“That he wouldn’t install someone who wasn’t under his orders…I have every confidence.”
The sphinx nodded. “Exactly.”
“What are you saying, Mr. Ambassador?”
“In absence of an interview with the principals themselves, Governor—which I wouldn’t expect you could arrange—I’ve come here specifically to see this young man. Get me that. Tomorrow morning at 0900h. I rely completely on your resourcefulness.”
God. Intrigues and accusations. He trusted Brazis’s essential honesty more than he trusted this stranger, this heartbeat-reading monster. Two years to get information to Earth and back. Two years. It was plausible, nearly, that the ambassador was telling the truth—that it was news of this replacement that had launched his mission. The time line could work. Just barely—if the ambassador had left Earth like a shot.
But it could work much better if the ambassador had been visiting worlds somewhat closer, and diverted here on the continuation of a mission. “I’ll talk to the Chairman,” Reaux said. “That’s all I can do. I can’t possibly guarantee you his response will be positive.”
A tone of mild surprise. “But I take you completely at your word, regarding this close cooperation. I expect it.” A hand lifted, an ancient emperor waving off a courtier. “Good day, sir.”
The man-half of the sphinx ebbed down, became featureless carapace. The whole surface turned from blue and violet to shining gold, smooth-shelled beetle.
Reaux hesitated, wondering if a good-bye would even be heard, and asking himself if he was possibly that great a hypocrite. In the end he said nothing, and, tight-jawed, let himself out the door.
His security escort was waiting, by the palm trees in the garden.
Talk to the taps. Talk to one of Marak’s taps, for God’s sake. Suspicions of First Movement tech leaking through their contacts with the planet. Subtle accusations, threatening the foundations of civilization itself.
God! What did a man straight from Earth know about Marak and Brazis’s staff? What judgment could Gide possibly make on what he had never tracked?
Except he came fluent in a language difficult to learn except on Concord, clearly prepared for this inquiry.
Knowledge, however, of what went on day to day in the life of a man, Marak, who’d personally seen the last gasp of the Gene Wars—or the woman the human worlds simply called the Ila, who might once have been Ilia Lindstrom, a combatant in those wars—what couldGide really know, when lifelong students of their biographies were frequently puzzled by their actions?
And the ondat,mention of whom Gide had passed so casually, untroubled by threat? Fool. Earth came along periodically bran-dishing some new idea, confident it knew best, sure of the brilliance of some new theory of how the universe ought to run.
Now Earth wanted to get directly, hands-on, involved with a Project tap, because replicated pots and fiber were visually identical to the originals and Marak’s newest watcher was exceedingly young?
The investigator seemed well-enough prepared he ought to know better—if he weren’t neck deep in some damn theory, some assumption or some set of orders that wouldn’t let him budge from his purpose. That was worrisome in the extreme.
Earth and its quarantine had frozen their own genetic type like a fly in amber, defining by exacting law what was human and what was not. Earth, they’d declared, didn’t evolve anymore, would never evolve again. Nor would the Inner Worlds. Any deliberate genetic change was anathema. Any natural mutation was examined with great suspicion. Natural change in the human genome was allowed, but…scrutinized.
On record, he’d agreed with the premise that there should be an agreed, broadly defined standard of what was human in the Outside. Humanity was capable of being each other’s predator if they grew too different, or, if re-encountering a profoundly variant group, apt to produce tragic problems in their offspring. He was Earth’s appointed governor out here, and he was bound to enforce certain boundaries.
But was a policy of no-change going to profit a species that wouldn’t flex, as if pinning down the genome, they’d forever reached the be-all and end-all of what was human? The theory was that humans were aptly fit for a cosmos that changed locally but not universally, and therefore evolution was no longer a good thing. But he’d slowly changed his opinions in a lifelong journey from the center. He’d begun to think that Earth, while disparaging Concord’s ancient language, was itself as stuck in that ages-past era as the immortals on Marak’s World—the latter of whom at least had a clear memory of catastrophe, and who lived in a changed and changing world. Earth insulated itself from Outsiders who’d gone on evolving, Outsiders whose genome, escaping the bottleneck of the emigration from the motherworld, showed, yes, a modest diversity from Earth’s standard, but the protections were extravagant, more to drive home the point than to protect Earth from any real threat. Granted, Outsiders had taken hellacious chances with deliberate tinkering with the genome, and, yes, deliberately modified planetary settlements had come to grief in very tragic circumstances, not least of them the Hammerfall, but Outsiders didn’t legislate the surviving planetary residents out of the human species.
Earth was legitimately worried about some imported problem hitting its ecosystem, the mother of all human environment, but over such a span of time and distance there were human groups whose divergences arguably had less to do with nanoceles and engineering than just isolation—isolation while eras of Earth’s internal confusion meant no ships had called there, eras when the whole system of trade and genetic exchange had broken down and left pockets of Outsiders completely stranded. In those dark ages, some stations had died altogether and some had developed unique looks, unique accents, odd political institutions, all of this. Were all these less than human, when you could drop most of them back into Earth’s gene pool and they’d become mere lumps in the batter, not anomalous except in their concentration of certain traits?
Reaux didn’t ordinarily entertain such rebel thoughts, not all at once. Gide had provoked them to the surface, and outright engaged his temper. Adapted to live out here? Well, yes, he was. He’d become adapted, mentally, if not physically. He had a daughter here, who had developed notions more in agreement with the Outsiders than with her own family, and that was what happened to pure Earth households this remote from Earth. The children did,some of them, go into the Outsider gene pool.
But did he love his daughter less, because she wanted to live on this station, because this station was her entire future?
Ask Judy how the purity laws worked—Judy, whose great-grandfather’s branch of the family had purged certain of their own relatives, banishing Judy’s own mother from the Inner Worlds to the Outside, because her genetic tests had failed the standard and a contact was suspect, third-hand. Judy, born at Arc, had married into the political elite—but never quite salved that social wound. Was her exile fair, or beneficial to the species? Had those questionable genes contaminated Kathy?
And for specimens—the Earthborn out here were by no means the prettiest, the swiftest, the best-looking or the brightest. Outsiders in general tended to be in far better physical condition than first generation Earth exiles, or than Mr. Andreas Gide himself, Reaux was willing to bet, inside that shell. It took a strong ego to live out here among the beautiful and the bright…
One only needed take a clear-eyed, unprejudiced look at Concord. One could see on this station how it all ought to work, in Reaux’s not humble opinion: not only Earth-exiles and Outsiders in daily face-to-face contact, but the ondatpeacefully resident among them abovea world where the absolute worst had happened.