True, she was on the verge of what might be a dangerous enterprise. But she’d taken risks before. Generally she’d enjoyed them. And the possible stakes—
She grinned, for the sake of bravado. Peeling off her coverall and dropping it on the floor, she sat down. She would rather have kept her feet, but figured obscurely that this showed her more at ease, more in command. She did set the lounger straight upright and ignored its sensuous self-adjustments to contours and skin temperature.
“Are you ready?” asked the machine. She nodded. Her heart thumped. “I speak for the Wardress Lilisaire. She has provided me a file of her information about you.”
Aleka frowned. “Was that safe? I mean, if she’s being watched—”
“How do you know she is?”
“She has a reason for these precautions, doesn’t she?”
The voice made a chuckle. “Excellent. You confirm her impression of sharp wits. The file was not transmitted from Luna, it was carried as a recording to Earth by a messenger. He privately gave it to another person, who brought it here.”
Then presumably Lilisaire had no cause to suspect Aleka was under surveillance. That came as a pulse-lowering relief. “Are you, uh, empowered to make decisions?”
“As far as feasible, yes. Why do you think you were called?”
“It has to do with the Habitat, right?”Lilisaire had talked enough about that, with enough venom, when they met, although mainly she had set herself to charm and, under cover of it, inquire. Besides, everybody knew how opposed to the project the large majority of Lunarians were.
“Yes,” the machine said. “What is your opinion of it?”
“I, I hadn’t given it much thought,” Aleka confessed. “The idea seemed—exciting—till I heard hef. Since then … I sympathize. If Earthlings want to colonize, let them go to Mars.”
“A long, expensive haul.”
“What does expense mean, when you can pretty nearly grow your ships in the nanotanks, and they don’t need human crews? Nor would you need a Habitat at Mars.”
“Shrewdly put. I was quoting the argument advanced by proponents. They are humans too, you know, in the government and out of it.”
Bitterness lifted. “What has the cybercosm bribed them with?”
The tone was matter-of-fact. “Essentially nothing. Most of them are sincere. They accept the cost-benefit analysis produced for them because they trust the cybercosm. You know why. This is a more stable world, with more social and economic justice, than ever was before sophotectic intelligence developed. Do not be so hostile to it.”
Aleka’s emotion subsided a little. “Oh, I’m not, not really. I’m … skeptical. At least, I often wonder where we humans are bound, and how much control over the course we have left to us.”
“Your Lyudovite background?”
“I never was a Lyudovite!” she exclaimed. “How could I be? The Rebellion happened lifetimes ago.”
“But when you were studying at the Irkutsk Institute, you encountered persons whose ancestors fought in it, and who still hold it was a rightful cause wrongly crushed.” Memory rushed back, campus, the Russian plain, glorious Lake Baikal, Yuri, Yuri, and the village to which he took her, more than once. “I had a, a close friend, a fellow student. He came from that kind of family, yes. They tried to keep the old ways alive, handicraft, agriculture, it was pitiful to see. He introduced me to them. We were very young.” Aleka sighed. “Later he … changed his mind.” And they drifted apart, and finally she went home to Hawaii. By now he seldom troubled her dreams.
“And you?”
She shrugged. “I’ve got my work to do.”
“I am only familiarizing myself with you,” the machine said mildly. “I know what Lilisaire has informed me of, but it is incomplete and abstract.”
However, Aleka reflected, it probably went beyond what she had revealed. Agents on Earth must have looked into her life before the Wardress decided she could trust her. Or earlier, yes. Lilisaire would have had more than a casual reason, a couple of mutual acquaintances, for inviting her to Zamok Vy-soki that time she vacationed on the Moon, and bedazzling her.
Aleka felt she ought to resent such snooping, but couldn’t. She didn’t even resent it that the ancestress Niolente had taken a part in fomenting and prolonging the Rebellion. A cold-blooded move, granted, in hopes of weakening the Federation until it gave up on incorporating Luna. But Lyudovites and Lunarians had a great deal in common.