C. J. Cherryh

Foreigner 2 (Foreigner)

Invader

Pranebella

There were people who'd never bothered to educate themselves about atevi because it wasn't their job to deal with atevi. The public just knew there was a different and far more violent world beyond their shores; the conservative party, which made a career out of viewing-with-alarm and deprecating esoteric scientific advances as costing too much money—those whose political bent was to conserve what was or yearn for what they thought had been, feared progress toward any future that didn't fit their imaginary past.

And they played to an under educated populace with their demands for stronger defense, more secrecy, more money for a launch vehicle to get humans off the planet—which, of course, they could get by spending less for atevi language studies, and nothing at all for trade cities, as giving too much to atevi.

Lately the conservatives had tried to get three perhaps ill-advised university graduate students' grant revoked for teaching atevi philosophy as a cultural immersion experience for human eight-year-olds.

And in the ensuing flap, the more radical conservatives had tried to get all atevi studies professors thrown off the State Department's university advisory committee.

[...]But the closer atevi and human cultures drew to each other, the more the radicals, turning up in high places, generated issue after issue after issue—because the majority of humans, while not hating atevi, still had just a little nervousness about their neighbors across the strait, who did shoot each other, who looked strikingly different, who were ruled by a different government, who couldn't speak Mosphei; and people, be they human, be they atevi, always wanted to feel safer than they did, and more in charge of their future than they were.

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