Ah. Thatwas the concept. Maybe not an entirely irrational prejudice.

“If you knew Ollie Strassen you wouldn’t hold that opinion. And I’d have thought you’d gotten tired of graduate theses. You got caught in a situation, let me remind you, I didn’t personally choose. I still support the decision, for the record, but this post I’m offering you is vastly different; and it may, I hope, make some amends for your time in purgatory. Far‑gone is a very comfortable place.”

“And I’d be under stringent security.”

“You were under that security at Beta, which has far fewer amenities than Fargone.”

“And how long would I be there? Eventually I foresee a hardscrabble station orbiting a snowball.”

“A living laboratory. Your laboratory, should you ever choose to view that world in person. But I think the proposal makes it clear–you’ll never be required to leave Fargone Station. You’ll work in a civilized, state of the art laboratory, handling everything from there…a three‑month lag in information, necessarily, six on a query tothe object of your operations and back again, but you’ll be in civilized surroundings, under perfectly innocuous cover, so long as you yourself choose to be.” Give it a few years, and he’d bet that Eversnow would draw her out to the site. Hands‑on work, a whole world for a lab, would draw Sandi Patil like an addiction: he knew her history She’d eventually get exasperated with the six‑month timelag on her results and go to Eversnow herself…if she’d take the post in the first place. And nothing he had thus far heard from her discouraged him from enlisting her. “Let me be perfectly open with you,” he said quietly. “Yes, you got an infamously bad deal during the War–”

“I got an infamously bad deal, damned right. Yanked out of my own research. Lured onto this dustball for a huge program I worked on for fifteen years–that got canceled six weeks before it implemented, largely thanks to Reseune. Pardon me if I have just a little apprehension about agreeing to another Reseune operation.”

“There’ll be no going back on this.”

Patil stared at him, dark eyes in a pale face surrounded by pale hair, and right now there was no beauty, nothing but harsh, hard assessment. “And how long will you stay in office, Proxy Councillor? And how long until this kid comes along and cancels everything I’m working on, just the way her predecessor did?”

Blunt question.

“We advance it now,” he said carefully. “We get the project implemented. That way there’ll be no profit in notgoing ahead, and there’ll be, let me remind you, nothing like the die‑off zones, nothing like woolwood. Or platytheres.”

“It’s a damn snowball!”

“It’s a Cyteen‑class planet in a million‑year deepfreeze. Remember you’ll sit at Fargone, safe and warm and in all the comforts. You can socialize with Reseune staff–or not–at your pleasure, so long as you maintain cover. And you’ll have a planet to work with, a 30‑billion‑cred budget, for the next several years, and the warming–let me breach a little security here–is advanced beyond our first projections. We’re going to jumpstart it with a few limited impacts this year, followed up by five more solar satellites as well as the research station. How fast canyou push it, if we gave you a wide‑open budget? And, once it’s that far advanced, how soon until you no longer haveto maintain cover?”

Lips went thin. But the eyes held thought. A lot of it. Fast. “Still a lot of practical unknowns with the snowball. Deep ocean. How much life is in the sea floor? How complex? You’ve got samples. The military is dialing up the heat with not a notion in hell what they’re doing, beyond polluting it with the Earth biome and making themselves a nice little salt puddle. Brilliant. Is Eversnow life going to fight back, and how hard? And what kind of a mess do we have if you change your mind on this one midway?”

“This will be a centuries‑long program…with a massive budget, on a bipartisan agreement. It incidentally gets you out from under Defense, back into Science, and gives you absolute authority about what drops onto that world–which may be some little incentive.”

Guarded look, after a furtive spark. He had her. “Maybe.”

“So do you want your name on it? Yes or no? It’s yours, if you want it.”

“No communications restrictions. Free access to Fargone, free access to Cyteen Beta by shipmail, no damn censoring of my articles for publication, once the lid comes off. And a 2,000‑standard‑kilo personal‑goods allowance.”

That mass was a heart‑stopper, if it had been just any traveler. The usual was 40 standard kilos. No censorship on publication or scientific cross‑communication, even with Earth and Alliance: that was worrisome–but it was no longer wartime and the lid was off. They just weren’t used to it.

And the ridiculous personal‑goods travel allowance was minuscule, compared to the equipment they’d be moving out there–a whole lab, containerized, to the farthest station down that strand of stars. “No communications restrictions,” he agreed, “no publication restrictions–once the cover goes off, not from Reseune admin, not from the legislature. For what we intend to have known publicly, for the short term cover story, you’ll run a new ReseuneSpace lab division at Fargone, having to do with medical nanistics, in a very secure facility. Reseune itself will pay transport out. And it will pay transport back, if you decide at any point that you want to resign the post. Your 2000 kilo freight allowance, all right, granted. I’ll throw in a resettling bonus, apartment paid, station share paid–unless you go out to Eversnow, and then you’ll have to take that station as it is. But you’ll be in on a founder’s station share, on what’s slated to be a major waystation down that strand of stars–tell me where you can get thatnowadays. You’ll have 10k a month, with equal pension when you retire. That’s the same as any Wing Director in Reseune. Out there, in Fargone’s economy, that 10k andapartment and station share is pretty damn extravagant.”

“Money’s not the issue. Freedom is. I’m spied on. Followed. For twenty‑five damned years I’m hounded by Cyteen police, Reseune Security, Defense MPs…”

“I’m aware of that. And you know why.”

“I don’t control what shows up at the public library!”

“What shows up at your lectures is a problem you didn’t choose and don’t cultivate. We know that. Here, you’re a magnet for people with agendas. You won’t have that problem at Fargone–for one thing, you won’t have to give any public lectures. I don’t, frankly, encourage any publicity, for the initial period without cover, when, shall we say, political interest in your project is likely to be intense–even on Fargone. But there’s no Paxer problem on Fargone, no Abolitionists to speak of, or if there are, they’re the polite sort who simply write condemnatory letters to the station bulletin board, nothing violent. We appreciate that you’ve been discreet throughout your career. We have no doubts of your character, your credentials–” Give or take a certain bias toward voting the opposition in Science. “We certainly have no doubts of your administrative abilities in a lab operation, and none about your scientific expertise. You’ll be able to pick your staff from Beta: you have absolute authority‑there. But I do need an answer, or I need to start looking out at Beta very quickly, because we are going to a vote tomorrow and I’m going to have to have some idea who we can put in. The bill will pass. I can present it for a vote with your name attached by cloakroom rumor, or not. We have a few Reseune personnel we could send out there, with less need of security, but you’re our first choice, one both sides of the aisle can agree on. And this is your one chance to ride it all the way from tomorrow’s vote to fund a ‘medical nanistics lab’–the project you’re signing onto.”