The dosage of cataphoric he receives is very heavy. His thresholds are completely flat and his blood chemistry is constantly monitored.
The tape is reinforcing his value-sets in words he is capable of understanding.
It tells him how to win approval. It tells him what his talents are and what his strengths are.
It may remind him that he has tendencies to avoid, much in the same way a parent may tell a child he must mind and not sulk. But the tape dwells continually on positive things and praise, and always ends that way.
As it closes the Supervisor tells him a word he must lock this up with; and he will remember it. The next time the Supervisor will access that set of instructions with that particular key, which is recorded in the azi’s file, with his tapes. As he grows, his deep-tape will become more abstract. The verbal keys will be integrated into larger and larger complexes as his psychstructures are merged into complete sets, and he will accept the values he is given with an azi’s complete openness to a licensed Supervisor.
Because the child has shown distress at the machine the Supervisor remembers to reassure him about the equipment while he is still receptive to instruction. Any distress the azi may feel with any of these procedures, no matter how minor, is carefully traced for cause and dealt with seriously. At no time does a Supervisor wish one of his charges to fear these procedures.
All the azi tape is designed here, in these ordinary-looking offices, by designers some of whom are azi themselves. Much of it is done with the help of computers, which analyze the extremely meticulous physiological testing done on azi types…such things as hand-eye coordination in a particular azi geneset, reaction time, balance, vision, hearing, physical strength, hormonal activity, Rezner scores, reaction to stress. The designer takes all of these things into account in making a tape specifically for that geneset, tailored precisely to that geneset’s strengths and weaknesses, and linking into a particular psychset.
It is a designer who consults Reseune’s library to select a geneset which can be given the special skills necessary to a new technology.
It is a designer who attends an azi returned to the labs by his Supervisor for what the report calls severe problems. It is a designer who will order the tests and interview the azi to discover whether the problem lies with the Supervisor or the azi. It is a designer who will prepare a tape to cure the problem—or issue a binding order regarding the handling of all azi of that geneset, restricting them from certain duties.
It is a designer who has destined this boy for civilian security duties, a change from the military training his genotype generally gets. Designers are usually conservative in shifting a genotype into new applications, because they, as much as their subjects, want to assure success. At Reseune, where azi test subjects are used, a keyword procedure creates a retrieval tab on the test set so that a psychsurgeon can maintain it separate for a considerable time before integrating it into the psychset. The few azi who run what are called short-term tests are specially trained in isolating and handling the interventions, and are themselves the judges of whether they should accept a particular test. Reseune’s rule is to experiment slowly, and to deal with only one change at a time.
Occasionally an azi, like any member of the general public, develops severe psychological problems.
Many of these are sent to Reseune, where designers and psychsurgeons work with them, attempting to devise solutions to the psychological difficulties, solutions which also benefit science and find their way into general psychotherapy.
In some instances the solution has to be retraining, which necessitates mind-wipe and a long period of recovery. In an azi of proven genotype and psychset a problem of this magnitude is always due to extreme trauma, and Reseune will take legal measures on the azi’s behalf in the event of negligence or mistreatment.
In other instances the solution is only in the genetics wing; Reseune forbids reproduction of a genotype that has met difficulty until the designers working with the afflicted azi can find a fix for the problem.
In very, very few cases, there is no fix, no remedial psychset to install even with mindwipe, and a panel of qualified staff members can find no humane solution, except to terminate. The azi’s quality of life is the main consideration, and Reseune, which has made the rules which forbid a Supervisor to speak sharply to one of its azi in the workplace, likewise must take the decision any next of kin must face when a body functions after reasoning, meaningful life has ceased…
C H A P T E R
4
i
The womb-tank tilted, spilled its contents into the fluid-filled receiving tank, and Ariane Emory struggled and twisted, small swimmer in an unfamiliar dim light and wider sea.
Until Jane Strassen reached down into the water and took her up, and the attendants tied off the cord and took her to a table for a quick examination while Jane Strassen hovered.
“She’s perfect, isn’t she?” There was worry in that question. An hour ago it would have been clinical worry, professional worry, anxiety about a project which could go very wrong if there was something wrong with the baby. But there was a certain personal anguish involved of a sudden, which she would not have expected to feel.
You’re the closest match to Olga Emory’s tests, her cousin Giraud had said; and Jane had thrown a tantrum, refused, protested that her management of Wing One labs did not include time to take on motherhood at a slightly fragile, overworked one hundred and thirty-two years of age.
Olga took it on at eighty-three, Giraud had said. You’re a strong-minded woman, you’re busy as hell—so was Olga—you have Olga’s interest in art, you were born in space, and you’ve got the professional skill and the brains. You’re the best match we’ve got. And you’re old enough to remember Olga.
I hate kids, she had retorted, I had Julia by immaculate conception, and I resent any comparison to that obnoxious nit-picking bitch!
Giraud, damn him, had smiled. And said: You’re on the project.
Which brought her to this, this room, this hour, agonizing while the medical experts looked over a squirming newborn, and the thoughts of personal responsibility took hold.
She had never involved herself much with her genetic daughter, who was her personal concession to immortality, conceived with the unknowing help of a Pan-paris mathematician who had made his donation to Reseune, because she had thought a random chance and new blood might be preferable. Too much planning, she had maintained, made bad gene pools; and Julia was the result of her personal selection, not bad, not good either. She had entrusted Julia mostly to nurses, and dealt with her less and less as Julia proved a sweet, sentimental space-brain—no, bright, in any less demanding environment, but overwhelmed right now by the discovery of her own biology and as feckless in her personal life as one of the azi.
But this, Ari’s replicate, this end-of-life adopted daughter, was what she had hoped for. The ideal student. This was a mind that could take anything she could throw at it and throw it back again. And she was forbidden to do it.
She had done tape of Olga with the child. Hand on Ari’s shoulder. Sharp tug at Ari’s sweater, straightening it. Ari’s angry, desperate wince. That was the pair she damned well remembered. It brought back everything.
For eighteen years of her life she had listened to that voice. Olga had carped at everyone on staff. Olga had carped at the kid, what time Olga had had time, till it was a wonder the kid was sane, in between which the kid had been totally on her own with the azi. Olga had taken all those damned blood-samples and psych-tests and more psych-tests, because Olga had theories that led to theories Ari had worked on. Olga had gotten Ari’s earliest Rezner tests, which damned near hit the top of the scale, and from that time on it had been a case of blood in the water: Olga Emory, with her pet theories of scientific child-rearing, had believed that she had an Estelle Bok on her hands, destined for centuries of immortality via Reseune labs. And every other kid in Reseune’s halls had heard that Ari was brilliant and Ari
was special because mothers and fathers on staff knew their professional heads would roll if their kid blacked the deserving eye of Olga’s precious Ari.
In those pioneering days on Cyteen, when intellectuals running from the Earth Company visa laws had gathered at what had then been the far end of space and founded Cyteen Station, renegade political theorists, famous physicists, chemists and legendary explorers had been thicker in the station mess hall than people who could fix the toilets; rejuv was a new development, Reseune was being founded to work with it, Bok’s physics was rewriting the textbooks, and speculations and out-there theories had possessed people who should have known better. And Olga Emory had been a brilliant intellect with an instinct for cross-disciplinary innovation, but she had entertained some real eetees in her mental basement.
Never mind James Carnath, who had more of them, and determined he and Olga were going to make a baby to outdo Bok the day he found out he was terminal.
Which had led them all to this room and this project.
So she had to do everything Olga’s way. Straighten up, Ari. Stand still, Ari. Do your homework, Ari—Twitch and bitch.
Between that and throwing Ari at azi nurses, the same way she had done with Julia. She had considerable remorse for that, in retrospect.
Changing that parental disinterest would change Ari. Benign neglect. It was a terrible thing to recognize her own personal mistakes retroactively. Studying up on Olga had been like looking in a too-revealing mirror. Giraud had been right. A hell of a thing to find out, at a hundred and thirty-two.
To this day she had no more maternal feeling for Julia than for any other product of the labs…or for the two azi the attendants were busy birthing over on the other side of the room. In the case of Ari, never mind the experience with one daughter and fifty-two years’ experience with students, it had to be a question of following program. For the kid’s own good. She had respected Ari Emory, and dammit, if she failed with her, that was all the reputation she was going to leave in Reseune. At a hundred and thirty-two. She hated fuck-ups. She hated personal indulgence and fuzzy thinking.
It was still damned hard to look at Julia and see what a meek thing she had come to be—constantly fouling up at work, spoiling her new baby beyond bearing, dependent on an endless succession of lovers—and know that it was partly genes and partly her fault. The same neglect, the same carping she had now to admit she had done with Julia, was part and parcel of what made Ari run. Psychsets and genetics at work.
Wrong kid, right parent, maybe. And vice versa.
Hell of a hand nature dealt out.
ii
“They’re all in good shape,” Petros Ivanov said.
“That’s wonderful. Really wonderful.” Denys took a bite of fish and another one. Private lunch, in the executive dining room, with the curtains back on the seal-windows of the observation deck. The weather-makers were giving them a rain, as requested, a major blow, water sheeting down the windows. The atmosphere was going to be compromised for a day or so. “Damn Giraud. Of course it’ll go all right, he says, and runs off to the capital. And damn if he’s called!”
“Everything’s right on the profile so far. The azi are absolutely norm. They’re already on program.”
“So’s Ari.”
“Strassen’s bitching about the head nurse.”
“What else is new?”
“Says she’s opinionated and she upsets her staff.”
“An azi is opinionated. That means the azi is going exactly down the instructions and Jane’s mad because she’s got new staffers in her apartment. She’ll survive.” He poured more coffee. “Olga’s azi is still a damn worry. Ollie’s younger, he’s a hell of a lot tougher-minded than that poor sod Olga had, by all accounts, and Jane’s got a good point: run tape on Ollie to soften him up and Jane’s temper will crack him. Her style with the kid she can manage; changing Ollie and changing the way she deals with him is further than Jane’s going to go without exploding. If that kid’s got even an ordinary baby’s instincts she’ll pick up on adult tensions right from the cradle. Figuring she’s got Ari’s sensitivity, God knows what she can pick up on. So what do you do?”
Petros grinned. “Run tape on Jane?”
Denys snorted into his coffee and sipped. “I sure as hell wish. No. Jane’s a professional. She knows what this is worth. We’ve got a bargain. We keep hands off Ollie and she cues Ollie how to play this. We just trust an azi that can make our Janie happy can cope with anything.”
Laughter.
He was mad as hell at Giraud. There was a good deal of this Giraud could have taken off his shoulders, but Giraud had a tendency to kite off to the capital whenever things got tense on the Project.
It’s all yours, Giraud had said. You’re the administrator. And welcome to it.
It had taken most of a year sifting through Ari’s notes, that small initial part of the computer record the technicians could get at easily. Reseune’s records computers had run for three weeks just compiling the initial mass of data on Ari. Thank God Olga had archived everything with cross-referencing and set it up in chronological order. The tapes had to be located, all this not only on Ari, but on two azi who had been protosets and unique. There was a tunnel under the hills out there and there were three more under construction, because that enormous vault was full, absolutely full to capacity, with workers beginning to divide tape into active, more active and most active, so more of it could be put in the House itself.
And when the data-flood from the Project came rolling out in full operation it would be a tidal wave in the House Archives. One of those tunnels was specifically to house the physical records of the Project; and that included software design for some of the things Ari had halfway worked out and someone else was going to have to finish before that baby was talking.
Reseune was not going to farm out anything to do with the Project. It was farming out some of the azi production runs, to clear personnel time. It would have been an economic crisis, except the military had thrown money at Reseune’s extension at Fargone and Reseune’s extension in Planys, money which funded more tanks, more computers, more production and those tunnels. Meanwhile Jordan Warrick was doing everyone a favor by actually handling the physical set-up over in Planys, which had Warrick happier than he had been since Ari’s demise, turning out real work again—no small gain in itself, since it made Defense happy. They had lost Robert Carnath from House Operations and promoted him over the Planys lab: Robert was no friend of Warrick’s and a sharp enough administrator to keep all the reins in his hands. They had lost other staff out to the Fargone lab construction and they were going to lose more, when that lab went active and the Rubin project kicked in. Reseune had been overstaffed when the thing began and now it was actually buying azi contracts from hackers like Bucherlabs and Lifefarms, rejuving every azi over forty and driving staff berserk with retraining tapes. Fifteen barracks were empty down in the Town, and they had just signed a buy-back deal with Defense for certain Reseune azi approaching retirement: it saved Defense expensive retraining and pensioning, it made certain azi damned happy when they learned they were going on working and getting staff positions at RESEUNEAIR and in freight and production and wherever else an azi whose outlook otherwise was transfer to some dull government work center could fill a slot and look forward instead of back. It gave Reseune a large pool of discipline-conscious, security-conscious personnel—instantly. Mistakes and glitches were bound to proliferate in Reseune’s smooth operations, but not on the Project, where there were no new faces, and where the top talent could consequently pay full attention to their jobs.
The military buy-back had saved them. Denys was proud of that stroke. It took something to multiply a Project designed for one subject into four—counting Rubin and the two azi. And to coordinate the project-profile and the finance and the covert aspects of it. Giraud handled the latter. Denys had had the rest in his lap for long enough he felt he had just given birth.
“It’s not ea
sier from here,” he told Petros. “From here on, it’s going to be a race between that kid and profile-management. If anyone fouls up, I want to know about it. If she gets an unscheduled sniffle, I want to know about it. Nothing’s minor until we’ve got results to check against profile.”
“Hell of a way to go, developing the profile while it’s running.”
“We’d have to anyway. There are going to be differences. We’d always be altering it. And we’d never know where we’re going anyway. If that kid is Ari in any measurable degree, we’ll never damn well know, will we?”
No laughter at all.
iii
Justin poured, wine swirling into Grant’s many times emptied glass. Poured another for himself and set the dead bottle down. Grant looked at his glass with a slightly worried look.
Duty. Grant was getting drunk and thinking about the fact. He knew. He knew the way he could tell that Grant was not going to say a thing, Grant had just decided that duty was not the operative word tonight.
They talked about the office. They talked about a design sequence they had been working on. A bottle of wine apiece did not do much for the design—the connections were getting fuzzy.
But Justin felt better for it.
He felt a strange dissatisfaction with himself. A baby arrived and he went through the day in a state of unreasoning depression. Reseune was aflutter with: “Is she cute?” and “How is she doing?” and he felt as if someone had a fist closed around his heart.
Over a baby being born, for God’s sake. And while a kind of a party was going on in the techs’ residencies, and another one over in Wing One residency, he and Grant held their own morose commemoration.
They sat in the pit in the apartment that had been home when they were both small, the apartment that had been Jordan’s, crackers and drying sausage slices on the plate, two dead wine bottles standing in cracker crumbs and moisture-rings on the stone table, and a third bottle a third gone. And that was finally enough to put him at distance from things.