"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'tdo. 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 generaclass="underline" 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 againstaggression, 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 andthe deep-sets she figured might hold someright 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.