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Congress with almost embarrassing ease.
    She was, by anyone’s standard, successful.
    Why then, did she feel like such a failure?
    The war, of course… She shook her head. She’d long ago decided that the politicians of human-explored space would get themselves into far fewer wars if more of them started off as warriors. Civilians, she’d found, were too likely to become caught up in the supposed glory of war. It took a soldier to remind people of why war was something to be avoided.
    Central Jefferson, she thought as she watched the viewall, was crowded. The capital had always been bustling, but the congestion had been getting worse lately. During the war, its location, almost forty-nine light years from Sol, and its industrial base, in a system rich in raw materials, had combined to make it a good candidate for the capital of the fledgling Confederation. The sign in front of the Sony Building back then had read FIRST PEOPLE’S CONFEDERATION CONGRESS , a nod both toward the old-Earth North American model upon which the government had been based and to the fact that, in those far-off, pioneering days, at least, it had been assumed that the Congress would meet only intermittently, in times of crisis.
    Like all governments, however, it had somehow put down roots and grown… though whether that growth had been more like that of a tree or a cancer, Katya hadn’t yet decided. And in the meantime, the mingled cultures of New America and the Confederation were transforming as swiftly as the technology. It was becoming harder and harder to maintain any kind of unity even among the cultures resident just on New America.
    And Katya was less and less sure that unity was something the government should—or could —impose. The Sinclair Doctrine applied here as well as to the scattered worlds of Confederation and Shichiju, didn’t it?
    She knew all of the arguments, of course. She’d invoked them plenty of times herself on the Senate floor. Unity was necessary now because the Imperials were pushing hard and would take advantage of any perceived weakness. Worse, things were changing so god-awfully fast. Technology was changing, the rate of change increasing at a pace that seemed totally out of control, and society itself was showing deep and troubling strains.
    It was almost impossible to keep up with the shifts and reworkings of Confederation culture anymore. As she looked through the viewall into Franklin Park, she could see some of the bizarre shapes strolling there.
    The Naga Revolution, it was called by some, especially by the younger generation, the kids born since 2550 or so. Most had personal Nagas, Companions, that fulfilled all of the functions of the old cephlinks and added a few more. It was curious, Katya thought, how a symbiosis that was changing the very way Man perceived himself was being manifested by New America’s younger citizens primarily as fashion statements. It seemed unbalanced, somehow, almost sacrilegious, if such a term had any meaning anymore, something akin to using a quantum power tap to light a match.
    There was a young couple riding a slidewalk just in front of her. The girl was nude, save for sandals and her Naga’s skin expressions—patterns of green and silver opalescence that rippled up and down her legs and torso, alternately revealing and concealing as it shifted. Her companion was sheer fantasy, human in shape but patterned in a hallucinatory montage of scales, feathers, and tawny predator’s hide, all fashioned through his Companion’s alterations to the cells of his skin. She assumed the person was male; the only clue to his sex was the outsized genitalia dangling between his legs, though even that in itself was no guarantee. Many people routinely changed their sex as casually as they changed clothes; others changed only the appearance, and there was no way to be sure which was which.
    The Naga Revolution had challenged old definitions not only of what sex you were, but of what it was