“Yes, sera.”
That put a patch on Phaedra’s problems. Ollie was walking wounded. He had asked her for tape. He—had asked her for tape, azi to Supervisor; and she had refused him.
“Ollie,” she had said. “You’re too much a CIT. I need you to be. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes,” he had said. And held up better than she had.
“One for yourself too,” she yelled at him, over the engine noise; and he looked around and nodded understanding. “And Phaedra!”
Peggy came up to Ollie’s side at the bar, wobbled as the plane hit a little chop and then ducked down and took out a pair of glasses.
For Julia. Back in the back. Julia and Gloria.
“You’ve ruined my life!” Julia had screamed at her in the terminal. Right in front of Denys, the azi, and the Family that had come to see them off. While poor Gloria stood there with her chin quivering and her eyes running over. Not a bad kid. A kid who had had too much of most things, too little of what mattered, and who stared at the grandmother she had hardly ever seen and probably looked for signs of ultimate evil about her person. Gloria had no idea in the world what she was going to. No idea in the world what ship discipline meant, or the closed steel world of a working station.
“Hello, Gloria,” she had said, nerving herself, trying not—God, not ever—to compare the kid against Ari—against Ari, who might hear a plane take off and might look up and realize it was RESEUNE ONE. Nothing more than that.
Gloria had run over to her mother. Who was about to hyperventilate. Who managed, atop it all, to impart a sense of the ridiculous to their departure. It was probably just as well they were traveling with Reseune Security. There was no trusting Julia not to bolt and run in Novgorod.
Irrationally afraid of the shuttle, the void, the jumps, all the things that involved a physics Julia had never troubled herself to learn and now decided she could not personally rely on.
Too bad, kid. I wish I could make a bubble for you where things work the way you want. I’m sorry it all overwhelms you.
It did from the moment you were born. Sorry, daughter. I’m really sorry about that.
Sorry you’re going with me.
Ollie brought back the drinks. He was pale, but he was doing quite well, considering. She managed to smile at him when he handed her hers, and he looked at her again when he sat down with his own drink in hand.
She had taken half of hers down without noticing it. “I’ll be all right,” she said, and lifted the glass. “Skoal, Ollie. Back where I came from. Going home, finally.”
And on her second double: “It feels like I was twenty again, Ollie, like nothing of Reseune ever happened.”
Or she had gotten that pain of hers numb for a while.
iv
Phaedra was not at the playschool. Nelly was. Nelly was easy to get around. Sam could push her in the swing really high. Nelly worried, but Nelly wasn’t going to stop them, because she would be mad at Nelly and Nelly didn’t like that.
So Sam pushed her and she pushed Sam. And they climbed on the puzzle-bars.
Finally Jan came after Sam and Nelly was walking her home when uncle Denys met them in the hall.
“Nelly,” Denys said, “Security wants to talk to you.”
“Why?” Ari asked. Of a sudden she was afraid again. Security and Nelly were as far apart as you could think of. It was like everything else recently. It was a thing that didn’t belong.
“Nelly,” Denys said. “Do what I say.”
“Yes, ser,” Nelly said.
And Denys, big as he was, got down on one knee and took Ari’s hands while Nelly was going. “Ari,” he said, “something serious has happened. Your maman has to go take care of it. She’s had to leave.”
“Where’s she going?”
“Very far away, Ari. I don’t know that she can come back. You’re going to come home with me. You and Nelly. Nelly’s going to stay with you, but she’s got to go take some tape that will make her feel better about it.”
“Maman can too come back!”
“I don’t think so, Ari. Your maman is an important woman. She has something to do. She’s going—well, far as a ship can take her. She knew you’d be upset. She didn’t want to worry you. So she said I should tell you goodbye for her. She said you should come home with me now and live in my apartment.”
“No!” Goodbye. Goodbye was nothing maman would ever say. Everything was wrong. She pulled away from Denys’ hands and ran, ran as hard as she could, down the halls, through the doors, into their own hall. Denys couldn’t catch her. No one could. She ran until she got to her door, her place; and she unclipped her keycard from her blouse and she put it in the slot.
The door opened.
“Maman! Ollie!”
She ran through the rooms. She hunted everywhere, but she knew maman and Ollie would never hide from her.
Maman and Ollie would never leave her either. Something bad had happened to them. Something terrible had happened to them and uncle Denys was lying to her.
Maman’s and Ollie’s things were all off the dresser and the clothes from the closet.
Her toys were all gone. Even Poo-thing and Valery’s star.
She was breathing hard. She felt like there was not enough air. She heard the door open again and ran for the living room.
“Maman! Ollie!”
But it was a Security woman who had come in; she was tall and she wore black and she had got in and she shouldn’t have.
Ari just stood there and stared at her. The woman stared back. The uniformed woman, in her living room, who wasn’t going to leave.
“Minder,” Ari said, trying to be brave and grown-up, “call maman’s office.”
The Minder did not answer.
“Minder? It’s Ari. Call maman’s office!”
“The Minder is disconnected,” the Security woman said. And it was true. The Minder hadn’t said a thing when she had come in. Everything was wrong.
“Where’s my mother?” she asked.
“Dr. Strassen has left. Your guardian is Dr. Nye. Please be calm, young sera. Dr. Nye is on his way.”
“I don’t want him!”
But the door opened and uncle Denys was there, out of breath and white-faced. In maman’s apartment.
“It’s all right,” Denys panted. “Ari. Please.”
“Get out!” she yelled at uncle Denys. “Get out, get out, get out!”
“Ari. Ari, I’m sorry. I’m terribly sorry. Listen to me.”
“No, you’re not sorry! I want maman! I want Ollie! Where are they?”
Denys came and tried to take hold of her. She ran for the kitchen. There were knives there. But the Security woman dived around the couch and caught her, and picked her up while she kicked and screamed.
“Careful with her!” Denys said. “Be careful. Put her down.”
The woman set her feet back on the floor. Denys came and took her from the woman and held her against his shoulder.
“Cry, Ari. It’s all right. Get your breath and cry.”
She gasped and gasped and finally she could breathe.
“I’m going to take you home now,” Denys said gently, and patted her face and her shoulders. “Are you all right, Ari? I can’t carry you. Do you want the officer to? She won’t hurt you. No one’s going to hurt you. Or I can call the meds. Do you feel like you want me to do that?”
Take you home was not her home anymore. Something had happened to everyone.
Denys took her hand and she walked. She was too tired to do anything else. She was hardly able to do that.
Uncle Denys took her all the way to his apartment, and he set her down on his couch and he had his azi Seely get her a soft drink.
She drank it and she could hardly hold the glass without spilling it, she was shaking so.
“Nelly is staying here,” uncle Denys said to her, sitting down on the other side of the table. “Nelly will be your very own.”
“Where’s Oll
ie?” she asked, clenching the glass in her lap.
“With your maman. She needed him.”
Ari gulped air. It was a good thing, she thought, if maman had to go somewhere, maman and Ollie ought to be together.
“Phaedra’s gone with them,” Denys said.
“I don’t care about Phaedra!”
“You want Nelly, don’t you? Maman left you Nelly. She wanted Nelly to go on taking care of you.”
She nodded. There was a large knot in her throat. Her heart was ten times too big for her chest. Her eyes stung.
“Ari, I don’t know much about taking care of a little girl. Neither does Seely. But your maman sent all your things here. You’ll have your very own suite, you and Nelly, right in there, do you want to go see where your room is?”
She shook her head; and tried not to cry. She tried to get a good mad. Like maman.
“We won’t talk about it now. Nelly’s going to be here tonight. She’ll be a little upset. You know she can’t take much upset. Promise me you’ll be good to her, Ari. She’s your azi and you have to be kind to her, because she really ought to stay in the hospital, but she’s so worried about you, and I know you need her. Nelly’s going to come home every night between her sessions—they’re going to give her tape, you know, they have to, because she’s terribly upset; but she loves you and she wants to come take care of you. I’m afraid it’s you who’ll have to take care of her. You understand me? You can hurt her very, very badly.”
“I know,” Ari said, because she did.
“There you are. You’re a brave little girl. You aren’t a baby at all. It’s very hard, very hard.—Thank you, Seely.”
Seely had brought her a glass of water and a pill, and expected her to take it. Seely was a nobody. He wasn’t like Ollie. He wasn’t nice, he wasn’t mean, he wasn’t anything but azi all the time. And he took her glass and put it on his tray and offered her the water.
“I don’t want any tape!” she said.
“It’s not that kind of pill,” uncle Denys said. “It’ll make your head stop hurting. It’ll make you feel better.”
She didn’t remember telling him her head hurt. Maman always said don’t take other people’s pills. Never, never take azi-pills. But maman was not here to tell her what this one was.
Like Valery. Like sera Schwartz. Like all the Disappeareds. Maman and Ollie had gotten caught too.
Maybe I can Disappear next. And find them.
“Sera,” Seely said. “Please.”
She took the pill off the tray. She put it in her mouth and drank it down with the water.
“Thank you,” Seely said. He was so smooth he wasn’t there. He took the glass away. You would never notice Seely.
Uncle Denys sat there so fat he made the whole chair go down, with his arms on his knees and his round face upset and worried. “You won’t have to go to playschool for a few days. Until you want to. You don’t think you can feel better. I know. But you will. You’ll feel better even tomorrow. You’ll miss your maman. Of course you will. But you won’t hurt as much. Every day will be a little better.”
She didn’t want it to be better. She didn’t know who made people Disappear. But it wasn’t maman. They could offer her whatever they wanted. It wouldn’t make her believe what they said.
Maman and Ollie had known there was trouble. They had been terribly upset and kept hiding it from her. Maybe they thought they could take care of it and they couldn’t. She had felt it coming and hadn’t understood.
Perhaps there was a place people went to. Perhaps it was like being dead. You got in trouble and you got Disappeared somewhere in some way even maman couldn’t stop it happening.
So she knew she couldn’t either. She had to push and push, that was what, and get in trouble until there wasn’t anybody. Maybe it was her fault. She had always thought so. But when they ran out of people to Disappear she had to find out what was going on.
Then maybe she could go.
She was Wrong, of a sudden. She couldn’t feel her hands or her feet, and she felt a burning in her stomach.
She was having trouble. But Seely picked her up in his arms and the whole room swung and became the hall and became the bedroom. Seely laid her gently on the bed and took her shoes off, and put a blanket over her.
Poo-thing was beside her on the bedspread. She put out her hand and touched him. She could not remember where she had gotten Poo-thing. He had always been there. Now he was here. That was all. Now Poo-thing was all there was.
v
“Poor kid,” Justin said, and poured more wine into the glass. “Poor little kid, dammit to hell, couldn’t they let her come down to the airport?”
Grant just shook his head. And drank his own wine. He made a tiny handsign that warned of eavesdroppers.
Justin wiped his eyes. He never forgot that. Sometimes he found it hard to care.
“Not our problem,” Grant said. “Not yours.”
“I know it.”
That for the listeners. That they never knew, one way or the other, whether they were there. They thought of ways to confound Security, even thought of devising a language without cognates, with erratic grammar, and using tape to memorize it. But they were afraid of the suspicion their using it might raise. So they went the simplest route: the tablet. He reached for it and scrawled: Sometimes I’d like to run off to Novgorod and get a job in a factory. We design tape to make normal people. We build in trust and confidence and make them love each other. But the designers are all crazy.
Grant wrote: I have profound faith in my creators and my Supervisor. I find comfort in that.
“You’re sick,” Justin said aloud.
Grant laughed. And Grant went serious again, and leaned over and took hold of Justin’s knee, the two of them sitting cross-legged on the couch. “I don’t understand good and evil. I’ve decided that. An azi has no business tossing words like that around, in the cosmic sense. But to me you’re everything good.”
He was touched by that. And the damned tape-flashes still bothered him. Even after this many years, like an old, old pain. With Grant it never mattered. That, as much as anything, gave him a sense of comfort. He laid his hand on Grant’s, pressed it slightly, because he could not say anything.
“I mean it,” Grant said. “You hold a difficult place. You do as much good as you can. Sometimes too much. Even I can rest. You should.”
“What can I do when Yanni loads me down with—”
“No.” Grant shook at his knee. “You can say no. You can quit working these hours. You can work on the things you want to work on. You’ve said yourself—you know what he’s doing. Don’t let them give you this other thing. Refuse it. You don’t need it.”
There was a baby in process on Fargone, replicate of one Benjamin Rubin, who lived in the enclave on the other side of an uncrossable wall, and worked in a lab Reseune had provided.
It provided something visible for Defense to hover over. And Jane Strassen, when she arrived, would find herself mother to another of the project’s children.
He knew. They gave him Rubin’s interviews. They let him do the tape-structures. He had no illusions they would run them without checks.
Not, at least, these. And that was a relief, after running without them for a year.
“It’s a degree of trust, isn’t it?” His voice came out hoarse, showing the strain he had not wanted to show.
“It puts another kind of load on you, a load you don’t need.”
“Maybe it’s my chance to do something worthwhile. It’s a major project. Isn’t it? It’s the best thing that’s happened in a long time. Maybe I can make Rubin’s life—better or something.” He leaned forward to pour more wine. Grant moved and did it for him. “At least Rubin had some compassion in his life. His mother lives on-station, he sees her, he’s got something to hold on to.”
Give or take the guards that attended a Special. Justin knew all these things. A confused, remote intellectual whose early health problems had
been extreme, whose attachment to his mother was excessive and desperate; whose frail body had made health a preoccupation for him; whose various preoccupations had excluded adolescent passions, except for his work. But nothing—nothing of what had shaped Ari Emory.
Thank God.
“I can do something with it,” he said. “I’m going to take some work in citizen psych. Do me some good. It’s a different methodology.”
Grant frowned at him. They could talk work at home, without worrying about monitors. But their line of conversation had gotten dangerous, maybe already gone over the line. He was not sure anymore. He was exhausted. Study, he thought, would take him off real-time work. Study was all he wanted. Grant was right, he was never cut out for trouble-shooting real-time situations. He cared too damn much.
Yanni had yelled at him: “Empathy is fine in an interview. It’s got no place in the solution! Get it straight in your head who you’re treating!”
Which made sense to him. He was not cut out for clinical psych. Because he never could get it straight, when he felt the pain himself.
By Yanni’s lights, even, he thought, by Denys’—because there was no way this could have come to him without Denys working at Giraud—it was the most generous thing they could have done for him, putting him back in work that took a security clearance, re-establish his career in a slightly different field, in work very like Jordan’s, let him work on a project where he could gain some reputation—CIT work was something the military would notice without actually giving the military an excuse to move on him, and it might clear him and do some good for Jordan. That was at least a possibility.
It was a kind of ultimatum, he thought, a kindness that could go entirely the other way if he tried to avoid the honor. That was always what he had to think about. Even when they were doing him favors.
vi
Ari woke with someone close to her, and remembered waking halfway through the night when someone got into bed with her, and took her in her arms and said in Nelly’s voice, “I’m here, young sera. Nelly’s here.”