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  “Only because I thought it was self-evident,” she said, and Colin bit off an acid response. He sometimes toyed with the notion that the millennia Cohanna had spent in stasis had affected her mind, but he’d known Terra-born humans just like her. She was brilliant and intensely curious, and little things like political realities, wars, and nearby supernovas were totally unimportant compared to her current project—whatever it might be.

  “Look,” he tried again, “I’ve got several million Terra-born who find simple biotechnics scary, ’Hanna.” Her nose wrinkled with contempt for such benighted ignorance, and he sighed. “All right, so they’re wrong. But that doesn’t change the way they feel, and if that upsets them, how are they going to react to your fooling with the natural order of evolution?”

  “Evolution,” she replied, “is an unreasoning statistical process which represents no more than the blind conservation of accidental life forms capable of surviving within their environments.”

  “Please don’t say things like that!” Colin ran his hands through his hair and tried not to look harried. “Maybe you’re right, but too many Terra-born regard it as the working out of God’s plan for the universe. And even the ones who don’t tend to remember the bio-weapon and wake up screaming!”

  “Barbarians!” Cohanna snorted, and Colin sighed.

  “I ought to order you to destroy them,” he muttered, but he shied away from the rebellion in her eyes. “All right, I won’t. Not immediately, anyway. But before I promise not to, I want to see them with my own eyes. And you are not to conduct any more genetic experiments outside a Petri dish without my specific—and written!—authorization. Is that understood?”

  The doctor nodded frigidly, and Colin walked around his desk to flop into his chair. “Good. Now, I’ve got a meeting with Horus and Lieutenant Governor Jefferson in ten minutes, so we’re going to have to wrap this up. But before we do, are there any problems—or surprises—with Project Genesis?”

  “No.” Cohanna’s spine relaxed. One thing about her, Colin reflected; she was a tartar when her toes got stepped on, but she recovered. “Although,” she added pointedly, “I’m a bit surprised you don’t object to the name.”

  “I wish I’d thought about it when Isis suggested it, but I didn’t. And we’re only using it internally and all the reports are classified, so I don’t expect it to upset anyone.”

  “Hmph!” Cohanna sniffed, then smiled wryly. “Well, it’s really more her project than mine, anyway, so I suppose I shouldn’t complain. Anyway, we should be ready to move within the next year or so.”

  “That soon?” Colin was impressed, and he cocked his head to gaze at Brashieel. “How do you folks feel about that, Brashieel?”

  “Curious,” the alien said, “and possibly a bit frightened. After all, the concept of females is still quite strange, and the notion of producing nestlings with a nestmate is … peculiar. Most of us, however, are eager to see what they’re like. For myself, I look forward to it with interest, though I’m highly satisfied with the way Brashan has turned out.”

  “Yeah, you might say he’s a chip off the old block.” Brashieel, whose race was given neither to cliches nor puns, looked blank, but Cohanna winced, and Colin grinned. “Okay, that’s going to have to be it.” His guests rose, and he wagged a finger at Cohanna. “But I meant what I said about experiments, ’Hanna! And I want to see them myself.”

  “Understood,” the doctor said. She and Brashieel walked from the office, pausing to exchange greetings with Horus, Hector, and Jefferson on their way out, and Colin leaned back in his chair with a sigh. Lord! Combining Narhani literal-mindedness with someone like Cohanna was just begging for trouble. He’d have to keep a closer eye on her.

  He opened his eyes to see his father-in-law studying the carpet. A quirked eyebrow invited explanation, and Horus chuckled.

  “Just checking to see how deep the blood was.”

  “You don’t know how close to right you are,” Colin growled. “Jesus! After all the times I’ve lectured her on the subject—!” He stood to embrace Horus, then extended a hand to Jefferson. “Good to see you again, Mister Jefferson.”

  “Thank you, Your Majesty. You might see more of me if I didn’t have to come by mat-trans.” His shudder was only half-feigned, and Colin laughed.

  “I know. The first time I used a transit shaft I almost wet my pants, and the mat-trans is worse.”

  “But efficient,” the stocky, brown-haired Lieutenant Governor replied with a small smile. “Most efficient—damn it!”

  “True, too true.”

  “Tell, me, Colin, just what has ’Hanna been up to now?” Horus asked.

  “She—” Colin paused, then shrugged. “It stays in this office, but I guess I can tell you. You know she’s bioengineering dogs for Narhan?” His guests nodded. “Well, she’s gone a bit further than I intended. She’s been working with a couple of Tinker Bell’s litters to give them near-human intelligence.”

  “What?” Horus blinked at him. “I thought you told her not to—”

  “I did. Unfortunately, she told me she wanted to ‘enhance their ability to communicate with the Narhani’ and I told her to go ahead.” He grimaced. “Silly me.”

  “Oh, Maker,” Horus groaned. “Why can’t she have half as much common sense as she does brainpower?”

  “Because she wouldn’t be Cohanna.” Colin grinned, then sobered. “The worst of it is, the first litter’s fully adult, and she’s been educating them through their implants,” he went on more somberly. “My emotions are having a little trouble catching up with my intellect, but if she’s really given them human or near-human intelligence, the whole equation shifts. I mean, if she’s gone and turned them into people on me, it’s not like putting a starving stray to sleep. ‘Lab animals’ or not, I’m not sure I even have a legal right, much less a moral one, to have them destroyed, whatever the possible consequences.”

  “Excuse me, Your Majesty,” Jefferson suggested diffidently, “but I think, perhaps, you’d better consider doing just that.” Colin raised an eyebrow, and Jefferson shrugged. “We’re having enough anti-Narhani problems without adding this to the fire. The last demonstration was pretty ugly, and it wasn’t in one of our more reactionary areas, either. It was in London.”

  “London?” Colin looked sharply at Horus, instantly diverted from Cohanna’s experiment. “How bad was it?”

  “Not good,” Horus admitted. “More of the ‘The Only Good Achuultani Is a Dead Achuultani’ kind of thing. There were some tussles, but they started when the marchers ran into a counter-demonstration, so they may actually have been a sign of sanity. I hope so, anyway.”

  “Oh, Lord!” Colin sighed. “You know, it was an awful lot easier fighting the Achuultani. Well, simpler, anyway.”

  “True. Still, I think time is on our side.” Colin made a face and Horus chuckled. “I know. I’m getting as tired of saying that as you must be of hearing it, but it’s true. And time is one thing we’ve got plenty of.”

  “Maybe. But while we’re on the subject, who organized this thing?”

  “We’re not entirely certain,” Jefferson replied. “Gus is looking into it, but the official organizers were a bunch called HHI—’Humans for a Human Imperium.’ On the surface, they’re a batch of professional rowdies backed up by a crop of discontented intellectuals. The ‘high-brows’ seem to be academics who resent finding everything they spent their lives learning has become outdated overnight. It would seem—” he smiled thinly “—that some of our fearless intellectual pioneers are a bit less pioneering than they thought.”

  “Hard to blame them, really,” Horus pointed out. “It’s not so much that they’re rejecting the truth as that they feel betrayed. As you say, Lawrence, they spent their lives establishing themselves as intellectual leaders only to find themselves brushed aside.”

  “I know.” Colin frowned down at his hands for a moment, then looked back up. “Still, that sounds like a pretty strange marriage. Professi
onal rowdies and professors? Wonder how they made connections?”

  “Stranger things have happened, Your Majesty, but Gus and I are asking the same question, and he thinks the answer is the Church of the Armageddon.”

  “Oh, shit,” Colin said disgustedly.

  “Inelegant, but apt,” Horus said. “In fact, that’s what bothers me most. The church started out as a simple fusion of fundamentalists who saw the Achuultani as the true villains of the Armageddon, but this is a new departure, even for them. They’ve hated the Achuultani all along, but this is a shift to open racism—if I may use the term—of a particularly ugly stripe.”

  “Yeah. Anything more on their leadership, Mister Jefferson?”

  “Not really, Your Majesty. They’ve never tried to hide their membership—why should they when they enjoy legal religious toleration?—but they’re such an untidy agglomeration of splinter groups the hierarchical lines are pretty vague. We’re still working on who actually calls the shots. Their spokesperson seems to be this Bishop Hilgemann, though I’m afraid I don’t agree with Gus about her real authority. I think she’s more a mouthpiece than a policy-maker, but we’re both just guessing.”

  “You’re going to discuss this with Ninhursag?”

  “Of course, Your Majesty. I’ve brought Gus’ report and I’m going up to Mother after this meeting. Admiral MacMahan and I will put our heads together, and perhaps Dahak can help us pull something out of the data.”

  “Good luck. ’Hursag’s been trying to get a handle on them for over a year now. Oh, well.” Colin shook his head and rose, holding out his hand to the Lieutenant Governor once more. “In that case, I won’t keep you, Mister Jefferson. Horus and I have a birthday party to attend, and two pre-adolescent hellions who’ll make us both miserable if we’re late.”

  “Of course. Please give the Empress and your children my regards.”

  “I will—in between the presents, cake, punch, and general hullabaloo. Good luck with your report.”

  “Thank you, Your Majesty.” Jefferson withdrew gracefully, and Colin and Horus headed for the imperial family’s side of the Palace.

  Chapter Three

  Colin MacIntyre tossed his jacket into a chair, and his green eyes laughed as a robot butler clucked audibly and scooped it up again. ’Tanni was as neat as the cat she so resembled, and she’d programmed the household robots to condemn his sloppiness for her when she was busy elsewhere.

  He glanced into the library in passing and saw two heads of sable hair bent over a hologram. It looked like the primary converter of a gravitonic conveyor’s main propulsion unit, and the twins were busily manipulating the display through their neural feeds to turn it into an exploded schematic while they argued some abstruse point.

  Their father shook his head and continued on his way. It was hard to remember they were only twelve—when they were studying, anyway—but he knew that was only because he’d grown up without implant educations.

  With neural interfacing, there was no inherent limit to the data any individual could be given, but raw data wasn’t the same as knowledge, and that required a whole new set of educational parameters. For the first time in human history, the only thing that mattered was what the best educators had always insisted was the true goal of education: the exploration of knowledge. It was no longer necessary for students to spend endless hours acquiring data, but only a matter of making them aware of what they already “knew” and teaching them to use it—teaching them to think, really—and that was a good teacher’s delight. Unfortunately, it also invalidated the traditional groundwork and performance criteria. Too many teachers were lost without the old rules—and even more of them, led by the West’s unions, had waged a bitter scorched earth campaign against accepting the new. The human race in general seemed to think the Emperor possessed some sort of magic wand, and, in a way, they were right. Colin could do just about anything he decided needed doing … as long as he was prepared to use heavy enough artillery and convinced the battle was worth the cost.

  It had taken him over three years to reach that conclusion where Earth’s teaching establishment was concerned. For forty-three months, he’d listened to reason after reason why the changeover could not be made. Too few Earth schoolchildren had neural feeds. Too little hardware was available. Too many new concepts in too short a time would confuse children already in the system and damage them beyond repair. The list had gone on and on and on, until, finally, he’d had enough and announced the dissolution of all teachers’ unions and the firing of every teacher employed by any publicly funded educational department or system anywhere on the planet.

  The people he’d fired had tried to fight the decree in the courts only to discover that the Great Charter gave Colin the authority to do just what he’d done, and when they came up against the cold steel his homely, usually cheerful face normally hid so well, their grave concern for the well-being of their students had undergone a radical change. Suddenly the only thing they wanted to do was make the transition as quick and painless as possible, and if the Emperor would only let them have their jobs back, they would get down to it immediately.

  They had. Still not without a certain amount of foot dragging when they thought no one was looking, but they had gotten down to it. Of course, every one of their earlier objections had had its own grain of truth, which made the introduction of an entirely new educational system difficult and often frustratingly slow, but once they accepted that Colin was serious, they’d really buckled down and pushed. And, along the way, the ones who had the makings of true teachers rather than petty bureaucrats had rediscovered the joy of teaching. The ones who didn’t make that rediscovery tended to disappear from the profession in ever greater numbers, but their earlier opposition and lingering guerrilla warfare had delayed the full-scale implementation of modern education on Earth by at least ten years.

  Which meant, of course, that children on Birhat had a measurable advantage over those educated on Earth. Dahak spent most of his time in Birhat orbit, and while Earth’s teaching establishment grappled with Imperial education theories, Dahak had already mastered them. More, he, unlike they, had no institutional or personal objections to adopting them, and it required only a tithe of his vast capacity to institute what amounted to a planet-wide system of small-group studies. His students responded with an insatiable hunger to learn, and, to Colin’s knowledge the twins had never played hooky, which was almost scary.

  He walked into the study, and Jiltanith smiled at him from her desk. He took the time to kiss her properly, then flopped into his chair and sighed contentedly as it adjusted to his body’s contours.

  “Thou soundest well content to leave thine office behind thee, my love,” Jiltanith observed, putting her own computer on hold, and he nodded.

  “You oughta try it sometime,” he said pointedly, and she laughed.

  “Nay, my Colin. ’Twould drive me to bedlam’s brink did I have naught to which to set my hands, and this—” she gestured at the hardcopy and data chips strewn over her desk “—is a study most interesting.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Aye. Amanda hath begun to think how best we may use Tao-ling’s Mark Twenty hyper gun in small unit tactics.”

  Colin shook his head wryly. Jiltanith didn’t love combat—she knew too much of what it cost—yet there were dark and dangerous places in her soul. He suspected that no one, not even he, would ever be admitted into some of them, but a lifetime of bitter guerrilla warfare had left its mark, and, unlike him, she saw war not as a last response but as a practical option that worked. She wasn’t merciless, but she was far more capable of slaughter—and less inclined to give quarter—than he. That was why he’d made her Minister of War. As Warlord, Colin was the Imperium’s commander-in-chief, but it was ’Tanni who ran their growing military establishment on a day-to-day basis.

  “Well, if you can tear yourself away, we’re about to have visitors.”

  “Ah?” She cocked her head at him.

  �
��Isis, Cohanna, and Cohanna’s … project,” he said less cheerfully. “I’m afraid Jefferson may be right about the logic of ordering them destroyed, but I can’t say I’m looking forward to making that decision.”

  “Nor shouldst thou.” His wife stood and walked around her desk. “Logic, as thou hast said time without number, my love, may be naught but a way to err wi’ confidence.”

  “You got that right, babe,” he sighed, snaking an arm around her as she passed. She paused to ruffle his sandy hair, then sank into her own chair. “The thing is, I think I’m trying to psych myself up to decide against them ‘cause I think I ought to, and that makes me feel sort of ashamed.”

  “The day thy self-doubt ceaseth will be the day thou becomest less than thy best self, Colin,” she said gently.

  He smiled, changed the subject to something more comfortable, and let ’Tanni’s voice flow over him. He treasured the moments when they could forget the Imperium, forget their duties, forget the need to finish the Achuultani threat once and for all, and ’Tanni’s soft, archaic speech wove a spell that helped him hold those things at bay, be it ever so briefly. She’d learned her English during the Wars of the Roses and flatly refused to abandon it. Besides, as she’d pointed out upon occasion, she spoke true English, not the debased dialect he’d learned.

  “Excuse me, Colin,” a mellow voice injected into a break in their conversation, “but Cohanna and Isis have arrived.”

  “Thanks.” Colin sighed and set the moment aside, feeling the universe intruding upon them once more but revitalized by the temporary escape. “Tell them we’re in the study.”

  “I have already done so. They will arrive momentarily.”

  “Fine. And hang around yourself. We may need your input.”

  “Of course,” Dahak agreed. Colin knew a tiny bit of the computer’s attention always followed him about, ready to respond to questions or advise him of new developments, but Dahak had designed a special subroutine to monitor his Emperor’s whereabouts and needs without bringing them to the front of his attention unless certain critical parameters were crossed. It was his way of assuring Colin’s privacy, a concept he didn’t entirely understand but whose importance to his human friends he recognized.