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caused
unrest.
    Jason
tried to think of who that might be now. “Old royalty? Praetorian officers?” He
looked at her, and shook his head. Calla had not had any elixir that
forestalled aging. She frowned and he looked away, embarrassed. At forty, as
his body counted years, he’d acquired creases here and there. He didn’t care
that Calla had more and that hers were more pronounced. He did care about
knowing that if he didn’t like his wrinkles, he had only to check into the
clinic for a few hours. Calla had no such options.
    “No,”
she said stiffly. “Not the Praetorians, nor even council members. Everyone
except the decemviri take their chances in the lotteries, or they go to the
clinics.”
    Except you , he thought. And that had
separated him from Calla because the survey rangers would not risk sending an
officer to an outback world where every minor injury put the officer’s life at
peril. Her request for transfer had been denied. Jason’s was accepted. He could
have turned it down, would have if she had asked him to stay with her. But she
had said nothing. She never expressed any anger over knowing that she couldn’t
have what her peers took for granted, and even the memory of knowing it caused
their parting didn’t seem to stir her now.
    “It’s
the matter of reapportionment of the existing supply. The Council of Worlds
rejected the Decemvirate’s recommendation for population control; too many economic
reasons not to on the local world level.”
    “Also
old news,” Jason said, sipping his wine. “They chose the other alternative the
Decemvirate gave them, and that was to improve the elixir yields. That way they
didn’t have to decide how to apportion the supplies to the new worlds. All were
treated equally.”
    “Except
that the yield increases were modest, and new elixir gardens fail more often
than they succeed. They’re only now realizing that for a new plant to succeed,
it required a generous supply of starter seed, skilled people, and equipment
brains that have at least ten years of experience.”
    “Green
thumb effect for jelly beans? People, yes, but not jelly beans. You take an
experienced one from a successful environment, duplicate it, and then you have
hundreds of experienced jelly beans. What’s so hard about that?”
    “Something
doesn’t transfer. The Decemvirate calls it jelly bean intuition, which in their
opinion will never be reproduced uniformly. There will never be enough elixir
for everyone. The Council of Worlds knows that now, and so they’ve put the
reapportionment question before the Decemvirate again. People on old worlds
where the population is stable are starting to lose their supplies because
population on the new worlds is expanding faster than the elixir supply. The
one-in-ten ratio is now one-in-twelve. Old worlds want elixir to be supplied
based on population counts of thirty years ago.”
    “Which
gives the old worlds a disproportionately large share, and that would make the
new worlds unhappy.” Now Jason began to understand how the Council of Worlds
might be said to be on the brink of a revolution against its own advisors.
Regardless of how the elixir was reapportioned, either old worlds or new worlds
would feel cheated. Yet once the decision was made, the Decemvirate was bound
to enforce the decision, even to the extent of using the legions to do it. He
reached for the wine flask to refill Calla’s glass, and added some to his own. “The
Decemvirate better have a third alternative, one that all of them can accept.”
    “They
don’t. Only variations of the two alternatives. The old worlds know the
decision will go against them.”
    “The old worlds ?” And then he caught
himself. Representation on the Council of Worlds was determined by population.
He knew that the new worlds were no
longer the insignificant minority they had been when he left the Hub, but that
change like so many changes was not real to him. Suddenly he felt the impact of
the years