She took a lot of time getting back from tapestudy. Sometimes she stopped and fed the fish, because there was a Security guard right at the door and uncle Denys had said she could do that. Today she went down the tunnel because there had been a storm last night and you had to stay indoors for a few days.
So she got to thinking how she and maman had come this way once when she went to see ser Peterson. You took the elevator. Dr. Peterson was boring as Seely was; but that hall was where Justin’s office was.
Justin would be interesting, she thought. Maybe he would at least say hello. And so many people had Disappeared that she liked to check now and again to see if people were still there. It always made her feel safer when she found they were. So if she got a chance to see an old place, she liked to.
She took the lift up to the upstairs hall, and she walked the metal strips she remembered: that was nice too, like once upon a time, when maman had been down the hall in that very office; but it made her sad, too, and she stopped it and walked the center of the hall.
Justin’s office door was open. It was messy as the last time. And she was happy of a sudden, because Justin and Grant were both there.
“Hello,” she said.
They both looked at her. It was good to see someone she knew. She really hoped they would be glad to see her. There weren’t many people who would talk to her that weren’t uncle Denys’s.
But they didn’t say hello. Justin got up and looked unfriendly.
She felt lonely all of a sudden. She felt awfully lonely. “How are you?” she asked, because that was what you were supposed to say.
“Where’s your nurse?”
“Nelly’s home.” She could say that now about uncle Denys’s place without it hurting. “Can I come in?”
“We’re working, Ari. Grant and I have business to do.”
“Everybody’s working,” she complained. “Hello, Grant.”
“Hello, Ari,” Grant said.
“Maman went to Fargone,” she said. In case they hadn’t heard.
“I’m sorry,” Justin said.
“I’m going to go there and live with her.”
Justin got a funny look. A real funny look. Grant looked at her. And she was scared because they were upset, but she didn’t know why. She sat there looking up and wishing she knew what was wrong. Of a sudden she was real scared.
“Ari,” Justin said, “you know you’re not supposed to be here.”
“I can be here if I want. Uncle Denys doesn’t mind.”
“Did uncle Denys say that?”
“Justin,” Grant said. And gently: “Ari, who brought you here?”
“Nobody. I brought myself.” She pointed. “I came from tapestudy. I’m taking a shortcut.”
“That’s nice,” Justin said. “Look, Ari. I’ll bet you’re supposed to go straight home.”
She shook her head. “No. I don’t have to. Uncle Denys is always late and Nelly won’t tell him.” She kept getting this upset-feeling, no matter how she tried to be cheerful. It was not them being bad to her. It was not a mad either. She tried to figure out what it was, but Grant was worried about Justin and Justin was worried about her being there.
Hell with Them, maman would say. Meaning the Them that kept things messed up.
“I’m going,” she said.
But she did it again the next day, sneaked up and popped sideways around the doorframe and said: “Hello.”
That scared them good. She laughed. And came out and was nice then. “Hello.”
“Ari, for God’s sake, go home!”
She liked that better. Justin was mad like maman’s mad. She liked that a lot better. He wasn’t being mean. Neither was Grant. She had got them and they were going to yell at her.
“I did Computers today,” she said. “I can write a program.”
“That’s nice, Ari. Go home!”
She laughed. And tucked her hands behind her and rocked and remembered not to. “Uncle Denys got me a fish tank. I’ve got guppies. One of them is pregnant.”
“That’s awfully nice, Ari. Go home.”
“I could bring you some of the babies.”
“Ari, just go home.”
“I have a hologram. It’s a bird. It flies.” She pulled it out of her pocket and showed how it turned, and came inside to do it. “See?”
“That’s fascinating. Please. Go home.”
“I’ll bet you haven’t got one.”
“I know I don’t. Please, Ari,—”
“Why don’t you want me here?”
“Because your uncle is going to get mad.”
“He won’t. He never knows.”
“Ari,” Grant said.
She looked at him.
“You don’t want us to call your uncle, do you?”
She didn’t. It wasn’t very nice. She frowned at Grant.
“Please,” Justin said. “Ari.”
He was halfway nice. And she was out of tricks. So she went outside, and looked back and smiled at him.
He was sort of a friend. He was her secret friend. She wasn’t going to make him mad. Or Grant. She would come by just a second every day.
But they were gone the next day: the door was shut and locked.
That worried her. She figured they had either figured out she was coming at the same time every day or they were truly Disappeared.
So she sneaked over on her way to tape the next morning and caught them.
“Hello!” she said. And scared them.
She saw they were mad, so she didn’t laugh at them too much. And she just waved them goodbye and went on.
She caught them now and again. When her guppy had babies she brought them some in a jar she had. Justin looked like that made him feel better about her. He said he would take care of them.
But when she took the lid off they were dead. She felt awful.
“I guess they were in there too long,” she said.
“I guess they were,” Justin said. He smelled nice when she leaned on the desk near him. A lot like Ollie. “I’m sorry, Ari.”
That was nice anyway. It was the first time he had really been just Justin with her. Grant came and looked and he was sorry too.
Grant took the jar away. And Justin said, well, sometimes things died.
“I’ll bring you more,” she said. She liked coming by the office. She thought about it a lot. She was leaning up by Justin’s desk now and he had stopped having that bad feeling. He was just Justin. And he patted her on the shoulder and said she had better go.
He had never been that nice since a long, long time ago. So she was winning. She thought he would be awfully nice to talk to, but she wasn’t going to push and make everything go wrong. Not with him and not with Grant. He was her friend. And when maman sent for her she would ask him and Grant if they wanted to go with her and Nelly.
Then she would have all the special people and she would be all right on the ship, because Justin was a CIT and he was grown-up and he would know how to do everything you had to do to get to Fargone.
She had a birthday coming. She had not even wanted a kids’ party. Just the presents, thank you.
Even that hadn’t made her happy. Until now.
She skipped down the hall, playing step-on-the-metal-line. And got Nelly’s keycard out of her pocket and used it on the lift.
Because she knew how Security worked.
xi
“You damn fool,” Yanni yelled, and threw the papers at him. And Justin stood there, paralyzed in shock as the sheets of his last personal project settled on the carpet around them. “You damned fool! What are you trying to do? We give you a chance, we do everything we fucking can to get you a chance, I sweat my ass off on my own fucking time working up critiques on this shit you dream up to prove to a hardheaded juvenile-fixated fool that his brilliant junior study project was just that, a fucking junior study project that Ari Emory would have dismissed with a Thanks, kid, but we tried that, if she hadn’t been interested in getting her hands
on your juvenile body and fucking over your father, son, which you’ve just done all by yourself, you damned fool! Get this shit out of here! Get yourself back to your office, and you keep that kid out, you hear me?”
It hit him in the gut, and paralyzed him between wanting to kill Yanni and believing for a terrible moment that it was over, that a little girl’s spite had ruined him, and Jordan, and Grant.
But then he heard it all the way to the end and realized it was not entirely that, it was not doomsday.
It might as well be.
“What did she say?” he asked. “What did she say about it? The kid brought me a damn jar of fish, Yanni, what am I going to do, throw her out of the office? I tried!”
“Get out of here!”
“What did she say?”
“She asked her uncle Denys to invite you to her fucking birthday party. That’s all. That’s all. You’ve got yourself a situation, son. You’ve got yourself a real situation. Seems she’s been coming by the office a lot. Seems she’s been dodging Security through the upstairs, seems she’s been using her azi’s keycard to get up and down the lift, seems she’s just real attracted to you, son. What in hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Is this a psych? Is that it? Denys asked you to run a psych and see what falls out?”
“Why didn’t you report it?”
“Well, hell, I have a few reasons, don’t you think?” He got his breath back. He got his balance back and stared at Yanni hard and straight. “It’s your security she outflanked. How am I to know Reseune Security can’t track a seven-year-old kid? I’m not going to be rude to her. No, thanks. I don’t want any part of it. I don’t want to be the one to ring up Denys Nye and tell him he’s lost track of his ward. You want a kid to get determined about something, you just tell her I’m forbidden territory. No, thanks. Denys said be polite, make nothing of it, avoid her where I can—hell, I started shutting my office when I knew she was due back from tape, what else can I do?”
“You could report it!”
“And get in the middle of it again? Get myself yanked in for another inquisition? I followed orders. I figured you were bugging my office. I figured Security knew where she was. I figured you knew exactly what I said, which was nothing. Nothing, Yanni, except Go home, Ari. Go home, Ari. Go home, Ari. And I got her out. It’s a juvenile behavior. She’s found an adult to tease. She’s being an ordinary brat kid. For God’s sake, you make something out of this, you’ll fix it, Yanni, does a damned juvenile-fixated fool have to tell you calm down with this kid and just let her pull her little prank? She can read you. She can read the tension you’re pouring on her, I know damned well she can, because I have to fight like hell to keep her from reading me in the two or three minutes she comes past and says hello, and you and Denys must be doing real well, the way you’re coming through to me. Get off her! Just let the whole thing alone, for God’s sake, or what in hell are you trying to do, push her at me till it takes?” A second pause for breath, while Yanni just stood there and stared at him in a way that raised the hair on his neck. “Is that what you’re trying to do? Is that what’s behind this? Are you helping her do this?”
“You’re paranoid.”
“Damned right. Damned right, Yanni. What are you trying to do to me?”
“Get out of here! Get the fuck out of here! I got you off. I got you off with Administration. I spent the fucking morning on you, Petros wasted a day covering your ass, and you’re damn right this is a psych and you just flunked it, son, you just flunked it! I don’t trust you. I don’t trust you further than I can see where you are. You walk a tight line, a damned tight line. If she shows up again you get her out of there and you phone Denys before her steps are cool!”
“What about Jordan?”
“Now you want favors.”
“What about Jordan?”
“I don’t hear anything about them cutting the phone calls. But you’re playing with it, son. You’re really playing with it. Don’t push. Don’t push any further.”
“What are you putting in that report?”
“That you’re not real casual around that kid. That you’ve got yourself some real hostilities about that kid.”
“Not about that kid! About the lousy things you’re doing to her, Yanni, about your whole damned program, your whole damned project! You’re going to drive her crazy, shooting her full of stuff and jerking everything human away from her, Yanni. You’re not a human being any longer!”
“And you’ve lost your perspective, boy, you’ve damned well lost your professional perspective! You’re feeding your own damn insecurities into the situation. You’re interpreting, son, you’re not observing, you’re not functioning, you’ve lost your objectivity, and you’re off the project, son, you’re off the project until you come back here with your head back together. Now get out of here! And don’t bother me with these damn play-time projects of yours until you get your problem fixed. Get out!”
“I don’t know what I could have said.”
He was shaking. He was shaking all over again when Grant came over to the couch and handed him a glass. The ice rattled. He drank a gulp, and Grant settled down beside him with the tablet.
Give it a few days. Yanni explodes. He calms down.
He shook his head. Made a helpless gesture with the glass and rested his eyes against his hand a moment while the whiskey hit his bloodstream and the cold hit his stomach. “Maybe,” he said finally, “maybe Yanni’s right. Maybe I’m what he said, an assembly-line designer making an ass out of myself.”
“That’s not so.”
“Yanni ripped me to shreds the last two designs. He was right, dammit, the whole thing would have blown up, they’d have had suicides.”
Grant grabbed the tablet next to him, and wrote:
Don’t give up. And went on writing: Denys said once Ari didn’t fake your Aptitudes. You’ve taken it as an article of faith that she did. You’ve always thought you belonged in Education. You do. But Ari wanted you in Design. I wonder why.
His gut went queasy when he read that.
Grant wrote: Ari did a hell of a lot to you. But she never refused to look at your work.
“I’m off the project,” he said. Because that was no news to Security and their eavesdroppers. “He says I hate the kid. It’s not true, Grant. It’s not true. It’s not true.”
Grant gripped his shoulder. “I know it. I know it, they know it, Yanni knows it, it’s what he does—he was psyching you. He was getting you on tape.”
“He said I flunked, didn’t he?”
“For God’s sake, that’s part of it, that’s part of the psych-out, don’t you understand it? You know what he was doing. The test wasn’t over yet. He wanted a reaction, and you gave it to him.”
“I’m still pulling up what I said.” He took a second drink, still shaking. “I can remember what I meant. I don’t know if I can figure Yanni well enough to know what he heard.”
“Yanni’s good. Remember that. Remember that.”
He tried to. He wrote: The question is, whose side is he on?
xii
Horse dipped his head and took grain from Florian’s palm. “See,” he said to Catlin, “see, he’s friendly. He just worries when it’s strangers. You want to touch him?”
Catlin did, very carefully. Horse shied back.
Catlin outright grinned as she jerked her hand back. “He’s smart.”
The pigs and chickens had not impressed Catlin at all. She had just looked at the chicks in disgust when they piled up against the wall, and retreated from the piglets in some alarm when they rushed up to get the food. Then she had said they were stupid, and when he explained how smart they were about what they ate, she said they wouldn’t be bacon if they were smarter about where they got what they ate.
The cows she said looked strong, but she was not very interested.
But Horse got the first real grin Florian had ever seen from Catlin, and she climbed up on the rail and watched while Horse
played games with them and snorted and threw his head.
“We aren’t going to eat Horse’s babies,” Florian said, climbing up beside her. “He’s a working animal. That means they’re not for food.”
Catlin took that in the way she took a lot of things, with no comment, but he saw the nod of her head, which was Catlin agreeing with something.
He liked Catlin. That took a lot of deciding, because Catlin was hard to get hold of, but they had been through the Room a lot of times, and only once had he been Got and that was because they had Got Catlin first, and there had just been a whole lot of the Enemy, all Olders. Catlin had been Got twice in all, but the second time she had yelled Go! and given him time to blow a door and get through, which was his fault: he had been slower than he ought; so she Got all the Enemy but the one that Got her, and he Got that one, because he had a grenade, and the Enemy didn’t expect him to have because he was a tech with his hands full. Catlin had been real proud of him for that.
He was just glad it was a game, and he told the Instructor it was his fault, not Catlin’s. But the Instructor said they were a team, and it didn’t matter.
He gave them half their Rec time.
Which was enough time to come over here. And this time he talked Catlin into coming with him and meeting Andy and seeing all the animals.
He was not sure Andy and Catlin got along. But Catlin said Horse was special.
So he got Andy to show Catlin the baby.
“She’s all right,” Catlin said, when she saw the girl Horse, and it played dodge with them, her tail going in a circle and her hooves kicking up the dust of the barn. “Look at her! Look at her move!”
“Your partner’s all right, too,” Andy said, with a nod of his head toward Catlin.
Which was something, coming from Andy. Florian felt happy, really happy, because all things he liked fell into place that way, Catlin and Andy and everything.