know, that antiquated notion of progress by compromise? I think we’ve had enough of fringe groups and extremists. I know you don’t like them any better than I do. I’ve tried to initiate compromise in my tenure. Personal legacy, ser. Personal legacy. That’s my ambition.”
Corain nodded quietly over his coffee.
Whether Corain bought it all was a good question. Nobody trusted a psychmaster. Urban legend invented the word, and amplified it into crazy notions of mind control and telepathy, all sorts of nonsense. The answer was, like most things, complicated. Yanni’s reasons were complicated, and the manipulations were complicated: a little truth, aptly distributed, with very few outright lies.
Divert and divide. Redirect the perception of profit involved. Create a little wedge, Defense interests and Citizen interests—those were easy to split. Defense was naturally Expansionist. Citizens was naturally Centrist. The Paxers’ interests, however, weren’t remotely divisible down that great divide of War years politics. Their name meant peace—but their war being over, nowadays they just wanted the power a large movement offered. Paxer rhetoric and Paxer violence could influence events. Violent acts could recruit the young and disaffected, while the old, canny, and astute Paxer leadership, some of whom were openly interviewed on the news these days, drew satisfaction from the fear that surrounded them.
A clever old warhorse like Corain, head both of the Centrist party, and of the Citizens Bureau—the very constituency that happened to contain most of the Paxer movement—did know what grief his party would come to if the Paxers ever got their wish. This might be the time, Corain might well be persuaded, to move the Centrists closer and closer to the same interests as the Expansionists—at least for this generation. Together, Defense, Information, Science, and Trade, the Expansionists had a strong bloc in the Council of Nine: add Citizens to that, and they had an unbreakable majority—on issues that Citizens could remotely favor.
And when the Nine swung that definitive a weight, the Council of Worlds historically fell into line.
That wrapped it up neatly enough. Yanni sipped his coffee, reminisced a little with the first Ari’s old adversary, and listened as much as he spoke.
They didn’t get into the second bottle of the Sauvignon.
They weren’t that friendly.
Chapter v
BOOK ONE
Section 1
Chapter v
A PRIL 22, 2424
1545 H
Ari wasn’t in a good mood. The smile was bright enough, a broad grin, a second or two in duration, and then it was gone. She went over paper printout with a forced concentration that just wasn’t up to its usual enthusiasm.
Justin Warrick didn’t ask why. It wasn’t profitable to ask, but her mood was bothersome. Ari wasn’t sulking, nothing to do with him, he sensed. She was just trying hard not to be elsewhere this afternoon, and didn’t volunteer the information that anything was wrong, but there was, somewhere in her universe.
Which, if it wasn’t his doing, he had to take as not his business. Her universe in one sense had widened when Denys had died; in another, in the weeks after, it had gotten a lot more focused, more down to the task at hand, and he was fairly sure she was dropping weight. He saw it in the hand that gripped the stylus, in the angle of the back—backbones showed under the silk jersey. She had a few people on her domestic staff, people who were supposed to be seeing to her welfare and making sure she got meals. She certainly had Florian and Catlin to look out for her and serve as confidants. But something wasn’t right, and he’d begun to suspect it was a troublingly unusual complaint in an eighteen-year-old genius-level CIT: far too much study, obsessive study. Too little real sleep. Taking the cataphoric drug too often, trying to let deepstudy hours sub for sleep, and giving herself no time for dream-function. That could lead to some real eetee
Corain nodded quietly over his coffee.
Whether Corain bought it all was a good question. Nobody trusted a psychmaster. Urban legend invented the word, and amplified it into crazy notions of mind control and telepathy, all sorts of nonsense. The answer was, like most things, complicated. Yanni’s reasons were complicated, and the manipulations were complicated: a little truth, aptly distributed, with very few outright lies.
Divert and divide. Redirect the perception of profit involved. Create a little wedge, Defense interests and Citizen interests—those were easy to split. Defense was naturally Expansionist. Citizens was naturally Centrist. The Paxers’ interests, however, weren’t remotely divisible down that great divide of War years politics. Their name meant peace—but their war being over, nowadays they just wanted the power a large movement offered. Paxer rhetoric and Paxer violence could influence events. Violent acts could recruit the young and disaffected, while the old, canny, and astute Paxer leadership, some of whom were openly interviewed on the news these days, drew satisfaction from the fear that surrounded them.
A clever old warhorse like Corain, head both of the Centrist party, and of the Citizens Bureau—the very constituency that happened to contain most of the Paxer movement—did know what grief his party would come to if the Paxers ever got their wish. This might be the time, Corain might well be persuaded, to move the Centrists closer and closer to the same interests as the Expansionists—at least for this generation. Together, Defense, Information, Science, and Trade, the Expansionists had a strong bloc in the Council of Nine: add Citizens to that, and they had an unbreakable majority—on issues that Citizens could remotely favor.
And when the Nine swung that definitive a weight, the Council of Worlds historically fell into line.
That wrapped it up neatly enough. Yanni sipped his coffee, reminisced a little with the first Ari’s old adversary, and listened as much as he spoke.
They didn’t get into the second bottle of the Sauvignon.
They weren’t that friendly.
Chapter v
BOOK ONE
Section 1
Chapter v
A PRIL 22, 2424
1545 H
Ari wasn’t in a good mood. The smile was bright enough, a broad grin, a second or two in duration, and then it was gone. She went over paper printout with a forced concentration that just wasn’t up to its usual enthusiasm.
Justin Warrick didn’t ask why. It wasn’t profitable to ask, but her mood was bothersome. Ari wasn’t sulking, nothing to do with him, he sensed. She was just trying hard not to be elsewhere this afternoon, and didn’t volunteer the information that anything was wrong, but there was, somewhere in her universe.
Which, if it wasn’t his doing, he had to take as not his business. Her universe in one sense had widened when Denys had died; in another, in the weeks after, it had gotten a lot more focused, more down to the task at hand, and he was fairly sure she was dropping weight. He saw it in the hand that gripped the stylus, in the angle of the back—backbones showed under the silk jersey. She had a few people on her domestic staff, people who were supposed to be seeing to her welfare and making sure she got meals. She certainly had Florian and Catlin to look out for her and serve as confidants. But something wasn’t right, and he’d begun to suspect it was a troublingly unusual complaint in an eighteen-year-old genius-level CIT: far too much study, obsessive study. Too little real sleep. Taking the cataphoric drug too often, trying to let deepstudy hours sub for sleep, and giving herself no time for dream-function. That could lead to some real eetee
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