Carnival

Kii is somewhat disconcerted at first. Inspection, however, reveals the source of the emotion; it is an outflow of the Consent. The Consent wishes more information regardingKaiwo Maru and regarding the life forms that inhabit her.

They are made things, like the khir, and like the khir,they are guardians. They are intelligent, and they are designed, but they are not people.

There are differences. The khir serve. They guard the Consent’s endless dreamings, but these Governors, while designed to serve a purpose, serve it by ruling over theesthelich creatures who created them.

It is an inversion.

Perhaps the bipeds are truly alien enough to place their destiny in the hands of monsters. Or perhaps there is a miscalculation, and this is the result. Kii cannot yet be sure, and the Consent is chary of deciding on so thin a pattern.

Kii continues to research. The Governors are an advantage to Kii’s bipeds—the local colony, that is. The bipeds Kii identifies as Kii’s pets, and which the Consent is to abet.

The Governors advantage Kii’s bipeds because they severely curtail the growth of the nonlocal population.

But they are a disadvantage as well. They create a population that is extremely creative and active, without the drain of substandard individuals. In other words, by ensuring that only extraordinary and accomplished individuals survive, and by skewing that population toward those most practically creative, the Governors nourish innovation. They force the Coalition outward, groping, grasping, subsuming other colony worlds.

They are the engine that drives the expansion that Kii has informed Michelangelo Osiris Leary Kusanagi-Jones that Kii will not permit in local space-time.