Stop everything he personally was doing, detour for a year or so to rescue Jordan from his twenty-year-gap?
Maybe he was a selfish ingrate. Maybe he should spare a couple of years, out of a long life.
And every time he thought about doing it his stomach knotted up.
A couple of years couldn’t make Jordan happy. He could take Jordan off to the wilds up by the new lab they were building and do dedicated deepstudy until he could get Jordan factually up to date, and Grant could meanwhile work on Paul in that isolation—he’d actually thought about it—but what would they have at the end of it? An up-to-date Jordan who was never going to accept Reseune the way it was—who’d given him that card, damn him, knowing they were being watched.
Jordan had done it deliberately, knowing he was going to run his son and Grant straight into an inquiry, if—hell, if!—he’d done it because someone in security would have spotted that card—Jordan would have been disappointed if they hadn’t.
It was bait, was what. It was Jordan stirring the pot, seeing what would happen—maybe hoping his son would be stopped, harassed, that the card would be confiscated and gone over by security—and so would his son be, which would throw him into a funk where Jordan could psychologically get at him; or maybe bring Grant running, in distress, right into Jordan’s hands, or maybe get him severed from Ari’s company and put under equal suspicion.
And what was the number? What in hell was Jordan doing? The thing was radioactive. You didn’t want to touch it. The room they were in was bugged beyond a doubt.
He couldn’t stand it.
He couldn’t stand it a moment longer.
“Grant.”
Keystrokes stopped. “Mmm?”
“Did you chance to look at that card?”
“It wasn’t chance.”
Heartbeat bumped. Leave it to Grant. “What was on it?” he asked.
“A number.”
“What number?”
“It had the form of a personal number. I recall it. Do you want me to find out?” Grant asked.
“No,” he said, and made a sudden decision: he didn’t want Grant involved, didn’t want to be on record doing anything furtive. “No, I will.”
He windowed up the message function and shot a query out straight to Ari’s security office address. WHAT WAS ON THE CARD JORDAN GAVE ME? DO YOU KNOW?
The answer came back fairly quickly. A CONTACT NUMBER AT THE UNIVERSITY IN NOVGOROD. A WOMAN NAMED SANDI PATIL. DO YOU KNOW THAT PERSON?
He typed: NOT A CLUE.
The answer came back, under Ari’s household ID, no further name telling who he was talking to: SENIOR LECTURER WITH A SPECIALITY IN BIONANISTICS. THERE IS NO APPARENT CONNECTION WITH JORDAN. WHAT IS YOUR THEORY?
His heart began a series of labored beats, old familiar fear, of a flavor he’d known for all the bad years, the twenty years when the Nyes had run Reseune. He typed: IS THIS FLORIAN?
—CATLIN, SER. MY QUESTION?
—I HAVE NO IDEA WHY HE WOULD GIVE ME THAT NUMBER. I DON’T KNOW THIS WOMAN. I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH HER FIELD. HER FIELD HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH MY FATHER’S, EITHER, AS I’M SURE YOU’RE WELL AWARE.
Grant had gotten out of his chair, and leaned over to see the screen. Set a hand on his shoulder. His heart beat harder and harder, the old instincts awake and alert.
—WE DON’T KNOW THE REASON OF THIS CONTACT, SER, OR OF HIS GIVING IT TO YOU. BUT THE RESTRICTED MILITARY NATURE OF THE PROFESSOR’S RESEARCH URGES CAUTION.
Bionanistics. God. Manufacturing? Genetic machines? Experimental, self-replicating life? Military secrecy?
—I HAVE NO IDEA, he typed. HE’S NEVER MENTIONED ANY SUCH CONTACT TO ME.
—WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE DONE WITH THE NOTE IF YOU WERE WELL-DISPOSED TO OBEY YOUR FATHER AT THE TIME?
Thump. Thump-thump. I SUPPOSE I WOULD HAVE LOOKED UP THE NUMBER. MAYBE I’D HAVE CALLED THIS PERSON IN NOVGOROD IF I WERE A TOTAL FOOL AND WANTED TO KNOW WHAT IT MEANT OR WHERE IT LED. I’M NOT A FOOL. AND I’D HOPE MY FATHER KNOWS I’M NOT. I’M NOT INTERESTED IN HIS OLD BUSINESS, WHATEVER IT IS, AND I THINK HE KNOWS THAT, TOO. He added that last sentence and felt like a traitor, for reasons not entirely well-defined. He manipulated azi minds for a living—and his own motivations eluded him. There damned sure wasn’t any connection of experience with Jordan left for him, nothing but an identical biology. CATLIN, I’M ENTIRELY UPSET BY THIS SITUATION.
—UNDERSTANDABLE, came the answer. SO YOU HAVE NO INCLINATION TO PURSUE THE INFORMATION.
—NONE WHATSOEVER, he answered back.
—BE AWARE THAT INFORMATION OR DEVICES INVOLVING DR. PATIL COULD PASS IN FORMS VERY DIFFICULT TO DETECT. TAKE PRECAUTIONS IN ANY FUTURE DEALINGS WITH YOUR FATHER, WITH THIS IN MIND.
—I TAKE THE WARNING. THANK YOU.
Catlin signed off. He did. He felt sick. He didn’t move. He felt the pressure of Grant’s fingers, and finally got up from the chair, knowing, damn them all, that everything he said was being recorded, watched, parsed, combed through.
“Security’s upset. I can’t blame them. Nanistics. They don’t want the experimental stuff on a planet…particularly the one we happen to live on. Particularly the one the radicals have wanted to terraform for the last century or so. Damn. Damn. Damn it, Grant. I don’t want any part of this. What is he doing to me? What does he think he’s doing?”
Grant shook his head slowly, helplessly. “Logic tells me he wants you involved with him in his situation. Beyond that—”
It hit like a hammer blow. He could have said it himself ten times, even thought it himself, and not heard it quite the same way, but from Grant, in that calm, reasoned way Grant struggled to navigate CIT emotional insanity, it made utter, reasonable sense. Jordan wasn’t azi. Neither he nor Jordan had, as Grant liked to put it, their logic-set at the foundation of their reasoning. No. They were born-men, and born-men grew up by chance, not by tape-study. Emotions ruled their actions, foundational, and inescapable. Flux-thinking at its finest.
Jordan had created him out of his own geneset and Jordan had lost him. Lost him to Ari, who had done things to Jordan’s work that Jordan couldn’t counter, and the new Ari was co-opting him out of Jordan’s reach.
“The government didn’t kill him for killing Ari,” he said aloud, to Grant’s worried look. “they could only exile him. So he figures whatever he does, exile’s the worst that will ever happen to him. He created me. He wants me back. He’s making his best play.”
“To get you on the outs with Yanni.”
“To get us all sent to Planys, where he ran his own little world.” Things clicked, just clicked, all of a sudden. “It might have been a prison, but he ran it, inside, and Ari ripped him out of it and brought him here to put him under what he sees as close house arrest. He’s not grateful for it, not once he got here and saw the way things are: he’s damned pissed. He wants me to break with Ari. He wants to create a situation. I don’t know who this Patil is, or how Jordan got that number, but Patil isn’t really the game…”
BOOK ONE Section 2 Chapter vi
APRIL 26, 2424
1659H
“…it’s him. Maybe he hates Patil. Or maybe there’s something actually going on, and he doesn’t give a damn about it, because they’re trying to use him—the old radicals—hell, I don’t know how they could have gotten to him, but he won’t play anybody else’s game. Just his own, always his own, the hell with anybody else.”
Interesting observation, Ari thought, sitting beside Catlin at the eon-sole. The audio clip ran to its conclusion:
“Will you go to Yanni?” Grant had asked.
And Justin: “I’m going to give Catlin another phone call. I’m not taking this. I’m not taking this from him. He wants us back under suspicion, he wants us arrested, he wants me upset, he’ll make himself the martyr, so we both get sent to Planys, back to his private kingdom, and he has years to work on us… Damn it. Grant, you’re right.”
“Did he call you?” Ari asked, when the clip ended.
br />
“Yes,” Catlin said, with a nod. “He did. He said—” She keyed another clip, listened, then made it audible.
“…he doesn’t give a damn about this Dr. Patil. He’s after me. He wants to get me at odds with admin and better yet, get us all sent back to Planys, where he has a base.”
“Why would he pick Dr. Patil?” recorded-Catlin asked.
“I’ve no idea. An outside and problematic contact he once had. Somebody he didn’t really know and doesn’t care about. Maybe somebody he hates. I just don’t know.”
Catlin stopped the clip.
“Jordan Warrick is a very interesting person,” Ari said. “And now Justin’s quite angry at him. Jordan’s supposed to be good at Working. Very good. I wonder if he intended all he got from Justin.”
“Warrick Senior’s behavior seems self-destructive,” Catlin said.
“Not only self-destructive,” Ari said. “He’d gladly take us with him. He seems to want things back the way they were before I was born, and he’s bound to be frustrated with me.”
“There is a solution to this,” Catlin said.
Kill him, Catlin meant. It wasn’t legal to do, but that certainly wouldn’t stop Catlin and Florian, if she ordered it. And very likely Yanni wouldn’t let her or them take the consequences for it. There was far too much invested in her. So she could even get away with it, under the law.
But not in Justin’s eyes, and the likelihood that Justin would find out sooner or later—oddly enough that was the first Stop the thought ran into. Not the Law. Justin.
Jordan was just very, very interesting—someone from the first Ari’s time, a piece of the puzzle of the first Ari’s life and death that had been missing all these. Everyone had said Jordan was a problem.
He certainly was. A very high-powered problem. He was attempting to Work his son, whatever else this was about, and Justin possibly had it figured out entirely accurately.
It was also clear Jordan Warrick still had secrets. The first Ari had wanted him for a partner: they’d worked together productively for a while, before their personalities clashed. Politics had been part of it—the Centrist Party with their program of stopping further explorations, concentrating Union into a tight, strong knot, so that their longtime rivals over at Pell’s Star—the Alliance—had to concentrate there, too. So no one would be expanding. If mankind went on exploring and expanding and trying to out-race each other to likely stars, expanding so fast they had to use birthlabs to multiply fast enough to keep economies going, the Centrists feared that so much use of birthlabs was going to change mankind—
And that was quite true. It was changing the balance in the genome. It had, already, in much more than just the genome. There were differences between them and Alliance and Earth far other than genetic balance.
But psychosociology wasn’t the reason why Jordan had aligned with the Centrists. Oh, no. His reason for taking their side was that the first Ari and most of Reseune was Expansionist. The first Ari’s whole life’s work was Expansionist.
And, not too strange to say, Jordan had taken up corresponding with the Centrists and their more radical branch at about the time the partnership between himself and Ari had broken up…so figure that Jordan didn’t really believe in the Centrist Party or give a damn about their fears for the future. He’d just used them.
Interesting.
Interesting, interesting.
“We’re going to watch him,” Ari said. “Yanni’s managing this so far. I’m sure you’ll tell him there was some sort of a leak, when you think it’s right to do.”
“Hicks has given us agents to be totally at our disposal,” Catlin said. “Thirty, with clericals.”
This was news. “Because of Jordan Warrick?”
“Perhaps. Ser Warrick, Dr. Patil, Dr. Thieu, and events unforeseen. We laid down conditions to our working with this staff. Florian is over at the barracks going through their records, analyzing the abilities of what we’ve been given.”
“A permanent gift? From Hicks?”
“Permanent, yes, sera. Much like the protection the first Ari had, high-level ReseuneSec, with accesses, only Florian said we wouldn’t take them except if you hold the Contracts, sera.”
“The first Ari’s guard. They were Contracted to Reseune itself?”
“Not our predecessors. But yes, the others were. Your predecessor never internalized the staff ReseuneSec lent her—she rather used all of ReseuneSec; but we think that may have been a problem, that her security staff wasn’t wholly hers. We’re taking care of that. You need to hold those Contracts.”
“To be inside the apartment?” She was a little appalled. “We need domestic staff.”
“Those are coming, sera. But we were offered the others. They can have a barracks here, in the wing, an adjunct office with computer ties to ReseuneSec. We’re moving out the rest of the records storage and taking over the guest apartment on the first floor. We can cancel everything if it’s not a good idea. But there’s room for them on the first floor, down by the old lab, and they won’t be in the apartment—we wouldn’t let them in, until we’re very comfortable with them; though I’m sure, when they are Contracted, that they’d like you to be there, sera. If it’s all right.”
That was a natural thing, an emotional thing. And it would cement the Contract, in that sense. She’d be their Supervisor, the CIT they’d come to in distress or in need—to be remote from them was unacceptable. And she’d told Florian to see to staff. He certainly had. She’d turned them loose to see to things, and they’d done it without making a ripple in her own schedule…maybe a bit widely, but—all the same—they had the chance to gain loyal personnel. That wasn’t a bad idea.
“Of course,” she said. “Of course I will. When are they coming in?”
“Soon. A few days. The domestic staff should get here first. Florian’s checking on their progress while he’s down the hill.”
“You’ve been very quiet to be so busy.”
“These are things we can do. I hope we’ve done them well enough.”
She’d been completely lost in her work, her deepstudy and her own tracking of problems down in Novgorod, out of touch with domestic issues, so long as her clothes appeared clean and her breakfast and supper arrived mostly on time. She walked about with her head stuffed with population equations and spent her days in the first Ari’s population dynamics designs—she’d reached a point, a strange point in such study, when whole disciplines had begun to come into focus, as if the brain had started assembling all the scattered bits of what had been her predecessor’s operations two decades ago, and put it all together. She was at that critical point, dammit, on the verge of overload, and she just went there on any stray thought, far, far from the needs of domestic staff. Her head ached—literally ached—from the effort it was to jump between the real world and Ari’s world, and back again—to try to grasp the underlying reasons for the ethics her predecessor had installed to patch what had already been done at Novgorod—laying down the commandment to work, and the necessity for recreation, and above all the mantra “We are different as our world is different, and our different world is a valuable resource…”
Hell, that was dangerous. It was sweeping, it had no exceptions, it was potentially troublesome, and the first Ari had dared embed that in the tape, high and wide, which was the way she worked. Half a million Novgoroders kept voting against terraforming, and, azi-originated as they were, and doggedly devoted to work for validation—they had deep suspicions about CIT-descended Centrists and about proposals for terraforming, and were increasingly inclined in the last ten years to favor red-brown architecture, one might note—the color of Cyteen’s outback.
Was that significant?
Was that going to produce a problem integrating into Union ethic as a whole—where her predecessor had done other interesting tweaks in local mindsets?
“Sera?” Catlin asked, and she blinked. That was how she was lately. That was the territory where her own though
ts wandered, and the choice of protective and service staff—essential to her safety—became just part of the overload.
“I think it’s likely very fine what you’ve done.” She brought herself to short-focus on it, and try to integrate it into her concept of her household, and how it was all going to work, and Catlin was right to persist in getting an answer out of her. You couldn’t make mistakes with azi. You couldn’t just Contract them and throw them away.
And it was scary, thinking of all the changes racketing around her.
She had two people in all the world—Florian and Catlin—that she trusted to be competent and devoted to her—an array of people like Sam and Yanni, that she trusted for other fields, but when it came down to it, it was Florian and Catlin who would keep her alive and give her time to pursue those abstracts she chased through the maze of records.
They reported to her. They made choices—in this case, they’d made one that affected the household around her.
And more security. Her life, certainly—maybe Union’s survival—depended on her bodyguards’ judgement.
“I have no doubt of you,” she said briskly to Catlin, totally focused for the moment on the here and now, and Catlin’s fair demand for her to back them or not. “Do what you see fit to do. Did Justin stay in the Wing today?”
“Working in his office, since a late breakfast, sera. So is Grant. Perfectly cooperative. Jordan called him; Justin left the office and went to breakfast. There was, however, no contact between them beyond that. Justin and his companion spoke only to the waiters at the restaurant and to each other. And he of course communicated with me. Jordan staved in his new office with Paul and rearranged things. He found two bugs. It wasn’t all.”
Ari gave a perfunctory laugh, not whole-hearted, more wistful. “It would be so much nicer if Jordan weren’t an enemy. Does Justin like his life, I wonder? Is he mad at me, do you think?”