"No, ser, I'm under oath. I am and you're not. My getting my majority triggered the notes. So when you withdrew your suit, that did it. That's the truth. And I'munder oath."
There was a little shifting in seats. A snort from Catherine Lao.
"Your uncle made the files and prepped you for this whole business."
The gavel banged. "That's enough, Councillor. Next question."
"I don't think we're listening to anything in this diplomatic fiasco," Khalid said, "but Denys Nye's constructions. Reseune is playing politics as usual, and it's held too much power too long."
"Do we mention the power in the Defense Bureau?" Giraud said.
"We have a clear case of conflict of interest on the Council. And we have embassies from Pell and Earth asking questions we had rather not answer."
"We have a clear conflict of interest as regards Defense," Giraud said. "Since your Bureau ordered this Gehenna mess over the protests of Science. Asthe witness has testified."
"Time," Harad said, and brought the gavel down.
"I'm due time to respond to that," Khalid said.
"Your time is up."
"I'd hate to accuse the Chairman of partisan politics."
Bang!"You are out of order, Councillor!"
Ari took another sip of water and waited while the Chair wrangled it out. Corain was making notes. So were Lao and a lot of the aides. Corain might have put Khalid up to it, making him the villain, since Khalid already had trouble. There was a challenge to Khalid's seat shaping up—already, a man named Simon Jacques. Much less flamboyant. Reseune had preferred Lu, but Lu's age was against him; and there was under-the-table stuff going on:
Corain had talked very secretly with Giraud and Jacques was a compromise they both could swallow, to get rid of Khalid. But that didn't mean Corain wouldn't let Khalid go after Reseune. It just meant that, under that table, Corain didn't want Reseune swallowed up by Defense any more than he wanted it to exist at all.
Meanwhile Khalid had broken off negotiations on a big Defense contract with Reseune. It was a fair-sized threat, but Khalid certainly wasn't doing any more than stalling, because there wasn't anywhere else to get tape from.
And the law that protected azi wound a civil rights issue right into Reseune's right of exclusivity on tape-production, because Reseune wasthe legal guardian of all azi, everywhere—Reseune couldterminate all azi contracts with Defense—which they wouldn't do, of course, but, Giraud said, Defense had been fighting for years to get access to the birth-to-eighteen tapes for its soldiers, and Reseune would never give them up. That was why Khalid wanted to nationalize Reseune. Khalid said there had been mismanagement at RESEUNESPACE—meaning Jenna Schwartz; but he made it sound like it was present management, meaning Ollie, and that made her damned mad; Defense also said it was worried about something being buried in the training tapes; and Khalid was threatening to bring a bill to break Reseune's monopoly on tape and licensing—
Fine, Giraud said: Khalid didn't have the votes; Khalid's position was already unpopular with his own party—who didn't want more azilabs, they wanted fewer; so the whole Gehenna thing was a lever all sorts of interests were using. Corain would have liked to have used it much more, except Corain was worried about Khalid.
It was all very crazy. The stock markets were going up and down on rumors, Chavez, of Finance, was furious and sent a shut-down order on the wave of the rumors, so no ship could leave port for a few days, because they didn't want thatmarket-dive information packet going off at trans-light across Union and clear to Pell and Earth, they wanted to get the market stable again before they let any ship leave; and that had the Trade Bureau upset and Information howling about trade censorship. It was a real mess. In fact everybody was getting anxious.
Council won't take this kind of stuff, Giraud had said. And grimly: this is getting very serious, Ari. Very serious.
There was, Giraud had said, a hard-line faction in the military that had been building up for years—a lot of them the old guard who blamed Gorodin and Lu for spending too much on the Fargone project and not getting the programs they wanted; theybacked Khalid in the election, and they wanted more shipbuilding and more defense systems Sunward; but that was also along the Alliance corridors, and that made the Centrists nervous.
While everybody thought Jacques was a front for Gorodin and might resign and appoint Gorodin proxy if
Crazy.
"We have this entire crisis," Khalid was saying, arguing with Harad, "because Reseune can sit in perfect immunity and level charges contained in documents only the Science Bureau can vouch for. Of coursethe Science Bureau is pure of Reseune influences!"
Giraud was right. Khalid was a disaster with the press, but he was fast on his feet and he was smart. You couldn't discount him.
But Harad brought down the gavel again. "Councillor Lao."
"The question is . . ." Thank God it was Lao's turn next. Uncle Giraud was put, because of conflict of interest. Harad of State was out because he was presiding. ". . . very simply, why a quarantine?"
"They're unpredictable, Councillor. That's the whole thing. We have huge computers that run sociology projections, when we work with psych-sets: we try to balance populations so they end up with wide enough genepools and we check out the psychsets we use to make sure that we haven't put something together that's going to turn up social problems when everybody becomes CIT. This thing—this whole planet—is completely wild and it's all artificial, it's got no relation at all to Terran history—it's just Gehennan. We don't know what it is. That's what made Ari nervous. These azi-sets could have been under God-knows-what interventions while they still had kat and they knew they were in trouble; God knows what their Supervisors decided to tell them; or even if there were Supervisors at the last—" Tell them that,get them off the question about predictive sociology. "Take these people into the Alliance or into Union and they're therefrom now on, and they're different.Ari didn't say you should never do it. She said there's a period after which it's a lot better to let Gehenna alone and let it grow up, so you can see what it's going to do when it comes into the mainstream culture. Maybe it never will get along with us. Maybe it'll be something very good. We just don't know at this point."
"How willyou know? Didn't she run those checks?"
"It changes with every generation. It relates to all those psychsets. It relates to the whole mix. Our sociology programs are always improving. Ari ran it every ten years or so until she died. But her data was all just the initial stuff; she was just testing it against the new Sociology programs. We've got to set up to run with the new data. We have to do all the sets with the master-program and then we have to integrate them—that's Sociology does that. Reseune is transferring data over right now to run it. But it's huge; it takes a lot of computer time. And we need up-to-date stats. We can tell Council a lot. But we can't do it overnight and there's nothing, sera, absolutely nothing that laymen can do with that kind of stuff, either, the only computers that can run it are ours. So the best thing, the thing Reseune wants, is to keep that planet exactly the way Alliance wants to—just as little contact as possible while we do the data-collecting. It's like trying to get a good level measure with somebody bouncing the instruments, if people keep meddling there. We have to input all the influences—because just the discovery team landing there had to have done something."
"This is not," Khalid said, "a playground for the Science Bureau."