“Can I say something?” Quarriman asked, raising her hand as if in school.

“Please do,” Jin Im-Jin invited warmly, his face aglow with delight as the Strangest Senator broke her accustomed silence. “Human Quarriman has the floor.”

“Thanks.”

The athlete stretched as she rose, bouncing in her light, pliable Humanist boots, science’s finest polymers folded in elastic layers as natural as muscles around bone, protecting and padding while leaving the foot as mobile as if it were still bare. It was no easy task fitting the metallic bands of so many Olympic medals among her boots’ folds, while the short stripes of her shared team medals sparkled in a dense line from her heel well up the calf.

“When I first heard about O.S.,” she began, “I was really upset. Like a lot of you are. Then, when I heard more, I started feeling worse. Because, even though I didn’t know about it, it was done partly for me, for my Hive, by my Hive. Now they’re saying it wasn’t even for the Hive but for world peace, which means not just we Humanists, but everybody has to feel dirty. And it’s horrible to accept that this wonderful world we’ve made is made from killing people. But then I started thinking about what the geographic nations used to do. I’m no expert, but I read a bit about it this morning, and from what I can tell, even to the end, the geographic nations never had any consistent policy on what secret nasty things they were and weren’t allowed to do to each other, and each other’s people. Even when they made rules, they let each other get away with breaking them all the time, because they all wanted to be able to use those extreme means to protect their own. Now it turns out that the Hives have been doing the same sorts of things, with O.S., and the Canner Device the Mitsubishi made, and I wouldn’t frankly be surprised if we discover more things like that. It’s not exactly the same as the geographic nations, but it’s legally and morally confusing in the same way. The pretend-we-aren’t-doing-this strategy has failed. And frankly, this new blame-everything-on-the-Humanists strategy isn’t going to work either. Romanova needs to make an official policy about covert actions, one that admits that, if O.S. really did facilitate world peace, then Romanova needs to come up with a substitute for that, another way to make peace, before O.S.’s good effects wear off. Minister Luo was brave enough to use the word ‘war’ here where everyone else has been avoiding it. O.S. was a terrible means, no one will deny that, but when you pull the keystone out of the arch the rest falls down unless you do something. We need a real legal answer to what means Hives and Romanova itself can and can’t use in future to fill the gap left by O.S. Otherwise we don’t know what will happen except that it’ll probably be really bad. Now”—her face stayed frank—“maybe some of you are thinking I should shut up and keep out of this because I don’t have much experience in law and politics, but in this situation none of you do either. We’re in unknown lands. We should all admit it. A witch-hunt-type trial isn’t going to solve the real problems, but a real terra ignota, where experts give us advice, just might. That’s what I think.”