But there was a problem with secure labs, and the Patil incident had demonstrated that, hadn’t it, abundantly? Secure labs were full of very bright people, who could be very devious if they wanted to be.
And getting a Special like Jordan involved there would jeopardize the far more important reason for Strassenberg, that the whole town was itself a lab, a control for herself, and for her successor. She wanted to see what herdesigns grew into, isolated from those at Novgorod.
She intended nothing antithetical to Novgorod, unless intolerance for other ideas was a timebomb developing in the first Ari’s design.
Within decades, Novgorod would meet something on its beloved planet that wasn’t Novgorod, when it had been the only true city in the world for all the world’s existence. Novgorod had had some experience in tolerance, tolerating Reseune itself, Reseune’s autocracy–even needingan Ariane Emory, and voting for her programs.
But would they tolerate diversity when it wasn’t theirbrand of diversity?
For the good of the planet, they would have to. Or their idiosyncrasy became a problem that she would have to handle with subsequent population surges.
And what she did carried through generations. That was the point of everything: ultimately it was peopleyou were dealing with, people whose psychsets might have been planned like a jigsaw puzzle, groups of the one psychset clicking into place with other groups of another, and tending to bond and procreate with individuals of like psychset, so there was a certain persistence of type– thatwas setted‑in, too. All part of integrations.
No apparent problems in Novgorod. So far. Even the Abolitionists might be healthy. At least people disagreed with the majority.
So let Novgorod meet something Else. In her time, in her successor’s time, let two separate psycharcologies learn each other. That would deliver a poke to the urban organism downriver, to see how it wiggled.
It might also guarantee that her successor would need to exist.
Azi felt a certain pride in the continuance of their type. It was part of their sets. But was it wired into what was basically human?
Curious, curious. She was able to compare herself only against the first Ari. Her successor would at least have a broader field of inquiry in that department.
And perhaps her successor would found yet another colony, just to check things out. She thought if she were that Ari, that thought would certainly occur to her.
But that would complicate the situation long‑term, when populations merged and met, as they would when the world grew. Too many variables spoiled the soup, to mix a metaphor.
Forgetting that they were dealing with living, self‑willed people spoiled it, too. Too much deepstudy, too much immersion in the theoretical, the give and take only of electrons, not the behavior of whole organisms. The world was more complicated than theory ever yet predicted: that was why she was important. It was her job to see things coming, and figure how to shift the demographics without conflicts. A machine didn’t work, mixing in yet one more metaphor, if it was all one homogenous piece. Neither did a city, or a species.
Finding the glitches was her job. Her problem. Man started out analyzing his environment, graduated into understanding his own psyche, graduated, again, into analyzing the behavior of the human species en masse.
That guaranteed employment for several of her kind, didn’t it?
BOOK ONE Section 2 Chapter vii
APRIL 27, 2424
0117H
Florian was back from down the hill–late. Exhausted. He fell into bed in the dark, and Catlin rolled over and asked, face to face, brow to brow with him: “So. What’s the story? Do we accept these people?”
“I didn’t find anyone to object to. I’ve interviewed them. I’ve ordered them into a single barracks, two days of special tape. They’ll be firmly under our orders and initially operational by, I’d think, the fifteenth of next month.”
“Good.” She eased an arm around him. She was tired, herself, from hour after hour at the screens, and running up and downstairs seeing to the move. He was tired from a day with Hicks and trekking from one end of Reseune to the other, down to the labs and the barracks, back to the offices, meeting upon meeting with prospective help.
“Has sera asked after me?”
“She knows where you’ve been all day. She’s very busy in her studies, but she approves of what we’ve done.”
“Good.” He pulled her close, bestowed a weary kiss on the forehead. She wasn’t thattired, that that didn’t get a reaction. But she stayed tracked, business first. “There was an interesting development on my side today.”
“Oh?”
“Justin called me. Called us. He wanted to know what was on the card. He wanted to distance himself from that inquiry. But he also wanted to know.”
The penalty of interesting information. Florian pushed her back enough to look at her eye to eye. “Curious about the card, is he?”
“Curious and worried. He’s conflicted. He wants to know and he doesn’t want to know. On my own judgment, I told him about the Novgorod doctor to see what his reaction would be, and also to warn him about the nature of the danger. He didn’t know her, not even by name. I ran the clip of his call for sera to hear it.”
“Interesting,” Florian murmured. “And what did she say?”
“Much the same. She found it interesting.”
Hands moved. And stopped. “Do you think sera’s going to call me tonight?”
“Definitely she won’t,” Catlin said. “She skipped supper again and went straight into deepstudy.”
“She shouldn’t do that.”
“I said so, too. She said she’d have a big breakfast in the morning.”
“She’s pushing herself again. It’s not good.”
“It’s not good,” Catlin agreed. “I think she feels we’re in danger. I think she suspects something she can’t identify, the same as us.”
“What’s Unusual?” Florian said. It was the old game, the childhood game. Find the change. Find the anomaly. Find the problem.
“Jordan,” she answered. “Jordan being in Justin’s old office.”
“The card.” He tossed the list of Unusuals back. “Yanni. This Dr. Patil. The new colony. The new wing. The new township. Am I missing anything?”
“I think,” Catlin said, “that the card fits Jordan. Jordan wanting Justin to get caught. Justin giving us the card and being angry at Jordan. Justin calling me this afternoon.”
“Sera studying late,” Florian said, “night after night. She doesn’t feel she’s ready. Or she’s looking for something.”
“Yanni coming to dinner, right after his trip to Novgorod. Talking about Eversnow. Which Patil is going to run. Connection.”
“Hicks suddenly giving us all this staff. Which he was prepared to do before I walked in. Which meant he could have prepared to do it before the card ever came up–or only afterhe knew about the card he didn’t have–yet–until I gave it to him. Does the card show him some specific danger? Or is he trying to plant a spy on us, by giving us this staff?”
“Sera pulling Justin into the Wing,” Catlin said. “She didn’t even exit the Wing to talk to Yanni. Yanni came here to talk to her–so she’s still regarding our warnings–but she pulled Justin inside our perimeters.”
“She may be going out of the Wing more often than the last couple of months, if we have this new security staff,” Florian said. “That exposes her to danger. Would Hicks want that?”