"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 wifl 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, Prote'ge' infantry, and a Chosen officer. Two plain-clothes 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: