex monolith of a building, towering many thousands of feet above the rocky surface of Deluros IV, visible for miles in every direction, all of its internal systems functioning smoothly, its exterior a paean to the art of a thousand sentient races.

Thus it stood. And thus, Mallow knew, it would stand for all eternity, an empty, unused monument both to Man's brilliance and his shortcomings, an edifice so mature and farsighted in its conception and execution that neither Man nor his neighbors in the galaxy would ever be ready for it. The night it was completed Mallow got rip-roaring drunk and stayed that way for a week. When he finally sobered up he resigned his position, left the Deluros system, set up shop some forty thousand light-years away, and made a fortune designing inexpensive but highly efficient group housing for the colonists of Delta Scuti II.

21: THE COLLECTORS

...With the Commonwealth entering a period of severe unrest, it was primarily the duty of the planetary governors to hold their native populations in check. They were a remarkable lot, these governors, charged with the responsibility of speaking for the Commonwealth on their respective worlds. One of the greatest of them was Selimund (6888- G.E.), who, in addition to his political abilities, founded the Museum of Antique Weaponry on Deluros VIII...

—Man: Twelve Millennia of Achievement (No mention can be found of either Selimund, his fabled

collection, or collectors and collections in general in Origin and History of the Sentient Races. ) Being a governor had its advantages, reflected Selimund, even when one was sitting on a powder keg like Mirzam X. For one thing, damned near all the alien worlds were powder kegs these days, and since Mirzam X was a little bigger than most, the job held a little more prestige than most. For another, the

natives despised humanity so devoutly and so openly that he perforce had very little contact with them.

And, too, there was his collection.

Man had always had the urge to collect things, to surround himself with ordered series of possessions. Possibly it was an intellectualization of the primordial territorial instinct, possibly not. Selimund himself called it the “pack-rat urge,” although no member of that long-extinct species had ever carried the fetish quite so far as Man had done. There was something in his nature that reveled not only in pride of ownership, but in the painstaking formulation of lists of objects to be procured, lists of objects already procured, and the numerical, alphabetical, or other orderly arrangement of both possessions and lists. It wasn't exactly avarice, for most collectors spent enormous amounts of time and capital on the accumulation of objects—or, more often, sets and series of objects—that most other people considered either trivial or worthless.

Collecting, over the eons, had become highly specialized, just as had all other forms of endeavor. There was once an era when it was possible for a man to know, in his own lifetime, the sum total of all scientific knowledge. By the time the race had left its birthplace and begun to permeate the galaxy, no man could even know his own highly specialized field with any degree of completeness, and the concept of the true Renaissance Man was lost forever. So, too, did collections become more and more specialized. It was still possible to collect the entire works of a single author or painter, or representative stamps from every period of a planet's history—but to try to collect all the literary works of a single genre, or all the stamps from a certain point of galactic history, was an out-and-out impossibility. Undaunted, Man continued to yield happily to the joy of ownership, the striving toward completion of some fancy or other which had piqued his imagination or awakened his greed. From stamps and currency to masterpieces of art to any other objects, no matter how unlikely or intrinsically worthless, Man collected.

And very few men collected with the skill, passion, or success of the current governor of Mirzam X. Selimund, whose closest association with military life was the armed guard around his executive mansion, had for reasons probably not even known to himself decided early in life that there was nothing quite so fascinating as the study—and, hence, the collecting—of alien firearms. The production and possession of all such weapons had been strictly prohibited since the inception of the Commonwealth, but that merely made their acquisition all the more challenging. He had begun with handguns from the Canphor Twins and Lodin XI from the Democracy, and had gradually increased his possessions, moving both forward and backward from that historical point in time. He was acknowledged to be the greatest living authority on the weaponry of the late Democratic period, and more than once he had been called in to determine the authenticity of a piece from that era. His collection was on permanent display back on Deluros VIII, and had been willed to the Commonwealth upon his death. Its value had been placed at some 22 million credits, but, like all collectors, the evaluation of his collection was dealt with in terms of emotion rather than currency, for no piece would ever be offered for sale.

Some pieces, however, might well be offered in trade, and it was for this purpose that he had cleared his

desk early this afternoon, and was awaiting the arrival of Baros Durmin, a dealer in antique weaponry who had supposedly come upon an unbelievably valuable cache of ancient firearms. Durmin was finding it harder to replenish his stock, and so he had proposed a trade rather than an out-and-out cash transaction. Selimund didn't know exactly what Durmin had to offer, but the man usually delivered high-quality items, and so the governor was willing at least to take a look at his wares.

Durmin, a huge man with hamlike hands and a deep, booming voice, was ushered into Selimund's office,

followed by two assistants who carried in a large, ornate container the size of a trunk. “Hello, Baros,” said Selimund. “Now, what's this fantastic find you've been raving about?” “You won't believe it until you see it, Governor,” said Durmin. “Okay, boys, open it up.” The two men unlocked the container and opened it. Selimund looked in, trying not to appear too anxious, and Durmin withdrew a small object wrapped in Toranian spider-silk. He removed the covering without a word and handed it over to Selimund, who began examining it gingerly. “A laser pistol,” he murmured, holding it up to the light. “Early Democracy ... no, make that late Republic. Handcrafted. Good for about four minutes without repowering. Trigger device fits a near-human hand, probably a little smaller. Emra IV, I'd say, or possibly Lemm.” He paused lost in thought. “No, it couldn't be Lemm. They never developed laser weapons. Probably Emran. Well-built. Looks almost new.” He looked up at Durmin. “What else have you got?” Durmin handed him another weapon.