“About the Gehenna files? They surfaced when I used the keywords.”
“When?”
“The day after you won the election.”
“Where did you get the keywords?”
“Denys Nye suggested them.” That was a bad thing to have to admit. “But—”
“Meaning they didn’t exist until then. Thank you, young sera. That explains a great deal.”
“That’s a psych, ser. It doesn’t prove anything. I had to know. My clearance—”
“Thank you, we’ve had your answer.”
“No, you’ve made up one.”
“The Council will not take disrespect, sera.”
“Yes, ser. But I don’t have to take being called a liar. You threatened us; I applied for my majority; that triggered—”
“It’s not you who’s lying, sweet. You’ve been deceived right along with the Council. Your uncle made those files. He’s made them from the beginning. There’s no secret, protected system. There are simply records Reseune doesn’t want to release, for very clear reasons, and Reseune created you to stand between the Council and Reseune’s mismanagement.”
“No, ser, I’m under oath. I am and you’re not. My getting my majority triggered the notes. So when you withdrew your suit, that did it. That’s the truth. And I’m under oath.”
There was a little shifting in seats. A snort from Catherine Lao.
“Your uncle made the files and prepped you for this whole business.”
The gavel banged. “That’s enough, Councillor. Next question.”
“I don’t think we’re listening to anything in this diplomatic fiasco,” Khalid said, “but Denys Nye’s constructions. Reseune is playing politics as usual, and it’s held too much power too long.”
“Do we mention the power in the Defense Bureau?” Giraud said.
“We have a clear case of conflict of interest on the Council. And we have embassies from Pell and Earth asking questions we had rather not answer.”
“We have a clear conflict of interest as regards Defense,” Giraud said. “Since your Bureau ordered this Gehenna mess over the protests of Science. As the witness has testified.”
“Time,” Harad said, and brought the gavel down.
“I’m due time to respond to that,” Khalid said.
“Your time is up.”
“I’d hate to accuse the Chairman of partisan politics.”
Bang! “You are out of order, Councillor!”
Ari took another sip of water and waited while the Chair wrangled it out. Corain was making notes. So were Lao and a lot of the aides. Corain might have put Khalid up to it, making him the villain, since Khalid already had trouble. There was a challenge to Khalid’s seat shaping up—already, a man named Simon Jacques. Much less flamboyant. Reseune had preferred Lu, but Lu’s age was against him; and there was under-the-table stuff going on: Corain had talked very secretly with Giraud and Jacques was a compromise they both could swallow, to get rid of Khalid. But that didn’t mean Corain wouldn’t let Khalid go after Reseune. It just meant that, under that table, Corain didn’t want Reseune swallowed up by Defense any more than he wanted it to exist at all.
Meanwhile Khalid had broken off negotiations on a big Defense contract with Reseune. It was a fair-sized threat, but Khalid certainly wasn’t doing any more than stalling, because there wasn’t anywhere else to get tape from.
And the law that protected azi wound a civil rights issue right into Reseune’s right of exclusivity on tape-production, because Reseune was the legal guardian of all azi, everywhere—Reseune could terminate all azi contracts with Defense—which they wouldn’t do, of course, but, Giraud said, Defense had been fighting for years to get access to the birth-to-eighteen tapes for its soldiers, and Reseune would never give them up. That was why Khalid wanted to nationalize Reseune. Khalid said there had been mismanagement at RESEUNESPACE—meaning Jenna Schwartz; but he made it sound like it was present management, meaning Ollie, and that made her damned mad; Defense also said it was worried about something being buried in the training tapes; and Khalid was threatening to bring a bill to break Reseune’s monopoly on tape and licensing—
Fine, Giraud said: Khalid didn’t have the votes; Khalid’s position was already unpopular with his own party—who didn’t want more azi labs, they wanted fewer; so the whole Gehenna thing was a lever all sorts of interests were using. Corain would have liked to have used it much more, except Corain was worried about Khalid.
It was all very crazy. The stock markets were going up and down on rumors, Chavez, of Finance, was furious and sent a shut-down order on the wave of the rumors, so no ship could leave port for a few days, because they didn’t want that market-dive information packet going off at trans-light across Union and clear to Pell and Earth, they wanted to get the market stable again before they let any ship leave; and that had the Trade Bureau upset and Information howling about trade censorship. It was a real mess. In fact everybody was getting anxious.
Council won’t take this kind of stuff, Giraud had said. And grimly: this is getting very serious, Ari. Very serious.
There was, Giraud had said, a hard-line faction in the military that had been building up for years—a lot of them the old guard who blamed Gorodin and Lu for spending too much on the Fargone project and not getting the programs they wanted; they backed Khalid in the election, and they wanted more shipbuilding and more defense systems Sunward; but that was also along the Alliance corridors, and that made the Centrists nervous.
While everybody thought Jacques was a front for Gorodin and might resign and appoint Gorodin proxy if he got elected; and Lu’s friends were mad about the double cross.
Crazy.
“We have this entire crisis,” Khalid was saying, arguing with Harad, “because Reseune can sit in perfect immunity and level charges contained in documents only the Science Bureau can vouch for. Of course the Science Bureau is pure of Reseune influences!”
Giraud was right. Khalid was a disaster with the press, but he was fast on his feet and he was smart. You couldn’t discount him.
But Harad brought down the gavel again. “Councillor Lao.”
“The question is…” Thank God it was Lao’s turn next. Uncle Giraud was put, because of conflict of interest. Harad of State was out because he was presiding. “…very simply, why a quarantine?”
“They’re unpredictable, Councillor. That’s the whole thing. We have huge computers that run sociology projections, when we work with psychsets: we try to balance populations so they end up with wide enough genepools and we check out the psychsets we use to make sure that we haven’t put something together that’s going to turn up social problems when everybody becomes CIT. This thing—this whole planet—is completely wild and it’s all artificial, it’s got no relation at all to Terran history—it’s just Gehennan. We don’t know what it is. That’s what made Ari nervous. These azi-sets could have been under God-knows-what interventions while they still had kat and they knew they were in trouble; God knows what their Supervisors decided to tell them; or even if there were Supervisors at the last—” Tell them that, get them off the question about predictive sociology. “Take these people into the Alliance or into Union and they’re there from now on, and they’re different. Ari didn’t say you should never do it. She said there’s a period after which it’s a lot better to let Gehenna alone and let it grow up, so you can see what it’s going to do when it comes into the mainstream culture. Maybe it never will get along with us. Maybe it’ll be something very good. We just don’t know at this point.”
“How will you know? Didn’t she run those checks?”
“It changes with every generation. It relates to all those psychsets. It relates to the whole mix. Our sociology programs are always improving. Ari ran it every ten years or so until she died. But her data was all just the initial stuff; she was just testing it against the new Sociology programs. We’ve got to set up to run with the new data. We have to do all the sets with the master-
program and then we have to integrate them—that’s Sociology does that. Reseune is transferring data over right now to run it. But it’s huge; it takes a lot of computer time. And we need up-to-date stats. We can tell Council a lot. But we can’t do it overnight and there’s nothing, sera, absolutely nothing that laymen can do with that kind of stuff, either, the only computers that can run it are ours. So the best thing, the thing Reseune wants, is to keep that planet exactly the way Alliance wants to—just as little contact as possible while we do the data-collecting. It’s like trying to get a good level measure with somebody bouncing the instruments, if people keep meddling there. We have to input all the influences—because just the discovery team landing there had to have done something.”
“This is not,” Khalid said, “a playground for the Science Bureau.”
“Nor for Defense, ser,” Lao said sharply.
The gavel came down.
She lay flat on the bed in the hotel, limp, while Florian and Catlin rubbed the kinks out, and she went to sleep that way, unexpectedly, just out, pop,
She woke up under the covers and Florian and Catlin had the light down very low, Catlin was stretched out on the other bed, and Florian was sitting in the chair in the corner.
“God,” she said, which woke Catlin instantly. “Get to sleep. There’s battalions of Security in the hall, aren’t there?”
“Yes, sera,” Florian said. Catlin said: “There are twenty-seven on duty.”
“Well, go to sleep.”
Which was short, for people who loved her enough to stay awake after a day like this one, but she was still falling-over tired, and she did, just grabbed the pillow with her arm, tucked her head down and burrowed until she had a dark place.
Florian turned out the lights anyway; and she heard him cross the room and sit down on the other bed and start undressing.
She headed out again, then, a slow drift. Tomorrow morning was uncle Giraud’s turn to testify. Then Secretary Lynch, of Science; Secretary Vinelli of Defense; Adm. Khalid—O God, Khalid, then her again, as soon as they got through. She hoped Giraud and Lynch did all right. But when Vinelli got up there, and Khalid, Giraud could cross-examine like everybody else.
Not saying, of course, that Khalid wouldn’t go over uncle Giraud and Secretary Lynch the way he had headed at her.
It was going to be a long week.
Or two.
We’re going to win about the quarantine, Giraud had predicted at the outset. There’s no way Union can do anything like move in on Gehenna without bringing in warships, and there’s no way we’re going to go to war with the Alliance to get access to Gehenna. What we can lose is what position Union takes about those people on Gehenna—whether they regard them as Union citizens and use that as a lever with the Alliance; or whether they negotiate a joint protectorate with the Alliance; and the hawks have a real stake in that: it’s Khalid’s political clout that’s at issue here—
The Centrist and the Expansionist coalitions were exactly that: coalitions. The hawks were trying to pull something different together by breaking off bits of both, that was what had surfaced in Khalid’s rise. They were too high-up in the government to call them eetee-fringes. They were real, the whole thing that Ari senior had been worried about had come true, the old Earth territorial craziness had found itself an issue and a time to surface—
And here she was holding Ari senior’s argument in both hands behind her back—You know what it would do to Union if they found out what I’ve done, Ari senior had said. So she couldn’t tell them: she couldn’t get the things about Sociology even Sociology didn’t know they had done—for Ari senior. She couldn’t tell Council about the deep-set work Ari had done, or the fact that Ari had been planning—and installing—imperatives in the azi work crews, in the military, in a whole lot of places—including the deep-sets of the Gehenna azi.
The thing was already going on. By design, thirty percent of the azi Ari senior had designed and turned out of Reseune, and thirty percent of all the azi everywhere who used Reseune tape, would have kids and teach them, all across Union. A certain number of those azi had gotten their CIT papers as early as 2384, on Fargone, then in other places. A lot of them were in Science, a whole lot were in Defense: the Defense azi couldn’t get CIT papers till they retired—but they were mostly male and they could still have kids or bring tank-kids up. A lot would do that, because that was in the deep-sets. The rest of those azi were scattered out through the electorates, heavy in Industry and Citizens, just exactly where the Centrists were strongest—a mindset that was biased right in its deep-sets, toward Ari senior’s way of things.
And even other psych people wouldn’t likely see what she had done—unless they were onto it—or unless they were as good as Ari senior, simply because what she did was a very accepted kind of program, a very basic kind of azi mindset. She had showed Council, she had even told them the program—and they couldn’t see what it did with all those military psychsets, because the connections were so wide and so abstract—except when a living azi mind integrated them and ran with them in the social matrix.
That was what had scared Ari senior so bad.
There were thousands and thousands by now: not a whole lot yet proportionate to all of Union, but the program was running, and those tapes were still turning out azi. Even out of Bucherlabs and Lifefarms, in the simpler, gentle types they trained—there were attitudes designed to mesh with the psychsets of Reseune azi in very special ways.
Look up the word pogrom, Ari had said, in her notes to her. And see why I am afraid for the azi if people find out too soon what I have done.
Or too late.
I don’t know what I have done. But the Sociology computers in my time can’t see beyond twenty of our generations. I do. I’ve tried to devise logarithmic systems—but I don’t trust them. The holes in my thinking could be the holes in the paradigms. Field Too Large is what the damned thing spits back on my wide runs.
I’m becoming emotional about those words.
I’ll tell you: if anyone threatens to access these files but you—there is a program that will move them and re-key them in such ways that they will look like a whole lot of different kinds of records and continually lie about file sizes and other data so that searchers will play hob finding them.
But for God’s sake don’t use it until they’re breaking the door down: it’s terribly dangerous. It has defensive aspects.
I will give you the keywords now to disorganize the System.
It has three parts.
First keyword: the year of your birth.
Second keyword: the year of mine.
Third keyword: annihilate.
Then it will ask you for a keyword to re-integrate Base One. Have one in mind and don’t panic.
It was a little comfort, knowing that was in there. Knowing she could hide what was going on.
But she wouldn’t have had just one answer in the computer, to protect something that important.
She didn’t think Ari had.
She tossed over on her other side and burrowed again.
And finally she said: “Florian…”
vii
Ari stepped off the plane and into the safeway, and walked the long weary way to the terminal, to get her baggage. Just the briefcase and her carry-bag, that Florian and Catlin had.
Night-flight again, with the escort. Which was a news story unto itself, but all Giraud would say was ‘precautions.’
And all the public got was: ‘quarantine justified.’
There were people going to be filming here, too—Reseune Information gave a live feed to Cyteen Station, and the station distributed it everywhere. Ships were on their way, the whole of Cyteen commerce was moving again, and the world took a collective breath.
Not knowing all of it, but feeling things were steadier. They were. The markets were up on bargain-hunting and in some ways healthier, because there had been a lot of built-up war-scare that just burst like a bubble, Defense stocks wer
e taking a beating, but diversifieds were doing fine, shipping stocks were soaring again, the futures market was shifting: the Cyteen market believed in peace again after a bad scare, and there was a lot of anti-hawk feeling coming to the surface in the Information polls, which encouraged the shyer voices to speak up and dragged the undecideds back to the peace camp.
After three bad weeks, you could say you wanted peace with the Alliance and sound like a responsible moderate—not a Universalist-eetee, who wanted all the human governments to build a capital in the Hinder Stars—never mind that Earth had over five thousand governments at last count; or a Pax agitator, the sort that had bombed a rush-hour subway car and killed thirty-two people last week in Novgorod.
The police were afraid there was some kind of a pipeline from the Rocher Abolitionists to the Paxers. They might have gotten the explosives from mine-camp pilferage or maybe just making the stuff: there were possible crime connections, everything from the illicit tape-trade to illegal drugs to the body trade, and a lot of the ones the police could get at were z-cases, just wipe-outs the real criminals used to do the work and take the hits.
The familiar walk from the plane to the safeway doors, the quiet, beige cord-carpet, the sight of Reseune Security guards talking with each other in more than coded monosyllables and moving easily, like there was more than a synapse-jump between a sudden noise and hosing-down the room—made her want to melt down on the spot and just sleep for a week, right there, right then, knowing she was safe.
But cameras met her at the exit into the terminal, Security reacted, the few reporters who had gotten passes shoved mikes at her and asked why Giraud had stayed—“He’s still got some clean-up,” she said. “Office things.”
Some secret meetings, staff with staff, Secretary Lynch’s staff with Chavez’s staff, which was a pipeline from Corain, but that was, God knew, not for the reporters.
“Do you feel confidence in the decision?”
“I think people are going to do the right things now. I think I made them understand—everything’s fine if they just treat those people all right—”