Regenesis

  That hurt. That really hurt, and it really bothered her—she didn’t cry about it, but the information just bored a sore spot in her heart, until finally she psyched herself and said Maman had changed her mind eventually, that it didn’t matter how it had started, she’d finally Gotten her Maman, all unexpected, because Maman had turned out to love her. She wouldn’t believe that wasn’t so.

  Well, it was what you got for getting into people’s records and eavesdropping: you caught people saying things you never wanted to hear, and this one, hurtful as it was, taught her that in a major way.

  But what she found went on teaching her. She couldn’t leave it where she’d left it. She couldn’t stop looking at it.

  She got into Maman’s records, too. She’d never gotten a letter from Maman after Maman had gone away to space, and there were no letters from Maman hidden in the record, but she did find her Maman’s report on her when she was five. She’s a handful. But site’s bright. God, she’s bright, She scares me.

  Ari Senior had also said—this turned up in Maman’s letters—Let Strassen choose the second surrogate. And Maman was going to pick Yanni to take over her upbringing after Maman went back to space, but Giraud hadn’t allowed that.

  That was worth a Mad, too: Giraud had just overridden Maman, being head of Security. He’d sent Maman to space, then ignored her choice, and ended up choosing Denys, as being a relative closer to her as well as actually being a Special himself, without the Senate declaration that said so. Which Yanni wasn’t.

  No question where Giraud’s reasoning lay, however. Giraud hadn’t wanted any power edging over into Yanni’s hands, and Yanni was the man that would take it and do what he pleased.

  And of possible candidates to take her on, Giraud wasn’t of the disposition. But Denys had agreed to it. Denys had probably just hated it; but Denys would have done it to get power.

  Possibly, too, it was because Denys couldn’t stand not knowing how she was developing. Denys had liked puzzles. And she’d been a puzzle to him—at close range. And by the time he was in it, he’d realized that an azi nurse wasn’t going to keep her from disrupting his life, nor was domestic staff, nor even his own bodyguard.

  The Child has subverted the minder, she read on a certain date, in a frustrated communication to Giraud. She eluded Seely. She’s a monster.

  She liked that one. It echoed Maman, in a Denys tone. She forgot for two seconds that she’d lost one and killed the other. For a fluxed second she was just there again, a little girl in Denys’s household, pursuing a Mad about losing Maman, a Mad that had never let her be friendly with Denys and never would.

  Or maybe it was just good taste, she thought. She’d picked her enemies, and she’d been pretty accurate so far.

  And then, with the thought of Denys, she riffled through the rest of that electronic file, the one that slowly built a case against Denys, finding justification for killing him—

  And, still in flux-state, back to Yanni’s file, as large as Denys’, in Base One.

  Was there a connection? Did one temporary authority equal the other? Was Yanni on the level with her?

  Denys might have killed her predecessor, and then made it look as if Jordan had done it, so Jordan was exiled for it. Or at least—Giraud had dug up the evidence. Giraud had hated the Warricks with a passion.

  But it had been Yanni who had actually brokered the Family deal that got Jordan into Planys, close and protected. There was a lot more security at Planys for several reasons—the military base, the isolation of oceans you couldn’t even fly across without decon; the fact that Planys worked on a lot of military projects and every communication that went out of there went through security. If they’d sent Jordan to space for exile, there’d have been ship-calls, people coming and going. Not at Planys.

  So it was both a closer arrest, and a safer one—nobody was going to assassinate Jordan inside PlanysLabs, where visitors were so closely tracked. Giraud had been perfectly capable of arranging an accident, wherever else Jordan might have ended up, inside some Reseune facility. Yanni had saved Jordan from that.

  Giraud had had power, a great deal of power just after the first Ari had died. And he had used it. A lot. So you could say he’d benefitted from Ari dying, and that was a motive. You could almost suspect him of killing the first Ari.

  But in all his communications and even messages to Denys, he’d really been upset by Ari’s death. He’d seemed to view it as a tremendous loss to Reseune—worse, a premature one, before they’d gotten the psychogenesis project really organized. They’d taken a whole year getting her started. So for one reason or another, they really hadn’t been ready.

  And once she’d started looking and sounding like her predecessor, Giraud had warmed up to her, and started doing her favors in a very fond way. She hadn’t wanted to like him. But she’d ended up liking him, and still did, even knowing what he’d done to the Warricks.

  The hour the first Ari had died, she’d arranged for the first Florian and the first Catlin not to be with her—she’d sent Florian and Catlin each off on an errand. She’d been alone, then. Jordan had come in. The sniffer at least proved that. Jordan admitted they’d had an argument, which no monitor had picked up—again, some device had broken, and nobody knew how. She’d died. But the crime scene had been muddled up because Denys argued they should call in the Moreyville police, not to have it investigated only by ReseuneSec, so as not to have any political accusations of a coverup. And in that process there’d been a lot of people going in and out, which they never should have been allowed to do, that was Yanni’s note on the case. The sniffers’ evidence was muddled for the same reason there were fingerprints all over—a lot of people used that lab, and a lot of people had been in and out in the immediate furor over Ari’s death before the Moreyville investigators ever got there.

  Should she take that at face value, as just the confusion of a bad, bad moment in Reseune’s history? Maybe. The authority that ran everything had died, and for an hour or so nobody had been running things. Departments were all running at their own admin levels, no coordination, nobody to call or appeal to, until Giraud and Yanni had stepped in.

  And Ari sending Florian and Catlin away…had she known she’d never see them again? Had she known she was killing them? Had she kept that cold a face and not given anything away to them, who’d have read her the way her Florian and her Catlin could read her? Some people thought the first Ari had killed herself. But she didn’t know how the first Ari could have ever gotten that intention past her Florian and Catlin, if they were anything like hers.

  She scanned Ari’s notes from immediately before she died. She had, a hundred times. She searched administrative comments on Jordan, and bastard was about the sum of comments from Giraud and no few others, plus a note that Jordan had found out about Ari having run an intervention on Justin, and that Jordan was madder than hell.

  But Ari’s records stopped with the lab notes, right at the end of a sentence. Period. Was it significant that Ari had finished her last sentence? She would finish a sentence, herself, even if somebody came in while she was writing. It was just the way she was.

  Base One had apparently shut down the instant Ari’s death was logged. Base One had gone into an entirely different mode, truncated its wide information-gathering to a single, computer-driven thread, all but shut down—for so many years some people must haw thought Denys’s base in the house system had actually become Base One, even if it called itself Base Two. But Denys had known better. Denys had gotten her to log onto Base One when she was old enough. And maybe he’d hoped he could get his own access on it. But it hadn’t done a lot when Denys was there.

  And then Base One had said, Hello, Ari. In her predecessor’s voice. In her room. She’d gained her secret friend. Her childhood advisor. Denys had been aware she used Base One to a certain extent, after that, but his Base continued as the dominantly active one in System. Maybe he knew Base One would be pegged to her age, and that she wouldn’t be
able to use it until she was the right age. But Base One had always treated her as two years older than she really was.

  Denys had been safe until she’d gotten the keys to open Base One wide and set it back to work at full stretch, as it had been in the first Ari’s day, assembling and collating all the log notes from the years it had been asleep—and it suddenly took priority.

  She sped through the mundane records. Being prime in System, nearly identical with System, Base One left no footprints where it went. She’d asked it to bring up remarks in which she or her predecessor or Maman had figured. It found those. And later, it found Justin’s.

  She felt abraded, rubbed raw, when she read Denys’s message to Giraud, saying, “Strassen spoiled the little bitch. Systematically.”

  Her eyes stung. She backed off, mentally, and just scanned it—she could read very, very last—and picked out keywords that were highlighted in colors. She got vocal records and listened to tone of voice, reserving judgement. It didn’t come out better for Denys or Giraud. She heard Abban’s remarks, that cold, distinct voice that sent chills through her. Abban had been near the labs when Ari died.

  But Abban had been Giraud’s bodyguard in those years, before Giraud died and Abban joined Seely in Denys’ household.

  Curious. Companion azi went in ones. Bodyguards went in twos. And neither Abban nor Seely had been companion azi, not if you really knew them. They’d been like Florian and Catlin, products of the training down in Green Barracks, and deadly dangerous. Giraud had been born, and seven years later, Denys had been born, and Abban and Seely had been in the household with Giraud. When Giraud was sixteen and making his first trip to Novgorod with his mother, leaving nine-year-old Denys at Reseune. Abban had gone with Giraud, and Seely had stayed with Denys. Which was the way it had been, forever after, when they set up separate domiciles. That was the way it had been until Giraud died.

  Had it started out a partnership, Abban with Seely? It wasn’t in the manuals, which had been maintained by Giraud’s mother, for starters. It would have been Giraud’s mother who had failed to record that small detail: she was the expert that had run them, at the start.

  A weird arrangement between the brothers—seven years separated in birth, but so, so close lifelong that they were part of each other and neither ever married or had a relationship…and a mother who didn’t keep complete records of azi under her management, who had, possibly, a secret few pages to those manuals that she didn’t enter into the record. For what logical reason?

  Some furtive sense of protection of her boys, a layer of security’ that would always tie them together?

  To judge by the rest of the world, Reseune had some real odd family connections, things that weren’t ordinary. For one thing, people who ran birthlabs could do pretty much as they pleased—Jordan wanted a Parental Replicate, and the first Ari had encouraged it, and so there was Justin. Ari wanted a tag on Justin, so she created Grant—especially for Justin, and one of a kind.

  So Geoffrey Nye had had two sons that were as different as different came, seven years apart and yet as joined as anybody could be who wasn’t cloned. They were natural-born, those two—that was unusual, in Reseune’s administration. They’d had a mother who’d actually lived married to their father, so normal by Novgorod standards you could expect Giraud and Denys to turn out as normal as anybody could ever be. But their mother had been a psych operator, and Denys’ Rezner scores had been off the high end of genius. God knew what she’d tried on her own sons, promoting that intellect—she’d wanted Giraud to come up to Denys’ level—but she never could turn one into the other. And then she’d died, along with her husband, in a boating accident, and not a common one. The boat had caught fire, out on the Novaya Volga, where you just didn’t open the cabin to the outside atmosphere. It had been pretty nasty.

  And maybe it was because she was so tired tonight, maybe it was because Yanni was meeting with Corain and Spurlin and Justin was meeting with Jordan, and because she’d found Maman hadn’t been in any loving mood when she’d agreed to bring her up, and because Denys, who knew one when he saw one, had called her a monster—all these truths had landed on her in one evening, with dinner being way late and Florian coming into her office and saying, for the third or fourth time, regarding the late dinner, “Sera, you really need more staff.”

  “Then you pick them!” she said peevishly. “Do it. You set the number. You know what’s needed better than I do. Just pick them, for God’s sake.”

  “Yes, sera,” Florian said and went away ever so quietly. That didn’t make her feel better at all, but she was still raw-nerved and she didn’t want to talk to anybody.

  They weren’t that badly off with the staff they had, if they’d just had a better cook. There’d been a time this winter when Florian had been making dinner and they’d lived on sandwiches, but they had their little staff, people they’d gotten from random picks, mainly from old Dr. Watts, who’d died, and whose sad little staff needed reassigning; and one good pick out of Amy’s dispersed office for a supplies clerk: Callie. Callie had gone into her service as acting majordomo, and she was going to shift back to household supplies when they got somebody trained for the post; Callie didn’t like dealing with CITs if she could avoid it. But Callie managed so far. Meanwhile a pastry chef who’d been released by general staff as too emotional for the huge cafeteria kitchens was serving as their general cook, which was why dinner had been late tonight.

  It wasn’t a staff: it was a collection, and yes, it needed seeing to, and yes, the cook had burned supper two nights in a row the first week they’d had him and last night delayed an entire hour putting together pork sandwiches—provoking Catlin to suggest armed force might hasten dinner—but Ari didn’t really care about that at the moment. Florian had looked upset when he left, which only made her feel worse, but she was one jump from breaking something, throwing something, or bursting into tears. The first Ari had hurt her Florian. She never, ever wanted to do that, and right now she was so fluxed she couldn’t even go track him down and talk to him.

  Yanni, dammit, Yanni. What are you doing to me?

  Flux-thinking. The mind skipped, one topic to the next, all of it connected only because one brain held it all in one confused packet before it lay down to sleep and sleep purged the chemicals that had held everything in a forced relationship. Flux-thinking. Skipping between categories. Skipping between emotional states. Linking things that weren’t linked and then getting way fluxed because there was an emotional charge left over from something else that wasn’t even related.

  It was how CITs routinely did things. Azi, which were started on logical, orderly input from the hour of their birth, didn’t flux—well, the high ones did, but generally had rather not.

  She, being CIT, being more than bright, and having a lot of circuits, was fluxed as hell, and knew it: mixing categories and jumping from one thought to the next in high flux—that was how ideas were born out of nothing. But she so wanted to sleep, and didn’t want to take a sleeping pill—there’d been too many pills.

  Get some rest, Justin had scolded her. He knew she was taking cataphoric and deepstudying too many hours. He knew she was strung out, but she was trying to watch all of Reseune while Yanni was gone, because she didn’t really feel safe with him gone and only ReseuneSec in charge. Hicks, who ran ReseuneSec, hadn’t stopped her taking down Denys, but then she’d come in by surprise and gotten control of System. She didn’t feel quite comfortable with ReseuneSec now that she’d resigned her takeover, and let Hicks, as Giraud’s second-in-command, assume his authority and his office. She didn’t know him. She never had known him, except that Giraud had trusted him.

  So in this interval while Yanni was gone, just so as not to give anybody any ideas, she’d sealed herself into her apartment with a staff she fairly well could trust, while she ran her own security checks, because she wasn’t clear who to trust and who not in any given department. They were names to her, was all, and she didn’t know histori
es, or how they connected to things that had happened.

  She was watching things for Yanni, that was what he’d said. Keep an eye on things while I’m gone. And like a silly azi she’d taken it as something she ought to do as a point of responsibility, along with her studies and everything else. She wasn’t trusting of Hicks, even if he had stood back and let her deal with Denys. But once she’d gotten into what was going on in Novgorod, all the same, it turned out she’d have done better to keep a closer eye on Yanni himself for the last several months.

  A meeting with Spurlin. Dinner with Mikhail Corain, in Yanni’s hotel room. And no record kept that she had yet reached via Base One, which meant he hadn’t recorded it in Base Two. She wanted Yanni back here. She wanted him back so she could look him in the eyes and see him answer and hear a really good explanation of what business he had having an off-record supper with Ari Senior’s old enemy—after an off-record meeting with Defense, which was a bureau that hadn’t been that nice to her at all.

  That didn’t make for a good night’s sleep, no matter how badly she needed it.

  BOOK ONE Section 1 Chapter vii

  APRIL 26, 2424

  1506H

  Keyboarding flowed and went on flowing, a spate of pure creation. The hindbrain could do one thing, recording what the brain had already decided had to happen, while the conscious and unconscious raced ahead, doing what they most liked to do. Occasionally Ari muttered a voice command, like a third hand, to locate a piece of programming and get it in queue, hardly noticing.

  She tagged certain things to her just-finished voice recording, then issued another command to autocheck and report on bugs and mandatory halts, a caution, before locking that little bit—and everything ever to be chained to it—firmly into Base One’s files.