It was at this point that my hosts sprang a bit of a surprise on me.

“Now we would like to ask you some questions, since you have been asking us so many questions,” the priest’s wife said.

“Sure, go ahead.”

“Why are you here?”

“I’m here as a diplomat seeking a treaty with your country.”

“That can’t be the full story.”

“I’m not sure what you mean. That is my purpose here.”

“We make treaties pretty easily. You saw how quickly we were able to work things out with the Fremen, and things are proceeding pretty rapidly with the Western Forest people as well. There will soon be two whole treaties conducted from scratch in the time that it takes you to negotiate one treaty. Clearly something more is going on.”

I was admittedly a bit caught off guard by this question. I had not taken the Bravians to be a people who were all that subtle in their recognition of other people and their intentions. In fact, among the most cherished thoughts I held about the Bravians is that they were a bit dense about such matters. When startling insight was combined with their characteristic blunt honesty, it was a bit hard to remain as diplomatic as I wished. “I suppose you are right that there is more going on.”

“Like what?” the priest chimed in. “We know that you are neighbors of the _________, and by our knowledge you too have had problems like we have with their surprise attacks and all. What we don’t know is the way you feel about Bravian ways.”

“I’m not sure what you mean by that.”

“Let’s be direct,” the priest said. “I’ve traveled to your country before, and I can explain what it was like. Our ship was put in quarantine and the people on our ship were not allowed shore leave during the time we were docked at your country. I had plenty of reading and studying I was doing on the ship when I wasn’t keeping track of the containers moving on and off of the boat at the dock, so it didn’t bother me as much, but the people I was with on the boat hated stopping at your ports because so few people got to even go on the dock like I did. This is not the behavior of a friendly nation, and people here judge your nation as unfriendly, even if they do not see you as an enemy.”

I was taken aback by how our attitudes had been recognized by the Bravian people for what they were. “Truth be told, we do have some concerns about your culture.”

“What aspects of our culture?”

“We are specifically concerned about your political culture. We know what happened with ______, that when they made a treaty with you and allowed you to settle trading posts that within a couple of generations the majority of their population had been turned against them and they were in danger of losing control over their entire land, which seems very possible. We don’t want that to happen to us.”

The priest sat thoughtfully for a second. “We know, from what little we have been able to gather about your nation and its ways, that you have what we would consider to be a more autocratic government than our own. We figured that your being anti-Marxist would be a sign of commonality between your ways and our own, but perhaps you fear the free and easy way that Bravians operate and the lack of deference that we feel towards authorities. Perhaps this free and egalitarian spirit is taken to be some sort of latent rebelliousness and bad attitude that is seen as a threat to social order.”

I had to give the priest credit for rather hitting the nail on the head, but I did not want to admit it, so I kept silent as he pondered the matter thoughtfully.

“How do you like it here?” the priest’s wife asked.

“I have enjoyed my time here.”

“Do you expect to be kept on as a permanent ambassador?”

“I’m not sure. While it is true that our diplomats tend to serve long terms in countries where we are chosen, and that there are not many people in the diplomatic corps who speak Low Bravian or have the right credibility within our community. But everything depends on the trust and confidence our leaders have in us, and if we lose that confidence no amount of skills can keep us in positions of responsibility.”

The priest’s wife tilted her head, seemingly startled. “That’s exactly what we think, only we think that about the people we serve. One of the main things that deters us from corruption and taking advantage of offices of trust is that we know that if we behave corruptly and abuse the responsibilities that we have that we will lose the trust of the people and that trust is something that can often never be recovered, and may not only affect us personally but also our entire families and associates. This is a major deterrent to behaving badly, not least because we live in our communities and have to interact with our neighbors whom we represent on a regular basis. We have to be able to hold up our heads and know that we are behaving with integrity in our dealings.”

“I don’t know what our people think about that sort of thing. I suppose they assume that leaders are going to behave corruptly, not that their opinion counts for much anyway.”

The priest looked at me seriously. “I can see how that would bring difficulties. You are wise enough to know that you benefit from a good relationship with Bravia, you certainly do not want us as an enemy, but at the same time you are concerned that opening yourself up to our influence, indirectly through the way our people will think and behave and comport themselves, will jeopardize the stability of your regime. That is not an unreasonable fear. We Bravians do not go abroad looking for regimes to topple or dragons to slay, but it is true that our example is powerful when ordinary people in other areas see how ordinary Bravians behave and wish to copy our example. What is to us obviously normal and acceptable behavior is deeply dangerous in many places.”

I was both pleased and disturbed by the way that the priest understood our dilemma so well. Our discussion ended with pleasantries exchanged on both sides, and I went back to the inn where I was staying to rest up before continuing my travels (which I will report on as well, as it provides the chance for another close encounter with a member of the Bravian royal family, which I know you are interested in). I have throughout these dispatches written at considerable length about the concerns we have, but it is striking to recognize that the Bravians understand our concerns. We would not wish for friendly relations with them merely on account of their power, but I take them seriously that they do not seek trouble in other countries. Indeed, form what I have seen in my own travels here, the Bravians are an exceedingly orderly people. I have seen a great many reasonable conversations about politics and religion, but I have never seen a riot or any civic discontent. We can be sure that the Bravians are not the sort of people to loot–they take property rights very seriously, and repeatedly have expressed to me the centrality of property to the Bravian way of thinking and their desire to obtain it and pass it on to their children unimpaired. The real danger they present is precisely what they recognize and openly admit, that their free and open ways are a threat to unequal power dynamics in the societies where they operate. Even in their histories, at least those I have been able to read, this problem is noted as being an essential aspect of what brought them into exile in the first place, how they ended up where they did.

This seems to be to be the essential difficulty that we face in opening up friendly relations with them. Without a treaty, they do not see us as an enemy but definitely see us as a non-friend, which is the way that they put it. With non-friends they are honest, to a point, but definitely put up a guard. Yet we do the same thing with regards to them, and it is hard to tell if they are reserved with us because of their own native suspicion of non-friends or if they are only mirroring our behavior back to us. Despite our limited relations so far, they recognize the sort of society that we have and also recognize it as being alien to their own, yet they figured that there were at least enough similarities that we could exist in peace. I know that there is a division within your court as to whether that is the case. I too am of a divided mind on this matter. I do not think that the Bravians would ever be a direct threat to us. They have no desire to take over the world and remake it in their own image. They keep themselves pretty busy with internal improvements as well as a mutually beneficial intercourse with the outside world. As I have told you, they have no shortage of work to do within their own land to cultivate it and bring it up to a tolerable level of development, and they take that work seriously.

But even if they are not a direct threat to us or to our ways, I do not believe that they can be anything but a continual indirect threat to us. As long as we and our people are interacting with Bravian elites, the people of our nation will assume that there is a free and easy relationship between elites of all countries and will not take such behavior to heart. They could be taught to see Bravians as a profitable but very strange people whose ways are not to be copied but which are not hostile to us and which are beneficial to us when properly used in a limited fashion. Indeed, as I have seen repeatedly, the Bravian elites themselves are charming and hospitable and are clearly within what we would consider to be the civilized tradition. They are well-educated and consider the feelings of others, and show tact and sensitivity. All of this has won Bravians a great deal of goodwill in the world and will continue to do so as long as they maintain those qualities. The problem is that if our people see ordinary Bravians behaving in their customary manner and being governed by Bravian laws and ways in their own cities, then the comparison that our people will make is that Bravian ways are better for ordinary people, and it is this that will be a danger to us. This tendency to see Bravian ways as better will encourage them to do as the Fremen did, and that is to make themselves in some fashion to be among the Bravian people, likely through intermarriage with ordinary Bravians and adopting their ways, so that they fall under the protection of Bravian laws and their powerful military. In so doing Bravian culture will spread and threaten to become dominant in our land just as it did with our neighbors.

I therefore recommend that we seek a non-aggression pact with Bravia, but wish to make sure that Bravians are not permitted to establish their own towns, but rather are permitted to and even encouraged or required to, settle in specific sections of existing towns where Bravians may have their customary extraterritoriality but have it within very narrow and constricted boundaries, where we can make sure that ordinary Bravians are engaged in the sorts of provisions of goods and services that may be profitable both to them and to us, but in such a way that prevents their ways from being recognized by our people, who will only see Bravians in a professional capacity and not see their social or political behaviors. Basically, what I propose is an expansion of our existing quarantine policy into something that is more like a ghetto policy, in that we will allow the Bravians to live where they may best be of us to us, and let them live freely in a constrained fashion that will keep their laws and culture from being a corroding influence to your regime. I hope that suggestion may be pleasing to you and may unify the court behind a decision that takes both profit and security concerns into account. I am sure you know and will convey that this will require constant vigilance on our part to keep our people from living within the Bravian areas and seeing how the Bravians behave. I believe our zoning regulators will be up to keeping the Bravian area open for business but not for anything else, but that will have to be arranged.