“Don’t move…”
“Pain and pleasure, sweet, are so thin a line. You can cross it a dozen times a minute, and the pain becomes the pleasure. I can show you. You’ll remember what I can do for you, sweet, and nothing will ever be like it. You’ll think about that, you’ll think about it for the rest of your life…and nothing will ever be the same…”
He opened his eyes and found a shadow over him, himself naked, in a bed he did not know, a hand patting his shoulder, moving to brush hair from his brow. “Well, well, awake,” Ari said. It was her weight that pushed down the edge of the mattress, Ari sitting there dressed and he—
His heart jumped and started hammering.
“I’m off to the office, sweet. You can sleep in, if you like. Florian will serve you breakfast.”
“I’m going home,” he said, and dragged the sheet over him.
“Whatever you like.” Ariane got up, releasing the mattress, and walked across to take a look in the wall mirror, demonstrative unconcern that crawled over his nerves and unsettled his stomach. “Come in when you like.—Talk to Jordan if you like.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
“Whatever you like.”
“Am I supposed to stay here?” Panic sharpened his voice. He knew the danger in Ari hearing it, acting on it, working on it. It was a threat she had just made. He thought that it was. Her tone was blank, void of cues. Her voice tweaked at nerves and made him forget for a handful of seconds that he had a counter-threat in Grant, upriver. “It won’t work.”
“Won’t it?” Ari gave her hair a pat. She was elegant, in a beige suit. She turned and smiled at him. “Come in when you like. You can go home tonight. Maybe we’ll do it again, who knows? Maybe you can tell your father and get him to pass it off, hmmn? Tell him whatever you like. Of course I had a recorder on. There’s plenty of evidence if he wants to go to the Bureau.”
He felt cold through and through. He tried not to show it. He glared at her, jaw set, as she smiled and walked out the door. And for a long while he lay there cold as ice, sick to his stomach, darts of headache going from the top of his skull through to the nape of his neck. His skin felt hypersensitized, sore in places. There were bruises on his arm, the marks of fingers.
—Florian—
A flash came back to him, sensation and image from out of the dark, and he plunged his face into his hands and tried to shove it out. Tape-flash. Deep-tape. More and more of them would come back. He did not know what could come back. And they would, bits of memory floating up to the surface and showing a moment, a drift of words and feeling and vision, before they rolled over and sank again into the dark, nothing complete—just more and more of them. He could not stop it.
He threw the sheets back and got out of bed, unfocusing his eyes where it came to his own body. He staggered into the bathroom, turned on the shower and bathed, soaped himself again and again and again, scrubbed without looking at himself, trying not to feel anything, remember anything, wonder anything. He scrubbed his face and hair and even the inside of his mouth with the perfumed soap, because he did not know if there was anything else to use; and spat and spat and gagged from the sharp, soapy taste, but it did not make him clean. It was a scent he remembered as hers. Now he smelled like it, and tasted it in the back of his throat.
And when he had chafed himself dry in the shower-cabinet blower and he had come out into the cold air of the bathroom, Florian walked in with a folded stack of his clothes.
“There’s coffee, ser, if you like.”
Bland as if nothing had happened. As if none of it were real. “Where’s a shaver?” he asked.
“The counter, ser.” Florian motioned toward the mirrored end of the bath. “Toothbrush, comb, lotion. Is there anything you need?”
“No.” He kept his voice even. He thought of going home. He thought of killing himself. Of knives in the kitchen. Of pills in the bathroom cabinet. But the investigation afterward would open everything up to politics, and politics would swallow his father up. In the same moment he thought of subliminals that might have been buried in his mind last night, urges to suicide, God knew what. Any irrational thought was suspect. He could not trust them. A series of tape-flashes ripped past him, sensations, erotic visions, landscapes and ancient artworks…
Then real things, set in the future. Images of Jordan’s outrage. Himself, dead, on the floor of his kitchen. He rebuilt the image and tried to make it something exotic: himself, just walking out beyond the precip towers, a body to be found like a scrap of white rag by air-search a few hours later…“Sorry, ser, looks like we’ve found him—”
But that was not a valid test of any suspected subliminal Ari might have put into his tape. When a mind drank in tapestudy, it incorporated it. Tape images faded and resident memory wove itself into the implant-structure and grew and grew in its own way. There was no reliable way to detect an embedded command; but it could not make him act when he was conscious, unless it accurately triggered some predisposition. Only when drugs had the threshold flat, then he would take in stimuli without censoring, answer what he was asked, do whatever he was told—
Anything he was asked, anything he was told, if it slipped past the subconscious barriers of his value-sets and his natural blocks. A psychsurgeon could, given time, get answers that revealed the sets and their configurations, then just insert an argument or two that confounded the internal logic: rearrange the set after that, create a new microstructure and link it where the surgeon chose—
All those questions, those questions in the damned psych-tests Ari had given him, calling them routine for Wing One aides…questions about his work, his beliefs, his sexual experiences…that he, being a fool, had thought were simply Ari’s way of tormenting him…
He dressed without looking at the mirrors. He shaved and brushed his teeth and combed his hair. There was nothing wrong with his face, no mark on it, nothing to betray what had happened. It was the same ordinary face. Jordan’s face.
She must have gotten a real satisfaction out of that.
He smiled at himself, testing whether he could control himself. He could. He had that back, as long as he was not facing Ari herself. Her azi he could handle.
Correction. Florian he could handle. He thanked God it was Florian she had left with him and not Catlin, and then a wild flutter of mental panic wanted to know why he reacted that way, why the thought of dealing with Catlin-the-icicle sent a disorganizing quiver through his nerves. Fear of women?
Are you afraid of women, sweet? You know your father is.
He combed his hair. He wanted to throw up. He smiled instead, a re-testing of his control, and carefully wiped the tension of the headache from the small muscles around his eyes, relaxed the tension from his shoulders. He walked out and gave that smile to Florian.
He’ll report to her. I can’t think with my head splitting. Damn, just let him tell her I was all right, that’s all I have to do, keep my face on straight and get out of here.
The sitting room, the white rug, the paintings on the walls, brought back a flash of memory, of pain and erotic sensation.
But everything had happened to him. It was a kind of armor. There was nothing left to be afraid of. He took the cup from Florian and sipped at it, stopping the tremor of his hand, a shiver which hit of a sudden as internal chill and a cold draft from the air-conditioning coincided. “Cold,” he said. “I think it’s the hangover.”
“I’m really sorry,” Florian said, and met his eyes with an azi’s calm, anxious honesty: at least it seemed to be and probably it was very real. There was not a shred of morality involved, of course, except an azi’s, which was to avoid rows with citizens who might find ways to retaliate. Florian had real cause to worry in his case.
—Florian, last night: I don’t want to hurt you. Relax. Relax—
The face had nothing to do with the mind. The face kept smiling. “Thanks.”
Far, far easier to torment Florian. If it was Ari, he would fall apart. He had
, last night. Seeing Florian afraid…
…pain and pleasure. Interfaces…
He smiled and sipped his coffee and enjoyed what he was doing with a bitter, ugly pleasure even while he was scared of what he was doing, meddling with one of Ari’s azi; and twice scared of the fact that he enjoyed it. It was, he told himself, only a human impulse, revenge for his humiliation. He would have thought the same thing, done the same thing, the day before.
Only he would not have known why he enjoyed it, or even that he enjoyed it. He would not have thought of a dozen ways to make Florian sweat, or considered with pleasure the fact that, if he could maneuver Florian into some situation, say, down at the AG pens, far away from the House, on terms that did not involve protecting Ari, he could pay Florian in kind—Florian being azi, and vulnerable in a dozen ways he could think of…without Ari around.
Florian undoubtedly knew it. And because Florian was Ari’s, Ari probably fed off Florian’s discomfiture in leaving Florian alone with him. It fitted with everything else.
“I feel sorry for you,” Justin said, and put his hand on Florian’s shoulder, squeezed hard. On the edge of pain. “You don’t have a real comfortable spot here, do you? You like her?”
—The first thing you have to learn is that you can get it anywhere. The second thing—it ties you to people who aren’t family and it mucks up your judgment unless you remember the first rule. That’s how I’m going to do you a favor, sweet. You’re not going to confuse what we’re doing here…
Florian only stared at him, not moving. Even though the grip on his shoulder undoubtedly hurt, and even though Florian could break it with a shrug. And maybe his arm, into the bargain. That stoic patience was, Justin thought, what one could expect, in this place, of Ari’s azi.
“What does Ari really want me to do?” Justin asked. “Have you got it figured out? Am I supposed to stay here? Am I supposed to go home?”
As if he and Florian were the same thing. Co-conspirators, azi both. He loathed the thought. But Florian was, in a way, his ally, a page he could read and a subject he could handle; and he still could not read the truth in Ari’s eyes, not even when she was answering his questions in all sobriety.
“She expects you to go home, ser.”
“Do I get other invitations?”
“I think so,” Florian said in a quiet, quiet voice.
“Tonight?”
“I don’t know,” Florian said. And added: “Sera will probably sleep tonight.”
As if it were all a long-familiar sequence of events.
A queasiness went through his stomach. They were all caught in this.
Attitude, Jordan would say. Everything is attitude. You can do anything if you’re in control of it. You have to know what your profit is in doing it, that’s all.
Life was not enough, to trade a soul for. But power…power to stop it happening, power to pay it back, that was worth the trade. His father’s safety was. The hope someday of being in a position to do something about Ariane Emory—that was.
“I’m going to go home,” he said to Florian, “take something for my headache, get my messages, and go on to the office. I don’t suppose my father’s called my apartment.”
“I wouldn’t know, ser.”
“I thought you kept up with things like that,” he said, soft and sharp as a paper-cut. He set down the coffee cup, remembering where the outside door was, and headed off through the halls, with Florian trailing him like an anxious shadow… Ari’s guard, too polite to show it, and much too worried to let him walk that course through Ari’s apartments unwatched.
For half a heartbeat he thought ahead to the safety of his own rooms upstairs and expected Grant would be there to confide in, the two of them would think things out—it was the habit of a lifetime, a stupid kind of reflex, that suddenly wrenched at a stomach ravaged by too little food, too much drink, too many drugs, too much shock. He went light-headed and grayed out, kept walking all the same, remembering the way from here, that it was a straight course down a hall decorated with fragile tables and more fragile pottery.
A triple archway, then, of square travertine pillars. And the reception room, the one Catlin had said was for show. He remembered the warning about the rugs and the floor, negotiated the travertine steps and crossed the room, up the slight rise to the door.
He reached to the door-lock to let himself out, except Florian interposed his hand and pushed the latch himself. “Be careful, ser,” Florian said. And meant more, he was sure, than the walk home.
He remembered the nine-year-old. And the azi Ariane had killed. Remembered the vulnerability any azi had, even Grant. And saw Florian’s—who had never had a chance since the day he was created and who was, excepting his dark side, gentle and honest as a saint, because he was made that way and tapes kept him that way despite all else Ari made him be.
It was that enigma that dogged him out the door and down the hall, in a confusion of graying vision and weakness, all part of the nightmare that crowded on his senses—tape-flash and physical exhaustion.
Ari had shaped Florian—in both his aspects, with all his capacities—the dark and the light. She might not have made him in the first place, but she maintained him according to the original design…from her own youth.
To have a victim? he wondered. Was that all it was?
Test subject—for an ongoing project?
Interface, the answer came rolling up to the surface and dived down again, nightmarish as a drowned body. Crossing of the line.
Truth lies at the interface of extremes.
Opposites are mutually necessary.
Pleasure and pain, sweet.
Everything oscillates…or there’s nothing. Everything can be in another state, or it can’t change at all. Ships move on that principle. The stars burn. Species evolve.
He reached the lift. He got himself inside and leaned against the wall until the door opened. He walked into a reeling hall, kept his balance as far as his own apartment and managed the key.
“No entries since the last use of this key.”
Can’t depend on that, he thought, in gray-out, in a sudden weakness that made the couch seem very far away, and nothing safe. Can’t depend on anything. She can get into anything, even the security systems. Probably bugged the place while I was out. She’d do a thing like that. And you can’t know if the Minder can catch the kind of things she can lay hands on. State of the art. Expensive stuff. Classified stuff. She could get it.
Maybe Jordan can.
He reached the couch and sat down, lay back and shut his eyes.
What if I’m not alone?
Ari’s voice, soft and hateful:
I planned your father’s actions. Every one of them. Even if I couldn’t predict the microstructures. Microstructures aren’t that important.
Tape-designer’s aphorism: macrostructure determines microstructure. The value-framework governs everything.
I even planned you, sweet. I planted the idea. Jordan has this terrible need for companionship. Am I lying? You owe your existence to me.
He imagined for a heartbeat that Grant would walk in from the other room, Grant would ask what was the matter, Grant would help him unweave the maze in which he found himself. Grant had experienced deep-tape. God knew.
But it was only a ghost. A habit hard to break.
And Grant, certainly, I planned. I made him, after all.
He had to go to the lab. He had to get out of the isolation in which the tape-structures could fester and spread before he could deal with them. He had to get about routine, occupy his mind, let his mind rest and sort things out slowly.
If the body could only have a little sleep.
“Messages, please,” he murmured, remembering he had to know, had to know if he had calls from Jordan. Or elsewhere.
They were generally trivia. Advisories from the wing. From Administration. A note of reprimand about the illicit entry. He drifted in the middle of it, woke with a start and a clutch at th
e couch, the erotic flush fading into a lightning-flash clinical recollection that he was going to have to wear long sleeves and high collars and put some Fade on the bruises: he could put Jordan off with a claim that Ari had him on extra lab duty, logical, since Ari had no reason, in what he had told Jordan, to be pleased with him. He could not face Jordan at close quarters until he had better control of himself.
In the next heartbeat as the Minder’s half-heard report clicked off, he realized that he had lost track of the playback, and that two days ago he had defaulted the Minder’s message-function to play-and-erase.
ix
Grant could see the plane long before they reached the strip—not the sleek elegance of RESEUNEAIR by any stretch of the imagination, just a cargo plane with shielded windows. The car pulled up where people were waiting. “There,” the driver said, virtually the only word he had spoken the entire trip, and indicated the people he was supposed to go to.
“Thank you,” Grant murmured absently, and opened his own door and got out, taking his lunchbag with him, walking with pounding heart up to total strangers.
Not all strangers, thank God, Hensen Kruger himself was there to do the talking. “This is Grant. Grant, these people will take you from here.” Kruger stuck out his hand and he was supposed to shake it, which he was not used to people doing: it made him feel awkward. Everything did. One of the men introduced himself as Winfield; introduced the woman in the group, the pilot, he supposed, in coveralls and without any kind of badge or company name, as Kenney; and there were two other men, Rentz and Jeffrey, last name or first or azi-name, he was not sure. “Let’s get going,” Kenney said. Everything about her was nervous: the shift of her glance, the stiffness of her movements as she wiped her hands on her grease-smeared coveralls. “Come on, let’s move it, huh?”
The men exchanged looks that sent little twitches through Grant’s taut nerves. He looked from one to the other, trying to figure whether he was the object of contention. Arguing with strangers was difficult for him: Justin always fended problems for him. He knew his place in the world, which was to handle what his employer wanted handled. And Justin had told him to object.