“You want me to unite Visager?” John felt his mouth drop open. “Me?” His voice broke embarrassingly, the way it had taken to doing lately, and he flushed.
Raj shook his head. “Not exactly. More to prevent it being unified, at least by the wrong people.” He leaned forward slightly. “Tell me honestly, John. What do you think of the Chosen?”
John opened his mouth, then closed it. Memories flickered through his mind; ending with the blank, caved-in faces of the dockers as the unconscious man was carried away.
“Honestly, sir—not much. Mom doesn’t, either. I tried talking to Dad about it once, but . . .” He shrugged and looked away.
Raj nodded. “Center can foresee things. Not the future always, but what will probably happen, and how probable it is. Don’t ask me to explain it—I’ve had three lifetimes, and I still can’t understand it. But I know it works.”
maintenance of your personality matrix is incompatible with the modifications necessary to comprehend stochastic analysis.
John started and put his hands to his ears. The voice had come from everywhere and nowhere. It felt heavy, somehow, as if the words held a greater freight of meaning than any he’d ever heard. The sound of them in his head had been entirely flat and even, but there were undertones that resonated like a guitar’s strings after the player’s fingers left them. The voice felt . . . sad.
“Center means that if I was changed that much, I wouldn’t be me,” Raj said.
john hosten, the ancient, impersonal voice said, in the absence of exterior intervention, there is a 51% probability ±6%, that the chosen will establish complete dominance of visager within 34 years. observe.
John looked toward the mirrored wall.
An endless line of men in tattered green uniforms marched past a machine-gun nest manned by Land troops, Protégé infantry, and a Chosen officer. Two plainclothes police agents stood by, in long leather coats and wide-brimmed hats, heavy pistols in their hands. Every now and then they would flick their hands, and the soldiers would drag a man out of the line of prisoners, force him down to his knees. The Fourth Bureau men would step up and put the muzzles of their guns to the back of the kneeling man’s head . . .
conquest of the empire, Center said. observe:
A montage followed: cities burning, with their names and locations somehow in his mind. Ships crowded with slave laborers arriving in Oathtaking and Pillars and Dorst. A group of Chosen engineers talking over papers and plans, while a line of laborers that stretched beyond sight worked on a railway embankment.
consolidation. further expansion.
A burning warship sank, in an ocean littered with oily guttering flames, wreckage, bodies, and men who still tried to move. Hundreds of them were sucked backwards and down as the ship upended and sank like a lead pencil dropped into a pool, its huge bronze propellers still whirling as it took the final plunge. Through the smoke came a line of battlewagons, with the black-and-gold banner of the Chosen at their masts. Their main batteries were scorched and blistered with heavy firing, but silent; their secondary guns and quick-firers stabbed out into the waters.
destruction of santander.
Even without Centers information, he recognized the next scene. It was Republic Hall in Santander City. The great red-granite dome was shattered; a man in the black frock coat and tall hat of Republican formality stood before a Chosen general and handed over the Constitution of the Republic in its glass-cased box. The general threw it down and ground the heel of his boot into it while the troops behind him cheered.
consequences.
A shabby tenement street in a Chosen city. Figures clustered about the steps, talking, falling silent as a strange-looking steamcar bristling with weapons hummed by.
“But those are Chosen,” John exclaimed.
Raj spoke: “What do carnivores do when they’ve finished off the game?”
metaphorical but correct, Center’s passionless non-voice said. once consolidation is complete, the chosen lines would fall out with each other. the planet cannot support so large a ruling class in conditions of intense competition, not indefinitely; and the social system resulting from conquest and slavery cannot be rationally adjusted to maximize productivity. internal reorganization would lead to the creation of a noble caste and the exclusion of most chosen lines.