She called Hicks. Personally. “We’ve heard the news,” she said straight off to Hicks. “We want every whisper out of that situation, as fast as you get it. Route it to my security office. No matter if it’s raw.”
“I understand you, sera,” Hicks said. “You’ll have it as fast as we can produce it. Councillor Jacques has requested a Council inquiry, seconded by Councillor Lynch.”
Lynch hadn’t made a move in months—notoriously didn’t act, deferring consistently to his Proxy, namely Yanni, who was Councillor in all but name: but Lynch had waked up this morning and made an actual motion to get at the facts, fast, and locally.
“Lynch is probably scared,” she said disingenuously. “I’ll imagine Yanni is moving to protect him.”
“He is, sera,” Hicks said.
“Yanni is in charge,” she said. “I’m holding Reseune One ready, but it’s staying grounded. Security concerns. Protect Yanni. He’s not looking at his own safety. I’m looking at it for him.”
“We’re in agreement,” Hicks said. “I’ll trust if you hear anything, I’ll get that advisement.”
“I trust I’ll hear it from you fastest,” she said, and let him figure out what that meant, whether it was a compliment or an order. “Thank you, ser. I’ll let you get on it.”
She broke the contact. Sat staring at the police report. The Novgorod Police had the body; the Bureau of Defense wanted it; the Office of Inquiry demanded it be sent to the University, its usual recourse for scientific questions, and it was going on two hours since a frightened housemaid had found the body. By the minute, evidence was being lost.
At least the Bureau of Defense wasn’t investigating it as an internal matter, and the Office of Inquiry was going to win. Nobody trumped them; and currently they’d sent a hearse to the District Coroner’s office to collect Spurlin’s remains. The COI had also put a lock on the potential crime scene, and taken steps to secure all computer records and recent communications. She drew part of that from the news and part from the Office of Inquiry itself, which she could get to by passive inquiry, just riding Yanni’s authority. She didn’t lodge any requests. She just read.
And frowned at the screen, and asked herself what in hell they were going to do about it if something happened to Lynch, or worse, Jacques.
“Sera,” Florian said from the doorway of her office. “The COI has taken physical custody of the body. They’ll be at the University inside half an hour. They’ve assembled a team of experts.”
“This is just bad,” she said. “This is bad, Florian.”
“Catlin would say there’s a solution for it, sera.”
“What? Go to the station and assassinate Khalid? And then somebody else comes after us?”
“We have no idea regarding that, sera.”
“Come here.” Her tone had been sharp. She regretted it. It was loss of control, but she felt less safe than she had felt a certain number of days ago. People died. Every time things reached a point of decision, people died, and everybody shifted places. Denys. That was her fault. His own fault. But Patil, and Thieu, upset Yanni’s plans for things, and now Spurlin? Everything Yanni had put together was getting hammered by successive events, and the Eversnow business wasn’t even underway yet.
Worse, much worse, it began to raise a specter of who-benefitted, and that answer was beginning to shape up in a very ugly fashion.
Florian came close. She got up from her desk and hugged him, took his face between her hands and saw slight puzzlement. “I’m not criticizing,” she said. “Doing that is a possibility, a real one, if anything should happen to Yanni. If I take over, they’ll be after me, and I don’t trust that man.”
“We think they already are after you,” Florian said. “They surely plan for contingencies. And, more than a contingency, you’re a certainty, sera. You’re a hundred-percent certainty unless someone stops you. And we won’t permit that. None of us will permit that.”
She certainly was a target. The first Ari had been. And it was the same thing she’d said to Yanni: she didn’t remember the War. She didn’t remember the Treaty of Pell. She just read about it. The fine textures of history just went away, the fabric lost its tensions and shredded until it didn’t make thorough sense any more, and nobody knew now what the deeper part of the issues had been, except what they’d recorded during the actual negotiations.
But how could anybody of her generation pull all those hours of recorded history up, and listen to all of it, and understand it? You’d have to live all the hours of all those negotiations, and all the simultaneous other hours of every other record, and you still wouldn’t get the gestalt of having grown up in it. You knew more, viewing it from the perspective of another generation, because the hidden things came out, but you knew less, too, because the context that made it all make sense had gone away. The first Ari had been somebody’s target, and she’d died, but how could you know why she’d died without being there, and only Yanni and Jordan, of the people still living, had been real close to the facts…
And if Abban had done it, how had Abban gotten the notion? Abban was Giraud’s shadow, not Denys’. And Giraud had mourned the first Ari. He’d loved her, she knew Giraud had loved the first Ari, so how had Abban possibly been the instrument of the other brother’s policy?
“Sera?” Florian said in a hushed voice, and touched her hair, and looked at her the way she looked at him, only with more awareness than she’d had in the last few seconds. She felt half paralyzed, the way she felt when the brain started working and working and working, pulling things together from one side of flux and the other, nothing matching…nothing making sense.
The first Ari died. Her Florian and Catlin died. Maman died. Giraud died. Denys died. Abban died. Seely died.
Thieu died. Patil died. Now Spurlin. Seven were killed by violence. Three had been old. And now there was Spurlin. The odds were definitely not with natural causes, when power passed from hand to hand.
“A lot of people have died,” she said to Florian. “A lot of people. You can’t count Denys and Abban and Seely. That was us pushing back when they pushed us. But your predecessors and mine…why would Abban be taking Denys’ orders, if it was Abban that did it?”
“If Denys ran tape on him,” Florian said. “If somebody good set it up. Denys had a lot of opportunity.”
“Was he the only one who could?” she asked. Her hands had fallen to his shoulders. He was a safe haven, Florian was. “Who could get to him, else? Track that.”
Fabric of history, all decayed, all the evidence, evaporating with every stray gust from a vent. The rime ice melted. The body went to the sun. People went on dying around the hinge-points of power. It had gone on a long, long time. Before any time she remembered, certainly.
“What priority?” Florian asked her. His hands were at her waist. He’d become a young man. He’d become what he was designed to be and he asked an important question: in the crisis of the moment, with Spurlin dead and Jacques’ decisions in doubt and Lynch possibly next on somebody’s list—what priority, the investigation of three twenty-year-old murders?
Absolute priority. It was the environment of her life. It was the reason she existed. Because she existed, all the others had died: her doing, or others’ doing, because of her.
Some few were still alive, still in power, in various places. Some of them she trusted. And that could be deadly.
“High,” she said. “See if it was investigated, that first. Then see how well it was investigated.”
“We’ll do that,” Florian said.
She kissed him, not for any good reason, except it fuzzed the brain for a moment, and it felt good, and she wanted to feel good for a moment. She wanted to lie to her senses for a moment and say they were all safe.
But it wasn’t true. The kiss was over and she sent him off to Catlin and Wes and Marco, and knew he’d do both—keep up with what was going on and investigate old history, both, if he and Catlin had to give up sleep.
The
y weren’t safe. And the next few days were going to be hard ones. Dangerous. She wasn’t ready to take over. Yanni’d told her that. But events weren’t going to wait for her. People were pushing, already, to get places and do things before she could possibly interfere and change the rules. People might die, in that push.
She couldn’t prevent it. That was the point.
So far, she couldn’t prevent it.
BOOK THREE Section 5 Chapter i
JULY 24, 2424
0821H
Giraud and Seely and Abban all reached their twenty-third week. They swallowed…their lungs developed more passageways, and blood vessels, which would one day soon be useful: the proximity of these structures to each other would ultimately make it possible to breathe. Right now they drew their oxygen through the bioplasm of the artificial womb itself. And it rocked, and moved, and occasionally received sounds, internally generated, which made muscles twitch. By now, the brains sent faint light stimuli to a particular center, and sound to another. Nothing was overload. Everything was even keel.
They each weighed about half a kilo, and looked human. Seely weighed a few grams more than Giraud, and was a few centimeters taller. Abban was larger, and weighed six grams more than Giraud. Proportionately, he always would be larger. But Giraud would overtake both in girth, and Seely in weight, before he was fifty.
They moved, they turned. They had their own agendas, based somewhat on what the womb was doing. But something different had happened. The two wombs that contained azi were active at scheduled times. The one that contained a CIT was completely random. Chaos was a part of Giraud’s life now. Order had begun to assert itself in the other two. And that would always be true.
BOOK THREE Section 5 Chapter ii
JULY 25, 2424
1931H
Probably every vid in Reseune that wasn’t in a child’s room was tuned to the Novgorod news channel. That was probably true up on Cyteen Station.
This election mattered—immensely. The balance of power between parties was at stake. And nobody knew the results yet. The computers were counting and recounting and running complex check routines.
Justin and Grant occupied themselves with a manual, at home, over pizza—the downstairs restaurant, named Seasons, had done mostly deliveries tonight, very likely. Ari was closeted with her staff across the hall. Justin had seen the deliveryman with a trolley full of other orders, mostly pizza, with one address designation on it, and that was Amy’s apartment…so he had the notion a lot of people were there.
Yanni—Yanni wasn’t home, or if he was, he was quiet about it. More likely he was in his office; and if Ari wasn’t with her young friends for something this important, it was because Ari was busy and planned to be busy, whatever happened.
Himself, he just read through a great deal of Jordan’s notes, exactly replicated: he’d already read the basic program. So had Grant. And he couldn’t concentrate worth a damn, with the clock now thirty-three minutes past the anticipated hour of the announcement of results. So he skimmed ahead, looking for the last and next to last note Jordan had made on that manual. Sequence of note was determined by the outline of programming itself. But Jordan’s handwriting had changed over twenty years, and he knew the way it had changed. It wasn’t that hard to find the latest ones.
“Page 183.23,” he said to Grant, a little troubled by what he saw.
Grant flipped pages, settled.
A little line appeared between Grant’s brows.
The station had been playing old tape of Spurlin, discussing Gorodin’s term as Proxy, Gorodin’s death—natural causes, that; then commentators discussing Spurlin’s suspicious death and the fact the special team at the University Hospital hadn’t published a cause of death—discussing Khalid’s last administration, familiar stuff to anybody who hadn’t been living in the outback for the last ten years—including the famous argument with young Ari—over and over and over. They’d turned the audio way down.
But the breaking news flasher went on, and Justin said, “Minder, sound.”
Audio came up. “The five minute alert has been given. We are five minutes away from hearing the results of…”
BOOK THREE Section 5 Chapter iii
JULY 25, 2424
1940H
“…the Bureau of Defense election,” the vid said, and the web didn’t get the results or relay them any faster—just the timelag between Cyteen Station, where the counting was done, and Novgorod, where the news station resided. Base One, directly receiving the satellite, was a fraction faster than the news station.
Microdifference, in the scheme of things. Ari forced herself to have a sip of water and waited as the minute counter ran. Florian and Catlin, Marco and Wes, and Theo and Jory all watched the big screen. Nobody said anything.
She had contingencies in mind. She hadn’t said what they were, because she didn’t want even her most intimate staff knowing what she’d do in certain instances, in case that what-she’d-do changed someday, putting staff at disadvantage.
Second sip of water.
The seconds ticked down. Two minutes and fewer.
She put a call through to Amy’s apartment, where all the gang was. “Amy? Ari here.”
Amy answered, nearly instantly. “Ari?”
“Listening, I take it. If it’s Spurlin I’ll send champagne down there. If it’s Khalid—you’re on your own. In either case—I’m going to be busy for a bit. Hang on.”
“We’re with you,” Amy said.
Twenty-one seconds. Fifteen. Ten. Five.
The flasher came up, computer-generated, the actual tally of votes, and the result.
Spurlin by 65 percent.
“We elected the dead man,” she said, and let go a breath as her staff visibly relaxed and as cheers erupted in Amy’s apartment. “Just a second.” She punched in Yanni’s office while the gang celebrated. “Yanni.”
“Told you” Yanni said.
“I told you,” she said. “Go have a party. I have my own to go to.”
“Not a tear for poor old Spurlin.”
“What for? We got his revenge for him. Just carry on what we’re doing.”
The autopsy had come in. Delicate death. A scarcely detectible drug, administered in the morning coffee. Murder. Council hadn’t wanted to announce that before the election. Now it was going to break, and occupy the news.
“…incumbent Councillor Jacques,” the news channel was saying, introducing its next speaker, and the staff paid absolutely silent attention.
“Jacques is on,” she said to Yanni. “Let him finish. Then go get some sleep.”
“I’ll wait to hear all of it,” Yanni said, and was silent while Jacques said…
“The Bureau of Defense mourns the passing of elected Councillor Spurlin, in which sentiment I know I am joined by candidate Vladislaw Khalid. The constitution provides that if a candidate for a Council seat dies between the closing of the polls and the reading of results, the incumbent Councillor for that bureau may, at his discretion, remain in office for the next term. I am opting to remain as Councillor for Defense. I will at a future date name a Proxy Councillor…”
Ari frowned. “Yanni.”
“I heard.”
“…as I see fit. Let us all join in paying tribute to a man…”
And so on.
“Did he agree? Is he still going to name Bigelow?”
“I don’t know what game he’s playing,” Yanni said. “I’m going to find out, but, dammit, this isn’t something for phone calls. Release the damned plane.”
Jacques, if Spurlin won posthumously, was supposed to have immediately named Gorodin’s long-time aide, Vice Admiral Tanya Bigelow, as Proxy Councillor for Defense. All Jacques had to do then was warm that chair until they could organize another election, and Khalid, defeated, had to wait two years. It had all been handled.
Jacques had just gone sideways.
“Ari?”
“Khalid got to him,” she said. “Khalid got to him. God,
this isn’t looking like Paxer business, Yanni. This isn’t.”
“I’ve got to get down there,” Yanni said. “I’m taking plenty of security, but I have to get there. I have to talk to Jacques directly. Dammit, Ari, either take over right now, or don’t. Don’t try to steer from the passenger seat.”
She didn’t want to agree. She saw the situation, however, just the same as Yanni. And he was right this time. Jacques was under threat, or he’d been paid off, and she’d guess the former.
“Yanni, I’ll clear the flight. Protect Lynch. Above all, take care of yourself.”
Florian and Catlin had come over to her, where she sat with the mini, linked into the minder. They had a much quieter manner than a few moments ago. Marco and Wes joined them, just stood and waited.
“Yanni’s going to Novgorod,” she said, “to talk to Jacques. Someone’s gotten to him. Maybe Yanni can supply enough security to give him a little backbone. Khalid’s people killed Spurlin, I’ll bet on it. All of a sudden I’m wondering about Patil and Thieu.”
“Khalid is still up on the station,” Catlin said.
“And out of reach. Out of our reach. But he has fingers down here. We need to know where, and into what. We need to know why Jacques changed his mind. Yanni’s going to ask that question personally. He’s relying on Hicks’s men to protect him. I’m not liking this. I’m not liking this at all.”
“We’ll keep informed,” Florian said.
“Inform me,” she said, “at any hour of the day or night. If anything happens to Yanni, under Hicks’s protection—” She thought about it, about the danger of a man with that many keys to the systems…when the source of the danger might lie well within the impenetrable heart of another Bureau. “Get ready to take Hicks down, dead or alive, I’m imposing no conditions. Just don’t risk yourselves. Remember I can axe his accesses. If I hear anything untoward out of Novgorod, Hicks is gone.”