"It is as close to mental telepathy as we're likely to get.  The union representatives are tuned into me, and I'm tuned into the dinosaurs.  The negotiator poses a question:  'How do you fellows feel about 120 of your number being harvested/murdered this year?'  I put the question in terms of predators.  A picture of an approaching tyrannosaur.  I get a fear response:  'Sorry, we'd rather not, thank you.'  I relay it to the unionist, who tells Callie the figure is not acceptable.  The unionist proposes another number, in tonight's case, sixty.  Callie can't accept that.  She'd go broke, there would be no one to feed the stock.  I convey this idea to the dinosaurs with feelings of hunger, thirst, sickness.  They don't like this either.  Callie proposes 110 creatures taken.  I show them a smaller tyrannosaur approaching, with some of the herd escaping.  They don't respond quite so strongly with the fear and flight reflex, which I translate as 'Well, for the good of the herd, we might see our way clear to losing seventy so the rest can grow fat.'  I put the proposal to Callie, who claims the Earthists are bleeding her white, and so on."

"Sounds totally useless to me," I said, with only half my mind on what the CC had been saying.  I was seeing a vision of myself living within the planet-girdling machine that the CC had become, and of him living within my body as well.  The funny thing was that nothing I'd learned since arriving at Scarpa Island had been exactly new to me.  There were new, unheralded capabilities, but looking at them, I could see they were inherent in the technology.  I'd had the facts, but not enough of them.  I'd spent almost no time thinking about them, any more than I thought about breathing, and even less time considering the implications, most of which I didn't like.  I realized the CC was talking again.

"I don't see why you should say that.  Except that I know your moral stand on the whole issue of animal husbandry, and you have a right to that."

"No, that whole issue aside, I could have told you how this all would come out, given only the opening bid.  David proposed sixty, right?"

"After the opening statement about murdering any of these creatures at all, and his formal demand that all-"

"'-creatures should live a life free from the predation of man, the most voracious and merciless predator of all,' yeah, I've heard the speech, and David and Callie both know it's just a formality, like singing the planetary anthem.  When they got down to cases, he said sixty.  Man, he must really be angry about something, sixty is ridiculous.  Anyway, when she heard sixty, Callie bid 120 because she knew she had to slaughter ninety this year to make a reasonable profit, and when David heard that he knew they'd eventually settle on ninety.  So tell me this:  why bother to consult the dinosaurs?  Who cares what they think?"