“You know what I mean,” said Rackham.

“I just didn’t want you to have any illusions.”

“So tell me what you’re thinking. What you’re planning. So we won’t interfere with our meddling.”

“Because you’re on my side,” Peter said scornfully.

“No, we’re not ‘on your side.’ We’re not really in this game, except insofar as it affects us. We’re in the business of dispersing the human race to as many worlds as possible. But so far, only two colony ships have taken off. And it will be another generation before any of them lands. Far longer before we know whether the colonies will take hold and succeed. Even longer than that before we know if they’ll become isolated worlds or trade will be profitable enough to make interstellar travel economically feasible. That’s all we care about. But to accomplish it, we have to get recruits from Earth, and we have to pay for the ships—again, from Earth. And we have to do it without any hope of financial return for a hundred years at the best. Capitalism is not good at thinking a hundred years ahead. So we need government funding.”

“Which you’ve managed to get even when I couldn’t raise a dime.”

“No, Peter,” said Rackham. “Don’t you understand? Everybody except the United States and Britain and a handful of smaller countries has stopped paying their assessments. We’re living off our huge cash reserves. It’s been enough to outfit two ships, to build a new class of gravity-controlled messenger ships, a few projects like that. But we’re running out of money. We have no way to finance even the ships we already have under construction.”

“You want me to win so I’ll pay for your fleet.”

“We want you to win so that the human race can stop spending its vast surpluses on ways to kill each other, and can instead send all the people that would have been killed in war out into space. And all the money that would have been spent on weapons can be spent on colony ships, and on trading ships, eventually. The human race has always produced a vast surplus of human beings and of wealth, and it has used up almost all of it either on stupid monuments like the pyramids or on brutal, bloody, pointless wars. We want you to unite the world so that this waste can finally stop.”

Peter laughed. “You are such dreamers. Such idealists!”

“We were warriors and we studied our enemy. The Hive Queens. They failed because they were too unified. Human beings are a better design for a sentient species. Once we get over this war thing. What the Hive Queens tried, we can do. Spread out the species so it can develop truly new cultures.”

“New cultures? When you insist that each colony be made up entirely of people from one nation, one language group?”

“We’re not absolutely rigid on that, but yes. There are two ways of looking at species diversity. One is that every colony should contain a complete copy of the whole human race—every culture, every language, every race. But what’s the point of that? Earth already has that! And look how well it’s worked.