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know,” said Korie. “But he’s still a consciousness, he can feel, he can hurt. As much as we need him, we also need to be compassionate .”
    â€œIn the middle of a war?” asked Hodel, unbelievingly.
    â€œIf not here, where better?” Korie met his gaze. “You don’t have the responsibility for this decision. I do. If we start chipping away at those things that make us human, then bit by bit, we’ll give the best parts of ourselves away. We’ll turn into the very thing we’re fighting. I’m not going to let my shipmates die alone and unknown.”
    â€œYou already signed one order,” said Leen. “I know that wasn’t easy—but you did it because it had to be done. Maybe this decision is another one of those.”
    Korie wanted to glare at Leen, but he knew the chief engineer was right. Finally, he said simply, “You don’t have to bludgeon me with it, Chief. I can figure it out for myself.”
    â€œSo? What’s it gonna be?”
    â€œHow much of the net is up?”
    Hodel answered. “We’ve got thirty percent of the system covered.”
    Korie considered the decision. “I want to give him every advantage we can. I won’t do it until the engines are recalibrated. And let’s see what kind of sensory repairs we can rig. We’re also going to need to get some kind of autonomic system functioning. Give me that much and I’ll take the chance.” He searched their faces.
    â€œFair enough,” said Leen.
    â€œCan do,” said Hodel.
    Li simply nodded.
    Korie pushed himself away from the display and out the starboard exit of the Bridge. Too many people were dying on this ship. There were the unavoidable deaths, yes—he had authorized those; that had been a compassionate action. But as yet, there were no deaths that were directly due to a mistaken decision that he’d made. He wanted to keep it that way. He didn’t want HARLIE to be the first.
    Almost anybody else, but not HARLIE.

The Morthan Solidarity

    â€”was a good idea carried to its illogical extreme.
    The idea had been only one of many drifting aimlessly in the human culture. The Brownian movement of human ideas tended to nullify most of them from seeing any concrete expression. Nevertheless, every so often in any culture, one or another odd notion reaches a critical mass of individual minds and coalesces into an intention that demands expression. At some point, the collective human consciousness had taken on behaviors that suggested it had almost become aware of itself. It began to plan for its own future.
    Sometime in the distant past, it decided to take charge of its own genetic destiny. Instead of allowing itself to spawn each new generation of individuals by the tossing of the genetic dice, the cumulative consciousness began to design itself for those traits it felt would be most advantageous to its own future.
    A rational species would have selected rationality as an advantageous survival trait. A species with the cortex of reptile and the forebrain of a chimpanzee could not be expected to make that same decision. It voted for superior musculature, enhanced sensory organs, a larger and stronger skeleton, a more efficient nervous system, better resistance to heat and cold, better utilization of resources, better internal conservation of fuel, greater speed and dexterity, improved healing functions, increased resistance to pain, and almost as an afterthought, a more powerful brain.
    In fact, the more powerful brain was the most important part of the package. Or as one of the early experimenters put it, “You want to run this hardware? You have to upgrade the software. The human brain alone isn’t sufficient to the task.”
    Of course, it didn’t happen overnight. It didn’t even happen in the space of a century. The whole business of genetic engineering crept up on the species, a gene at a time. We can tweak this