Roman Hitchcock, the president of the Visigoth System, was the most rugged looking of the people around the table, at least as far as his features were concerned. He had black hair, dark-gray eyes, and a strong nose, but in comparison to Hurskainen, who could easily have served as an artist's model for a barbarian king, Hitchcock was not only ten centimeters shorter, but built for speed and agility instead of raw power.

Nikomedes Kakadelis, Chief Counsel of the Democratic Republic of Thrace, was the only person there whose appearance really suited the traditional Old Earth ethnicity of his name. He had dark, curly hair, blue eyes, a strong nose and chin, and a slightly olive complexion. He was barely eight centimeters taller than Kubrick, but that was the only physical similarity between them. He had a weight lifter's physique and a wrestler's arms.

Beyond Kakadelis, Director Vincent Stone, who headed the Directorate of New Orkney, was almost too pretty. He had extraordinarily regular features, and a nose just on the masculine side of delicate, liquid brown eyes, a cleft chin, and hair as dark as a raven's wing. In fact, he was so "pretty" people often overlooked his powerful physique. Despite his youthful appearance, he was one of the older people in the room, and he'd also been a highly decorated naval officer before he entered politics . . . which, of course, had been part of the plan for his career from the beginning.

Coming around the end of the table, back toward the Detweilers, was Rebecca Monticelli, president of the Comstock Republic and the only other woman present. She could have been deliberately designed by the Alignment's geneticists as Kubrick's antithesis, although it had actually just worked out that way. She had black hair, dark eyes, and a skier's tan—not surprisingly, since her favorite recreational pastime was cross-country skiing. She was also a good two centimeters taller than the famous Honor Alexander-Harrington—in fact, she and Hurskanien were the two tallest people in the room—and her genotype included even more musculature enhancement than the Meyerdahl first wave's.

Next was Chancellor Robert Tarantino of the Republic of New Bombay. Personally, Detweiler found Tarantino just a bit on the irritating side. It wasn't really the chancellor's fault, but one of the quirks in the Tarantino genotype had expressed unusually vigorously in his case, with the result that he was one of the most physically restless people Detweiler had ever met. He had platinum hair, brown eyes, and a slightly swarthy complexion, and he was constantly fiddling with something. In fact, Detweiler had once experimented by taking Tarantino's old-fashioned "worry rock" away from him to see what would happen, only to find the chancellor tapping his toes under the table in time with his fingers' drumming on his knees. Despite that, he was an extremely capable political leader, with multiple advanced degrees—in economics and physics—and he enjoyed a League-wide reputation as an economic policymaker.

And, finally, to Albrecht's left, was Reynaldo Lucas—Marquis Reynaldo IV, of the Marquisate of Denver. He was sandy-haired, with hazel eyes and a neatly trimmed beard. Like Hurskainen, he favored long hair, and the Lucas genome shared some of the Polanski genome's musical talent. In Lucas's case, it expressed as a magnificent baritone singing voice rather than an instrumental ability, however.

An extraordinarily capable group of people by any standard, he thought, trying hard not to feel complacent. And they, and their families (and a substantial portion of the rest of their homeworlds' political and economic elites, for that matter), were every one of them part of the Alignment. Part of its strategy, proof of its genetic superiority, recruited—or, in some cases, inserted—generations before. The Hurskainen genome, for example, had been placed in Visigoth over three T-centuries ago. Stanley Hurskainen represented the fifteenth generation of that alpha line, and the Thompson genome on New Madagascar was even older. None were as old and prestigious as the Detweiler genome, yet unlike the Detweilers, they and their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents had been open parts of their homeworlds' societies. Indeed, they'd been put in place for exactly this moment.

"I hope you'll forgive me for saying this, Albrecht," Ford said after a moment, "but I wish you could come into the open at the same time. We all understand why you can't, but it just seems . . . wrong, somehow."

"Thank you, Walt. I appreciate that," Detweiler said, and he did. It wasn't flattery or sycophancy on Ford's part, and he saw agreement in most of the others' faces.

"I appreciate it, but we all know why I can't."

Ford nodded, as did a couple of the others, and Detweiler reminded himself—again—of all the manifold reasons what he'd just said was true.

The last thing they could afford at this critical juncture was for the rest of the galaxy to decide that the corrupt, outlaw corporations of Mesa were secretly pulling the strings behind these men and women. The very thing that made them so critical to the Alignment's ultimate success was the fact that there had never been a single trace of a connection between one of them and Mesa. All of them came from families which had been part of their native societies for so long their bona fides were beyond question. All had well-earned reputations as capable, farsighted, deeply involved heads of state. Each had expressed his or her own condemnation of genetic slavery, and most had been actively involved in stamping it out in their own societies. And unlike the vast majority of Solarian League politicians, there had never been even a hint of corruption or venality attached to any of them.

Which meant they were absolutely essential. When the Manties hammered the SLN into wreckage yet again—when the carefully primed "spontaneous rebellions" broke out in a dozen places simultaneously in the Verge as the League Navy's reputation crumbled, and when the score of Frontier Security governors who'd been carefully prepared by their own versions of Aldona Anisimovna followed the example of the Maya Sector and unilaterally assumed emergency powers in order to "protect" the citizens of their sectors—the men and women around this table with Albert Detweiler would emerge as the leaders of a new interstellar power.

The Alignment's strategists had picked the name for that power—the Renaissance Factor—decades ago, and the exquisitely orchestrated crescendo of disasters would "force" them into taking steps to protect their own star systems from the tide of anarchy. They wouldn't call themselves a star nation—not immediately—but that was what they would be. And, in the fullness of time, when it was obvious to the entire galaxy that they were simply responding to the catastrophic, totally unanticipated disintegration of the League, they would finally, regretfully, exercise their constitutional right to secede from the League and formally assume their position as a sovereign star nation.

A star nation which had grown solely out of their emergency association to stave off collapse. On which had nothing at all to do with Mesa . . . and which would painstakingly avoid anything that could be even remotely construed as a eugenics policy.

Until, that was, the rest of the galaxy discovered that the Renaissance Factor had become exactly what it called itself—the reinvigorated successor of the Solarian League, at least as big and powerful as the League itself had ever been, and dedicated, indeed, to the rebirth of humanity in a new and glorious future of potential fully realized at last.

Albrecht Detweiler wasn't at all certain he himself, even with prolong and the "natural" longevity engineered into his genes, would live long enough to see that day arrive. But that was all right, for he was seeing something even more important. He was seeing this day, when centuries of sacrifice, planning, and unceasing labor had finally come to fruition and forced the path of human history into the rightful direction from which the sanctimonious Beowulf Code and the human race's hysterical reaction to Old Earth's Final War had diverted it so long ago. None of them would live long enough to see the completion of the journey upon which their entire species had just unknowingly set out, but every one of them knew it would come, and that they —they and their ancestors—were the ones who had made that so.