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  “Perhaps some things would come out. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “I’m not making any charges. I don’t want to go public with any of this. I’m saying that Ari has too damn much power, inside Reseune and out. There’s no question of her scientific contributions. As a scientist I have no quarrel with her. I only know the politics inside the house and politics outside it is the only way I see to get free of a situation that’s become increasingly—explosive.”

  One had to be careful, very careful. Corain had not spent twenty years in government to take everything at face value. Or to frighten a cooperating witness. So he asked softly: “What do you want, Dr. Warrick?”

  “I’d like to see that project go through. Then I’m going to transfer. She’s going to try to prevent that. I’d like support—in my appeal.” Warrick cleared his throat. His fingers were locked, white-edged. “The pressure at Reseune is considerable. A move would be—everything I want. I’ll tell you,… I’m not in agreement with this colonization effort. I agree with Berger and Shlegey, there is harm dispersing humankind to that degree, that fast. We’ve just finished one social calamity; we’re not what left Earth, we’re not what left Glory Station, we’re not going to be what our founders anticipated; and if we make this further push there’s going to be a critical difference between us and our descendants—there’s no miracle, no Estelle Bok, no great invention going to close up this gap. That’s my view. I can’t express that from Reseune.”

  “Dr. Warrick, are you telling me your communications are limited there?”

  “I’m telling you there are reasons I can’t express that view there. If you leak this conversation to the press I’ll have to take Reseune’s official position.”

  “Are you telling me, Dr. Warrick, that that transfer is what you’re holding out for?”

  “The transfer, Councillor. Myself. And my son. Then I would have no fear of expressing my opinions. Do you understand me? Most of us in the field that could speak with authority against the Hope project—are in Reseune. Without voices inside Science, without papers published—you understand that ideas don’t gain currency. Xenology is strongly divided. The most compelling arguments are in our field. You do not have a majority in the nine electorates, Councillor. It’s Science itself you have to crack, Ari Emory’s own electorate. This, this psychogenesis project is very dear to her heart—so much her own, in fact, that she doesn’t let her aides handle it. It’s the time factor again. On the one hand, there’s so very little in a lifetime. On the other—a process that involves a human life has so many hiatuses, so many periods when nothing but time will produce the results.”

  “Meaning we’ll still have her to deal with.”

  “As long as she lives, definitely, you’ll have her in Council to deal with. That’s why the Fargone project is an advantage to both of us. I’d like to take a public position, on your side. An opposition from inside Reseune, as it were, particularly from another Special—would have considerable credibility in Science. But I can’t do it now, as things are.”

  “The important question,” Gorodin said, “aside from that: is the Rubin project likely to work? Is it real?”

  “It’s very likely that it will, Admiral. Certainly it’s a much more valid effort than the Bok project was. You may know, we don’t routinely create from the Specials’ genesets. Even our genetic material is protected by statute. On a practical level, it’s the old ‘fine line’ business—genius and insanity, you know. It’s not total nonsense. When we create azi, the Alpha classes take far more testing and correction. Statistically speaking, of course. What went wrong with the Bok clone was what could have gone wrong with Bok, give or take her particular experiences, and influences we don’t have record of. Our chances of recovering a currently living Special are much better. Better records, you understand. Bok came here as a colonist, her records went with her ship, and it was one of the de-built ones: too much was lost and too much just wasn’t recorded. I’m not sure we ever will get Bok’s talent back, but it certainly won’t be in the present project. On the other hand—recovering, say, Kleigmann…who’s, what?—pushing a century and a half…would be a real benefit.”

  “Or Emory herself,” Corain said under his breath. “God. Is that her push? Immortality?”

  “Only so far as any human might want progeny like himself. It’s not immortality, certainly no sense of identity. We’re talking about mental similarity, two individuals more like each other than identical twins tend to be, and without a dominant twin. Essentially the recovery of an ability latent in the interface between geneset and what we call tape in an azi.”

  “Done by tape?”

  Warrick shook his head. “Can’t be done with tape. Not by present understanding.”

  Corain thought it through again. And again.

  “Meaning,” Gorodin said, “that with our lead in genetics and reconstructive psych, we might replicate living Specials as well as dead ones.”

  “That is a possibility,” Warrick said quietly, “if certain laws were changed. Practically—I’d speak against that. I understand why they’re starting with one. But the potential for psychological trouble is very strong, even if the safeguards keep the two from meeting. Even dead ones—If I were such a subject—I’d worry about my son, and that individual—who would not, in any meaningful sense, be his brother; or his father. Do you see, it’s very complicated when you’re dealing with human lives? The Nine took a strong interest in the Bok case. Too strong. In this much I agree with Dr. Emory: only the Bureau of Science, in specific, only Reseune ought to have any contact with the two subjects. That’s what she wants on Fargone. We’re not talking about an office or a lab. We’re talking about an enclave, a community Rubin will not leave except as I leave Reseune: rarely and with escorts for his protection.”

  “My God,” Gorodin said, “Fargone will veto it.”

  “A separate orbiting facility. That’s what she’s had to promise Harogo. A compartmentalized area. Reseune will pay the construction.”

  “You know, then, what deals she’s made.”

  “I happen to know that one. There may be others. That’s a fat contract for certain construction companies at Fargone.”

  It rang true. All the way down. Corain gnawed his lip.

  “Let me ask you a difficult question,” Corain said. “If there were other information—”

  “I would give it.”

  “If there were other information yet to come—”

  “You’re asking me to be an informant.”

  “A man of conscience. You know my principles. I know yours. It seems there’s a great deal in common. Does Reseune own your conscience?”

  “Even the admiral hasn’t been able to requisition me. I’m a ward of the state. My residencies have to be approved by the Union government. That’s the price of being a Special. The admiral will tell you: Reseune will call me essential. That’s an automatic five votes of the Nine. That means I stay in Reseune. I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, Councillor. I’m going to slip Adm. Gorodin a request for transfer, just as soon as that Special status is voted for Rubin, before the appropriations vote for the Hope Station project. Officially—that’s when it will happen.”

  “God! You think you’re worth a deal like that?”

  “Councillor,—you can’t win the Hope Station vote. DeFranco is in Ari’s pocket. Or her bankbook, via Hayes Industries. The arrangement is—deFranco’s going to try to abstain, which at least is going to show a little backbone for her constituency. Forget you heard that from me. But if you don’t throw the vote into a tie and send the business into the General Council, it’s inevitable. You buy me and my son out of Reseune, Councillor—and I’ll start talking. I’ll be worth far more—outside her direct surveillance, in the Reseune facility on Fargone. She might get Hope Station. But she can be stopped, Councillor. If you want a voice inside Science, I can be that.”

  It was a moment before Corain felt in command of his breathing. He l
ooked at Lu, at Gorodin, suddenly trying to remember how Lu had maneuvered him into this meeting, suspecting these two dark eminences among the Nine, who played behind a screen of secrecies.

  “You should go into politics,” he said to Warrick then, and suddenly remembered to his disturbance who he was talking to: that this was a Reseune psychmaster, and that this mind was one of those twelve Union considered too precious to lose.

  “Psych is my field,” Warrick said, with a disturbing directness to his gaze, which no longer seemed ordinary, or harmless, or average. “I only want to practice it without harassment. I’m fully aware of politics, Councillor. I assure you it never leaves us, at Reseune. Nor we, it. Help me and I’ll help you. It’s that simple.”

  “It’s not simple,” Corain objected, but to Warrick it was. Whoever had drawn him into this meeting—be it Lu, be it Gorodin—be it Warrick—

  He was not sure, suddenly, that it was not Emory. A man could grow insane, dealing with the potential in the Specials, especially those Specials who dealt with perception itself.

  One had to trust someone sometime. Or nothing got done.

  iii

  “The first bill on the agenda is number 2405, for the Bureau of Science. Ariane Emory sole sponsor, regarding the regular appropriations for the Bureau of Science, under the provisions of Union Statute 2595, section 2…”

  Emory looked Corain’s way. Well? that half-lidded stare said. Will you defy me, over something so routine?

  Corain smiled. And let the bitch worry.

  The gavel hammered down, again early: “We are in recess,” Bogdanovitch said. The murmuring in the Council chamber was subdued.

  Ariane Emory drew a whole breath, finally. The first stage was passed. Rubin had his status, barring a veto from the Council of Worlds, and there would be none. Corain might orchestrate a double-cross, but he would save it for something important. Something Corain considered important. The Hope Station project could serve as a decoy until then. DeFranco might want to abstain. But she would not, when the heat came on.

  Aides surged doorward, accompanying their Councillors. The press was, thank God, held downstairs, away from the chamber as long as there was no adjournment. A two-hour lunch and consideration of the dispensation of the rest of the Science permissions afterward, a tedious long list of permissions which, in the way of a good many things in a government which had started small and cozy and grown into an administrative monster within a single lifespan, the executive Nine were supposed to clear, but which in fact had devolved to the Secretarial level and which had become routine approval.

  Still, she would not breathe easy until that clearance was given—until the obfuscated facts of permission to use a geneset from a living Special went through in the list of Reseune projects that required routine permissions.

  There had been, each year, an attempt to cancel the whole Science permissions grant from the floor of General Council. Every year the Abolitionists or some other lunatic group got up a proposal to outlaw azi and to outlaw human experimentation. Every year the Council of Worlds sensibly voted it down. But there was that lunatic element, which the Centrists could in some attempt to exert leverage against the Hope project—use against the Science bill. If the fringes and the Centrists did combine on an issue in that body, it came dangerously close to a plurality against the Expansionist party.

  She was worried. She had worried ever since her informers told her that the Centrists were talking walk-out. Corain’s sudden willingness to deal bothered her.

  And if it would not have raised the issue of an unseemly haste, she would gladly have urged the chair to put the Science bill up before noon. As it was, obstacles were falling too fast, things were going too well, everything was sliding on oil. What had looked to be a lengthy session would end in a record three days, sending the Nine back to their civilian lives for at least another six months.

  It had been intended as a means to speed up government, that the Nine would meet and pass all measures that impacted their various spheres of interest, then leave the staff of the Bureaus and the elected representatives of the Council of Worlds and the various senates and councils to handle the routine and the ordinary administrative detail.

  In fact, the Nine, being top professionals, were very efficient. They met briefly, did their job, and went away again to be what they were—but some of them exerted an enormous control over the Bureaus they oversaw, wielding Power that the framers of the constitution had not entirely foreseen, no more than they had foreseen Reseune’s work in the war, or the fact that population would become what it was, or the defection of Pell from both Sol and Union, and the developments that had entrained. The Bureau of State had been conceived as carefully controlled by professionals in diplomatic service; but distances pushed it into greater and greater dependency on the Defense Bureau’s accurate reporting of situations it was not there to see.

  The Bureau of Science, considering the discovery of alien life at more than Pell’s Star, had to take on diplomatic functions and train potential contact specialists.

  The Bureau of Citizens had become a disproportionately large electorate, and it had elected an able and dangerous man, a man who had still the sense to know when he was trapped.

  Possibly Corain did not know that deFranco was solidly hers. That would explain his willingness to risk his political life on a walk-out. Surely he did not think he had any hope of swinging the Pan-paris trade loop, which Lao dominated. He could do nothing but cost the government money, with which other interests would not be patient. It was certainly not likely that he would create any objection on the Science bill.

  Surely.

  “Dr. Emory.” Despite her aides and her bodyguards a touch reached her arm, and Catlin was there too, instantly, her body tense and her expression baffled, because the one who had touched her was no one’s aide, it was Adm. Gorodin himself who had just brushed by Catlin’s defense. “A word with you.”

  “I’m on a tight schedule.” She had no desire to talk to this man, who, already with an enormous share of the budget at his disposal, with sybaritic waste in his own department, argued with her about the diversion of ten ships to the Hope project; and sided with Corain. She had other contacts inside Defense, and used them: a good section of Intelligence and most of Special Services was on her side, and a new election inside the military might unseat both Gorodin and Lu: let Corain consider that if he wanted a fight.

  “I’ll walk with you,” Gorodin said, refusing to be shaken, his aides mingling with hers.

  “One moment,” Catlin said, “ser.” Florian had moved in. They were not armed. The military were. But it did not prevent them: they were azi, and they answered to her, not to logic.

  “It’s all right,” Ariane said, lifting a hand in a signal that confirmed what she said.

  “An inside source tells me,” Gorodin began, “you’ve got the votes on the Hope project.”

  Damn. Her heart raced. But aloud, with a stolid calm: “Well, then, your source might be right. But I don’t take it for granted.”

  “Corain’s upset. He’s going to lose face with this.”

  What in hell is he up to?

  “You know we can stall this off,” Gorodin said.

  “Likely you can. It won’t win you anything. If you’re right.”

  “We have a source on deFranco’s staff, Dr. Emory. We are right. We also have a source inside Andrus Company; and inside Hayes Industries. Damn good stock buy. Are they finally going to get that deep-space construction?”

  My God.

  Gorodin lifted a brow. “You know, Hayes has defense contracts.”

  “I don’t know what you’re getting to, but I don’t like to talk finance anywhere near the word vote. And if you’ve got a recorder about your person, I take strong exception to it.”

  “As I would to yours, sera. But we’re not talking finance. As it happens, I set my people to talking to people in Hayes when we heard that. And we know very well that the Reseune extensio
n is connected to the Rubin bill, and when my staff spent last night investigating the Reseune Charter, a very helpful young aide came up with a sleeper in the articles that gives Reseune the unique right to declare any subsidiary facilities part of its Administrative Territory. That means what you’re going to build at Fargone won’t be under Fargone control. It’s going to be under yours. An independent part of Union. And Rubin has something to do with it.”

  This is more than he could come up with on his own. Damn, but it is. Someone’s spilled something and he keeps naming Hayes and Andrus. That’s who I’m supposed to blame.

  “This is all very elaborate,” she muttered. They had reached the intersection of the balcony and the hall to the Council offices, where she wanted to go. She stopped and faced the admiral. “Go on.”

  “We find this of military interest. A Reseune facility at Fargone poses security risks.”

  For a moment everything stopped. It was not from the direction she had expected. It was not sane. It was, if one was worried about merchanter contacts.

  “We’re not talking about labs, admiral.”

  “What are we talking about?”

  “Rubin’s going to be working there. Mostly it’ll be his lab.”

  “You have enormous faith in this young man.”

  Trap. My God, where is it? “He’s a very valuable young man.”

  “I’d like to discuss the security aspects of this. Before the vote this afternoon. Can we talk?”