Besides, the Alliance was engaged in another, secret project: it had long known of an Earth‑class world within its grasp, and it mounted an expedition which the Alliance captains saw as finally giving the Alliance the exploitable world they so greatly wanted.

The expedition arrived at that planet, and found it already occupied by a human colony…a Union colony.

The timing of the revelation could not have been worse for Alliance‑Union relations. During the negotiations for the Treaty, Pell had strongly insisted on acquiring adjacent territory…knowing that world was there.

But a secret Union operation at the close of the War had landed not a military occupation, but a colony. The CIT supervisors of the colony, largely military, had perished, early. The azi workers, however, had survived, multiplied, and scattered into the outback, incidentally commingling Terran‑origin biologicals and highly engineered microbes with the native fauna…and ultimately making accommodation with the native life.

The revelation of the Union colony on that world–which came to be known as Gehenna–came close to shipwrecking the Treaty of Pell. Alliance held that the Union signers of the Treaty had kept Gehenna a secret, and that the Treaty had thus not been negotiated in good faith. Union responded that its negotiators had not known about the colony, and that, within the framework of Union government, all knowledge of the settlement had been sequestered within two of the branches of government, Science and Defense. Thus the Bureau of State, which had negotiated and maintained the Treaty, had had absolutely no knowledge there was a problem.

Further, Union argued, the administrations of Science and Defense, under Emory of Science and Adm. Azov of Defense, had profoundly changed personnel since the War, and with the present Council of Nine pressing strongly for peace, it made no sense even to the most hawkish of the Alliance political parties to lead humanity back to a state of war. Union formally apologized for the situation and offered amends. The situation was so volatile that Union accepted, the Treaty of Gehenna, presented by Pell, virtually without amendment–to wit, that there would be no future manned landing on a biologically complex world except by joint participation of Alliance and Union on the mission, and there would be no landing on a world with a native intelligence until that intelligence could meet humans in space and speak for itself.

By the same treaty, Union offered access to certain restricted technology in a joint Alliance‑Union mission to be settled in orbit about Gehenna…a watchdog mission designed to preclude any biohazard getting off the planet. Regulations for any persons in contact with Gehenna became the standard for any future exploratory missions.

Though the Treaty of Gehenna was accepted by both sides, the matter of Union assistance at the Hinder Stars was quietly tabled “pending future study,” and, as the third component of the treaty, certain trade concessions and tariff reductions were given to the Alliance Council of Captains; as a confidence‑building measure.

Scholars tend to mark the Treaty of Pell as the beginning of the post­war cooling‑off period, and the Treaty of Gehenna as its close, as if the era could be summed up within those parentheses. But between those two events, the death of a single human woman, Ariane Emory, and her rebirth in a Parental Replicate, could ultimately prove of greater import in human history. As the rumor reached Pell and Earth that the Architect of Union–and of Gehenna–had died, there had been reaction clear to the ends of human space.

The war years, in which stations and whole planets had become logical targets, had threatened the existence of humankind, from the motherworld to the most remote colony of Union space. That state of affairs had remained true for much of the first Ariane Emory’s tenure in various offices. She had been a genius in genetics and psychology, served as Director of Reseune for a number of years, was the principle theorist behind Union’s strong population push during the War…and she had served as Councillor of Science during a critical period of the post‑War era, including the Gehenna operation. Her political views were pro‑Expansionist. She had been instrumental in the push of human population and commerce to the farthest reaches of explored space. She had founded the genetic Arks, in which genetic records of every available Earth species were preserved. She had steered the development of the planet of Cyteen from a largely vacant wilderness to a continent­ spanning network of towns and research centers, and the establishment of ecological studies on the second continent. She had begun her career in full accord with Union’s early intentions to terraform the world of Cyteen into a new Earth, but her opinion had evolved over time into a determination to preserve its native fauna.

The Centrist party of her day, which had crystallized around Emory’s change of opinion about terraforming, continued to press for terraforming Cyteen and basing Union around a strong centered authority. Emory and the Expansionists contrarily argued against further alterations to Cyteen, and in favor of further colonization, with a strong emphasis on local autonomy of governments thus formed, a de facto decentralization of power.

And Emory prevailed.

Then, as a war‑weary universe foresaw Emory’s life winding down to a natural close, and as powers jockeyed to position themselves for a quieter post‑Emory era of consolidation, Emory advanced a process called psychogenesis, the cloning of a psychologically and intellectually identical offspring. It was a procedure that had conspicuously failed before.

When Emory was assassinated, many in Alliance and even in Union assumed that her fined project had been aborted, incomplete, or that if ever attempted, it would fail–that, in effect, it had been the last, forlorn hope of a dying woman.

Within two years, a child named Ariane Emory was born at Cyteen.

BOOK

ONE

BOOK ONE Section 1 Chapter i

MARCH 27, 2424

1328H

Hundreds of babies floated in their vats, in various stages, in Reseune’s largest birthlab–azi babies, CIT babies, much the same. Azi were in one section. CIT babies–for Citizen mothers who for physical reasons, job reasons, or personal preference, didn’t want to handle pregnancy the old‑fashioned way–occupied another section of the same lab. The only difference between the two groups at this stage was a doorway, and whether a number or a CIT name tagged the vat. The data of real pregnancies bathed all the fetuses in a perpetual sea of appropriate chemistry and sound. The machinery of artificial wombs rocked them, moved them, kept them close and safe and warm.

There was, on one side of that doorway, Abban AB‑688, an azi. It would take a look to see him floating in his tank. At six weeks, Abban AB was about pea‑sized, though growing fast. He’d be tall, someday. He’d be dark‑haired, and very, very clever, and cold as ice.

In the tank beside him was Seely AS‑9, who had been conceived in the same hour. He would be of a slighter build, pale blond, eyes fair blue, and, like Abban, he would be an alpha, and very, very smart. The 9 should have meant he was the ninth of his exact geneset and psychset combination: in fact he was the tenth.

The ordinary naming conventions did fall by the wayside at times, especially among highly socialized alphas, whose Supervisors named them whatever they liked, or among very old, foundational sets, whose numbers and alphabetics didn’t always conform to modern usage. Abban, for instance: his personal alphabetic was B. But he had been given a name starting with both his letters–someone’s whimsy, perhaps.