don't do as we've asked, you upset everything."
The hausfrau next to him laughed apologetically. "You've lost them, Jeffrey." She put a plump, motherly hand over his and gave Lucia a warm smile. "You have to imagine the scope of what we're talking about, ladies. It's not just an either-or proposition. It's like the biggest pin-ball game you can imagine, with a hundred thousand balls in play, and a million flippers, each of which has a simple decision to make. Do or don't. You see, it was a simple decision we made on your behalf - don't move on the terrorist information. In connection with about fifty other simple decisions, it cleared the way for something important to happen. However, now all of that is unclear again, the ball randomly bouncing. We can't control what we can't foresee."
Lucia looked around at all of them, all the quiet faces, ranging from scowls to smiles. "You're all...psychics? Like Simms?"
"Oh, no." The man called Jeffrey sipped his tea and looked put out at the question. "There are only a handful of genuine psychics in this world, you know. Fifty or so, in any generation - "
"Sixty-two as of last week," murmured an old, creaky gentleman two chairs down. He blinked at Lucia benignly from behind thick, magnifying lenses.
"Edgar, it doesn't matter. I wasn't trying to be precise, I was - "
"Precision is important," Edgar said. "I wouldn't want our new friends to think we weren't precise. My, no."
Jeffrey shot him a grim look. "As I was saying, I could give you the exact mathematical equations about how we derive the existence and location of these people, but I doubt it would mean anything to you. To put it simply, we are a kind of clearinghouse. In addition to Simms, who founded our organization, we maintain facilities in which quite a number of precognitives are housed and cared for. They give us predictions - some, as many as hundreds each day. We feed these into a sophisticated mathematical model, and from that, we see the shape of things to come. Not in detail, you understand. In generalities. The psychics themselves are specific, but in combining their prophecies you lose the - the details. You understand?"
Lucia exchanged a fast look with Jazz. Why isn't Borden here? She couldn't tell if Jazz was thinking about that; her partner looked closed and coplike, utterly unreadable. Just like McCarthy, next to her. How much of this had he heard before? How much did he believe? Not enough, obviously, if he'd finally broken with the Society and gotten himself tossed in jail for his troubles.
"Yes, I understand," she said, although she was fairly certain that she didn't. "You get hundreds of predictions a day. Somehow you create scenarios out of blending all of them together, to show you the future."
"No," Laskins said. He'd recovered some of his calm. His color was a hot pink instead of deep red, and he'd seated himself again. "Not the future. A - sketch of the future. A rough outline of it, with some details in place to give it structure and scope."
"And if you don't like what you see," McCarthy said, "you just figure out which pinball levers to push until you get what you want."
It was as if they'd forgotten he was there. All eyes turned toward him. If he felt the weight of it, he didn't let it show; he was reconfiguring a paper clip into steel origami, and he kept right on doing it.
"What they're not telling you," McCarthy continued, "is that they're all about the greater good. Excuse me, the greater good as they see it. So if a couple hundred people have to die in an upcoming terrorist attack, well, those are acceptable losses if that still takes us down the path they want us to follow."
"People die," said a young woman dressed in ill-fitting blue jeans over a skeletal frame. Her arms were frighteningly thin, as if she'd just come from a prison camp. But since her skin had a tanning-salon glow, Lucia was fairly certain that it was the gauntness of fashion, not famine. "You can't make decisions like this based on individuals, it makes everything worthless. You have to take a wider view than that."
"I'm sure that's a great comfort to the dead," Lucia said. "That they died for a reason."
"Everybody dies for a reason," Laskins said. "We just try to make it a better reason than random chance."
"That apply to all of you, too?" McCarthy