Regenesis (16 page)

Staff brought the next course, grilled fish, with citrus. It took a moment. And she was annoyed with staff, who should have waited for a signal. Probably the fish would have seriously overcooked. But she needed a stern talk with staff about interrupting. A very stern talk.

“So,” she said, after the obligatory compliments, and several bites further on.

“So,” Yanni said, perfectly composed.

“So I’m following everything you’re saying, and it makes sense. But why are you personally voting for terraforming Eversnow this fast? What if there’s something as important as rejuv down there? Something we
can’t
make in a lab?”

“One reason: Reseune’s continued existence, its power to make decisions, aboveboard or in secret, is the core of all Union stability. Without us, Union falls apart. That’s not arrogance. That’s fact. Right now, Union isn’t populous enough to avoid fragmentation. Decisions are being taken. Some really stupid ideas are current in politics, and some damned selfish ones. Reseune is at a low ebb of power, during my interregnum, so it’s perceived—because I’m not an Emory, a Carnath, or a Nye—not even a Warrick. I’m an unknown, and it’s widely perceived I’m merely a footnote, filling time between Denys Nye’s control of Reseune—and your taking the office, for which all the Centrists are busy bracing themselves. They perceive me as weak, someone they can get concessions out of—before you come in. But on this one matter, on this, I am passionate. We need the expansion of human space to go on holding the power to make decisions; we need labs to extend our reach to other places, labs, incidentally, out of immediate view of Centrist leadership here on Cyteen…but I’m not advertising that feature of the plan. We may still find biologicals we can develop at Eversnow; and the experience will be invaluable; but right now, and in the immediate future, we need the expansion of our loyal voting base, before some short-sighted, over-content business interests on Cyteen Station and in Novgorod break up Reseune and let us fall behind the Alliance. Fatally so. In which case I
guarantee
you there’ll be another war. We need to hedge our bets by spreading outward. Concerns for microbes take second place. The way Earth is managing its affairs currently, we may be using your predecessor’s genetic Arks to recover what they lose.”

“And what if we lose something like rejuv because we rushed in and messed up a place we don’t wholly know?”

“We could lose something, yes. But we know what we gain. A power base. And whatever we mess up there, it won’t be
us
. The Centrists envision a planet they can live on in billions, like Earth, the great fantasy. They see this project as a foot in the door of that science. We get the Centrists involved
far
outside the understanding of their comfortable power base on Cyteen, and we edge their children closer and closer to our point of view. The Long View…in this case, from a standpoint of distance from the center of Union. We get their kids involved in this project. We turn the Centrists into our asset. They go for the profit out there, being people with families they want to support—and we go on as we are, controlling colonization. There are other worlds beyond Eversnow. But we can’t reach them without stepping stones. Trade
drives
expansion. Trade drives
us
. And the Treaty of Pell meant our trade pays a price, it may have meant peace, but Alliance is getting fatter on a share of our trade. And some of those merchanters are using the profit to update armaments—the way some of our warships nowadays run a little cargo—of a medical and emergency nature. The Treaty may someday break down on that point. We have to get other options, we have to maintain our economic push that
keeps
us stronger than the Alliance, or see the consequences.”

It wasn’t a stupid idea. She could see that. And it was a vision. It might be stupid to think Expansionism could go on at the same pace forever, but there was something to it going on for a while: Earth was one planet, one star system, and fragile. Earth had antagonized all its colonies, who held the only safe direction for Earth to expand—Earth now knew it wasn’t going to grow without running into intelligence in the other directions, and they only hoped Earth didn’t provoke something out in the deep. Alliance was already committed in the direction of Gehenna, but that planet was a problem.

Eversnow would lead Union development further out on another tangent, away from Earth and farther out than the Alliance, down a strand of stars that worked like a river in space. Broaden Union’s population base, widen their territory, make them secure, and yes, make sure there were jobs. That had been a poser, but Yanni’s plan solved that at a stroke.

Going away from Alliance made them unassailable, militarily: Defense would like that. Folly for Alliance or Earth to attack something that much bigger; and a strong Union, with other resources, wouldn’t actually
need
Earth, or even Alliance…while a strong Union was a big market, for Earth, and for Alliance. So it could possibly preserve the peace better than standing still.

So was it worth ruining a planet? A snowball, the domain of microbes? It might be.

“So let me ask you one,” Yanni said. “This new research post up-river. It seems your own plan’s gotten beyond that…while I’ve been in Novgorod. Now we’re talking about a major lab expansion—five hundred jobs on this budget request, my office tells me. Requests for extension on use of the excavators. There’s nothing there to
mine
up in the hills. No industry’ likely. But now you’re requesting residences. A river port, with coffer dam and shields.
Why
do you need a river port for remediation research?”

“To move supply.”

“And? It’s seeming a little beyond a bare-bones research post all of a sudden. I’m not complaining, understand. I just want to know what we’re suddenly funding up there. What are you up to, young lady?”

She really hadn’t been ready to talk about that. But maybe it was time. Secret for secret.

“Actually—a township.”

“An adjunct to Reseune? Or a rival?”

“A real township. Like here. Shops. People. Manufacture, eventually. I’m thinking of calling it Strassenberg.”

“Strassenberg,” Yanni said, sitting back a little. That had been Maman’s name, Strassen. “Well, now
there’s
an ambitious design for an eighteen-year-old. You’re building a new wing on Reseune and in the last three weeks your research lab has mutated into a town. And why, pray, do you think we
need
another township in the world?”

That, like her question about Yanni’s programs, was a deeper question. Fair question, considering the funds she’d counted on weren’t going to be plentiful, if they now had to fund the remediation. “Two reasons: first the isolation, what I said at the start: a place to put the rest of my uncle’s staff where I don’t have to deal with them. But I want a lab for
my
decisions. The first Ari created me to carry on
her
work. I’m setting up a place where absolutely all the decisions are mine and all the mindsets are what I choose to be up there, CIT and azi. Give or take my uncle’s people, that they’ll have to encapsulate, they’re
my
research question. I
said
it was a lab. And it actually is. It’s my comparison to what the first Ari did in, say, Gehenna.”

Eyebrows lifted. Clearly a city wasn’t quite the answer Yanni had expected under the title of a research lab. But it was the truth. There might be a timebomb in the Gehenna mindset, but—a more closely-held secret, and one she wasn’t sure the first Ari had ever directly discussed with Yanni—there was possibly one in the Cyteen population itself, simply because the mindsets were what they were, exactly the same mix of psychsets Yanni had been talking about continuing at Eversnow. All but the CITs who’d come down from orbit were Reseune-designed mindsets—the same as Yanni planned to go on using out at Eversnow. The station over their heads had its founding families, a certain aristocracy of CITs, people with citizen-numbers from the origin of the system: the Carnaths, the Nyes, the Emorys, and the Schwartzes, plus a couple of hundred other names that had proliferated through the station—and then a number had settled at Reseune and Novgorod, on the planetary surface, once they’d begun to colonize the planet.

But it had needed a succession of population bursts to build civilization and sustain an economy independent of Earth’s economy, independent of the Merchanters Alliance, from which
they
had seceded by force of arms. A planetary economy needed hands to work, minds to devise, and people to mine resources, consume products, and fill the vacant spots in the outback, dense enough population for viable commerce. In the early days Union had boosted its numbers by birthlabs, by cycling azi into freedmen at an extraordinary rate…azi who’d been given their ethics by tape that Reseune had created in the first Ari’s mother’s time.

And the first Ari had had a very heavy hand on that process, tweaking what her mother Olga Emory had done; and then those azi had become freedmen, and married and had CIT kids, and taught them their values. More, the first Ari had operated increasingly with deep sets, in a style that scared a lot of other psych designers, and
they
didn’t read what she’d been doing.

Teaching the kids’ kids’ generation to carry on, that was what—just like Gehenna. A lab-made ethic was threaded all through the stations in Union’s grasp—just exactly what Yanni intended continuing with another surge in azi population in the deep Beyond. The same ethic the first Ari-generated population-burst had installed was buried in the psyches of all those people who took the subways to work and voted in the massive Bureaus of Citizens and Technology. Educated votes counted multiple times, and there were devices in the way the vote happened to keep the decision-making within a Bureau constantly in the hands of people expert in the fields in question, but the fact was, in Union’s system, the popular vote, moving in a unified direction, could swing a certain way no matter what the experts wanted.

Count on it: the azi-born were never going to turn on Reseune: the sons and daughters of the azi-born were never going to turn, no matter what the Centrists wanted, or the Expansionists wanted, or the Paxers wanted. Yanni’s maneuvers to divide and diminish the Centrists were, she suspected, all unnecessary, if the first Ari was right. There was a worm working in the programs, something that moved and reprogrammed itself to suit the times, and it was damned scary how it worked, and changed, while azi-descended were now out-populating CITs.

But it was not something she was going to discuss in depth with Yanni. The terrible danger of that ethics implant was what the first Ari had died knowing—she’d died haunted by the fact one human couldn’t live long enough to see what it was going to do. It was why an Ari Two had to exist—to watch out for glitches in the mindsets she’d installed, at Gehenna, on Cyteen, inside Reseune itself. It was necessarily an untried theory, in those population surges mandated by the War, decommissioned soldiers, workers, colonists in the Gehenna outback: the first Ari had had to adjust them fast, and do it wide, or see it undone and unraveling. A collective azi-descended socio-set could mutate under unforeseen circumstances, creating not just new attitudes, but a whole artificially-setted human population, an integration with a capital I.

The first Ari had not just tweaked the helm of the ship of colonial ambitions, but rewritten the navigational charts. Gehenna was only a part of it.

And her predecessor had kept that secret to herself, until she passed it to her own image and set her onto a very specific course: to be sure the design didn’t blow up in the second and third generation of newly-minted CITs…because to tell anyone was risking letting
another
worm loose in the population, one of knowing one’s fate and trying to second-guess it.

And where
was
the end? What was going to happen to humanity as a whole, when half the human population in the universe was on a different, human-devised program? Done was done. She had to steer it.

“All right,” she said to this man, her own caretaker. Her protector. The man likely empowered by her predecessor to remove her if she ran amok. And she forgave him his sins of secrecy and surrendered a planet to him, because this man, whose use was his independent thinking, thought it was a necessary move. “All right, Yanni, so I’ll study up on Eversnow. I should have done before now. The damage, you’re right, is already done. The military saw to that. And I’m sure there are benefits I haven’t looked at.”

“I have a paper for you on that matter,” he said. “Whalesong, on Earth.”

“Whalesong,” she said. The whim of a nostalgic preservationist: the oceans of Eversnow. “They sing.”

“I think you’ll find it interesting.”

A bite of fish.

“You give me my city, Yanni, and I’ll give you your planet.”

“Precocious child.”

“On a completely different topic—I’ve almost made up my mind this week. I’m pretty sure we’re going to clone Denys.”

“Are we? Now? Or some time in the next seven years?”

She frowned. That was a question. A big one: how close will we try to stick to program? “Giraud is the one we’re going to trust—a little. Without his brother Denys to protect—how do we make a Giraud? So we clone Denys, for him, so Giraud keeps on track. That’s my total reasoning in deciding. I was all set to tell you that this evening, when you dropped this Eversnow business in my lap. You said you were leaving the decision up to me. And I was thinking about it a lot while you were gone.”

“Denys has no essential value,” Yanni paraphrased her, “except to keep Giraud on track.”

“No. That’s what I changed my mind on. Denys helped create
me
. And if you have to create me again, you’d probably want a Denys to keep the new me in line, because Giraud is too soft.”

“You don’t think I could fill that position?”

“Uncle Yanni,” she said fondly, “you’re much too easy on me. You let me get away with everything.”

“Hell. Sounds as if you’re already making a lot of minor decisions, especially when I’m out of the house.”