“So you think he’s been talking to people? Including Jordan? It’s not Jordan’s field.”
“Politics is. Jordan’s always been a political animal. And we know there’s been a leak to Corain.”
“One we found,” she said. “You think there’s more?”
“Oh, I think we brought a major item of it here, with Jordan.”
“My fault, you’re saying.”
“Having him sucked up by the military wouldn’t have helped at all.”
It wouldn’t. She’d prevented that. That was true.
“Thieu arrived at Planys during the War,” Yanni said, “quietest retreat he could have. We’d moved a major part of the lab there, in point of fact, because we didn’t want to risk a raid on Beta, and that research falling into Alliance hands. The staff moved back to Beta when the War ended—but he’d already gotten on the wrong side of your predecessor in an absolute fury over the cancellation of his programs. So there he was, just quietly aging, still within the Planys labs, not the man he had been, but still—still within the structure, still doing some work on biologicals for Defense, supposedly doing some side work on the rejuv sensitivity issue—he either wasn’t allowed to work on the remediation as of two years ago, or he refused to work on it any further: it’s not totally clear how that happened, and we’re quietly asking at this moment. The man has a temper that doesn’t always serve him.”
“But he still has his security clearances.”
“He still has some clearance—though he carried on correspondence with a few people in the University in Novgorod, not all of whom we were quite comfortable with: people who’d gotten burned in the program cancellation; people who leaned just a little to the Centrist fringes—ReseuneSec found it useful to let it continue, to see where the lines of communication led, granted nothing classified got out. Meanwhile he met Jordan Warrick…when Jordan moved out there, not, of course, voluntarily. They weren’t close for the first ten years, didn’t even speak; but in the last few, as Thieu tended toward retirement, they started up a friendship. We can’t prove a damned thing, except our quiet in-house inquiry about resurrecting a nanistics project—the Eversnow project, which we didn’t say at the time, nor mentioned Patil’s name—got Thieu very exercised. He breached security, at least within that close community of academics, and contacted a student of his currently teaching in Novgorod, qualified in the field, security clearance, to be sure, but not a contact he was authorized to make.”
“Patil.”
“Patil. He’d corresponded with her for years, but all those letters were innocuous, two scientists talking about programs, and definitely subject to censors who actually can read in that field. Recall there’s a strong Centrist bent in Novgorod University, through the social studies department and into some very shady nooks of the rebel chic. Patil’s work has a cult following. She doesn’t encourage the radicals. But they get excited when she publishes. When she lectures, they show up at her lecture series. If we revive the old studies for use at Eversnow, I want to be sure it doesn’t get used here on Cyteen by some lunatic with a lab vial. Let me tell you, with Thieu retired and Patil’s whole operation off at Eversnow we’re actually safer—barring something coming back by ship. All of which I mention to you just in the case I should fall down the stairs and break my neck—”
“Please don’t!”
“—in case, I say, I’m telling you verbally. There is that one very untidy and roundabout link to Jordan Warrick that we don’t like, the elderly and sometimes erratic Dr. Thieu, who connects with Patil, who’s the person we want to use at Eversnow, partly for very political reasons. But while we’re going ahead with the Patil nomination, we’re also going through the establishment on Planys with a microscope right now on the excuse of investigating Jordan, and it’s why we shouldn’t roundtrip Jordan right back to Planys at first excuse. If fire and fuel can meet, we just want to be very sure the bottles are secure. Once we ship Patil out to Fargone, we’ll feel a lot safer.”
“But you’re saying it’s possibly all innocent.”
“Patil’s a natural candidate for the Eversnow post. But hauling her from the Centrist party to the Expansionist side of the slate is going to mightily annoy some people. It’s possible certain factions will be more interested in the politics of it than in the actual science, which is years off. Short-term, it’s very likely to be political.”
“ ‘Rethinking the Theory of Long-Period Nanistic Self-direction.’ ”
“God, where did you run across that?”
“It was going to run in Scientia last year. It was pretty thick going, but I read it.”
“I should think it was. You and the censors. How did you get it?”
“The Centrists had made a fuss about it, pre-publication, said it proved they could do what they wanted to do on Cyteen without killing the rejuv ecology. Uncle Denys was mad about it. He was threatening to have the editor fired if it ran, so they pulled it. I figured I should give it a look. So she was writing up what she shouldn’t have written about?”
“It was an agitation on her part. But a quiet one, the presentation of a theory, not a how-to. The War’s over. We could enlist any nanistics expert we want out of Beta, and will—but for various reasons—including the fact she’s the darling of the Paxers, the Centrists, and the military, and could get us the votes—she’s our pick for the lab going out to Eversnow. It’s a dream assignment for her. She may be the Centrist intellectuals’ darling, not that they understand half of what she’s about, but she does want to see her theories put into the field, and she’s how we got the two Councillors to shift their vote to support mine, notable Defense and Citizens. And just to draw a line under the fact of who’s in bed with whom, our Jordan’s spent the last eight years having lunch with the professor who taught Patil.”
“He doesn’t have a Base in System any more. So how did he know about it? How did he get the card? Maybe he wanted us to have it. Maybe he’s trying to ask a question…in his unique way.”
“That would be an interesting position,” Yanni said. “Or maybe he just wanted Justin to take exception to the ensuing investigation.”
“To drag Justin into it on his side,” Ari said, “but I don’t think he did what Jordan would want him to do.”
“Oh, it probably was within his guesswork,” Yanni said. “I assume Jordan expected the card to be confiscated, and Justin to be involved, and upset, and maybe more amenable to Jordan’s arguments. He’s psych, not nanistics, educational psych, at that. I don’t like the notion he could have gotten this card from Thieu, and gotten it through our screening. Security’s got to take a look at that. But it’s not much more comfortable a thought that someone here gave it to him…probably with information.”
“It has a reader-strip, ser,” Florian said. “We didn’t put it into a System-connected reader.”
“Probably a very good notion,” Yanni said. “Damn it! Damn Jordan to bloody hell.”
“I’d rather not if I can avoid it,” Ari said. “But Justin is staying in Wing One.”
“Granted,” Yanni said. “No question. Good call.”
“You didn’t bring Patil’s name up with Jordan, did you?”
“Hell, no.”
“Just asking,” she said easily. It remained a possibility, all the same. But less likely, perhaps.
So Justin was safe. But Jordan definitely wasn’t.
BOOK ONE Section 2 Chapter iii
APRIL 26, 2424
0855H
Late to bed, late to rise, and not that early to the office.
The morning was definitely off routine, when you had to rack your memory to recall what your own office address was, and it was entirely surreal to walk in and find the set-up pretty much what you remembered—and you hadn’t put it there.
Justin had expected boxes. The office was—just moved. Things were on shelves in exactly the same order…apparently so, at least. Florian hadn’t exaggerated.
“Well,” Grant sai
d, at his shoulder, “they were neat.”
“Certainly better than some invasions we’ve had,” Justin muttered, and let go a long, long breath. He hadn’t known he was that wound up about the move, but he had been. He didn’t see a safe. Opening several desk drawers didn’t turn up Ari’s material. It had gone somewhere, and that bothered him.
“Her stuff isn’t here,” he said.
“Security will have it,” Grant said. “Five against ten, Florian will have gotten it, personally.”
“Well, it’s not a bad office,” Justin said, looking around. It wasn’t bad. It was even good, given there was room for the two of them—ample room, but nothing for staff. God knew what Em thought, this morning, arriving to find he had no office and no job.
There was a window. The view from the purported window was fake, but it was a very expensive fake: a screen showed the Novaya Volga from, one supposed, the top of the cliffs, more likely the top of one of the precip towers—he’d never been up there: nobody went there, except the repair and maintenance crews working on the weather system, and most of those were robots.
It was a dizzying image, if one thought about it. It gave an illusion the whole building was forty stories tall, when the brain knew for a fact they were on the ground floor.
“Nice view,” Grant said.
“You’re such an optimist.” Justin ran his hand over the spines of the physical books on the shelf, finding no flaw in the order of them—printout of this and that psychset. He liked printout, when it came to review. He marked-up with abandon, and liked things in order, his order. The stacks on the desk looked like his stacks. He thumbed through them. They were in a reasonable order. Likely the stacks on Grant’s desk were the same.
But he wanted to find something they’d messed up. He checked the drawers. Exact order, exact contents. “I hate it when I don’t know what they’ve done wrong. I’m sure there’s something.”
“The movers were ReseuneSec, weren’t they?” Grant asked. “They’re used to not having things look disturbed.”
That was worth half a laugh at least.
There was an in-office coffee dispenser sitting on a sideboard. That was new, and good. The machine was loaded and it turned on and functioned at the touch of a button. That was even better.
And the movers had improved on one other thing: the move had organized the supply cabinet contents in a logical, eye-pleasing way, with little colored bins for the various styli and clips and pointer-tags. He surveyed it top to bottom, looking for flaws.
“Color-coded.” Justin remarked, giving up his search. “I suppose our mess was too much for them to get here intact. We have all shiny new paper clips.”
“Have a cup of coffee.” Grant handed him one, an implicit calm-down.
“You know Jordan’s going to be beside himself this morning.”
“Likely he is,” Grant said. “Just about now.”
He took a sip. It was better coffee than what they’d had available down the hall in the old office. Much better. It was probably real. “Pricey.”
“Free,” Grant said.
“Meaning we’re entirely on her tab.” That didn’t improve the taste.
“Do we ever actually run through our wages?” Grant asked.
“We never get a chance to find out, do we? And what about our regular work?” He turned full circle, looked at the walls, the river view, and something beyond vertigo bothered him, something indefinably bothered him and made his shoulders twitch. He walked across the office and back before it dawned on him. “It’s backward. It’s damned backward! The back wall is south. The old office wall faced north.”
“Is that going to bother you?”
“It’s already bothering me.” He was still frustrated. The office had always had its carefully designed clutter—even his every-other-layer stacking was preserved, in the pile on the corner of his desk. The room was white-walled, had a view that cost a month’s pay. The desks were new black lacquer, not brown lake wood, scarred from years of use. Their use. It was like that damned black and white bedroom they lived in, that was what. “I want some flowers in here. Some pictures that don’t move.”
“I can order the flowers,” Grant said, and added wickedly. “Red?”
“No. Blue. Green. Purple. Anything but red.” There was one red pillow, one red flower, in their professionally decorated black, gray, and white quarters.
“Maybe you’d like to pick out the pictures yourself.”
That nettled him, too. “Ordering flowers is not your job to do. You’re not my—”
“I’m not as afflicted by the decor as you are,” Grant said. “It’s a born-man problem. You’re fluxed. I’m sure I could order flowers in a sane, logical way. Possibly I’d be calm enough to pick out complementary pictures. Clearly—”
“The hell.” He found his mood improving, unwanted improvement, even toward laughter. “Oh, hell, blue. Blue would be good. Blues and purples, that sort of thing.” The single screen pretending to be a window drew the eye and suggested blue-greens and grays. “Cancel the purple. Blues and quiet greens. That might do it. I’d like that. If you wouldn’t mind doing it. I’m not that logical, at the moment.”
“I’m sure there’s something that’ll work,” Grant said nicely. “I’ll look.”
By computer. You could do anything by computer. It would be there in an hour, if they opted for messenger service, and flowers and paintings could get through security, oh, by tomorrow, if security was in a good mood.
It certainly wasn’t the way he’d done things in the days when he’d been free, on his own salary and Grant’s.
Before the first Ari had gotten her hands on him. Before Jordan had gotten himself in trouble and gotten shipped to the far side of the world.
So Jordan came back, and Ari protected him from his own father…meaning she’d finally gotten her way and gotten him all the way into her wing—to do nothing in his career, but teach her.
Standing, he flipped on the computer. The screen blinked up.
Three messages from Ari, in the upper righthand corner.
Calamity?
He dropped into the chair, keyed the messages up.
And had to laugh, however ruefully.
“What is it?”
“Ari’s postscripts. The first Ari didn’t do postscripts. Wouldn’t have done a postscript when she was six. Our girl’s done two in the same letter. She’s worried I’ll hit the ceiling. I think she’s really worried.”
“What does she say?”
“That they’re giving the other office to Jordan. That were better off here. That the old office was bugged, anyway.”
That got a laugh from Grant.
Justin keyed off and got up. “Let’s go out for lunch.”
“Out for lunch? We haven’t gotten any work done yet. I’m just into the flowers.”
“Lunch. Relaxation. Out of the Wing. Prove we can. But somewhere less likely to run into Jordan.”
“Jordan is going to be heading for Yanni’s office about now. If we stay off that track, we’ll miss him.”
This time he laughed. It made fair sense. Jordan was going to take about five minutes to realize he’d been given the office solo, and bet on it, Jordan wasn’t going to be working today, either.
Straight line course for Yanni’s office, no question.
Not that Yanni would do anything to make Jordan happier. Yanni didn’t do it, Ari’s final note had said. And she claimed she hadn’t done it.
So who had? What other authority was there, ruling his life?
Justin walked over to the desk, picked out the printout he’d been working over. Laid the project-book, open, on his desk, where he would work on it when he got back. “There. We’re officially moved in and my desk is officially cluttered, so it’s home. God knows what the fallout was from that card Jordan handed me. Opening barrage, in what’s going to be some kind of war, I’m afraid. A war for possession of us, for starters. For possession of Reseune, I’m very m
uch afraid. Jordan’s not going to win anything and I don’t think he’ll stop until someone stops him. And I don’t want that, Grant, damn, I really don’t want it.” His mood crashed. He leaned on his chair back. “He’s headed for a fall.”
“You think she’ll send him back to Planys?”
Deep down, he actually wished she would, this morning once and for all. And that was so startlingly dark and traitorous a thought that he felt deeply ashamed of himself. Jordan had spent twenty years in comparative privation, shut out of the modern world for a crime his accuser had likely committed; and his own son at least owed him some sympathy for the resultant bitterness, didn’t he?
But not when Grant was in danger from that sympathy: Ari had created Grant, Jordan had written some of his first tapes, knew at least his initial keywords and triggers, and if Jordan decided there might be flaws in Grant’s loyalty, and wanted to revise things, he could do major damage.
And hell if he’d let that happen, not if it meant Jordan going straight back into exile. He shoved back from the chair and picked up his coat.
“Jordan’s not making it easy for anybody,” he said grimly. “Not for me, not for you, not for two hours running since he’s been back.”
“Why does he do it?” Grant asked, reaching for his own coat. “What does an intelligent CIT want out of this situation?”
“Intelligent as he is, I’m afraid intelligence is nowhere in this situation.”
“You’re angry with him.” Halfway into the coat.
Justin settled his own onto his shoulders. “You noticed that.”
“Angry enough to take action against him as you did. That seems justified, from my own view.”
“I’m angry about being uprooted into an office that’s just damned backward to what I’ve been used to for most of my life. I’m angry at being co-opted deeper into Ari’s wing. I’m angry because I’m going to miss Abrizio’s…”