“Yanni?”
“He wrote me a long letter. A long letter. He told me what you were working on. Said you were crazy, but you were getting somewhere. That you were getting integrations on deep-sets that he could see, and that he’d run them through Sociology’s computers and gotten nothing—indeterminate, insufficient data, field too wide. That sort of thing. Sociology hates like hell to have its computers give answers like that; you can imagine how nervous it makes them.”
Jordan started back to the table with the tea, and sat down. Justin dropped into his chair, shivering from too little sleep, too late hours. And leaned on his folded arms and listened, that was all.
“Ariane Emory helped map those sociology programs,” Jordan said. “So did I. So did Olga Emory and James Carnath and a dozen others. You’ve at least handed them something that exceeds their projective range, that the computer’s averaging can’t handle. It’s what I said. I don’t know is a disturbing projection—when it comes from the machines that hold the whole social paradigm. Sociology, I think, is less interested in what you’ve done than in the fact that your designs refuse projection: Sociology’s computers are very sensitive to negatives. That’s what they’re programmed to turn up.”
He knew that.
“And there’s either no negative in the run or it can’t find it. It carried it through thirty generations and kept getting an I don’t know. That may be why Administration sent you here. Maybe Reseune is suddenly interested. I am. They have to wonder if I’d lie—or lie to myself—because I’m your father…”
Justin opened his mouth and stopped. So did Jordan stop, waiting on him; and there were the guards, there was every likelihood that they were being taped for later study by Security. And maybe by Administration.
So he did not say: They can’t let me succeed. They don’t want me to call their Project into question by being anything like a success. He clamped his mouth shut.
Jordan seemed to sense the danger. He went on quietly, precisely: “And I would lie, of course. I have plenty of motives. But my colleagues at Reseune wouldn’t: they know there’s something in this, Yanni says so, the Sociology computers say so, and they certainly don’t have ulterior motives.”
They could lock me away like you, couldn’t they? What doesn’t get out, doesn’t breach Security. No matter what it contradicts.
Except—except I said it to Denys: if I go missing from Reseune, there are questions.
“I don’t know if there’s a hope in hell of getting you transferred to Planys,” Jordan said. “But I’ll ask you the question first: do you want to transfer?”
He froze then, remembering the landscape outside, the desolation that closed about him with a gut-deep panic.
He hated it. For all its advantages of freedom and relief from the pressure of Reseune, Planys afflicted him with a profound terror.
He saw the disappointment on Jordan’s face. “You’ve answered me,” Jordan said.
“No, I haven’t.—Look, I’ve got a problem with this place. But it’s something I could overcome. You did.”
“Say I had a limited choice. Your choice is real. That’s what you can’t overcome. No. I understand. Your feelings may change with time. But let’s not add that to the problems. We’re certainly going to have Yanni in the loop. No way they’re going to let us send anything anywhere without someone checking it for content. We’ll just work on it—as we can, when we can. They’re curious right now, I’m sure. They aren’t so locked on their Project they can’t see the potential in an unrelated idea. And that, son, is both a plus and a minus. You see how concerned they are for my well-being.”
“Ser,” the guard said.
“Sorry,” Jordan said, and sighed, staring at Justin for a long while with somber emotions playing freely across his face.
Not free here, not as free as seems on the surface.
Succeed and gain protection; and absolutely protected, become an absolute prisoner.
He felt a lump in his throat, part grief, part panic. For a terrible moment he wanted to leave, now, quickly, before the dawn. But that was foolishness. He and Jordan had so little time. That was why they stayed awake and drove themselves over the edge, into too much honesty.
Dammit, he left a kid, and I’m not sure how he sees me. As a man? Or just as someone grown? Maybe not even someone he knows very well. I know him and he knows so little what I am now.
Damn them for that.
There’s no way to recover it. We can’t even say the things to each other that would lei us know each other. Emotions are the thing we can’t give away to our
He looked away, he looked at Paul, sitting silent at the table, and thought that their life must be like his with Grant—a pressured frustration of things they dared not say.
It’s no different from Reseune, here, he thought. Not for Jordan. Not really, no matter what the appearance they put on it. He can’t talk. He doesn’t dare.
Nothing, for us, is different from Reseune.
ii
“Working late?” the Security guard asked, stopping in the doorway, and Grant’s heart jumped and kept up a frantic beat as he looked up from his desk.
“Yes,” he said.
“Ser Warrick’s out today?”
“Yes.”
“Is he sick?”
“No.”
Where Justin was fell under Administrative need-to-know. That was one of the conditions. There were things he could not say, and the silence was irritating to a born-man. The man stared at him a moment, grunted and frowned and continued on his rounds.
Grant let go his breath, but the tension persisted, the downside of an adrenaline rush, fear that had only grown from the time Justin had told him he was going to Planys.
Justin was going—alone, because that was one of the conditions Administration imposed. He had brushed off Justin’s worry about him and refused to discuss it, because Justin would go under whatever conditions, Justin had to go: Grant had no question about it.
But he was afraid, continually, a fear that grew more acute when he saw the plane leave the ground and when he walked back into Reseune alone.
It was partly ordinary anxiety, he told himself: he relied on Justin; they had not been apart since the incidents around Ari’s death, and separation naturally brought back bad memories.
But he was not legally Justin’s ward. He was Reseune’s; and as long as Justin was not there to obstruct Administration and to use Jordan’s leverage to protect him, he had no protection and no rights. Justin was at risk, traveling completely in the hands of Reseune Security—which might arrange an incident; but much more likely that they might take an azi down to the labs where they could question him or, the thing he most feared, run tape on him.
There was no good in panic, he told himself, since there was nothing, absolutely nothing he could do about it, nowhere he could hide and nothing he could do, ultimately, to stop them if that was what they intended.
But the first night that he had been alone with all the small lonely sounds of a very large apartment and no knowledge what was happening on the other side of the world, he had shot himself with one of the adrenaline doses they kept, along with knock-out doses of trank, in the clinical interview room; and taken kat on top of it.
Then he had sat down crosslegged at the side of his bed, and dived down into the innermost partitions he had made in himself, altering things step by step in a concentration that slicked his skin with sweat and left him dizzy and weak.
He had not been sure that he could do it; he was not sure when he exited the haze of the drug and the effort, that the combination of adrenaline and cataphoric would serve, but his heart was going like a hammer and he was able to do very little more after that than fall face down on the bed and count the beats of his heart, hoping he had not killed himself.
Fool was the word for a designer who got into his own sets and started moving them around.
Not much different, though, from what the test-unit azi did, whe
n they organized their own mental compartmentalizations and controlled the extent to which they integrated new tape. It was a question of knowing one’s own mental map, very, very thoroughly.
He turned off the computer, turned off the lights and locked the office door on his way out, walking the deserted hall to go back to that empty apartment and wait through another night.
Azi responses, dim and primal, said go to another Supervisor. Find help. Take a pill. Accept no stress in deep levels.
Of course doing the first was extremely foolish: he was not at all tempted. But taking a pill and sleeping through the night under sedation was very, very tempting. If he sedated himself deeply enough he could get through the night and go meet Justin’s plane in the morning: it was only reasonable, perhaps even advisable, since the trank itself would present a problem to anyone who came after him, and if they were going to try anything at the last moment—
No, it was a very simple matter to delay a plane. They could always get more time, if they suddenly decided they needed it.
Mostly, he decided, he did not trank himself because he felt there was some benefit in getting through this without it; and that thought, perhaps, did not come from the logical underside of his mind—except that he saw value in endocrine-learning, which the constantly reasonable, sheltered, take-a-tape-and-feel-good way did not let happen. If it were an azi world everything would be black and white and very, very clear. It was the grays of flux-thinking that made born-men. Shaded responses in shaded values, acquired under endocrine instability.
He did not enjoy pain. But he saw value in the by-product.
He also saw value in having the trank in his pocket, a double dose loaded in a hypospray, because if they tried to take him anywhere, he could give them a real medical emergency to worry about.
iii
Nelly, Ari reflected, was still having her troubles.
“We have to be careful with her,” Ari said to Florian and Catlin, in a council in Florian and Catlin’s room, while Nelly was in the dining room helping Seely clean up.
“Yes, sera,” Florian said earnestly; Catlin said nothing, which was normal: Catlin always let Florian talk if she agreed. Which was not to say Catlin was shy. She was just that way.
And Nelly had taken severe exception to Catlin showing Ari how to do an over-the-shoulder throw in the living room.
“You’ll hurt yourself!” Nelly had cried. “Florian, Catlin, you should have better sense!”
Actually, it was Florian who was the one with the complaint coming, since Florian was the one on the floor. He was being the Enemy. Florian was all right: he could land and come right back up again, but Catlin wasn’t teaching her what to do next, just first, and Florian was lying down being patient while Catlin was showing her how to make sure he wouldn’t get up.
Nelly had heard the thump, that was all, and come flying in after Florian was down in the middle of the rug. Catlin was demonstrating how to break somebody’s neck, but she was doing it real slow. If Catlin was really doing it and pulling it, she was so fast you could hardly see what she did. Catlin and Florian had showed her how to fall down and roll right up again. It was marvelous what they could do.
Sometimes they played Ambush, when they had the suite to themselves. You turned out the lights and had to find your way through.
She was always the one who was Got. That was all right. She was getting harder to Get and she was learning things all the time. It was a lot more fun than Amy Carnath.
Florian showed her a whole lot of things about computers and how to set Traps and do real nasty things with a Minder, like blow somebody up if you had a bomb, but they kept those down in the Military section. She knew about voice-prints and how the Minder knew who you were, and how handprint locks were linked into the House computer, along with retina-scans and all sorts of things; and how to make the electric locks open without a keycard.
Florian found out a lot of things, real fast. He said the House residential locks were all a special kind that was real hard to get past. He said that uncle Denys’ apartment had a lot of interesting stuff, like really special special locks, that were tied in somewhere Florian couldn’t trace, but he thought it was Security: he said he could try to find out, but he could get in trouble and they were Olders and he would do it only if she wanted.
He wouldn’t tell her that until they were outside, because he and Catlin had found out other things.
Like the Minder could listen to you.
It was a special kind, Florian had told her: it could hear anything and see anything, and it was specially quiet, so you never knew; and specially shielded, with the tape functions somewhere outside the apartment. The lenses and the pickups could be small as pinheads, the lenses could be fish-eyed and the pickups could be all kinds, motion detection and sound. “They can put one of those in the walls,” Florian said, “and it’s so tiny and so transparent you can’t see it unless you go over the walls with a bright light sort of sideways, or if you’ve got equipment, which is the best, but they have real good focus. Then they can digitalize and you can get it a lot tighter than that. Same with the audio. They can run a voice-stress on you. If they want something they can get it. That’s if they want to. It’s a lot of work. Most Minders are real simple and you can get into them. The ones in the House are all the complicated kind, all security, all built-ins, and it’s really hard to spot all the pickups if they set them into the cement between stones and stuff.”
That had made her feel real upset. “Even in the bathroom?” she had asked.
Florian had nodded. “Especially, because if you’re setting up surveillance, they’re going to try to go places they don’t think they’ll have a bug.”
She had gone to uncle Denys then, and asked, worried:
“Uncle Denys, is there a bug in my bathroom?”
And uncle Denys had said: “Who told you that?”
“Is there?”
“It’s for Security,” uncle Denys had said. “Don’t worry about it. They don’t turn them on unless they have to.”
“I don’t want it in my bathroom!”
“Well, you’re not a thief, either, dear, are you? And if you were, the alarm would go off in Security and the Minder would watch and listen. Don’t worry.”
“Yes, ser,” she said; and had Florian go over the whole bathroom till he found the lenses and the pickups and put a dab of clay over them. Except the one in the wall-speaker. So she hung a towel over it, and Nelly kept moving it, but she always put it back.
Florian found the ones in the bedroom too, but uncle Denys called her in and told her Security had found the bathroom pickups dead in a regular test they ran, and he would let her cover up the bathroom ones, but the rest were apartment Security, and she had better not mess with them.
So they hadn’t.
That wasn’t the only Security, either. Catlin said Seely was Security. So was Abban, Giraud’s azi. She could tell. Florian said he thought so too.
Catlin taught her things too: how to stand so still nobody could hear you, and where all the spots were that you ought to hit for if somebody attacked you.
So uncle Denys didn’t need to worry so much about security all the time, and didn’t need to worry about her being in the halls. And when maman’s letter came—it had to come, soon; she had the months figured out—then she could take care of herself going to Fargone.
She was a lot more scared of going where there were strangers than she had ever been, since she had begun to understand there were a lot of people outside Reseune who wanted to break into places and steal and a lot who would kill you or grab you and steal you; but at least it was a scared that knew how to spot somebody being wrong; and she was learning how to handle nasty people more than by getting Hold of them and Working them.
She would really like to do it to Amy Carnath.
But that was where you stopped thinking about like-to and knew how wide that would go, all over the place, and Amy would really be dead, which meant som
ething you couldn’t take back and you couldn’t Work and you couldn’t get Hold of.
You got a lot more by Working people, if you had the time.
That was something she showed Florian and Catlin a little about. But not too much. First, they were azi, and you couldn’t push them and it was hard to show them without doing it; and, second, she didn’t want them learning how to do it at her.
For one thing she had to be best at it. She was their Super.
For another, they made her scared sometimes; sometimes she really wanted them, and sometimes she wished she didn’t have them, because they made her mad and they made her laugh and they made her think sometimes, in the middle of the night, that she shouldn’t like them that much, because maman might not let them come.
She didn’t know why she thought that, but it hurt a lot, and she hated it when people made her scared; and she hated it when people made her hurt.
“We shouldn’t get in trouble,” she said to Florian and Catlin, when they were in the room after Nelly had scolded them; and finally, because it was on her mind, sneaked up on what she had been wanting to tell them for a long time, but it was hard to put words on it and it made her stomach upset. “I know a lot of people who aren’t here anymore. You get in trouble and they get Disappeared.”
“What’s that?” Florian asked.
“They just aren’t here anymore.”
“Dead?” Catlin asked.
Her heart jumped. She shook her head, hard. “Just Disappeared. Out to Fargone or somewhere.” The next was hard to talk about. She warned them with her face to be real quiet or she would be mad, because it wasn’t Nelly she was going to talk about. “My maman and her azi got Disappeared. She didn’t want to. Uncle Denys said she had real important business out on Fargone. Maybe that’s so. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s what they tell you because you’re a kid. A lot of kids got Disappeared, too. That’s why I’m real careful. You’ve got to be careful.”
“If anybody Disappears us,” Catlin said, “we’ll come back.”