"If you say yes," Raj said. "I'm not going to lie to you, son. Soldiering isn't a safe profession; andif you refuse, the final war between die Land and your country may not be for a generation or more, possibly two."

"Yeah, and the horse might learn to sing," Jeffrey said. He was a little surprised at Raj's chuckle. "And if I had lads, they'd be around when it happened, anyway. I'll do it. Somebody's got to. A Fair does what has to be done."

Unconsciously, his voice took on another tone with the last words; Raj nodded approvingly and handed him the balloon snifter.

"Good lad."

"There's just one thing," Jeffrey said. He looked up; the… computer… wasn't there-wasn't anywhere, specifically, while he was in its mind-but that helped.

"Just one thing. If, ah, Center can predict things, and manipulate them the way you're saying, couldn't you change the Chosen? You showed me what would happen if the Chosen took over by themselves, didn't you? Left to themselves, on their own." correct. Raj nodded.

"So, you could help them, and sort of twist things around so that they built a star-transport system? It'd be easy enough, with you showing all the technical stuff they had to do every step of the way, not like reinventing it, not really. And you could get whoever you picked to the top in Chosen politics, couldn't you? Make 'em next thing to a living god."

Raj leaned back in bis chair. "Smart lad," he said admiringly. "But then, you've got a different perspective on it than your brother-your brother to be, I mean. probability of medium-term success with such a course of action is 62%, ±10, Center said, unusually high degree of uncertainty due to stochastic factors, we cannot be certain of coming into contact with a suitable chosen representative, this course of action is contraindicated by other factors, however.

Raj nodded, his hard dark face bleak. "It might be possible to get Visager back into interstellar space with die Chosen running things," he said. "But you couldn't change them into something we'd want in interstellar space-not without redesigning their society from the ground up, and that would be impossibly difficult." impressionistic but correct, observe: