When the meeting broke again, Nilis snorted. “What a distraction! It’s been a tactic of my opponents all along, to divert my discoveries to lesser targets — to waste this unique possibility.”
Pirius frowned. “But the commanders are just doing their jobs, aren’t they, Commissary? They have to think through the options—”
Commander Darc shook his head. “What is going on in this room is politics, remember. The Navy and the Green Army, to name but two, have been at each other’s throats since they were founded.
And the individuals around this table all have their own career strategies, their own rivalries and ambitions. Now they are maneuvering, you see. If our technology is promising, they each want to get hold of it for themselves to further their own careers. If our Core assault does go ahead, and it happens to go well, they will want to take the credit. Conversely, if it goes wrong, as I suspect most of those here believe is likely, they don’t want to be blamed.”
Torec was angry. “Maybe it would be better if we put our effort into fighting the Xeelee rather than each other.”
Darc laughed, not particularly unkindly. “Of course there will be honest doubts, too. I tell you, Commissary, there are many serving officers who don’t like your Project just for the feel of it. This fiddling with physics: it’s more like a Ghost project than anything humanity would devise. It has their glistening sheen all over it — that might be our biggest obstacle of all.”
In the next session, the many representatives of the Commission for Historical Truth took over, and the lines of questioning drifted away from the military justification of the Project and into realms of philosophy, ideology, and legalism.
The sinister Office of Doctrinal Responsibility, as the Commission’s ideological police force, had agents throughout the Galaxy, and assigned to every frontline unit: even Arches Base had its political officers, or “Doctrine cops,” as the troops called them. They were widely mocked, but their power was feared. And now the Doctrine cops on this committee dug into the question of the legality of what Nilis had been up to.
It was of course impossible for the Commissary to deny that he had been assisted by a jasoft, or that he had called on a posthuman colony on Mars, or that his gravastar hadn’t been developed by humans at all. But he was able to fend off their probing. It was not him, he pointed out, who had allowed Luru Parz to survive, or let a Coalescence to develop under Mons Olympus, or revived a colony of the long-extinct Silver Ghosts. These developments happened long before he was born, presumably with the full knowledge and even cooperation of the Commission.
“And why did all this happen? Because these divergences are useful. They may be non-Doctrinal, but they are valuable resources, and those who allowed such developments, far wiser than I, knew that it is sometimes necessary to compromise the purity of one’s ideology. If we were to lose the war, all our ideology would count for nothing anyhow. I am merely following in the footsteps of my wiser forebears.”
This mixture of flattery and blame-shifting seemed effective, and he deflected them further with a bit of philosophy. Was knowledge morally neutral? If a fact came from a dubious source, was its utility to be overridden by its ethically compromised origin? If so, who was to be the arbiter of what was “clean” science and what was not?…
By the time the Doctrine cops gave up, Nilis was sweating again. He had been on shaky ground. After all, it was one of Nilis’s “pragmatically useful resources,” Luru Parz, who, by threatening to expose the existence of other “morally compromised facilities,” had forced this committee to consider Nilis’s requests in the first place.
But now the Office of Cultural Rehabilitation waded in. This department of the Commission was a sister to the ancient Assimilation program, which had been tasked with absorbing the resources of conquered alien races for the benefit of mankind’s projects. Rehabilitation had the mission, still in fact ongoing, of seeking out relics of older waves of human colonization. These pre-Third Expansion pockets of humanity, having been seeded before the establishment of the Coalition, were of course non-Doctrinal by definition. Many had even lapsed into eusociality, becoming Coalescences. But all of them had to be brought into the fold, their populations reeducated. The ultimate goal of Rehabilitation was to ensure that every human in the Galaxy was assigned to the single goal of the great war.
Now, it seemed to Pirius, Rehabilitation officers were expressing concern about Nilis’s Project, not in case it failed, but if it succeeded. Would it actually be moral to end this war? The entire human economy of the Galaxy was devoted to the war: if it ever ended, the resulting dislocation would be huge. And without the war’s unifying discipline, how could central control be maintained? There would be riots; there would be starvation; whole worlds would break away from the light of the Coalition and fall into an anarchic darkness.
One dry academic even suggested that a true reading of Hama Druz’s writings showed that that ancient sage had been arguing, not for the conquest of the Galaxy, but for the continual cleansing of unending conflict. The war had to go on, until a perfect killing machine had been forged from imperfect mankind. Of course victory was the ultimate goal, but a victory too soon could imperil that great project of the unity of a purified species…
Torec and Pirius were amazed. But since they had come to Sol system, it wasn’t the first time they had heard people actually argue against victory.
Pirius thought he could see what was really going on here, beneath the dry academic discussions. These ancient agencies weren’t concerned for the myriad people in their care; they were only concerned about their own survival. If the war went away, he thought with a strange thrill, any justification for the continuance of the Coalition itself, and its Galaxy full of ideological cops, would vanish. And then what?
Perhaps he was growing cynical.
The session overran its allotted time. At last Gramm banged his gavel, and ordered the committee to reconvene in the morning.
While they had talked, the planet had spun on its axis, taking Conurbation 11729 and its busy inhabitants into its shadow.
Nilis’s party was assigned quarters on a residential floor of the huge building. The room given to Torec and Pirius seemed impossibly luxurious. After a while, they stripped blankets off the too-soft beds, making themselves a nest on the floor.
But a bot called, sent by Nilis. It contained some technical updates Gramm had requested, and Pirius,
as Nilis’s representative, was to accompany the bot to the Minister’s office. Reluctantly Pirius allowed his uniform to slither back into place over his body.
The bot led the way through a maze of carpeted corridors to the Minister’s office.
Pirius had been expecting opulence. The room was richer than anything he had seen at Arches Base, of course — and a lot richer than Nilis’s apartment, for instance. The carpet on the floor was a thick pile, and even the walls were covered by some kind of heavily textured paper.
But the room was windowless: that was significant, as Pirius had learned that the most prized rooms in any Conurbation-dome building had window views. And this was a working room. The only furniture was a desk, a small conference table, and chairs — and a couch, upholstered with maroon fabric and laden with cushions, on which rested the great bulk of the Minister of Economic Warfare himself.
Gramm had kicked his shoes off, and loosened his robe. Lying there, his stomach had spread out like a sack of mercury, and his jowly face was slack and tired. A table floated at Gramm’s right hand; Pirius could smell spicy food. Bots and small Virtual displays hovered around Gramm’s head, and voices whispered, constantly updating the Minister on whatever was happening in the corners of his complex world. Gramm’s fat hand dug into the plates, but he never so much as glanced at what he was pushing into his mouth. Pirius had never seen the Minister look so deflated, so exhausted.