Cyteen

  “We’re going to Merild?” he asked, because he had not heard that name, and he was determined to hear it before he went anywhere.

  “We’re going to Merild,” Winfield said. “Come on, up you go.—Hensen—”

  “No problem. I’ll contact you later. All right?”

  Grant hesitated, looking at Kruger, understanding that things were passing he did not understand. But he knew, he thought, as much as they were going to tell him; and he went ahead to the steps of the jet.

  It had no company markings, just a serial number. A7998. White plane, with paint missing here and there and the spatter of red mud on its underside. Dangerous, he thought. Don’t they foam it down here? Where’s Decon? He climbed up into the barren ulterior, past the cockpit, and uncertainly looked back at Jeffrey and Rentz, who followed him, a little ahead of Winfield.

  The door whined up and Winfield locked it. There were jump-seats of a kind, along the wall. Jeffrey took him by the arm, pulled a seat down and helped him belt in. “Just stay there,” Jeffrey said.

  He did, heart thumping as the plane took its roll and glided into the sky. He was not used to flying. He twisted about and lifted a windowshade to look out. It was the only light. He saw the precip towers and the cliffs and the docks passing under them as they came about.

  “Leave that down,” Winfield said.

  “Sorry,” he said; and drew the shade down again. It annoyed him: he very much wanted the view. But they were not people to argue with, he sensed that in the tone. He opened the bag the Krugers had fixed for him, examined what he had for breakfast, and then thought it was rude to eat when no one else had anything. He folded it closed again until he saw one of them, Rentz, get up and go aft and come back with a few canned drinks. Rentz offered one to him, the first kind gesture he had had out of them.

  “Thank you,” he said, “they sent one.”

  He thought it would be all right to eat, then. He had been so exhausted last night he had only picked at supper, and the salt fish and bread and soft drink Krugers had sent were welcome, even if he had rather have had coffee.

  The jet roared away and the men drank their soft drinks and took occasional looks out under the shades, mostly on the right side of the aircraft. Sometimes the pilot talked to them, a kind of sputter from the intercom. Grant finished his fish and bread and his drink and heard that they had reached seven thousand meters; then ten.

  “Ser,” someone had said that morning, opening the door to his room in Kruger’s House, and Grant had waked in alarm, confused by his surroundings, the stranger who had to be speaking to him, calling him ser. He had hardly slept; and finally drowsed, to wake muddled and not sure what time it was or whether something had gone wrong.

  They had taken his card last night, when the night watch had brought him up from the dock and the warehouses, into the House itself, up the hill. Hensen Kruger himself had looked it over and gone somewhere with it, to test its validity, Grant had thought; and he had been terrified: that card was his identity. If anything happened to it, it would take tissue-typing to prove who he was after that, even if there was only one of him, which he had never, despite Jordan’s assurances, been convinced was the case.

  But the card had turned up with the stack of clothing and towels the man laid on the chair by the door. The man told him to shower, that a plane had landed and a car was coming for him.

  Grant had hurried, then, rolled out of bed, still dazed and blurry-eyed, and staggered his way to the bathroom, rubbed his face with cold water and looked in the mirror, at eyes that wanted sleep and auburn hair standing up in spikes.

  God. He wanted desperately to make a good impression, look sane and sensible and not, not what Reseune might well report to them—an Alpha gone schiz and possibly dangerous.

  He could end up back in Reseune if they thought that. They would not even bother with the police; and Ari might have tried some such move. Justin would have answered to Ari by now—however he was going to do it Grant had no idea. He tried not to think about it, as he had tried to send the thoughts away all night long, lying there listening to the sounds of a strange House—doors opening and closing, heaters and pumps going on, cars coming and going in the dark.

  He had showered in haste, dressed in the clothes they had laid out for him, a shirt that fit, trousers a bit too large or cut wrong or something—given his hair a careful combing and a second check in the mirror, then headed downstairs.

  “Good morning,” one of the household had said to him, a young man. “Breakfast on the table there. They’re on their way. Just grab it and come on.”

  He was terrified for no specific cause, except he was being rushed, except that his life had been carefully ordered and he had always known who would hurt him and who would help him. Now, when Justin had told him he would be free and safe, he had no idea how to defend himself, except to do everything they told him. Azi-like. Yes, ser.

  He dropped his head onto his chest while the plane droned on, and shut his eyes finally, exhausted and having nothing to look at but the barren deck, closed windows, and the sullen men who flew with him: perhaps, he thought, if he simply said nothing to them the trip would be easier, and he would wake up in Novgorod, to meet Merild, who would take care of him.

  He waked when he felt the plane change pitch and heard a difference in the engines. And panicked, because he knew it was supposed to be three hours to Novgorod, and he was sure it had not been. “Are we landing?” he asked. “Is something wrong?”

  “Everything’s fine,” Winfield said; and: “Leave that alone!” when he reached for the shade, thinking it could surely make no difference. But evidently it did.

  The plane wallowed its way down, touched pavement, braked and bumped and rolled its way, he reckoned, toward the Novgorod terminal. It stopped and everyone got up, while the door unsealed and the hydraulics began to let the ladder down; he got up, taking the wadded-up paper bag with him—he was determined not to give them a chance to complain of his manners—and waited as Winfield took his arm.

  There were no large buildings outside. Just cliffs and a deserted-looking cluster of hangars; and the air smelled raw and dry. A bus was moving up to the foot of the ladder.

  “Where are we?” he asked, on the edge of panic. “Is this Merild’s place?”

  “It’s all right. Come on.”

  He froze a moment. He could refuse to go. He could fight. And then there was nothing he could do, because he had no idea where he was or how to fly a plane if he could take it over. The bus down there—he might use to escape; but he had no idea where in the world he was, and if he ran beyond the fuel capacity in raw outback, he was dead, that was all. Outback was all around them: he could see the land beyond the buildings.

  He could hope to get to a phone, if they got the idea he was compliant enough to turn their backs on. He had memorized Merild’s number. He thought of all that in the second between seeing where he was and feeling Winfield take his arm.

  “Yes, ser,” he said meekly, and walked down the steps where they wanted him to go—which still might be to Merild. He still hoped that they were telling the truth. But he no longer believed it.

  Winfield took him down to the waiting bus and opened the door to put him in, then got in after, with Jeffrey and Rentz. There were seven seats, one set by each window and across the back; Grant took the first and Winfield sat beside him as the other pair settled in behind them.

  He scanned the windows and doors: elaborately airsealed. An outback vehicle.

  He clasped his hands in his lap and sat quietly watching as the driver started up and the bus whipped away across the pavement, not for the buildings: for a line road, probably the one they used to get to the precip towers. In a little time they were traveling on dirt, and in a little time more they were climbing, up from the lowland and onto the heights beyond the safety the towers maintained.

  Wild land.

  Perhaps he was going to die, after they had stripped his mind down for what he kn
ew. They might be Ari’s; but it was a very strange way for Reseune to handle its problems, when they could easily bring him back to Reseune without Jordan or Justin knowing, just land like one of the regular transport flights and send him off in the bus to one of the outlying buildings where they could do whatever they liked till they were ready (if ever) to admit they had him.

  They might, more likely, be Ari’s enemies, in which case they might do almost anything, and in that case they might not want him to survive to testify.

  Whatever had happened, Kruger was involved in it, beyond a doubt, and it could even be monetary…perhaps everything rumor had said about Kruger’s humanitarian concerns was a lie. Reseune was full of lies. Perhaps it was something Ari herself maintained. Perhaps Kruger had just fooled everyone, perhaps he was engaged in a little side business, in forged Contracts whenever he got a likely prospect. Maybe he was being sold off to some mining site in the hinterlands, or, God, some place where they could try to retrain him. Try. Anyone who started meddling with his tape-structures on a certain level, he could handle. On others…

  He was not so sure.

  There were four of them, counting the driver, and such men might well have guns. The bus seals were life itself.

  He clasped his hands together and tried desperately to think the thing through. A phone was the best hope. Maybe stealing the bus once they trusted him, once he knew where civilization was and whether the bus had the fuel to get there. It could take days to get a chance. Weeks.

  “I think you know by now,” Winfield said finally, “this isn’t where you’re supposed to be.”

  “Yes, ser.”

  “We’re friends. You should believe that.”

  “Whose friends?”

  Winfield put his hand on his arm. “Your friends.”

  “Yes, ser.” Agree to anything. Be perfectly compliant. Yes, ser. Whatever you want, ser.

  “Are you upset?”

  Like a damned field supervisor, talking to some Mu-class worker. The man thought he knew what he was doing. That was good news and bad…depending what this fool thought he was qualified to do with tape and drugs. Winfield had mismanaged him thus far. He did not give way to instincts simply because he reckoned that they did not profit him in this situation, and because there was far more profit in keeping his head down…reckoning that his handlers were not stupid, but simply too ignorant to realize that the Alpha-rating on his card meant he could not have the kind of inhibitions born-men were used to in azi. They should have drugged him and transported him under restraint.

  He was certainly not about to tell them so.

  “Yes, ser,” he said, with the breathless anxiousness of a Theta.

  Winfield patted his arm. “It’s all right. You’re a free man. You will be.”

  He blinked. That took no acting. ‘Free man’ added a few more dimensions to the equation; and he did not like any of them.

  “We’re going up in the hills a ways. A safe place. You’ll be perfectly all right. We’ll give you a new card. We’ll teach you how to get along in the city.”

  Teach you. Retraining. God, what am I into?

  Is there any way this could be what Justin intended?

  He was afraid, suddenly, in ways that none of the rest of this had touched…that he did not have it figured, that defying these people might foul up something Justin had arranged—

  —or Jordan, finding out about it, intervening—

  They might be what the only friends he had in the world had intended for him, they might be heading him for real freedom. But retraining, if that was what they had in mind, would reach into all his psychsets and disturb them. He did not have much in the world. He did not own anything, even his own person and the thoughts that ran in his brain. His loyalties were azi-loyalties, he knew that, and accepted that, and did not mind that he had had no choice in them: they were real, and they were all he was.

  These people talked about freedom. And teaching. And maybe the Warricks wanted that to happen to him and he had to accept it, even if it took everything away from him and left him some cold freedom where home had been. Because the Warricks could not afford to have him near them anymore, because loving him was too dangerous for all of them. Life seemed overwhelmed with paradoxes.

  God, now he did not know, he did not know who had him or what he was supposed to do.

  Ask them to use the phone, get a message to Merild to ask whether this was all right?

  But if they were not with Merild that would tip them off that he was not the compliant type they took him for. And if they were the other thing, if this was not the Warricks’ doing, then they would see he had no chance at all.

  So he watched the landscape pass the windows and endured Winfield’s hand on his arm, with his heart beating so hard it hurt.

  x

  It was surreal, the way the day fell into its accustomed order, an inertia in the affairs of Reseune that refused to be shaken, no matter what had happened, no matter that his body was sore and the damnedest innocent things brought on tape-flashes that hour by hour assumed a more and more mundane and placid level of existence—of course that was what it felt like, of course people from the dawn of time had done sex with mixed partners, paid sex for safety, it was the world, that was all, and he was no kid to be devastated by it—it was more the hangover that had him fogged, and now he was on the other side of an experience he had rather not have had, he was still alive, Grant was downriver safe, Jordan was all right; and he had damned well better figure Ari Emory had more than that in mind—

  Shake the kid up, play games with his mind, go on till he cracked.

  You wanted Grant free, boy, you can substitute, can’t you?

  —leave the apartment, report to the office, smile at familiar people and hear the business go on about him that had gone on yesterday, that went on every day in Wing One—Jane Strassen cursing her aides and creating a furor because of some glitch-up in equipment repair; Yanni Schwartz trying to mollify her, a dull murmur of argument down the hall. Justin kept to his keyboard and immersed himself in a routine, in a problem in tape-structure Ari had set him a week ago, complex enough to keep the mind busy hunting linkages.

  He was careful. There were things the AI checker might not catch. There were higher-level designers between his efforts and an azi test-subject, and there were trap-programs designed to catch accidental linkages in a particular psychset but it was no generic teaching-tape: it was deep-tape, specifically one that a psychsurgeon might use to fit certain of the KU-89 subsets for limited managerial functions.

  A mistake that got by the master-designers could be expensive—could cause grief for the KU-89s and the azi they might manage; could cause terminations, if it went truly awry—it was every designer’s nightmare, installing a glitch that would run quietly amok in a living intellect for weeks and years, till it synthesized a crazier and crazier logic-set and surfaced on some completely illogical trigger.

  There was a book making the rounds, a science fiction thriller called Error Message, that had Giraud Nye upset: a not too well disguised Reseune marketed an entertainment tape with a worm in it, and civilization came apart. There was a copy in library, on CIT-only check-out, with a long waiting list; and he and Grant had both read it—of course. Like most every House azi except Nye’s, it was a good bet.

  And he and Grant had tried designing a worm, just to see where it would go.—“Hey,” Grant had said, sitting on the floor at his feet, starting to draw logic-flows, “we’ve got an Alpha-set we can use, hell with the Rho-sets.”

  It had scared him. It had gone unfunny right there. “Don’t even think about it,” he had said, because if there was such a thing as a worm and they designed one that would work, thinking about it could be dangerous; and it was Grant’s own set Grant meant. Grant had his own manual.

  Grant had laughed, with that wicked, under the brows grin he had when he had tagged his CIT good.

  “I don’t think we ought to do this,” Justin had said, a
nd grabbed the notebook. “I don’t think we ought to mess around with it.”

  “Hey, there isn’t any such thing.”

  “I don’t want to find out.” It was hard to be the Authority for the moment, to pull CIT-rank on Grant and treat him like that. It hurt. It made him feel like hell. Suddenly and glumly sober, Grant had crumpled up his design-start, and the disappointment in Grant’s eyes had gone right to his gut.

  Till Grant had come into his room that night and waked him out of a sound sleep, saying he had thought of a worm, and it worked—whereupon Grant had laughed like a lunatic, pounced on him in the dark and scared hell out of him.

  “Lights!” he had yelled at the Minder, and Grant had fallen on the floor laughing.

  Which was the way Grant was, too damned resilient to let anything come between them. And damned well knowing what he deserved for his pretensions to godhood.

  He sat motionless at the keyboard, staring at nothing, with a dull ache inside that was purely selfish. Grant was all right. Absolutely all right.

  The intercom blipped. He summoned up the fortitude to deal with it and punched the console button. “Yes,” he said, expecting Ari or Ari’s office.

  “Justin.” It was his father’s voice. “I want to talk to you. My office. Now.”

  He did not dare ask a question. “I’m coming,” he said, shut down and went, immediately.

  He was back an hour later, in the same chair, staring at a lifeless screen for a long while before he finally summoned the self-control to key the project-restore.

  The comp brought the program up and found his place. He was a thousand miles away, halfway numb, the way he had made himself when Jordan told him he had gotten a call through to Merild and Merild had given a puzzled negative to a coded query.

  Merild had gotten no message. Merild had gotten nothing at all that he would have recognized as the subject of Jordan’s inquiry. Total zero.