Regenesis

“Don’t be.”

“But I’mgoing 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, Ya

“Not very profitable ones, except Mariner. I’m afraid I’m not an optimist about the peace with the Alliance lasting through your tenure.”

“ Iam. I think we cankeep 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, Ya

Ya

“Eat,” she said. “It’s Cook’s first formal di

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 cantake 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, Ya

“You find out things already, don’t you?” Ya

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. “Ya

“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 di

“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 ismore 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 sorts 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, Ya

A bite stayed poised on Ya

“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. Powercomes 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 hellof an imagination,” Ya

“I’m serious, Ya