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did not think Carmina Gold could even hear her. "What do you think that Captain Rebka was doing on Miranda before he came here?" she shouted along the table. "Sunbathing?"

    "—about four meters tall." Rebka had his head close to Glenna Omar's. "An adult specimen, standing erect, with a midnight-blue torso supported on thick blue tentacles—"

    "— living Zardalu—"

    "My God !" Merada's piercing tenor cut through the hubbub. His worries over the dating of Zardalu extinctions had apparently been replaced by a much more urgent one. He turned to Darya. "Wild Phages, and an Alliance councilor, and an embodied computer. Professor Lang, those entries for the fifth edition of the catalog, the ones for which you promised to provide the references. Are you telling me that the only reference sources you will offer me are— "

    There was a loud crash. Carmina Gold, hurrying out of the dining room but turning to glare back at Darya, had collided with a squat robot carrying a big tureen of hot soup. Scalding liquid jetted across the room and splashed onto the back of Glenna Omar's graceful bare neck. She screamed like a mortally wounded pig.

    Darya sat down again and closed her eyes. With or without soup, it was unlikely to be one of the Institute's most relaxing dinners.

     

    "I thought I handled things rather well." Hans Rebka was lying flat on the thick carpet in the living room of Darya's private quarters. He claimed that it was softer than his bed on Teufel. "You have to understand, Darya, I said all those things about the Builders and the Zardalu on purpose ."

    "I'm sure you did—after we all agreed to reveal absolutely nothing to anyone about them! You agreed to it, yourself."

    "I did. Graves proposed it, but we all agreed we should keep everything to ourselves until the formal briefing to the Council. The last thing we wanted was to throw the spiral arm into a panic because there are live Zardalu on the loose."

    "And panic is just what you started at dinner. Why did you all of a sudden do the exact opposite of what we said we'd do?"

    "I told you, the briefing to the Council was an absolute fiasco . We need to get people worked up about the Zardalu now. Not one Council member would believe a word of what we had to say!"

    "But Julius Graves is a Council member—he's one of them, an insider."

    "He is, and yet he isn't. He was elected one of them, but of course his interior mnemonic twin, Steven Graves, as someone pointed out early in the hearing, was never elected to anything . No one expected a simple memory extension device to develop self-awareness, and that happened after Julius was elected to the Council. The integration of the personalities of Julius and Steven seems to be complete now—the composite calls himself Julian , and gets upset if you forget and still call him Julius or Steven. But there were more than a few hints by other councilors that the development of Steven had sent Julius off his head while the integration was going on. You can see their point: although councilors do not lie or fabricate events, Julian Graves is not, and never was, a councilor."

    "But what about E.C. Tally? A computer, even an embodied computer, can't lie. He should have had more to say than anyone—his original body was torn to bits by the Zardalu."

    "Try and prove that, when you don't have one tangible scrap of evidence that all the Zardalu didn't become extinct eleven thousand years ago, and stay extinct. A computer can't lie, true enough—but it can sure as hell be reprogrammed with a false set of memories."

    "Why would anyone want to do that?"

    "That's not the Council's worry. And old E.C. didn't help his case at all. Halfway through his testimony he started to lecture the Council about the inadequacies of the Fourth Alliance central data banks, and the nonsense that had been pumped into him from those banks about the other clades of the spiral arm before he was sent to the Phemus Circle. The Council data specialist