Regenesis

by C. J. Cherryh

  And that unrest, of people feeling trapped and dead-ended, was still out there at Fargone and Pan-Paris, in the electorate of Citizens, in Defense. It spread even through the Science Bureau, out there: the Expansionists had just squeaked through its traditional majority in the last election Science had had.

  That was dangerous, even if it was just one star-station.

  She had an inkling all of a sudden where Yanni was leading with this little surprise, and it wasn’t stupid: it was an answer to the kind of problems Yanni had faced in his tenure as Proxy Councillor for Science and head of the Expansionist Party. Give Fargone a major project, jobs, prosperity—and mutate Fargone’s maverick electorate into one more in line with Reseune, who’d be running the project. Setting a whole new population-burst of azi out there, who would, over time, migrate to freed-man status at Fargone and then, supposedly, at Eversnow Station, azi who’d teach their own CIT children their opinions—

  And Corain was going along with it? She felt her week-long Mad cool off just a degree. Defense still had a strong interest in Eversnow. It was going to be a problem to pry their fingers off it, and Yanni was trying to work with them…had Yanni thought of that?

  “We set up an alpha-capable lab at Fargone,” Yanni was saying quietly, and she began to track it, “but the locals are naturally immediately thinking of CIT-use, ordinary CIT births, and that’s what they know. Corain hasn’t mentioned Eversnow in his own arguments, or at least it hadn’t leaked by this morning. But Council has something to gain from this bill. Fargone’s going to be the stepping-off point for Eversnow, which will become more and more economically important to Fargone voters and to the Citizens Bureau. But most of all, to us. Not just a new city. A new planet. For us, a whole new genetic resource. A whole new population to birth and set up. Corain’s agreeing to cooperate with us on the Hinder Stars Defense Treaty, but we agreed to drop the remediation funding increase for this session, for this project. Seed money. Corain gains jobs and votes and he gets funding without a tax increase. But ultimately we gain everything.”

  The damned thing was an appalling daisy chain of favors exchanged. She suddenly had a much wider window into the content of the mysterious meetings, and here was Yanni—stolid, just-the-facts Yanni, non-activist through her whole life—advancing an outrageously ambitious Expansionist agenda the first Ari had contemplated and slowed down on, toward the end of her life, as too much, too far.

  In Yanni’s plan, they acquired not just Eversnow as a base, but the string of stars beyond it; that was the thing. The strand that had been, without Eversnow, unattainable. Defense wanted that: she could see it.

  And the Centrists, particularly numerous in the Citizens Bureau, whose whole platform had always been to have Union’s power to stay clustered tightly around Cyteen, were suddenly going along with Eversnow? The first Ari had started out supporting terraforming at Cyteen, her mother Olga’s project, and then pulled the rug from under that once rejuv manufacture became a vital industry. The Centrists, wanting to expand population, not territory, had been outraged. They’d seen it as a ploy to keep Cyteen mostly desert, carved up into Administrative Territories, notably Reseune’s protective reserves, where CITs couldn’t get a foothold. They’d been furious and called Eversnow a pie-in-the-sky piece of politics that was going to give Reseune one more protectorate and never would benefit the average CIT.

  And now the Centrists, who had been so fundamentally opposed to that project at the edge of space, were suddenly willing to give up their campaign to terraform Cyteen and concentrate on Eversnow.

  The universe had changed in a week.

  And she didn’t know enough. Eversnow had been a problem she’d planned to postpone for decades.

  A world locked in a snowball effect. A world without a spring for millions of years—with, however, the strong likelihood that there was still life there, genetically unique, locked in rocks in the sub-basement of a frozen ocean.

  In the first Ari’s day, with all of humankind busy blowing each other up in the War, the Expansionists and the military had both been hot to seed Eversnow for their own reasons—their hedge on a bet, if the Alliance had hit Cyteen. But Centrists hadn’t wanted to spend money there at all, and a few Centrist-leaning scientists had argued they needed to preserve and study that world for a few decades.

  Too late, by then. An early Defense Bureau project had already broken the freeze, or begun to break it, artificially, with solar heat, and tipped the balance toward a melt…how that had ever turned out, she didn’t know in any detail. Earth-origin phytoplankton reportedly bloomed in certain areas, thanks to Defense.

  She would not have done that: she would have said a vehement no. It was a living world, and living worlds were precious in the cosmos. Even snowballs. That was what she’d thought in her slight reading of the project—good they gave it up.

  But now came politics. And Yanni was getting friendly with Corain? Establishing a population burst out at Fargone and then at Eversnow, where the Centrists weren’t paying attention—

  That actually could be smart, she had to admit it. Centrists attracted the violent fringe elements, people like the Paxers and the Abolitionists, whose major agenda had gone from a unilateral peace in the Company Wars on the one hand, and an abolition of all azi production on the other. The Paxers and the Abolitionists had, as a curious side agenda, the terraforming of Cyteen, which they thought would break the power of Reseune, and that was how those fringe groups had found an ideological home in the Centrist Party.

  But let Corain of Citizen shift the political focus to “jobs for Fargone,” and snuggle up to Science, and watch the fringe elements scramble to cope with that.

  The first Ari had created her, she’d said, to keep watch over her projects—among which was Gehenna, and maybe, yes, she supposed, that could include Eversnow, even if it wasn’t, like Gehenna, populated.

  So, well, maybe Yanni didn’t deserve spacing.

  A sudden expansion of Reseune interests out on the fringe of human space—a whole new strand of stars. New frontiers. A commitment to expansion—and to Expansionism, with all it stood for, and all the dangers in the deep unknown…

  Was she ready to open that door to the universe and deal with whatever lay out there? Was she, for that matter, going to be as Expansionist in her own career as her predecessor had been? She didn’t know. Decisions were coming down on her too early…and she was about to be stuck with this one: there were ways for her to undo everything except the dispersal of the Earth genome into an alien, living world.

  But Defense, by all reports, had already done that part, even including higher lifeforms.

  “I’m not sure, Yanni. I’m still not sure. Tell me why.”

  “A planet with only microbes to recommend it is interesting, but we have samples.”

  “All right. Keep going. Why now?”

  Yanni took a sip of wine. “Here’s the urgency in it. The War’s over; that used to be our cohesive factor, as a nation: we had to stop the Earth Company So now Union’s teetering somewhere between an amalgam of star-stations and a fully formed state, and there’s power to be had, power Reseune holds virtually solo. Reseune keeps Union going in a specific direction, keeps a momentum, or God knows what it would do. The Council may govern, but Reseune still makes the rules that govern azi, and azi are still, and for a few centuries more, the source of the population base.”

  “That’s supposed to end.”

  “Not yet. And this is the reason. As long as we expand into new frontiers, CIT births won’t keep up with the need for population; azi go on being born, and Reseune goes on making the rules, the newest population goes on voting our way, and we’ll always outvote the Centrists and keep them from clustering all our assets around one vulnerable planet. Plus we retain our police power, where azi are concerned, and we remain a clearing-house for information that most of the citizenry doesn’t even want to know, but which could come back on their heads. We don’t know what the future holds,
but it’s a sure bet the Centrists know less than we do. Earth is out of serious play in human politics for at least a century. It can’t even get a consensus together to manage its trade relations, and right now they see us as an endless source of funds and invention, so they don’t actually have to solve any of their problems. They sell us their antiquities, their artwork, their unique biologicals, and we make the worst of their politicians drunk with money and importance. The only thing they really badly want, we won’t sell them.”

  That, of course, was rejuv. On a populous planet like Earth, it could be a disaster. And she saw Yanni’s point: left with nobody to make a decision not to trade in it, it would have happened, and Earth would have collapsed.

  “Earth won’t move until it’s uncomfortable,” she murmured, quoting. The rest of what Ari One had said was: It won’t make any decision until at least three of its factions combine. “So where do you see things going for us all? Another war?”

  “Alliance has its own problems, transitioning from a collection of merchant captains to a government making law for two worlds. It’s set Pell off limits. It saw Gehenna as a potential resource, but now they know it’s a time bomb. So they came out of the War owning two planets they don’t want to touch—partly noble ethics. But this is the important part: partly it’s the paralysis of not having a ReseuneLabs to make informed decisions, and they refuse to ask us what to do with Gehenna or Pell. Their R&D was always driven by the likes of LucasCorp’s operation, all profit, no long-range planning—ecological disaster in the making. Plus their two planets both have higher life to worry about. Our two worlds don’t. Right now they can’t do anything about what we do.”

  “But,” she said, “Cyteen’s biosystem produces rejuv, and we can’t jeopardize that by terraforming here. Go over strictly to lab production and it drives up the cost of something everybody has to have for most of their life—so you create a class who can live for a century and a half being young, and separate them from the people who can’t afford it.”

  Staff brought the next course, grilled fish, with citrus. It took a moment. And she was annoyed with staff, who should have waited for a signal. Probably the fish would have seriously overcooked. But she needed a stern talk with staff about interrupting. A very stern talk.

  “So,” she said, after the obligatory compliments, and several bites further on.

  “So,” Yanni said, perfectly composed.

  “So I’m following everything you’re saying, and it makes sense. But why are you personally voting for terraforming Eversnow this fast? What if there’s something as important as rejuv down there? Something we can’t make in a lab?”

  “One reason: Reseune’s continued existence, its power to make decisions, aboveboard or in secret, is the core of all Union stability. Without us, Union falls apart. That’s not arrogance. That’s fact. Right now, Union isn’t populous enough to avoid fragmentation. Decisions are being taken. Some really stupid ideas are current in politics, and some damned selfish ones. Reseune is at a low ebb of power, during my interregnum, so it’s perceived—because I’m not an Emory, a Carnath, or a Nye—not even a Warrick. I’m an unknown, and it’s widely perceived I’m merely a footnote, filling time between Denys Nye’s control of Reseune—and your taking the office, for which all the Centrists are busy bracing themselves. They perceive me as weak, someone they can get concessions out of—before you come in. But on this one matter, on this, I am passionate. We need the expansion of human space to go on holding the power to make decisions; we need labs to extend our reach to other places, labs, incidentally, out of immediate view of Centrist leadership here on Cyteen…but I’m not advertising that feature of the plan. We may still find biologicals we can develop at Eversnow; and the experience will be invaluable; but right now, and in the immediate future, we need the expansion of our loyal voting base, before some short-sighted, over-content business interests on Cyteen Station and in Novgorod break up Reseune and let us fall behind the Alliance. Fatally so. In which case I guarantee you there’ll be another war. We need to hedge our bets by spreading outward. Concerns for microbes take second place. The way Earth is managing its affairs currently, we may be using your predecessor’s genetic Arks to recover what they lose.”

  “And what if we lose something like rejuv because we rushed in and messed up a place we don’t wholly know?”

  “We could lose something, yes. But we know what we gain. A power base. And whatever we mess up there, it won’t be us. The Centrists envision a planet they can live on in billions, like Earth, the great fantasy. They see this project as a foot in the door of that science. We get the Centrists involved far outside the understanding of their comfortable power base on Cyteen, and we edge their children closer and closer to our point of view. The Long View…in this case, from a standpoint of distance from the center of Union. We get their kids involved in this project. We turn the Centrists into our asset. They go for the profit out there, being people with families they want to support—and we go on as we are, controlling colonization. There are other worlds beyond Eversnow. But we can’t reach them without stepping stones. Trade drives expansion. Trade drives us. And the Treaty of Pell meant our trade pays a price, it may have meant peace, but Alliance is getting fatter on a share of our trade. And some of those merchanters are using the profit to update armaments—the way some of our warships nowadays run a little cargo—of a medical and emergency nature. The Treaty may someday break down on that point. We have to get other options, we have to maintain our economic push that keeps us stronger than the Alliance, or see the consequences.”

  It wasn’t a stupid idea. She could see that. And it was a vision. It might be stupid to think Expansionism could go on at the same pace forever, but there was something to it going on for a while: Earth was one planet, one star system, and fragile. Earth had antagonized all its colonies, who held the only safe direction for Earth to expand—Earth now knew it wasn’t going to grow without running into intelligence in the other directions, and they only hoped Earth didn’t provoke something out in the deep. Alliance was already committed in the direction of Gehenna, but that planet was a problem.

  Eversnow would lead Union development further out on another tangent, away from Earth and farther out than the Alliance, down a strand of stars that worked like a river in space. Broaden Union’s population base, widen their territory, make them secure, and yes, make sure there were jobs. That had been a poser, but Yanni’s plan solved that at a stroke.

  Going away from Alliance made them unassailable, militarily: Defense would like that. Folly for Alliance or Earth to attack something that much bigger; and a strong Union, with other resources, wouldn’t actually need Earth, or even Alliance…while a strong Union was a big market, for Earth, and for Alliance. So it could possibly preserve the peace better than standing still.

  So was it worth ruining a planet? A snowball, the domain of microbes? It might be.

  “So let me ask you one,” Yanni said. “This new research post up-river. It seems your own plan’s gotten beyond that…while I’ve been in Novgorod. Now we’re talking about a major lab expansion—five hundred jobs on this budget request, my office tells me. Requests for extension on use of the excavators. There’s nothing there to mine up in the hills. No industry’ likely. But now you’re requesting residences. A river port, with coffer dam and shields. Why do you need a river port for remediation research?”

  “To move supply.”

  “And? It’s seeming a little beyond a bare-bones research post all of a sudden. I’m not complaining, understand. I just want to know what we’re suddenly funding up there. What are you up to, young lady?”

  She really hadn’t been ready to talk about that. But maybe it was time. Secret for secret.

  “Actually—a township.”

  “An adjunct to Reseune? Or a rival?”

  “A real township. Like here. Shops. People. Manufacture, eventually. I’m thinking of calling it Strassenberg.”

  “Strasse
nberg,” Yanni said, sitting back a little. That had been Maman’s name, Strassen. “Well, now there’s an ambitious design for an eighteen-year-old. You’re building a new wing on Reseune and in the last three weeks your research lab has mutated into a town. And why, pray, do you think we need another township in the world?”

  That, like her question about Yanni’s programs, was a deeper question. Fair question, considering the funds she’d counted on weren’t going to be plentiful, if they now had to fund the remediation. “Two reasons: first the isolation, what I said at the start: a place to put the rest of my uncle’s staff where I don’t have to deal with them. But I want a lab for my decisions. The first Ari created me to carry on her work. I’m setting up a place where absolutely all the decisions are mine and all the mindsets are what I choose to be up there, CIT and azi. Give or take my uncle’s people, that they’ll have to encapsulate, they’re my research question. I said it was a lab. And it actually is. It’s my comparison to what the first Ari did in, say, Gehenna.”

  Eyebrows lifted. Clearly a city wasn’t quite the answer Yanni had expected under the title of a research lab. But it was the truth. There might be a timebomb in the Gehenna mindset, but—a more closely-held secret, and one she wasn’t sure the first Ari had ever directly discussed with Yanni—there was possibly one in the Cyteen population itself, simply because the mindsets were what they were, exactly the same mix of psychsets Yanni had been talking about continuing at Eversnow. All but the CITs who’d come down from orbit were Reseune-designed mindsets—the same as Yanni planned to go on using out at Eversnow. The station over their heads had its founding families, a certain aristocracy of CITs, people with citizen-numbers from the origin of the system: the Carnaths, the Nyes, the Emorys, and the Schwartzes, plus a couple of hundred other names that had proliferated through the station—and then a number had settled at Reseune and Novgorod, on the planetary surface, once they’d begun to colonize the planet.