And then peace had happened, and the project had stalled–people elsewhere hadn’t thought terraforming anything was a good idea; and then the first Ari had died, and it had stayed a dead issue for twenty years.
But the Eversnow collapse hadhad an effect, politically. Fargone Station’s independence tilt, voting sometimes with the Expansionists, sometimes with the Centrists, and bargaining hard for its vote, had been a factor in the Defense election that had put Vladislaw Khalid in–her least favorite Bureau head in her own lifetime.
And that unrest, of people feeling trapped and dead‑ended, was still out there at Fargone and Pan‑Paris, in the electorate of Citizens, in Defense. It spread even through the Science Bureau, out there: the Expansionists had just squeaked through its traditional majority in the last election Science had had.
That was dangerous, even if it was just one star‑station.
She had an inkling all of a sudden where Yanni was leading with this little surprise, and it wasn’t stupid: it was an answer to the kind of problems Yanni had faced in histenure as Proxy Councillor for Science andhead of the Expansionist Party. Give Fargone a major project, jobs, prosperity–and mutate Fargone’s maverick electorate into one more in line with Reseune, who’d be running the project. Setting a whole new population‑burst of azi out there, who would, over time, migrate to freed‑man status at Fargone and then, supposedly, at Eversnow Station, azi who’d teach their own CIT children theiropinions–
And Corain was going along with it? She felt her week‑long Mad cool off just a degree. Defense still had a strong interest in Eversnow. It was going to be a problem to pry their fingers off it, and Yanni was trying to work with them…had Yanni thought of that?
“We set up an alpha‑capable lab at Fargone,” Yanni was saying quietly, and she began to track it, “but the locals are naturally immediately thinking of CIT‑use, ordinary CIT births, and that’s what they know. Corain hasn’t mentioned Eversnow in his own arguments, or at least it hadn’t leaked by this morning. But Council has something to gain from this bill. Fargone’s going to be the stepping‑off point for Eversnow, which will become more and more economically important to Fargone voters and to the Citizens Bureau. But most of all, to us. Not just a new city. A new planet. For us, a whole new genetic resource. A whole new population to birth and set up. Corain’s agreeing to cooperate with us on the Hinder Stars Defense Treaty, but we agreed to drop the remediation funding increase for this session, for this project. Seed money. Corain gains jobs and votes and he gets funding without a tax increase. But ultimately we gain everything.”
The damned thing was an appalling daisy chain of favors exchanged. She suddenly had a much wider window into the content of the mysterious meetings, and here was Yanni–stolid, just‑the‑facts Yanni, non‑activist through her whole life–advancing an outrageously ambitious Expansionist agenda the first Ari had contemplated and slowed down on, toward the end of her life, as too much, too far.
In Yanni’s plan, they acquired not just Eversnow as a base, but the string of stars beyond it; that was the thing. The strand that had been, without Eversnow, unattainable. Defense wanted that: she could see it.
And the Centrists, particularly numerous in the Citizens Bureau, whose whole platform had always been to have Union’s power to stay clustered tightly around Cyteen, were suddenly going along with Eversnow? The first Ari had started out supporting terraforming at Cyteen, her mother Olga’s project, and then pulled the rug from under that once rejuv manufacture became a vital industry. The Centrists, wanting to expand population, not territory, had been outraged. They’d seen it as a ploy to keep Cyteen mostly desert, carved up into Administrative Territories, notably Reseune’s protective reserves, where CITs couldn’t get a foothold. They’d been furious and called Eversnow a pie‑in‑the‑sky piece of politics that was going to give Reseune one more protectorate and never would benefit the average CIT.
And now the Centrists, who had been so fundamentally opposed to that project at the edge of space, were suddenly willing to give up their campaign to terraform Cyteen and concentrate on Eversnow.
The universe had changed in a week.
And she didn’t know enough. Eversnow had been a problem she’d planned to postpone for decades.
A world locked in a snowball effect. A world without a spring for millions of years–with, however, the strong likelihood that there was still life there, genetically unique, locked in rocks in the sub‑basement of a frozen ocean.
In the first Ari’s day, with all of humankind busy blowing each other up in the War, the Expansionists and the military had both been hot to seed Eversnow for their own reasons–their hedge on a bet, if the Alliance had hit Cyteen. But Centrists hadn’t wanted to spend money there at all, and a few Centrist‑leaning scientists had argued they needed to preserve and study that world for a few decades.
Too late, by then. An early Defense Bureau project had already broken the freeze, or begun to break it, artificially, with solar heat, and tipped the balance toward a melt…how that had ever turned out, she didn’t know in any detail. Earth‑origin phytoplankton reportedly bloomed in certain areas, thanks to Defense.
She would not have done that: she would have said a vehement no. It was a living world, and living worlds were precious in the cosmos. Even snowballs. That was what she’d thought in her slight reading of the project–good they gave it up.
But now came politics. And Yanni was getting friendly with Corain? Establishing a population burst out at Fargone and then at Eversnow, where the Centrists weren’t paying attention–
That actually could be smart, she had to admit it. Centrists attracted the violent fringe elements, people like the Paxers and the Abolitionists, whose major agenda had gone from a unilateral peace in the Company Wars on the one hand, and an abolition of all azi production on the other. The Paxers and the Abolitionists had, as a curious side agenda, the terraforming of Cyteen, which they thought would break the power of Reseune, and thatwas how those fringe groups had found an ideological home in the Centrist Party.
But let Corain of Citizen shift the political focus to “jobs for Fargone,” and snuggle up to Science, and watch the fringe elements scramble to cope with that.
The first Ari had created her, she’d said, to keep watch over her projects–among which was Gehenna, and maybe, yes, she supposed, that could include Eversnow, even if it wasn’t, like Gehenna, populated.
So, well, maybe Yanni didn’t deserve spacing.
A sudden expansion of Reseune interests out on the fringe of human space–a whole new strand of stars. New frontiers. A commitment to expansion–and to Expansionism, with all it stood for, and all the dangers in the deep unknown…
Was sheready to open that door to the universe and deal with whatever lay out there? Was she, for that matter, going to be as Expansionist in her own career as her predecessor had been? She didn’t know. Decisions were coming down on her too early…and she was about to be stuck with this one: there were ways for her to undo everything except the dispersal of the Earth genome into an alien, living world.
But Defense, by all reports, had already done that part, even including higher lifeforms.
“I’m not sure, Yanni. I’m still not sure. Tell me why.”
“A planet with only microbes to recommend it is interesting, but we have samples.”