“Yes. And all kinds of other things too,” Tanya answered. “It beats having to ship lots of materials all the way from here.”
Luthis traced a finger along one of the exciter power cables, then turned to Vicki. “Now I think I’m beginning to see why they were in such a hurry to get that power system there that Landen designed.”
“You mean the Agni?”
“Yes. The generating plant to power something like this is already there. Did they really anticipate it that far back?”
“But of course,” Vicki said loyally. But in fact, she was only just appreciating it herself.
* * *
That evening, Vicki sat alone in her room in the quarters the outbound personnel had been assigned while waiting to be taken up to the Aztec. It felt depressingly like the unit she had vacated on Dione. Even with Lan and Sariena working most of the time in other parts of Kronia, their visits had meant more than she’d realized. And after the Varuna mission departed, the steadily lengthening signal delay eventually made meaningful interaction with them electronically impossible too. Robin had become progressively more withdrawn before finally joining the Security Arm, and now he had been shipped off with the reconnaissance survey sent to Jupiter—which perhaps would be best for him. Leo Cavan still stayed in touch and tried to be reassuring, telling her that it was only to be expected that young people would go through a troubled time when the world they had thought they would grow up to was snatched away from them, and in the long run he was confident that Robin would be fine. Vicki was just a mother, being a mother. . . . But the way she saw it too, he was just Cavan being Cavan.
And so she had immersed herself in her work with Emil Farzhin’s group and his account of how Earth and Mars had influenced each other’s histories in recent times. In conjunction with other work that had been going on, it was shedding new light on the puzzle of how living forms managed to alter so abruptly in conditions of stress and change. This was the area that Luthis specialized in and what he and Vicki were going back to Earth to investigate further.
The principal mechanism for introducing new genetic information into a species and spreading it rapidly through an initial breeding group, they now suspected, was not the sexual mixing of genes and subsequent agonizingly slow propagation of any benefits through a population. Even before Athena, this had been recognized as a major problem with the orthodox ideas on evolution, but nobody had been able to suggest anything better. Yet a far more effective process had been there all the time, capable of manifesting its effects immediately among adults already at a procreative age, and capable of appearing almost literally overnight: infection. But it had been misidentified through being noticed only when the mechanism produced harmful results instead.
The room’s wall screen, which had been showing a dance troupe with the sound turned down—low-g choreography could be quite captivating—switched to a head and shoulders view of Claud Valcroix talking. The caption aztec mission below interrupted Vicki’s brooding. “House. Sound up,” she instructed in a slightly raised voice.
The Pragmatists were making a bid for greater influence in the Congress by arguing that since the Directorates embodied concentrations of expertise and knowledge in certain vital areas, then by the Kronians’ own system of values they represented the interests of entrenched “wealth,” thus violating the principles of democracy and fairness. Therefore the Pragmatists, who claimed to speak for typically unrepresented elements of the population, should be involved in their decision-making processes too. It was an obvious attempt to gain greater access to policymaking without having the votes needed for seats in the Assembly, which constituted the democratically elected arm of the Congressional system. Officers of the Directorates were appointed from within, much in the way that senators had been placed by their state legislatures under the original American system. It was an ingenious ploy, Cavan had conceded when he and Vicki spoke a day or two previously. But he couldn’t see Congress buying it.