It wasn’t a stupid idea. She could see that. And it was a vision. It might be stupid to think Expansionism could go on at the same pace forever, but there was something to it going on for a while: Earth was one planet, one star system, and fragile. Earth had antagonized all its colonies, who held the only safe direction for Earth to expand–Earth now knew it wasn’t going to grow without running into intelligence in the other directions, and they only hoped Earth didn’t provoke something out in the deep. Alliance was already committed in the direction of Gehenna, but that planet was a problem.
Eversnow would lead Union development further out on another tangent, away from Earth and farther out than the Alliance, down a strand of stars that worked like a river in space. Broaden Union’s population base, widen their territory, make them secure, and yes, make sure there were jobs. That had been a poser, but Yanni’s plan solved that at a stroke.
Going away from Alliance made them unassailable, militarily: Defense would like that. Folly for Alliance or Earth to attack something that much bigger; and a strong Union, with other resources, wouldn’t actually needEarth, or even Alliance…while a strong Union was a big market, for Earth, and for Alliance. So it could possibly preserve the peace better than standing still.
So was it worth ruining a planet? A snowball, the domain of microbes? It might be.
“So let me ask you one,” Yanni said. “This new research post up‑river. It seems your own plan’s gotten beyond that…while I’ve been in Novgorod. Now we’re talking about a major lab expansion–five hundred jobs on this budget request, my office tells me. Requests for extension on use of the excavators. There’s nothing there to mineup in the hills. No industry’ likely. But now you’re requesting residences. A river port, with coffer dam and shields. Whydo you need a river port for remediation research?”
“To move supply.”
“And? It’s seeming a little beyond a bare‑bones research post all of a sudden. I’m not complaining, understand. I just want to know what we’re suddenly funding up there. What are you up to, young lady?”
She really hadn’t been ready to talk about that. But maybe it was time. Secret for secret.
“Actually–a township.”
“An adjunct to Reseune? Or a rival?”
“A real township. Like here. Shops. People. Manufacture, eventually. I’m thinking of calling it Strassenberg.”
“Strassenberg,” Yanni said, sitting back a little. That had been Maman’s name, Strassen. “Well, now there’san ambitious design for an eighteen‑year‑old. You’re building a new wing on Reseune and in the last three weeks your research lab has mutated into a town. And why, pray, do you think we needanother township in the world?”
That, like her question about Yanni’s programs, was a deeper question. Fair question, considering the funds she’d counted on weren’t going to be plentiful, if they now had to fund the remediation. “Two reasons: first the isolation, what I said at the start: a place to put the rest of my uncle’s staff where I don’t have to deal with them. But I want a lab for mydecisions. The first Ari created me to carry on herwork. I’m setting up a place where absolutely all the decisions are mine and all the mindsets are what I choose to be up there, CIT and azi. Give or take my uncle’s people, that they’ll have to encapsulate, they’re myresearch question. I saidit was a lab. And it actually is. It’s my comparison to what the first Ari did in, say, Gehenna.”
Eyebrows lifted. Clearly a city wasn’t quite the answer Yanni had expected under the title of a research lab. But it was the truth. There might be a timebomb in the Gehenna mindset, but–a more closely‑held secret, and one she wasn’t sure the first Ari had ever directly discussed with Yanni–there was possibly one in the Cyteen population itself, simply because the mindsets were what they were, exactly the same mix of psychsets Yanni had been talking about continuing at Eversnow. All but the CITs who’d come down from orbit were Reseune‑designed mindsets–the same as Yanni planned to go on using out at Eversnow. The station over their heads had its founding families, a certain aristocracy of CITs, people with citizen‑numbers from the origin of the system: the Carnaths, the Nyes, the Emorys, and the Schwartzes, plus a couple of hundred other names that had proliferated through the station–and then a number had settled at Reseune and Novgorod, on the planetary surface, once they’d begun to colonize the planet.
But it had needed a succession of population bursts to build civilization and sustain an economy independent of Earth’s economy, independent of the Merchanters Alliance, from which theyhad seceded by force of arms. A planetary economy needed hands to work, minds to devise, and people to mine resources, consume products, and fill the vacant spots in the outback, dense enough population for viable commerce. In the early days Union had boosted its numbers by birthlabs, by cycling azi into freedmen at an extraordinary rate…azi who’d been given their ethics by tape that Reseune had created in the first Ari’s mother’s time.
And the first Ari had had a very heavy hand on that process, tweaking what her mother Olga Emory had done; and then those azi had become freedmen, and married and had CIT kids, and taught them their values. More, the first Ari had operated increasingly with deep sets, in a style that scared a lot of other psych designers, and theydidn’t read what she’d been doing.
Teaching the kids’ kids’ generation to carry on, that was what–just like Gehenna. A lab‑made ethic was threaded all through the stations in Union’s grasp–just exactly what Yanni intended continuing with another surge in azi population in the deep Beyond. The same ethic the first Ari‑generated population‑burst had installed was buried in the psyches of all those people who took the subways to work and voted in the massive Bureaus of Citizens and Technology. Educated votes counted multiple times, and there were devices in the way the vote happened to keep the decision‑making within a Bureau constantly in the hands of people expert in the fields in question, but the fact was, in Union’s system, the popular vote, moving in a unified direction, could swing a certain way no matter what the experts wanted.
Count on it: the azi‑born were never going to turn on Reseune: the sons and daughters of the azi‑born were never going to turn, no matter what the Centrists wanted, or the Expansionists wanted, or the Paxers wanted. Yanni’s maneuvers to divide and diminish the Centrists were, she suspected, all unnecessary, if the first Ari was right. There was a worm working in the programs, something that moved and reprogrammed itself to suit the times, and it was damned scary how it worked, and changed, while azi‑descended were now out‑populating CITs.
But it was not something she was going to discuss in depth with Yanni. The terrible danger of that ethics implant was what the first Ari had died knowing–she’d died haunted by the fact one human couldn’t live long enough to see what it was going to do. It was why an Ari Two had to exist–to watch out for glitches in the mindsets she’d installed, at Gehenna, on Cyteen, inside Reseune itself. It was necessarily an untried theory, in those population surges mandated by the War, decommissioned soldiers, workers, colonists in the Gehenna outback: the first Ari had had to adjust them fast, and do it wide, or see it undone and unraveling. A collective azi‑descended socio‑set could mutate under unforeseen circumstances, creating not just new attitudes, but a whole artificially‑setted human population, an integration with a capital I.