“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 wantto 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 integrations–I’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 rationally–you 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 damned 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 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, 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. 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,” 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 lifetime–that’s third‑gen. That’s where the problems usuallycome 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 whatthey’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’sthe viral idea, Yanni? That somebody’s always going to beus, 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 thembombs and sending them out–but 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 becomeus.”
“So do you see a fix, short of a mass 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 space: 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 hell 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’san 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 makehim care. And he doesn’t.”