“You have to trust me.”

And nowwas he going to bring up those secret meetings? “Oh. I do, but I’d really like to know, and you know I’d like to know.”

“Well, I agreed with Corain on a compromise. Fargone’s hurting for jobs. His constituency atFargone is extremely important to him getting re‑elected if he’s challenged for the seat. So we put in a new lab wing. We get Centrist Party support on a rider tacked onto that bill, becauseit helps Corain’s constituency at Fargone, and, here’s the core of it: the Eversnow project gets underway.”

“Eversnow!” That hadn’t been part of the report.

“Eversnow.”

“It’s a dead project.”

“Not dead. We get a station at Eversnow, a full blown research station onEversnow, and a new lab at Fargone that’s very quietly aimed at terra‑forming, exactly as originally planned on Cyteen–the Centrists’ favorite dream–but out there, where it’s notgoing to cause us trouble.”

Her pulse rate was getting up. Her blink rate would be. And he’d read that in a second. “So we’re suddenly friends with the Centrists and we’re terraforming Eversnow, of all things. And producing alpha azi at Fargone.”

“A few.”

“We havea lab at Fargone. The Rubin Project was at Fargone.”

“Mostly terraforming research…a clearing house for what we learn on Eversnow. Ultimately–ultimately azi, yes.”

“Alpha production has never left the planet!”

“Our personnel, mind, no release of proprietary secrets. By the time we’re bringing any great number of azi into the Eversnow system, we’ll be on the planet. Azi production. Full scale by then. You’ll be putting together the sets for that population in your lifetime.”

The Eversnow deal had been dead as long as the first Ari. And Reseune had allowed a prerogative of exclusivity to lapse, enabling labs that high‑end, that capable, to run out at Fargone–with the possibility of somebody outside Reseune staff laying hands on the manuals? Bad enough they’d licensed out military thetas to BucherLabs and had thoseproblems to mop up for the next forty years of the first Ari’s career–they’d never done anything like this.

And terraforming? That was a dead issue.

“None of this is in the news,” she said calmly.

“None of it is going to be in the news. It’s under deep cover, disguised as that azi lab.”

“But, damn it, Yanni.” She kept her voice down, kept the whole situation under control, holding the lid on. “I assume you’ve got a very, very good reason. What happened to the remediation budget?”

“It’ll wait a year.”

“While we create a terraforming lab out at Fargone?”

“Yes,” Yanni said, head‑on, “It was the first Ari’s project. It got scrapped.”

“The first Ari isn’t alive now. I am. And I have an opinion. You didn’t ask me. Where are my budget items, Yanni?”

“Next year.”

“We have two labs full of scientists we’re going to have to fund till next year and I’m making a heavy hit on budget as it is!”

“I know that.”

“So you could have talked about this. Eversnow, for God’s sake! And an alpha lab! What else?”

“We manage the lab, top to bottom. Our personnel run it, no training of local techs to do anything: they’ll all be Reseune people, born here, trained here, retiring here, ultimately.”

Yanni’s voice was so quiet, so reasonable. He wasn’t that way with a lot of people. But he knew he’d sneaked this one past her, and he was presenting a case in which she was going to have the say. She’d be in charge when this thing came into full bloom, and Yanni–Yanni would be gone by then, at least gone from Admin, and back in the lab.

That thought settled her heart rate a tick or two. She didn’t want that, yet.

And she thought about what he was doing. He’d been meeting with Corain, of all people. Corain didn’t meet with Science.

“So.” she said, “and Citizens voted for it.”

“Jobs,” Yanni said. “A lot of jobs. Council knows what it’s for. We’re just not advertising it for the media yet.”

“They know, and they voted for this.”

“Everybody but Internal Affairs and State. Two nays. I’m sure you know.”

She knew. Corain had gone along. Jobs, Yanni said. Jobs at Far‑gone. Elder Ari had warned her about unrest in the population–the Citizens Bureau, which Corain represented. Ari had warned her about unhappiness–at Fargone, at Pan‑Paris, which wasn’t on the expansion routes; both flashpoints, fobs had been scarce, opportunities scant since the War. Fargone was supposed to be in for major expansion when the military had planned to go ahead with Eversnow; she knew that was the history of it at that star.

And then peace had happened, and the project had stalled–people elsewhere hadn’t thought terraforming anything was a good idea; and then the first Ari had died, and it had stayed a dead issue for twenty years.

But the Eversnow collapse hadhad an effect, politically. Fargone Station’s independence tilt, voting sometimes with the Expansionists, sometimes with the Centrists, and bargaining hard for its vote, had been a factor in the Defense election that had put Vladislaw Khalid in–her least favorite Bureau head in her own lifetime.

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 histenure as Proxy Councillor for Science andhead 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 theiropinions–

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.