"No, ser," Ari said, hands folded on the table. The microphones picked up her voice and carried it, making it huge, a caricature of a young girl's voice. She sat by herself at a table facing the Nine. Uncle Giraud sat in the Science seat; there were Nasir Harad, and Nguyen Tien; Ludmilla deFranco; Jenner Harogo; Mikhail Corain; Mahmud Chavez; and Vladislaw Khalid—whose looks toward her were absolute hostility. Corain had asked the question.
"No, ser, I won't give you a transcript. I've said why. It wouldn't be all of it. And that's worse than nothing. I'm telling you the important things. Adm. Azov sent the colony even when Ari told him not; she didn't want it because it was top dangerous. And he went ahead.
"This is the important thing—let me say this—" she said, when Corain interrupted her. "Please."
"I doubt you would forget," Corain said dryly.
Harad's gavel came down. "Go on, young sera."
"This is important," Ari said. "This is the most important part. Adm. Azov came to my predecessor wanting a colony planted on that world because it was an Earthlike planet and it was right next to Pell. Defense wanted to make sure if Alliance got there in fifty years or a hundred they were going to find a planet full of Union people, or an ecological disaster that could contaminate the planet with human-compatible diseases ..."
It disturbed the Council. Heads leaned together and the gavel banged down again.
"Let the girl finish."
"That was in the notes. They wanted Reseune to build those too. They wanted Ari to design tape so the azi they sent would always be Union, no matter what, and they would cause trouble and work from inside Alliance once Alliance picked them up off the world. Ari tried to tell them they were crazy. But they wouldn't listen.
"So Ari listened to everything they wanted, and she ordered some immunological stuff, I don't know what, but my uncle is going to talk about those. What they essentially did was use viruses to transfer material, and that was all done pretty much like we use for genetic treatment—and they picked some things they hoped would just help the colonists' immune systems; but there was another contractor Ari didn't trust and she didn't know what they might dump onto Gehenna that Reseune didn't know about."
"Do you know the name of that contractor?" Corain asked.
"It was Fletcher Labs. It was May of 2352. That's all she knew."
That made the Councillors nervous. An aide came up and talked to Khalid. Several others took the chance.
"But she was in charge of actually organizing the colony," Corain said then, when things settled down. "Describe what she did."
"She was in charge of picking the azi and training them; and she did the main instructional tape. They wanted her to do all this stuff you can't do. Like all these buried instructions. What she did, she made the primary instruction deep-tape; and she axed the azi's contracts in a way that meant if there weren't any CITs they were contracted to the world itself."
"She disregarded the Defense Bureau's instructions. That's what you're saying."
"If she'd done what the military wanted the whole colony would likely have died out; or if they lived past the diseases the third or fourth generation would be really dangerous—psychsets interact with environment. They didn't want to hear that."
"Time," Chairman Harad said. "Councillor Chavez of Finance."
"You consider you're qualified to pronounce on that," Chavez said, following up.
"Ser, that's a real basic."
"I don't care if it's a basic," Chavez said, "you're consistently reading in motives or you're attributing them to people only one of whom you know anything about, and you're not making it clear where you're quoting and where you're interpreting. I'm talking about your predecessor, young sera, who is the one whose notes you're supposed to be testifying to. Not your own interpretations of those notes."
"Yes, ser." Ari drew a long breath, and restrained her temper behind a very bland look. "I won't explain, then."
"I suggest you respect this body, young sera. You attained your majority last week; it means, young sera, that you are obliged to act as an adult."
She looked at Councillor Chavez, folded her hands again and sat there.
"Go on, young sera," Harad said.
"Thank you, ser Chairman. I'm sorry; I'll explain only if you ask. Ari wasn't technical about it: she said: quote: Defense insisted. I explained the hazards of environmental interactions in considerable detail. Their own psychologists tried to make them understand what I was saying; unfortunately the admirals had already made up their minds: the system of advancements in the military makes it damn near impossible for a Defense Bureau bureaucrat to back off a position. Even if—"
"Young sera," Chavez said. "The Council has limited time. Could we omit the late Councillor's profane observations?"
"Yes, ser."
"Go on."
"That was the answer."
"You didn't answer. Let me pose the question again. What, specifically, was Emory's argument to Defense?"
"I can't answer without explaining."
"What did Emory say?"
"She said they shouldn't do it because the environment would affect the psychsets and the tape couldn't be re-adjusted for the situation. And Defense couldn't tell her enough about the environment. That was the first reason she said they were crazy."
"She knew that when she made the original design. Why did she do it in the first place?"
"Because she did it during the War. If humanity had wiped itself out of space and gotten the planets too, it was one more place humanity might survive. It was real dangerous, but it wouldn't matter if they were the only ones."
"What was the danger?"
"You're going to get upset if I tell you again."
'Tell me."
"Letting a psychset run in an environment you don't know anything about. Do you want me to explain technically why that's dangerous?"
The Expansionists all laughed behind their hands. Even Tien, who was Centrist.
"Explain," Chavez said with a surprising lot of patience. She decided she liked him after all. He was not stupid. And he could back up when he got caught.
"Deep-tape is real simple and real general: it has to be. If you make aggression part of the set, and they're in an environment that threatens them, they'll expand the aggression all over everything, and it'll proliferate through the rest of the sets all the way to the surface; or if you put in a block against aggression, it could proliferate the same way, and they couldn't take care of themselves. Deep-tape gets all the way down to which way you jump when something scares you. It hits the foundation of the logic sets. And it almost has to be slightly illogical, because on pure logic, you don't move till you understand it. The deep-sets are a bias toward fight or flight. Things like that. And the Defense Bureau didn't give Ari senior any chance to design real deep-sets that might be a whole lot better for Gehenna. They came in and wanted her to program adult military-setted azi to colonize, and they wanted it in one year. She said that was garbage. She argued them into taking a mix of soldiers and farmers. So she composed a genepool of types that might have all the skills and the deep-sets she figured might hold some right answers to the environment, whatever it was."
"In other words she lied to the Bureau."
"She had to. They were going to go throw their own azi onto the world without her help, and they were telling their own psychology branch to break the law and try to run a deep-set intervention on them. Their own psych people said that was stupid, and some of them were threatening to talk to the Council, but Adm. Azov told one of them he could end up on Gehenna himself if he kept objecting. That's what that man told Ari. Then she thought about bringing it to Council, but she thought about the chance of the whole human race getting wiped out, and that was when she made up her mind to go along with it, but to do it safer than Defense was going to do it.
"She couldn't just go back and mindwipe all those azi and start over. That was another crazy suggestion the military had. Reseune didn't have enough facilities. And you don't recover from mindwipe that well that they could just dump them off on another planet and leave them there with no psych help. So she couldn't work with the deep-sets. She just studied all the deep-sets and worked up something real simple: she told the azi it was their planet and they had to take care of it and survive and teach their children what was important, that was all. As positive as she could. Because she didn't know how long Gehenna would be lost, and how much that would change.
"And that's the danger in it. Their generations are real short. There's already been a lot of change. Alliance is scared of them because they're afraid there's something on the planet like a secret base, that's the way I understand it; but if there's anything like that, it's not in the notes. Mostly I hear it's the azi that did survive, and there's not much left of CIT culture. That means the program did take.
"There's too many people to mindwipe—thousands and thousands. They'd have to mindwipe them all the way down, and that's a lot of psych work, and they haven't got a Reseune. Councillor Nye can tell you what it would take—"
"It would take a facility the size of Reseune," Giraud said, "doing nothing else, for at least ten years; and the re-integration of that many mindwiped individuals into ordinary society would tax anything any of us have. We're talking about thirty thousand individuals. Or more. They're still trying to estimate. No one has a place to disperse those people—they'd still cluster. Cluster means community; community means cultural identity. Alliance hasn't got the population base to absorb them. We don't. Don't even mention turning them loose on Earth."
"They probably can't find all of them," Ari said. "Anyway. So they can't get them off. They'll always be different; and they'll always be a problem. They're an azi population. They're not like CITs. They're just going to be crazy according to CIT thinking. Teaching their kids is part of their mindset; and if you bring them into the 25th century that's another environment that's going to hit that program and proliferate changes. That's Emory's word on it. If it's second generation, you could integrate them back, but there's even fourths now. Once it hits fourth, she said, you're into something real different. And they don't have rejuv. The Olders die off before they're a hundred. I've heard it's more like forty or fifty. That doesn't give them time to live with their kids or teach them much about being grown up. They're already more different from us than we are from Earth. That's Emory talking."
"I'm out of questions," Chavez said.
"We're going to recess for lunch," Harad said. "And take ser Tien's questions after—are you holding up to this, young sera?"
"I'm doing all right," she said. "After lunch is fine. Thank you, ser."
"It vastly disturbs me, sera," Tien said, from the dais where the Nine sat. He spoke very quietly, very politely, which was the way the man talked. "I have to tell you I'm concerned with the security clearance the Science Bureau has given you—not, understand, that I think you're not an exceedingly mature young woman. But we're dealing with things that could mean war or peace, and things that have been thrust on you very prematurely. Do you ever talk to your friends about these things?"
"No, ser, absolutely not." It was a fair question. All along, Tien had been fair.
"Do you understand the importance of not talking to reporters about this?"
"Yes, ser. I do. The only people I've discussed this with are Denys Nye, Giraud Nye, and the Council, exactly; and my azi, but they're not in the room when I work with the System on this either, and they don't know everything. Certainly they don't talk: they're Reseune Security, and their psychset is against discussing anything about me, even little things."
"We understand that. Can you estimate how much of the data you're not telling us?"
Oh. Very good question. "My predecessor had some theories about what would happen on Gehenna." Try to answer without answering. "But they're complicated, and I can't report on those because they're all in design-structure, and they're something that's going to take me a long while to sort through. Science Bureau is going to provide us the Gehenna data as it comes in—"
"To you?"
"Ser, to whoever's working on this project, but likely to me, yes, since I'm the one with my predecessor's notes."
"Time," Harad said. "Adm. Khalid."
"Let's keep to the question of the notes," Khalid said. "And why those notes, if they exist, haven't been turned over to a competent researcher."
"She is technically rated as a Wing supervisor," Giraud said. "And she is competent."
"She has no business with the notes," Khalid said. "Or do we believe that Reseune is being steered by a fifteen-year-old and a dead woman? That raises more questions about the competency of Reseune's administration than it does about hers. I have no quarrel with the child. I do have with Reseune. I find evidence of gross mismanagement. Gross mismanagement. I think we have more than enough evidence to extend this investigation into Reseune's actions in creating this situation."
"You can do that," Giraud said, "but it won't get you those notes."
The gavel came down. Repeatedly.
"Young sera," Khalid said. "You can be held in contempt of a Council order. So can your Administrator and the other people who are prompting you."
Ari took a drink of water. When it was quiet she said: "You can arrest people, but what you want to know is science and you have to ask scientists, and we're it. Bucherlabs hasn't got anybody who can read it. Neither does Defense. I'm already telling you what's in the notes and what you'll find if you go to all that trouble. If you don't think I'm telling the truth now, are you going to believe me then?"
The gavel banged again. "Councillor. Sera. If you please. Councillor Khalid."
"We're dealing with an immature child," Khalid said, "who's being pushed into this position by Reseune Administration. I repeat, we need to widen this probe until we get at individuals who are responsible. This is a question of national security. The Military Secrets Act—"
"The Councillor is out of order," Giraud said.
"—requires an investigation of any mishandling of classified information. The mishandling that allowed a fifteen-year-old child to go in front of news cameras to leak information that never should have become public—"
Again the gavel. "Councillor, we operate under rules, let me remind you. This is not a debate."
"A diplomatic crisis is at issue. Our enemies have a pretext to break treaties, including the arms treaty, which is not to our advantage. They're talking about plots, seri, completely ignorant of what azi are and what they're capable of. This is the result of practicing diplomacy in the press."
"The Councillor is out of order," Giraud said.
"Admiral," Harad said, "your time is running. Have you a question for the witness?"
"I have. Under oath, young sera, and bearing in mind you can be prosecuted for perjury, how long have you known about these files?"
"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 psych-sets: 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 oft 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. . . ."