He stepped up beside her, looking back out the window himself at the screaming mob. They were beginning to throw things at the residence’s ground-floor walls and windows. The security fields were stopping the tide of rocks, eggs, over-ripe vegetables, and occasional old-fashioned molotov cocktails, but the symbolic acts of vandalism seemed to please the crowd. Not as much as the little knots of people who were burning the Manticoran and Beowulf planetary flags and dismembering—or igniting—effigies dressed in what they fondly believed were Manticoran and Beowulfan naval uniforms, though. As Carmichael watched, one flashily dressed, wildly tattooed flag-burner—he looked like one of the millions of longterm unemployed who collected their stipends from the planetary government every month—held onto a burning Manticoran flag just a moment too long. It was impossible to hear his howls, but the way he started leaping about and waving his hand frantically said volumes, the ambassador thought with a certain satisfaction.

“Frankly,” Hadley said, “what astonishes me, even though I ought to know better after all this time, is that anyone would take Education and Information’s word for anything.” She grimaced. “Like I say, I ought to know better. In fact, I do know better. But it still seems so incredibly brainless. It’s like they want to be lied to because it’s so familiar, or because it keeps them in their comfort zone by absolving them of the need to actually think about things. Apparently nobody on Old Terra ever heard that cliché about ‘Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.’”

“Well I don’t know if E&I’s reflected on just how badly this is going to bite them on the butt out in the Verge and the Shell,” Carmichael replied. “Sure, it’s tailor-made for the Core Worlds. These people are so sheltered and divorced from what’s going on out on the frontiers that it’s no surprise, really, that they’re liable to actually believe this nonsense. And I realize Kolokoltsov’s and Abruzzi’s immediate concern is how the Core Worlds are going to react. But they’re making a huge mistake if they think the Core Worlds are all that matters, and I think they really do. I think they genuinely believe that as long as they can jolly the oldest, most ‘respectable’ worlds into going along with them, they’ll be able—eventually, at least—to restore the ‘old order’ outside the Core. That ‘the little people’ outside the Core are going to accept their more sophisticated intellectual superiors’ guidance once more, they way they ought to, once all this unpleasantness blows over.” His lips twisted and his eyes were bitter. “Even that OFS and its corporate cronies will be able to go back to administering their little empires out in the Verge. And they’re wrong about that.”