Twisted-tree flushed slightly. Thunder-man looked offended. The Procurator, through long practice, ignored what she had said. Alliance Central wasn’t officially a “world.” It was a government. Freedom-of-procreation laws that applied to Alliance worlds could not apply here. The administration would not remain in power if Alliance Central ever hit crit-popple. There were ways to assure that it did not. Required emigration for larger families. Shadowhood for overactive males. A little something in the water supply. A little something else in the air.
Poracious Luv’s hand twitched toward her cup. Snark moved like invisible lightning, taking away the used cup, filling a clean one, putting it where the avid hand could fall upon it. Poracious drew in the hot fragrant brew as though breathing it, half emptying the cup. It was time to change the subject.
“Is there any news from Dinadh?” she asked.
“Lutha Tallstaff is on her way there now,” said the Procurator. “It will be some time before we hear anything from there. How about the recorders we had hidden all through Hermes Sector? Did they function properly? Did we get anything useful?”
Twisted-tree growled, “They functioned well, yes. We have excellent records of thousands of colonists going about their business. Then we get deterioration of the audio segment, then brief exclamations, drawn breaths, yes. We see people staring fearfully around themselves. Then we see a gray veil, and the next moment we have good views of a planet without human life.”
“That quickly?”
“More quickly than I can tell it. Subsequently, the recorders stop functioning.”
Twisted-tree said gloomily, “They stopped functioning on Mandalay and Jerome’s System, yes.”
Silence once more except for the almost surreptitious inhalation of tea.
After a time the Procurator offered, “If they are taking the people first, perhaps some kind of device implanted in the people themselves would give us useful information.”
“Political suicide,” hissed Poracious. “If it were ever found out we’d used workers or colonists …”
“What if they were volunteers?” asked the Procurator.
The woman shook her head. “Even so. There are populated worlds out there, worlds with representation here at Prime. Those representatives are already giving us hell because we didn’t start evacuation the minute we knew the Ularians were back. Never mind that it’s impossible to evacuate a settled world. We take off a thousand; the same day they have a thousand and ten babies! They don’t want to hear we can’t do it, even though that’s what we’ve told them right along. Blind faith in somebody stepping in to fix things eliminates a lot of emotional stress, so blind faith is what most people have!
“Now that they’re facing the fact nobody can fix things, they’re on the screaming prod; and if they found out we’d put recorders into people we knew would be taken, they’d have us for breakfast, broiled.”
“But we need information,” the Procurator murmured.
“Well, we can’t use colonists.” Her eyes came to rest on Snark, seeming to see her through her garb, through her shadowhood. Poracious Luv’s gaze went past Snark, on to the several other shadows in the room, resting briefly on each. “Not colonists, Procurator. But …”
His eyes followed hers. “Shadows?” he asked in a hushed voice. “You mean shadows?”
“Why not?”
“Why not? Because it denies the first right of man! As shadows, they can live part of their lives normally. But on a frontier world …”
“How do we know they wouldn’t be better off?” Poracious asked in a silky tone. “We don’t know what the Ularians do with them. Maybe they transport them to other, more suitable worlds.”
“Tchah,” he snorted.
“We could always claim we believed so, and who could prove we didn’t?” asked Thunder-man. “Besides, in a time of war, there have to be sacrifices. Whom would you rather sacrifice?”
“The first rule of governance is never to choose who to sacrifice,” snarled the Procurator. “Or, at least, never to be seen to choose. Death and dismemberment must always be … inadvertent. Everybody’s fault or nobody’s fault!”
“What are you suggesting?” Thunder-man asked the woman, ignoring the Procurator’s words. “Replacing a real preliminary team with one made up of shadows?”
Poracious Luv nodded thoughtfully. “Exactly. If I heard you correctly, we took preliminary teams off three worlds. One of them was Perdur something?”
He glanced at his notes. “Perdur Alas,” he confirmed.
Twisted-tree drummed his fingertips on his chair arm, scanning his databoard. “The team there was only a few hundred strong. How many shadows are there?”
“I’m sure there will be enough,” said Poracious significantly. “By the time we get them ready to go.”
The Procurator folded his hands in his lap and stared at his guests. Was he capable of this? He murmured, “You’ll recall we use simulation booths to control the shadows, to vent their hostility. The booths are a modified form of sensurround. Shadows are accustomed to the satisfaction they get in the booths. There are no simul booths on Perdur Alas.”
“No, and you can’t put any there,” said Poracious. “The Firsters would have a fit.”
The Procurator shook his head slowly, considering.
“There aren’t that many Firsters,” said Twisted-tree.
“There are altogether too many,” whispered the Procurator. It was true. They had an influence that was out of all proportion to their numbers, and those numbers were growing.
Thunder-man said, “Firsters have enough trouble accepting sensurround. They’d have a fit if they knew about simul booths.”
Poracious nodded. “You’re right. We may get away with sending shadows, but we’d never get away with the other. Someone would talk. Some shipping coordinator or installation tech.”
“Then you’re talking about deep conditioning,” the Procurator objected. “The very conditioning the shadows have rejected!”
“How much can be accomplished with deep conditioning?” asked Poracious. “Can we make anything much of them?”
The Procurator mused, half aloud. “Look around you, madam! Half the people on the streets have been conditioned to some degree, though they’ve done it voluntarily. Most professionals are educated at least partly through deep conditioning. The only difference between them and the shadows is that they’ve asked for it and the shadows have
