Council won't take this kind of stuff, Giraud had said. And grimly: this is getting very serious, Ari. Very serious.

There was, Giraud had said, a hard-line faction in the military that had been building up for years—a lot of them the old guard who blamed Gorodin and Lu for spending too much on the Fargone project and not getting the programs they wanted; theybacked Khalid in the election, and they wanted more shipbuilding and more defense systems Sunward; but that was also along the Alliance corridors, and that made the Centrists nervous.

While everybody thought Jacques was a front for Gorodin and might resign and appoint Gorodin proxy if he got elected; and Lu's friends were mad about the double cross.

Crazy.

"We have this entire crisis," Khalid was saying, arguing with Harad, "because Reseune can sit in perfect immunity and level charges contained in documents only the Science Bureau can vouch for. Of coursethe Science Bureau is pure of Reseune influences!"

Giraud was right. Khalid was a disaster with the press, but he was fast on his feet and he was smart. You couldn't discount him.

But Harad brought down the gavel again. "Councillor Lao."

"The question is . . ." Thank God it was Lao's turn next. Uncle Giraud was put, because of conflict of interest. Harad of State was out because he was presiding. ". . . very simply, why a quarantine?"

"They're unpredictable, Councillor. That's the whole thing. We have huge computers that run sociology projections, when we work with psych-sets: we try to balance populations so they end up with wide enough genepools and we check out the psychsets we use to make sure that we haven't put something together that's going to turn up social problems when everybody becomes CIT. This thing—this whole planet—is completely wild and it's all artificial, it's got no relation at all to Terran history—it's just Gehennan. We don't know what it is. That's what made Ari nervous. These azi-sets could have been under God-knows-what interventions while they still had kat and they knew they were in trouble; God knows what their Supervisors decided to tell them; or even if there were Supervisors at the last—" Tell them that,get them off the question about predictive sociology. "Take these people into the Alliance or into Union and they're therefrom now on, and they're different.Ari didn't say you should never do it. She said there's a period after which it's a lot better to let Gehenna alone and let it grow up, so you can see what it's going to do when it comes into the mainstream culture. Maybe it never will get along with us. Maybe it'll be something very good. We just don't know at this point."

"How willyou know? Didn't she run those checks?"

"It changes with every generation. It relates to all those psychsets. It relates to the whole mix. Our sociology programs are always improving. Ari ran it every ten years or so until she died. But her data was all just the initial stuff; she was just testing it against the new Sociology programs. We've got to set up to run with the new data. We have to do all the sets with the master-program and then we have to integrate them—that's Sociology does that. Reseune is transferring data over right now to run it. But it's huge; it takes a lot of computer time. And we need up-to-date stats. We can tell Council a lot. But we can't do it overnight and there's nothing, sera, absolutely nothing that laymen can do with that kind of stuff, either, the only computers that can run it are ours. So the best thing, the thing Reseune wants, is to keep that planet exactly the way Alliance wants to—just as little contact as possible while we do the data-collecting. It's like trying to get a good level measure with somebody bouncing the instruments, if people keep meddling there. We have to input all the influences—because just the discovery team landing there had to have done something."

"This is not," Khalid said, "a playground for the Science Bureau."

"Nor for Defense, ser," Lao said sharply. The gavel came down.

She lay flat on the bed in the hotel, limp, while Florian and Catlin rubbed the kinks out, and she went to sleep that way, unexpectedly, just out, pop,

She woke up under the covers and Florian and Catlin had the light down very low, Catlin was stretched out on the other bed, and Florian was sitting in the chair in the corner.

"God," she said, which woke Catlin instantly. "Get to sleep.There's battalions of Security in the hall, aren't there?"

"Yes, sera," Florian said. Catlin said: "There are twenty-seven on duty."

"Well, go to sleep."

Which was short, for people who loved her enough to stay awake after a day like this one, but she was still falling-over tired, and she did, just grabbed the pillow with her arm, tucked her head down and burrowed until she had a dark place.

Florian turned out the lights anyway; and she heard him cross the room and sit down on the other bed and start undressing.

She headed out again, then, a slow drift. Tomorrow morning was uncle Giraud's turn to testify. Then Secretary Lynch, of Science; Secretary Vinelli of Defense; Adm. Khalid—O God, Khalid, then her again, as soon as they got through. She hoped Giraud and Lynch did all right. But when Vinelli got up there, and Khalid, Giraud could cross-examine like everybody else.

Not saying, of course, that Khalid wouldn't go over uncle Giraud and Secretary Lynch the way he had headed at her.

It was going to be a long week.

Or two. We're going to win about the quarantine, Giraud had predicted at the outset. There's no way Union can do anything like move in on Gehenna without bringing in warships, and there's no way we're going to go to war with the Alliance to get access to Gehenna. What we can lose is what position Union takes about those people on Gehenna—whether they regard them as Union citizens and use that as a lever with the Alliance; or whether they negotiate a joint protectorate with the Alliance; and the hawks have a real stake in that: it's Khalid's political clout that's at issue here—

The Centrist and the Expansionist coalitions were exactly that: coalitions. The hawks were trying to pull something different together by breaking off bits of both, thatwas what had surfaced in Khalid's rise. They were too high-up in the government to call them eetee-fringes. They were real,the whole thing that Ari senior had been worried about had come true, the old Earth territorial craziness had found itself an issue and a time to surface—And here she was holding Ari senior's argument in both hands behind her back— You know what it would do to Union if they found out what I've done,Ari senior had said. So she couldn't tell them: she couldn't get the things about Sociology even Sociology didn't know they had done—for Ari senior. She couldn't tell Council about the deep-set work Ari had done, or the fact that Ari had been planning—and installing—imperatives in the azi work crews, in the military, in a whole lot of places—including the deep-sets of the Gehenna azi.

The thing was already going on. By design, thirty percent of the azi Ari senior had designed and turned out of Reseune, and thirty percent of all the azi everywhere who used Reseune tape, would have kids and teach them, all across Union. A certain number of those azi had gotten their CIT papers as early as 2384, on Fargone, then in other places. A lot of them were in Science, a whole lot were in Defense: the Defense azi couldn't get CIT papers till they retired—but they were mostly male and they could still have kids or bring tank-kids up. A lot would do that, because thatwas in the deep-sets. The rest of those azi were scattered out through the electorates, heavy in Industry and Citizens, just exactly where the Centrists were strongest—a mindset that was biased right in its deep-sets, toward Ari senior's way of things.