“Hence Patil’s project. Hence this whole thing. Patil’s an excuse. Terraforming never was it. It’s the population burst. It’s a colony, never mind what the rest of the planet is like! they can sit on an iceball. Terraforming’s just what you’re paying to enlist Corain’s people.”
“Well, not altogether,” Yanni said, “because ultimately, we want that planet, we want to colonize freely there, and we don’t want Defense controlling that real estate. Terraforming’s the excuse we use to get a base of our own down there. Right now Defense has themselves a nice one-thousand-kilometer-wide salt water puddle they’re using Beta Labs nanistics people to work with, long-distance, which is no way to run a laboratory. We need to be self-sufficient down there, we need to be on-site and in charge of anything genetic. We’re going to need integrations on foundational sets for Eversnow residency and some CIT volunteers pretty quick. We have that in part: we have the orbiting station and the military has the onworld base, which gives us the capability to land, and it’s kept them moderately cooperative, because they need us for supply—rather than them having to build their own station. But right now we only have the kernel of a star station in orbit. It needs to grow. Fast. It needs the onworld lab. We keep the military from owning the whole planet, we boot them entirely out of nanistics research, and Union gets a highway to new stars. I’ve needed you, young lady; I’ve desperately needed you to get up to speed on integrations. We need azi that can face down military CITs and say no, ser, that’s Reseune territory. Keep out.”
“You’re doubling the size of Union. You’re handing us problems we don’t even imagine yet!”
“It’s not me that’s running that onworld presence. Not at the moment. The elder Ari died at an inconvenient time and I couldn’t get Giraud to move faster. Not to mention you ate up a lot of budget, young lady—your new wing, hell, your budding township’s nothing against what you’ve already cost Reseune in lab time, in research, set-up. But we’ve done our Eversnow research, in budget masked behind the Fargone lab we already have. We’ve surveyed stars down that strand. There’s no likelihood of sapience down that route unless it comes a long way to meet us. Several planeted stars. Resources. Jobs. Habitat. New genetics, at least at Eversnow, not likely much at the gas-balls and ice moons we’ll be dealing with further along. A lot of advantages. And as you say—prime opportunity for a major population burst that would solve several problems, including the Citizens electorate, within the next two to three decades. That could be of incalculable value.”
“Look, I’m sorry for what I cost—”
“Don’t be.”
“But I’m going to argue with you. I’m looking at the population dynamic that results from this project, not just down that route, but all over Union. I’m looking at Cyteen and our own home territory becoming a stagnant backwater in a few hundred years, if Eversnow works. Because if it does, the center of gravity of all of Union shifts—considerably. Political interests, population dynamics, everything goes out there to what we call the edge of space right now. And if it doesn’t work, we’ll have spent a bigger budget than I ever was, ending up with no viable planet out there, just one more star station, and twice and three times the population sitting out at Fargone with no jobs, while Pan-Paris falls apart out on an unused route and hates us, maybe for nothing.”
“It’s going to work. Even at the rate we’re going, Eversnow is about twenty years from a tipover point, after which the melt accelerates and goes on its own. You’ll know it in your lifetime.”
“I’m not done, Yanni. I’m also looking at a future in which we lose touch with Alliance, if we shift our center toward Fargone. We’re at a point where we stand a small chance of making a lasting peace. Alliance has already gone poking off in another direction themselves, and they’ve proven that’s dangerous. But once Alliance finds out we’re expanding in another direction—what are they going to do to expand, but either start putting enclaves on Downbelow, or throwing some colonial effort onto Gehenna, which is their one usable planet with one hell of a local problem. —Or they accelerate their push into the Hinder Stars, and get closer to Earth. Not to mention Eversnow moves our center away from the border we share with the Alliance and that lets them take the star stations we used to own…”
“Not very profitable ones, except Mariner. I’m afraid I’m not an optimist about the peace with the Alliance lasting through your tenure.”
“I am. I think we can keep the peace if we’re sensible and get control of our own people bombing subways and talk to Alliance with some kind of notion how our own politics are going to run for ten years consecutive. You talk about integrations out there. I’m worried about integrations here. We have a disease in our own heart, Yanni. We have a serious problem in the Novgorod population, and I’m pretty sure it’s not an azi problem, it’s probably come down from the station, and I think it’s serious. I think it’s serious enough that before we start any future population burst of the size you describe, we need to know why we have Paxers, and what drives them. Is it the azi-CIT mix, or is there something about us?”
Yanni was silent a moment, thinking about that, and at that moment Haze and Hiro carried dinner in, briskly served. It was chicken with herbs, in a delicate pastry crust, and it smelled good.
“Eat,” she said. “It’s Cook’s first formal dinner. They probably went crazy back there keeping it ready to serve. Don’t let it go to waste.”
He had a bite. “It’s good. This is really good.”
Ari looked at Haze and Hiro. “Tell Wyndham so. It really is.”
“Thank you, ser, sera,” Haze said, pleased, and quietly departed, and the door shut.
Two bites later: “I can take over Admin,” she said, “when I want to. Don’t think Base Two can ever overpower Base One. It just won’t happen. That’s not a threat, Yanni. It’s a warning. Please don’t try me. Convince me. I’m willing to listen to your plans. I am listening.”
“You find out things already, don’t you?” Yanni asked. “You get what you want. You didn’t need my clearance. You’re as deep into the information as you want to be.”
She lifted a shoulder, and had a bite. To get information, sometimes you had to give away a real piece on your side. “Generally,” she said, and swallowed, and laid down her knife and fork and looked at him. “Yanni, please don’t be against me. I don’t want to be against you.”
“I won’t cede you Eversnow. I’ll fight you for that. On everything else, I’m with you. But for that, because I believe in it, and I believe I’m right, I’ll fight yon.”
She considered that a moment, on two bites of dinner, then nodded. “All right, Yanni,” she said, finally. “I think you’re making me a lot of trouble, long term, but I’ll think hard about what you’re saying. I did promise, and you’ll get your onworld base and I’ll work your integrations—I’m not up to what you want now, and you’re right, I don’t know enough to argue. But I’ll be there; and I’ll back your project until I have a clear reason not to. I promise you. If I have to set my successor on the case, it will run, and we’ll take care of those people. But I want you to know I’m worried. My predecessor was murdered. We have people in Reseune we can’t trust. We have a lot of people in Novgorod who aren’t behaving rationally—you can argue it’s rational from their point of view, but not in the macrosetted view. Macrosets in that population aren’t working the way they’re supposed to. People aren’t as happy as they’re supposed to be, for no damned reason I can figure.”
“I’m not sure those people will ever be happy; the planet isn’t what their parents were promised it was going to be. They were all going to be rich. It wasn’t going to take them a great deal of education to succeed. Now it is. That’s just pure human nature, Ari, nothing too arcane.”
That was a point. She thought about it. “So it is more work than some people want. But that’s not all that’s going on. Those people, who are persuading other people to build bombs—you can always find somebody out of so
rts and desperate: people get themselves into mental messes. But the Paxers are out creating more unhappy people as a matter of policy, because they want power, and they’re getting recruits because they’re either tapping into some flaw in the macrosets—which is possible. But I have a theory that upsets me more than that.”
“What?”
“Maybe they’re using Reseune techniques to get the recruits they want. Maybe they’re doing things we don’t know about.”
“The Paxers?”
“Look. We created the science: the military went off on their own tangent thinking they could use it, and we ended up with some spacecases and some real dangerous people. The first Ari’s book got published, and all of a sudden we had people trying to run interventions on each other in their living rooms. —It’s serious, Yanni, don’t laugh. What we do is power. And power is what people want. The people operating in their living rooms, they’re fools, especially if they do it under therapeutic kat; but remember what the first Ari said about ordinary people understanding Einstein, in this age, and someday they’d understand Bok?”
A bite stayed poised on Yanni’s fork. “Meaning we’ve got a society that thinks they understand what we do.”
“I think Ari’s book wasn’t exactly a trigger. It just warned us that we needed to look at how much people believe they really do understand what we do. Power comes from doing what we do, and maybe there have been a few people who are smart enough, but not smart enough, if you get what I mean. Ari One and her mother both designed azi sets that worked around that CIT footprint, but what if a handful of CITs have been freelancing for the last few decades, and bringing up bent kids? Look at Giraud and Denys’s mother. Look at Olga Emory herself, the things she did to my predecessor. There wasn’t a method, back then, there was just this viral idea floating around society that if there was a hyper-efficient way to educate azi, there could also be some process to make a bright CIT kid a genius. And if some people ran the wrong intervention on the wrong kid, they could create what Denys called me.”
“What’s that?”
“A monster,” she said. “A real monster.”
“You have a hell of an imagination,” Yanni said.
“I’m serious, Yanni. Novgorod’s lag-timed by rejuv and birthlabs: if they store the genesets, people can have kids into their eighties and hundreds, with birthlabs: and the time the Paxers start blowing things up is during my predecessor’s lifetime—that’s third-gen. That’s where the problems usually come out in a bad set.”
“That also happened to coincide with the War they were protesting.”
“True. But there’s no War now, and they’re still protesting. They’re not real clear what they’re protesting, except the planet isn’t what they want it to be, and they clearly think they can dispense with us.”
“Nothing psychotic about that. Humanity did without us for thousands of years. Alliance and Earth, somehow, still do.”
“That’s not it, though. It’s not that they can do without us, it’s that somebody wants to be us. What if that’s the viral idea, Yanni? That somebody’s always going to be us, and that’s where the power is situated, and maybe somebody’s little kid, or several people’s little kids, were turned into something that’s angrier about us than the parents were. Maybe that’s why they’re still protesting a war that’s been over for decades, and why it’s only gotten worse and crazier. I mean, the first Paxers blew up buildings at odd hours when people weren’t likely to be there, and now they’re just trying to cause the worst casualties they can. It’s accelerated. They’re sucking in mental cases their violence created, and giving them bombs and sending them out—but you don’t think the leaders of this movement are ever going to carry the bombs. They’ll sit back pretending to be us, congratulating themselves that they’ve become us.”
“So do you see a fix, short of a mass mindwipe of every CIT in Novgorod?”
“I see Paxers proliferating like crazy, once Eversnow goes public. That worries me, Yanni.”
“Why would they proliferate?”
“Because it’s change. Because it scares the followers. Because change changes the balance of power and that’s going to agitate their leaders. Some people won’t want the whole terraforming question shunted out to the edge of space: they want it here. Some people won’t want it anywhere. Some people will agree with me that it’s too much too soon. It’s going to be like yeast in a bowl, it’s just going to froth up and make a hell of a mess.”
“In your theory you could change the national polling hours and they’d bomb subways over it.”
“They probably would,” Ari said. “It would all become some Reseune plot.”
“So there’s a monster in the walls. What’s his name, Anton Clavery?”
“You’re making fun of me.”
“Not exactly. Your theory would say the Paxers took out Patil and Thieu. The one’s easy, the other’s hard. You need sane people to get into Planys and then go insane.”
She shook her head. “You need a killer. Money’s a motive, too. When you need something delicate done, you hire an expert.”
Yanni sat and thought about that a moment. “Nasty theory, young lady.”
“It’s scary. So’s your Eversnow, but I said I’d support it. You know what else worries me in the whole issue? Jordan worries me.”
“Regarding the Paxers?”
“He’s an issue with them. If he’s as self-interested as you say, he’ll do whatever benefits him. He’s the embodiment of the disaffected, the third-gen problem. You can’t make him care. And he doesn’t.”
“Interesting analysis.”
“Am I right?”
“Jordan’s an old issue with the Paxers: they think they’d like to see him out in public—they think he’d blast Reseune in the media if he gets his chance, and they’d really love that. He doesn’t personally give a rat’s ass whether we terraform or don’t. And if you want somebody who’s got the skill to be a real operator, your bogeyman in the CIT sector, that’s Jordan. But—” Yanni said, “there’s one thing against it. Jordan is entirely for himself. He’d fry the Paxers quicker than he’d fry Reseune. Stupid people bother him. He’d turn on them in a heartbeat, the moment they cross him.”
“And he designs azi sets.”
“Damned good ones,” he said.
“So have you ever worried what he put into them?” she asked. “Back when he was working, and mad at Ari? I say it’s probably CITs that are the cause. But we had the War, we had the military running interventions on their own azi, who later decommissioned and went civilian, a lot of them in Novgorod. And we had Jordan designing azi sets for decades and decades. I don’t think he could have gotten anything past my predecessor, but that may just be my own ego. We never had the handle on military sets I wish we had.”
“We had people blowing up subways forty years ago,” Yanni said. “Well before Jordan became the ass he is.”
“Was there ever a point he wasn’t one?”
“You want the truth? He said he was in love with your predecessor,” Yanni said. “I don’t think he really was. But he may have thought he was, for a complex of reasons involving power, and he was certainly less of an ass before that major blowup.”
That was interesting. “So he lied to her. He was interested in romance and power, and she was interested in her projects?”
“I don’t think she cared about the sex. It was his mind she wanted. I think he lied to himself, for one of the rare times in his life. Major self-delusion, wrapped up in his self-concept. He was sleeping with Paul while that affair was going on. I told him it wouldn’t work. He told me go to hell. A year later he had Justin conceived, born the year after. The Ari affair was on again, off again. They were trying to work together. He suddenly got the notion she was taking his ideas. Sharing didn’t work with either of them. That’s where it blew up. What happened in the bedroom, I don’t know; but the ideas were the issue he complained about.”
“I can imagin
e that,” she said. “He’s very self-protective in that regard.”
“So,” Yanni said somewhat cheerfully, “it all blew up. I don’t think Jordan’s the godfather of the Paxers, not even the model of them—he may have done a few designs that could be problematic in Ari’s integrations, you could be right about that. She tossed certain of them out and wouldn’t let them go to implementation. There was a hell of a fight about it—he called her a goddess-bitch and she said he was a damned lunatic. They traded those words back and forth and had one shouting light right in Admin offices in front of the secretaries and the visitors. I don’t think they slept together after that.”
She had to laugh ruefully for a microsecond, and grew sad after, thinking about herself and Justin, and swearing to herself it never would happen to them that way. “What did Paul think about it?”
Yanni looked at the door, as if measuring the distance to the conference room, and said, quietly, “Poor Paul. Always, poor Paul. Paul puts up with him. That’s got to be a ferociously strong mindset, Paul’s. God knows Jordan’s tinkered with it over the years. But Paul loves him.”
“That’s what Paul gets out of it, at least. Did the first Ari ever try to do anything with him?”
Yanni shook his head emphatically. “No. That would have really torn it worse than what she did with Justin. Paul’s where Jordan lives, that’s all. Justin just happened one year—a project that ran for a couple of decades, and blew up when Ari intervened. Became a permanent reminder of a quarrel he’d had with Ari. That’s one way to look at it, on Jordan’s scale of things.”
“That’s sad, too. Justin loves him.”
“A lot of people have tried,” Yanni said with a second shake of his head. “God knows. If you have an altruistic bent, young lady, take it from me on this one. Don’t try kindness, not with him. He’s just what he is. Let him be.”
“I wish I could Get him, all the same,” she said, and set to work at the dish again. “Yanni, Uncle Yanni, you keep being Director for a while. I’ll wait. Just don’t you be my Jordan, and let’s be friends. I’ll respect your opinion, you respect mine, and don’t hold out on me anymore.”