Cherryh, C J - Alliance-Union 08 (92 page)

"I'm out of questions," Chavez said.

"We're going to recess for lunch," Harad said. "And take ser Tien's questions after—are you holding up to this, young sera?"

"I'm doing all right," she said. "After lunch is fine. Thank you, ser."

"It vastly disturbs me, sera," Tien said, from the dais where the Nine sat. He spoke very quietly, very politely, which was the way the man talked. "I have to tell you I'm concerned with the security clearance the Science Bureau has given you—not, understand, that I think you're not an exceedingly mature young woman. But we're dealing with things that could mean war or peace, and things that have been thrust on you very prematurely. Do you ever talk to your friends about these things?"

"No, ser, absolutely not." It was a fair question. All along, Tien had been fair.

"Do you understand the importance of not talking to reporters about this?"

"Yes, ser. I do. The only people I've discussed this with are Denys Nye, Giraud Nye, and the Council, exactly; and my azi, but they're not in the room when I work with the System on this either, and they don't know everything. Certainly they don't talk: they're Reseune Security, and their psychset is against discussing anything about me, even little things."

"We understand that. Can you estimate how much of the data you're not telling us?"

Oh. Very good question. "My predecessor had some theories about what would happen on Gehenna." Try to answer without answering. "But they're complicated, and I can't report on those because they're all in design-structure, and they're something that's going to take me a long while to sort through. Science Bureau is going to provide us the Gehenna data as it comes in—"

"To you?"

"Ser, to whoever's working on this project, but likely to me, yes, since I'm the one with my predecessor's notes."

"Time," Harad said. "Adm. Khalid."

"Let's keep to the question of the notes," Khalid said. "And why those notes, if they exist, haven't been turned over to a competent researcher."

"She is technically rated as a Wing supervisor," Giraud said. "And she is competent."

"She has no business with the notes," Khalid said. "Or do we believe that Reseune is being steered by a fifteen-year-old and a dead woman? That raises more questions about the competency of Reseune's administration than it does about hers. I have no quarrel with the child. I do have with Reseune. I find evidence of gross mismanagement.
Gross
mismanagement. I think we have more than enough evidence to extend this investigation into Reseune's actions in creating this situation."

"You can do that," Giraud said, "but it won't get you those notes."

The gavel came down. Repeatedly.

"Young sera," Khalid said. "You
can
be held in contempt of a Council order. So can your Administrator and the other people who are prompting you."

Ari took a drink of water. When it was quiet she said: "You can arrest people, but what you want to know is science and you have to ask scientists, and we're it. Bucherlabs hasn't got anybody who can read it. Neither does Defense. I'm already telling you what's in the notes and what you'll find if you go to all that trouble. If you don't think I'm telling the truth now, are you going to believe me then?"

The gavel banged again. "Councillor. Sera. If you please. Councillor Khalid."

"We're dealing with an immature child," Khalid said, "who's being pushed into this position by Reseune Administration. I repeat, we need to widen this probe until we get at individuals who
are
responsible. This is a question of national security. The Military Secrets Act—"

"The Councillor is out of order," Giraud said.

"—requires an investigation of any mishandling of classified information. The mishandling that allowed a fifteen-year-old child to go in front of news cameras to leak information that
never
should have become public—"

Again the gavel. "Councillor, we operate under rules, let me remind you. This is not a debate."

"A diplomatic crisis is at issue. Our enemies have a pretext to break treaties,
including
the arms treaty, which is not to our advantage. They're talking about
plots,
seri, completely ignorant of what azi are and what they're capable of. This is the result of practicing diplomacy in the press."

"The Councillor is out of order," Giraud said.

"Admiral," Harad said, "your time is running. Have you a question for the witness?"

"I have. Under oath, young sera, and bearing in mind you
can
be prosecuted for perjury, how long have you known about these files?"

"About the Gehenna files? They surfaced when I used the keywords."

"When?"

"The day after you won the election."

"Where did you get the keywords?"

"Denys Nye suggested them." That was a bad thing to have to admit. "But—"

"Meaning they didn't exist until then. Thank you, young sera. That explains a great deal."

"That's a psych, ser. It doesn't prove anything. I had to know. My clearance—"

"Thank you, we've
had
your answer."

"No, you've made up one."

"The Council will not take disrespect, sera."

"Yes, ser. But I don't have to take being called a liar. You threatened us; I applied for my majority; that triggered—"

"It's not you who's lying, sweet. You've been deceived right along with the Council. Your uncle made those files. He's made them from the beginning. There's no secret, protected system. There are simply records Reseune doesn't want to release, for very clear reasons, and Reseune created
you
to stand between the Council and Reseune's mismanagement."

"No, ser, I'm under oath. I am and you're not. My getting my majority triggered the notes. So when you withdrew your suit, that did it. That's the truth. And
I'm
under oath."

There was a little shifting in seats. A snort from Catherine Lao.

"Your uncle made the files and prepped you for this whole business."

The gavel banged. "That's enough, Councillor. Next question."

"I don't think we're listening to anything in this diplomatic fiasco," Khalid said, "but Denys Nye's constructions. Reseune is playing politics as usual, and it's held too much power too long."

"Do we mention the power in the Defense Bureau?" Giraud said.

"We have a clear case of conflict of interest on the Council. And we have embassies from Pell and Earth asking questions we had rather not answer."

"We have a clear conflict of interest as regards Defense," Giraud said. "Since your Bureau ordered this Gehenna mess over the protests of Science.
As
the witness has testified."

"Time," Harad said, and brought the gavel down.

"I'm due time to respond to that," Khalid said.

"Your time is up."

"I'd hate to accuse the Chairman of partisan politics."

Bang!
"You are out of order, Councillor!"

Ari took another sip of water and waited while the Chair wrangled it out. Corain was making notes. So were Lao and a lot of the aides. Corain might have put Khalid up to it, making him the villain, since Khalid already had trouble. There was a challenge to Khalid's seat shaping up—already, a man named Simon Jacques. Much less flamboyant. Reseune had preferred Lu, but Lu's age was against him; and there was under-the-table stuff going on:

Corain had talked very secretly with Giraud and Jacques was a compromise they both could swallow, to get rid of Khalid. But that didn't mean Corain wouldn't let Khalid go after Reseune. It just meant that, under that table, Corain didn't want Reseune swallowed up by Defense any more than he wanted it to exist at all.

Meanwhile Khalid had broken off negotiations on a big Defense contract with Reseune. It was a fair-sized threat, but Khalid certainly wasn't doing any more than stalling, because there wasn't anywhere else to get tape from.

And the law that protected azi wound a civil rights issue right into Reseune's right of exclusivity on tape-production, because Reseune
was
the legal guardian of all azi, everywhere—Reseune
could
terminate all azi contracts with Defense—which they wouldn't do, of course, but, Giraud said, Defense had been fighting for years to get access to the birth-to-eighteen tapes for its soldiers, and Reseune would never give them up. That was why Khalid wanted to nationalize Reseune. Khalid said there had been mismanagement at RESEUNESPACE—meaning Jenna Schwartz; but he made it sound like it was present management, meaning Ollie, and that made her damned mad; Defense also said it was worried about something being buried in the training tapes; and Khalid was threatening to bring a bill to break Reseune's monopoly on tape and licensing—

Fine, Giraud said: Khalid didn't have the votes; Khalid's position was already unpopular with his own party—who didn't want
more azi
labs, they wanted fewer; so the whole Gehenna thing was a lever all sorts of interests were using. Corain would have liked to have used it much more, except Corain was worried about Khalid.

It was all very crazy. The stock markets were going up and down on rumors, Chavez, of Finance, was furious and sent a shutdown order on the wave of the rumors, so no ship could leave port for a few days, because they didn't want
that
market-dive information packet going off at translight across Union and clear to Pell and Earth, they wanted to get the market stable again before they let any ship leave; and that had the Trade Bureau upset and Information howling about trade censorship. It was a real mess. In fact everybody was getting anxious.

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;
they
backed 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
course
the 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 psychsets: 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
there
from 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
will
you 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."