Cherryh, C J - Alliance-Union 08 (91 page)

But I worked increasingly alone, without checks, and without consultation with anyone, because there
was
no one who understood what I understand.

I can tell you in capsule form, young Ari,
as
I have told the press and told the Council repeatedly: but few seem to understand the basics of what I am saying, because it runs counter to short-term goals and perceptions of well-being. I have not been able to model simply enough the complex of equations that we deal with; and I fear demagogues. Most of all I fear short-term thinkers.

The human diaspora, the human scattering, is the problem, but Centrism is not the answer. The rate of growth that sustains the technological capacity that makes civilization possible is now exceeding the rate of cultural adaptation, and distance is exceeding our communications. The end will become more and more like the beginning, scattered tribes of humans across an endless plain, in pointless conflict—or isolate stagnation—unless we can condense experience, encapsulate it, replicate it deliberately in CIT deep-sets—unless psychogenesis can work on a massive scale, unless it can become sociogenesis
and
exceed itself as I hope you will exceed me. Human technology as an adaptive response of our species has passed beyond manipulation of the environment; beyond the manipulation of our material selves; beyond the manipulation of mind and thought; now, having brought us out of the cradle it must modify our responses to the universe at large. Human experience is generating dataflow at a rate greater than individuals can comprehend or handle; and the rate is still increasing. We must begin compression: we must compress experience in the same way human history compresses itself into briefer and briefer instruction—and events on which all history depended rate only a line in passing mention.

Ultimately only the wisdom is important, not the event which produced it. But one must know accurately what those things are.

One must pass the right things on. Experience is a brutal and an imprecise teacher at best.

And the time at which all humanity will be within reach, accessible to us—is so very brief.

You will see more than I could, young Ari. You may well be the only mind of your day able to grapple with the problem: I hope that events have handed you my power undiminished; but no matter, if I have fitted you to hold on to it I have also fitted you to acquire it. Most of all, govern your own self. If you survive to reach the power I have had, you will walk a narrow boundary between megalomania and divinity. Or you will let that anger reach humankind; or you will abdicate in cowardice.

If I have failed with you, I have failed in everything, and I may have created nothing worse than presently exists; or I may have doomed at least half of humanity to wars or to stifling tyranny.

If I have succeeded, there is still work to be done, to keep the hand on the helm. Situations change.

If I had done nothing at all, I foresaw a war that the human species might not survive: too much of it resides only on two planets and depends on too few production centers. We are too young in space; our support systems are still too fragile, and our value systems still contain elements of the stone ax and the spear.

That conviction is the only moral assurance I will ever have.

Study the Company Wars. Study the history of Earth. Learn what we are capable of.

Study Gehenna. This program has ascertained re-contact has been made. People have survived there. Its generations are shorter than ours. Gehenna is the alarm system.

Your Security clearance is now active in the Science Bureau with rank of: Department head, Reseune Administrative Territory.

Further explanation is filed in Reseune Security: access via Security 10, keyword: clearance.

"No, ser," Ari said, hands folded on the table. The microphones picked up her voice and carried it, making it huge, a caricature of a young girl's voice. She sat by herself at a table facing the Nine. Uncle Giraud sat in the Science seat; there were Nasir Harad, and Nguyen Tien; Ludmilla deFranco; Jenner Harogo; Mikhail Corain; Mahmud Chavez; and Vladislaw Khalid—whose looks toward her were absolute hostility. Corain had asked the question.

"No, ser, I won't give you a transcript. I've said why. It wouldn't be all of it. And that's worse than nothing. I'm
telling
you the important things. Adm. Azov sent the colony even when Ari told him not; she didn't want it because it was top dangerous. And he went ahead.

"This is the important thing—let me say this—" she said, when Corain interrupted her. "Please."

"I doubt you would forget," Corain said dryly.

Harad's gavel came down. "Go on, young sera."

"This is important," Ari said. "This is the most important part. Adm. Azov came to my predecessor wanting a colony planted on that world because it was an Earthlike planet and it was right next to Pell. Defense wanted to make sure if Alliance got there in fifty years or a hundred they were going to find a planet full of Union people, or an ecological disaster that could contaminate the planet with human-compatible diseases ..."

It disturbed the Council. Heads leaned together and the gavel banged down again.

"Let the girl finish."

"That was in the notes. They wanted Reseune to build those too. They wanted Ari to design tape so the azi they sent would always be Union, no matter what, and they would cause trouble and work from inside Alliance once Alliance picked them up off the world. Ari tried to tell them they were crazy. But they wouldn't listen.

"So Ari listened to everything they wanted, and she ordered some immunological stuff, I don't know what, but my uncle is going to talk about those. What they essentially did was use viruses to transfer material, and that was all done pretty much like we use for genetic treatment—and they picked some things they hoped would just help the colonists' immune systems; but there was another contractor Ari didn't trust and she didn't know what they might dump onto Gehenna that Reseune didn't know about."

"Do you know the name of that contractor?" Corain asked.

"It was Fletcher Labs. It was May of 2352. That's all she knew."

That made the Councillors nervous. An aide came up and talked to Khalid. Several others took the chance.

"But she was in charge of actually organizing the colony," Corain said then, when things settled down. "Describe what she did."

"She was in charge of picking the azi and training them; and she did the main instructional tape. They wanted her to do all this stuff you
can't
do. Like all these buried instructions. What she did, she made the primary instruction deep-tape; and she axed the azi's contracts in a way that meant if there weren't any CITs they were contracted to the world itself."

"She disregarded the Defense Bureau's instructions. That's what you're saying."

"If she'd done what the military wanted the whole colony would likely have died out; or if they lived past the diseases the third or fourth generation would be really dangerous—psychsets interact with environment. They didn't want to hear that."

"Time," Chairman Harad said. "Councillor Chavez of Finance."

"You consider you're qualified to pronounce on that," Chavez said, following up.

"Ser, that's a real basic."

"I don't care if it's a basic," Chavez said, "you're consistently reading in motives or you're attributing them to people only one of whom you know anything about, and you're not making it clear where you're quoting and where you're interpreting. I'm talking about your predecessor, young sera, who is the one whose notes you're supposed to be testifying to. Not your own interpretations of those notes."

"Yes, ser." Ari drew a long breath, and restrained her temper behind a very bland look. "I won't explain, then."

"I suggest you respect this body, young sera. You attained your majority last week; it means, young sera, that you are obliged to act as an adult."

She looked at Councillor Chavez, folded her hands again and sat there.

"Go on, young sera," Harad said.

"Thank you, ser Chairman. I'm sorry; I'll explain only if you ask. Ari wasn't technical about it: she said: quote: Defense insisted. I explained the hazards of environmental interactions in considerable detail. Their own psychologists tried to make them understand what I was saying; unfortunately the admirals had already made up their minds: the system of advancements in the military makes it damn near impossible for a Defense Bureau bureaucrat to back off a position. Even if—"

"Young sera," Chavez said. "The Council has limited time. Could we omit the late Councillor's profane observations?"

"Yes, ser."

"Go on."

"That was the answer."

"You didn't answer. Let me pose the question again. What, specifically, was Emory's argument to Defense?"

"I can't answer without explaining."

"What did Emory say?"

"She said they shouldn't do it because the environment would affect the psychsets and the tape couldn't be re-adjusted for the situation. And Defense couldn't tell her enough about the environment. That was the first reason she said they were crazy."

"She knew that when she made the original design. Why did she do it in the first place?"

"Because she did it during the War. If humanity had wiped itself out of space and gotten the planets too, it was one more place humanity might survive. It was real dangerous, but it wouldn't matter if they were the only ones."

"What was the danger?"

"You're going to get upset if I tell you again."

'Tell me."

"Letting a psychset run in an environment you don't know anything about. Do you want me to explain technically why that's dangerous?"

The Expansionists all laughed behind their hands. Even Tien, who was Centrist.

"Explain," Chavez said with a surprising lot of patience. She decided she liked him after all. He was not stupid. And he could back up when he got caught.

"Deep-tape is real simple and real general: it has to be. If you make aggression part of the set, and they're in an environment that threatens them, they'll expand the aggression all over everything, and it'll proliferate through the rest of the sets all the way to the surface; or if you put in a block
against
aggression, it could proliferate the same way, and they couldn't take care of themselves. Deep-tape gets all the way down to which way you jump when something scares you. It hits the foundation of the logic sets. And it almost has to be slightly illogical, because on pure logic, you don't move till you understand it. The deep-sets are a bias toward fight or flight. Things like that. And the Defense Bureau didn't give Ari senior any chance to design real deep-sets that might be a whole lot better for Gehenna. They came in and wanted her to program adult military-setted azi to colonize, and they wanted it in one year. She said that was garbage. She argued them into taking a mix of soldiers and farmers. So she composed a genepool of types that might have all the skills
and
the deep-sets she figured might hold
some
right answers to the environment, whatever it was."

"In other words she lied to the Bureau."

"She had to. They were going to go throw their own azi onto the world without her help, and they were telling their own psychology branch to break the law and try to run a deep-set intervention on them. Their own psych people said that was stupid, and some of them were threatening to talk to the Council, but Adm. Azov told one of them he could end up on Gehenna himself if he kept objecting. That's what that man told Ari. Then she thought about bringing it to Council, but she thought about the chance of the whole human race getting wiped out, and that was when she made up her mind to go along with it, but to do it safer than Defense was going to do it.

"She couldn't just go back and mindwipe all those azi and start over. That was another crazy suggestion the military had. Reseune didn't have enough facilities. And you don't recover from mindwipe that well that they could just dump them off on another planet and leave them there with no psych help. So she couldn't work with the deep-sets. She just studied all the deep-sets and worked up something real simple: she told the azi it was their planet and they had to take care of it and survive and teach their children what was important, that was all. As positive as she could. Because she didn't know how long Gehenna would be lost, and how much that would change.

"And that's the danger in it. Their generations are real short. There's already been a lot of change. Alliance is scared of them because they're afraid there's something on the planet like a secret base, that's the way I understand it; but if there's anything like that, it's not in the notes. Mostly I hear it's the azi that did survive, and there's not much left of CIT culture. That means the program did take.

"There's too many people to mindwipe—thousands and thousands. They'd have to mindwipe them all the way down, and that's a lot of psych work, and they haven't got a Reseune. Councillor Nye can tell you what it would take—"

"It would take a facility the size of Reseune," Giraud said, "doing nothing else, for at least ten years; and the re-integration of that many mindwiped individuals into ordinary society would tax anything
any
of us have. We're talking about thirty thousand individuals. Or more. They're still trying to estimate. No one has a place to disperse those people—they'd still cluster. Cluster means community; community means cultural identity. Alliance hasn't got the population base to absorb them.
We
don't. Don't even mention turning them loose on Earth."

"They probably can't find all of them," Ari said. "Anyway. So they can't get them off. They'll always be different; and they'll always be a problem. They're an azi population. They're
not
like CITs. They're just going to be crazy according to CIT thinking. Teaching their kids is part of their mindset; and if you bring them into the 25th century that's
another
environment that's going to hit that program and proliferate changes. That's Emory's word on it. If it's second generation, you could integrate them back, but there's even fourths now. Once it hits fourth, she said, you're into something real different. And they don't have rejuv. The Olders die off before they're a hundred. I've heard it's more like forty or fifty. That doesn't give them time to live with their kids or teach them much about being grown up. They're already more different from us than we are from Earth. That's Emory talking."