Fifty-One

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The constitution was never going to pass. Then eleven objects appeared in the outer system and made no attempt whatever to hide. In June 2038 the count is seventy-one states for and a hundred and four needed, and the modelling says 2047. Everybody supports the instrument. Nobody wants to be among the first to sign an agreement they can never leave. At 04:11 on Friday the thirteenth of August, eleven observatories on the night side of the Earth record the same thing at the same moment. The Aperture proved they can be invisible. This is a decision. Asha Varghese spends the following eleven weeks arguing, in public and increasingly alone, that the species must not adopt its constitution because a fleet is coming - that we would be passing the examination by cheating on the only question ever asked. She loses the argument comprehensively. She is also right, and the arithmetic is in the register, and she has never stopped believing both. It passes on the eleventh of October 2038 by fifty-one per cent to forty-nine. And then, with a bare majority for the most irreversible act in human history and four hundred and forty-six people in the chamber who believe they have been steamrollered, a member of the losing side stands up and asks for the votes to be counted a third time on no procedural ground at all - because he wants to be able to tell his neighbours that he asked, and the answer was yes. The expensive part of legitimacy is doing the unnecessary thing in front of the people who think it is necessary. The fleet arrives at 11:04 on the twenty-ninth of October. What it does first is the most courteous act in this entire history, and nobody in the chamber expected it, and it takes ninety seconds for anyone to understand what they are looking at. Book Five of six. Human Alliance, Volume One.