"Why?"

"Because, for one thing, we can get quite a bit of yardage for Reseune's programs if we don't let Corain know you're coming into power sooner than most people thinkand I think you are. They'll deal, right now, because they're scared to death of you. Corain is shocked by what happened to Patilbut he's still on board with the Eversnow deal. So are the others. Secondly, we haven't seen the outcome in the Defense election, and maintaining a bit of our flexibility in the face of that outcome is a good thing. Polls have been wrong before."

"And meanwhile there's somebody running around Reseune leaving cards from somebody who's supposed to be under strictest security weeks before she was murdered? And it had Planys markers, Yanni. What's the theory on that, officially?"

"Authenticity," Yanni said with a shrug. "Whoever did it wanted it to smell like Planys, as authentic as possible, and whoever did it went to a small bit of trouble to do thatprobably to rattle the walls and see if they could provoke some action. Or maybe it's real and Jordan lied. Maybe an old man with a failing memory and a few weeks to live really wanted some personal acknowledgment from somebody about to take over his life's work. It's Planys paper. It may have been printed almost anywhere but on Reseune office machinerythere's that security feature: micro-ID in the typeface, if your security hasn't told you. Which still leaves, as a source, the town, various neighboring towns, and pa.s.sing rivercraft, not to mention the airport. The card has all kinds of issues attached, no finger-traces of any kind except the people that we well know handled itsuper-clean."

"So it was real. Or it was somebody knew about the markers and knew to be careful about the microprint. Did you search Jordan's apartment?"

"While he was at supper with you, yes. We did. Found nothing, of course."

"Did you tell him you searched it?"

"No. Nor left any traces he could find, if Hicks was entirely up to his job."

"Yanni, I want you to back off Jordan. Don't make him mad. Give him work to do. Real work."

"There's a small problem with that."

A pose, a quizzical tilt of the head. "You mean you don't trust him?"

"I trust he'll do something. He'll sabotage something just to make us find it. And we're busy."

"Send the results to me. It's good exercise. I'll check them."

"You have enough to do, yourself. Just keep going with your lessons."

"Do it, Yanni."

"He'll burst a blood vessel."

"Probably, but I'll check what he does. Who's Clavery?" Yanni blinked, then shrugged. "Clavery is a name not in the computers. Ergo a nonperson, a construct, a codeword, or an alias."

"Possibly someone she knew by sight."

"We're running checks on everybody who was ever in contact with her. But just occasionally, in Novgorod, there are places where you aren't being logged, and people can make contact off the record. Restrooms. Subways. Standing on a street. At the theater. If she was ever accosted by somebody named Clavery it wouldn't be in her apartment buildingnot until that night."

"A hollow man?"

Yanni drew a deep breath. And gazed at her directly. "I'm not even asking where you learned that term. Myself, I'm strongly betting on Paxer involvement in the murders, but I'm not a hundred percent certain."

"I'm worried about people running around the halls of Reseune putting cards in people's pockets. And no camera caught them, either?"

"We're working on it. Just say we're working on it. Jordan favors very crowded, dark little restaurants where the chairs are jammed up together and people are moving all over the place. We don't have good imaging. Right now we're investigating a lot of people."

"Jordan's a magnet for blame. You never thought Jordan killed the first Ari, did you?"

Yanni shook his head. Took a drink of wine. "For one thing, he was in the hall when the electronics went out, and the system was very selective with what went dead at that point. Are we going to starve?"

"Sorry." She silently cued Haze, and said, "Yanni, will you support me if I do take over?"

"I'd support you, yes."

"What if I'd asked you to drop the Eversnow project? Would you do that?"

"I wouldn't be at all happy about it."

"But would you do it if I asked it?"

"Actually," Yanni said, "I'd probably go full ahead until the hour you nuked my accesses, because I believe in it. And I think you'd be quite wrong. So I'd fight you on that."

"Good. I like it when somebody tells me the truth. Why do you think I'm wrong?"

"Because Eversnow solves the employment problem on Fargone."

"Doesn't help Pan-Paris at all."

"It still solves one critical unemployment problem and makes Pan-Paris less critical. No, it doesn't help Pan-Paris and they'll be mad about it and we'll have to find something to give them pretty fast."

"Not on this year's budget."

"We'll let Pan-Paris stew and protest and get jealous of Fargone, and then we'll agree to do something. That makes it evident we're listening."

"You're a total cynic."

He shrugged. "Works. We've got worse potential problems on the horizon. We have an important alliance on this bill: us, Citizens, Defense. We can get Information and Trade in on it, and that's our majority. But Defense is in mid-election and Corain's getting old. He could see himself challenged for the seat in Citizens, and believe me, a lot worse could come out of that huge electorate than Corain. It's diverse. It may be true that if there hadn't been a Corain to hold Citizens together, we'd have to invent one, but in any given year, we could see something nasty develop there. Another reasonanother reason to pursue a major population burst at Fargone. Population in an area farthest removed from Alliance s.p.a.ce & most of them will end up voting in Citizens, supporting, we hope, moderates like Corain."

"All right, let's discuss it. You think that Eversnow is still an a.s.set. I frankly see it having serious problems."

"I think it's a safety factor. If there's another war, Alliance will think twice. If we toss their merchanters out of that route, we can enforce a ban, and we can protect it. It's a very narrow corridor."

"No great abundance of jump points in the region?"

"Scarce. Just about what we're developing as destinations, places we'll be able to defend. That's the word from Defense."

That was certainly a point in favor. "How soon is your population burst at Fargone?"

"All right. This is getting to be in your need-to-know, one more reason why it's not good for you and me to have a contest for power this year. There's a station onworld, already. That's all military and cla.s.sified to the hilt: it's been black-budgeted for decades, since your predecessor's time. We've kept its secrecy because we use its facilities pretty freely, but there've been some issues over the years, too."

"That's how you got the samples! It wasn't a robot. You lied on that, too."

"Well, it was a robot, but we have people down there, as we speak. Very cold, very lonely people, in company with a lot of cold, lonely Defense people, and not an azi in the lot. Defense has been d.a.m.ned worried we'd tamperso they haven't allowed azi down there. Just a nice little born-man society."

"What are we, for G.o.d's sake? At war?"

"During the War, it was a lot friendlier. Lately it's gotten political and full of rules and restrictions. The restrictions on our information-gathering and on our flow of personnel to and from is one motive on our part. We very much need a Reseune presence down there, an expanding presence in our own facility before the whole planet becomes a military zone where they make the rules."

"Hence Patil's project. Hence this whole thing. Patil's an excuse. Terraforming never was it. It's the population burst. It's a colony, never mind what the rest of the planet is like! they can sit on an iceball. Terraforming's just what you're paying to enlist Corain's people."

"Well, not altogether," Yanni said, "because ultimately, we want that planet, we want to colonize freely there, and we don't want Defense controlling that real estate. Terraforming's the excuse we use to get a base of our own down there. Right now Defense has themselves a nice one-thousand-kilometer-wide salt water puddle they're using Beta Labs nanistics people to work with, long-distance, which is no way to run a laboratory. We need to be self-sufficient down there, we need to be on-site and in charge of anything genetic. We're going to need integrations on foundational sets for Eversnow residency and some CIT volunteers pretty quick. We have that in part: we have the orbiting station and the military has the onworld base, which gives us the capability to land, and it's kept them moderately cooperative, because they need us for supplyrather than them having to build their own station. But right now we only have the kernel of a star station in orbit. It needs to grow. Fast. It needs the onworld lab. We keep the military from owning the whole planet, we boot them entirely out of nanistics research, and Union gets a highway to new stars. I've needed you, young lady; I've desperately needed you to get up to speed on integrations. We need azi that can face down military CITs and say no, ser, that's Reseune territory. Keep out."

"You're doubling the size of Union. You're handing us problems we don't even imagine yet!"

"It's not me that's running that onworld presence. Not at the moment. The elder Ari died at an inconvenient time and I couldn't get Giraud to move faster. Not to mention you ate up a lot of budget, young ladyyour new wing, h.e.l.l, your budding township's nothing against what you've already cost Reseune in lab time, in research, set-up. But we've done our Eversnow research, in budget masked behind the Fargone lab we already have. We've surveyed stars down that strand. There's no likelihood of sapience down that route unless it comes a long way to meet us. Several planeted stars. Resources. Jobs. Habitat. New genetics, at least at Eversnow, not likely much at the gas-b.a.l.l.s and ice moons we'll be dealing with further along. A lot of advantages. And as you sayprime opportunity for a major population burst that would solve several problems, including the Citizens electorate, within the next two to three decades. That could be of incalculable value."

"Look, I'm sorry for what I cost-"

"Don't be."

"But I'm going 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, ii 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 s.p.a.ce 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, Yanni. I'm also looking at a future in which we lose touch with Alliance, if we shift our center toward Fargone. We're at a point where we stand a small chance of making a lasting peace. Alliance has already gone poking off in another direction themselves, and they've proven that's dangerous. But once Alliance finds out we're expanding in another directionwhat are they going to do to expand, but either start putting enclaves on Downbelow, or throwing some colonial effort onto Gehenna, which is their one usable planet with one h.e.l.l of a local problem. Or they accelerate their push into the Hinder Stars, and get closer to Earth. Not to mention Eversnow moves our center away from the border we share with the Alliance and that lets them take the star stations we used to own &"

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

'I am. I think we can keep 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, Yanni. We have a serious problem in the Novgorod population, and I'm pretty sure it's not an azi problem, it's probably come down from the station, and I think it's serious. I think it's serious enough that before we start any future population burst of the size you describe, we need to know why we have Paxers, and what drives them. Is it the azi-CIT mix, or is there something about us?"

Yanni was silent a moment, thinking about that, and at that moment Haze and Hiro carried dinner in, briskly served. It was chicken with herbs, in a delicate pastry crust, and it smelled good.

"Eat," she said. "It's Cook's first formal dinner. They probably went crazy back there keeping it ready to serve. Don't let it go to waste."

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 can take 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, Yanni. It's a warning. Please don't try me. Convince me. I'm willing to listen to your plans. I am listening."

"You find out things already, don't you?" Yanni asked. "You get what you want. You didn't need my clearance. You're as deep into the information as you want to be."

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. "Yanni, please don't be against me. I don't want to be against you."

"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 dinner, then nodded. "All right, Yanni," she said, finally. "I think you're making me a lot of trouble, long term, but I'll think hard about what you're saying. I did promise, and you'll get your onworld base and I'll work your integrationsI'm not up to what you want now, and you're right, I don't know enough to argue. But I'll be there; and I'll back your project until I have a clear reason not to. I promise you. If I have to set my successor on the case, it will run, and we'll take care of those people. But I want you to know I'm worried. my predecessor was murdered. We have people in Reseune we can't trust. We have a lot of people in Novgorod who aren't behaving rationallyyou can argue it's rational from their point of view, but not in the macrosetted view. Macrosets in that population aren't working the way they're supposed to. People aren't as happy as they're supposed to be, for no d.a.m.ned reason I can figure."

"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 is more work than some people want. But that's not all that's going on. Those people, who are persuading other people to build bombsyou 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 macrosetswhich 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 s.p.a.cecases 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, Yanni, don't laugh. What we do is power. And power is what people want. The people operating in their living rooms, they're fools, especially if they do it under therapeutic kat; but remember what the first Ari said about ordinary people understanding Einstein, in this age, and someday they'd understand Bok?"

A bite stayed poised on Yanni's fork. "Meaning we've got a society that thinks they understand what we do."

"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. Power comes 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 h.e.l.l of an imagination," Yanni said.

"I'm serious, Yanni. Novgorod's lag-timed by rejuv and birthlabs: if they store the genesets. people can have kids into their eighties and hundreds, with birthlabs: and the time the Paxers start blowing things up is during my predecessor's lifetimethat's third-gen. That's where the problems usually come out in a bad set."

"That also happened to coincide with the War they were protesting."

"True. But there's no War now, and they're still protesting. They're not real clear what they're protesting, except the planet isn't what they want it to be, and they clearly think they can dispense with us."

"Nothing psychotic about that. Humanity did without us for thousands of years. Alliance and Earth, somehow, still do."

"That's not it, though. It's not that they can do without us, it's that somebody wants to be us. What if that's the viral idea, Yanni? That somebody's always going to be us, and that's where the power is situated, and maybe somebody's little kid, or several people's little kids, were turned into something that's angrier about us than the parents were. Maybe that's why they're still protesting a war that's been over for decades, and why it's only gotten worse and crazier. I mean, the first Paxers blew up buildings at odd hours when people weren't likely to be there, and now they're just trying to cause the worst casualties they can. It's accelerated. They're sucking in mental cases their violence created, and giving them bombs and sending them outbut you don't think the leaders of this movement are ever going to carry the bombs. They'll sit back pretending to be us, congratulating themselves that they've become us."

"So do you see a fix, short of a ma.s.s mindwipe of every CIT in Novgorod?"

"I see Paxers proliferating like crazy, once Eversnow goes public. That worries me, Yanni."

"Why would they proliferate?"

"Because it's change. Because it scares the followers. Because change changes the balance of power and that's going to agitate their leaders. Some people won't want the whole terraforming question shunted out to the edge of s.p.a.ce: they want it here. Some people won't want it anywhere. Some people will agree with me that it's too much too soon. It's going to be like yeast in a bowl, it's just going to froth up and make a h.e.l.l of a mess."

"In your theory you could change the national polling hours and they'd bomb subways over it."

"They probably would," Ari said. "It would all become some Reseune plot."

"So there's a monster in the walls. What's his name, Anton Clavery?"

"You're making fun of me."

"Not exactly. Your theory would say the Paxers took out Patil and Thieu. The one's easy, the other's hard. You need sane people to get into Planys and then go insane."

She shook her head. "You need a killer. Money's a motive, too. When you need something delicate done, you hire an expert."

Yanni sat and thought about that a moment. "Nasty theory, young lady."

"It's scary. So's your Eversnow, but I said I'd support it. You know what else worries me in the whole issue? Jordan worries me."

"Regarding the Paxers?"

"He's an issue with them. If he's as self-interested as you say, he'll do whatever benefits him. He's the embodiment of the disaffected, the third-gen problem. You can't make him care. And he doesn't."