That was like Catlin. Catlin would, too, Ari thought, or at least Catlin and Florian would do a lot of damage.
“My maman is real smart,” she said, “and Ollie is real strong, and I’m not sure they just grab you. I think maybe they Work you, you know, they psych you.”
“Who’s our Enemy?” Florian asked.
It was the way they thought. Her heart beat hard. She had never, ever talked about it with anyone. She had never, ever thought about it the way the azi did, without being in the middle of it. Things suddenly made sense when you thought the way they did, straight and plain, without worrying. And when you thought: what if it could be an Enemy? She sat trying to think about who could do things like grab people and psych people and Disappear strong grown-up people without them being able to do anything about it.
She dragged Florian real close and whispered right into his ear between her two hands, the way you had to do if you really wanted something to be secret, because of the Minder—and if they were talking about an Enemy, you didn’t know where you were safe. “I think it might be Giraud. But he’s not a regular Enemy. He can give you orders. He can give Security orders.”
Florian looked real upset. Catlin elbowed him and he leaned over and whispered in Catlin’s ear the same way.
Then Catlin looked scared, and Catlin didn’t do that.
She pulled Catlin close and whispered: “That’s the only one I know could have Got my maman.”
Catlin whispered in her ear: “Then you have to Get him first.”
“He might not be it!” she whispered.
She sat and she thought, while Catlin passed it to Florian. Florian said something back, and then leaned forward and said to her:
“We shouldn’t be talking about this now.”
She looked at Florian, upset.
“An Older is real dangerous,” Florian said. And in the faintest whisper of all: “Please, sera. Tomorrow. Outside.”
They understood her, then. They believed her, not just because they were azi. What she said made sense to them. She tucked up her legs in her arms and felt shaky and stupid and mad at herself; and at the same time thought she had not put a lot of things together because she hadn’t had any way of making it make sense. She had thought things just happened because they happened, because they had always happened and the world was that way. But that was stupid. It wasn’t just things that happened, people made things happen, and Florian and Catlin knew that the way she should have known it if it hadn’t always been there, all the time.
What’s unusual? was a game they played. Florian or Catlin would say: What’s unusual in the living room? And they timed how long it took you to find it. Once or twice she beat Catlin and once she beat Florian at finding it; a couple of times she set things up they had to give on. She wasn’t stupid about things like that. But she felt that way about this.
The stupid part was thinking things had to be the way they were.
The stupid part was that she had thought when maman went away, that someone had made her go, but then she had just fitted everything together so that wasn’t so important—if maman had had to go without her, it was because she was too young and it was too dangerous. And that was what she had been looking at, when the Something Unusual was sitting right in plain sight beside it.
The stupid part now was the way she still didn’t want to think all the way to the end of it, about how if there was an enemy and he Got maman, she didn’t really know whether maman was all right; and she was scared.
She remembered arguing with uncle Denys about the party last year. And her not wanting Giraud to come; and uncle Denys said: That’s not nice, Ari. He’s my brother.
That was scary too.
That was scary, because uncle Giraud might get uncle Denys to do things. Uncle Giraud had Security; and they might get into her letters. They might just stop the letters going to maman at all.
And that tore up everything.
Stupid. Stupid.
She felt sick all over. And she couldn’t ask uncle Denys what was true. Denys would say: He’s my brother.
iv
Giraud poured more water and drank, tracking on the reports, bored while the tutors argued over the relative merits of two essays, one out of archives, one current.
Denys, Peterson, Edwards, Ivanov, and Morley: all of them around a table, discussing the implications of vocabulary choice in eight-year-olds. It was not Giraud’s field. It was, God help them, Peterson’s.
“The verbal development,” Peterson said, in the stultifying murmur that was Peterson in full display, “is point seven off, the significant anomaly in the Gonner Developmentals…”
“I don’t think there’s any cause for worry,” Denys said. “The difference is Jane and Olga, not Ari and Ari.”
“Of course there is some argument that the Gonner battery is weighted away from concept. Hermann Poling maintained in his article in—”
It went on. Giraud drew small squares on his notepaper. Peterson did good work. Ask him a question, he had a pre-recorded lecture. Teacher’s disease. Colleagues and strangers got the same as his juvenile subjects.
“In sum,” Giraud said, finally, when the water was at half in his glass, and his paper was full of squares. “In sum, in brief, then, you believe the difference was Olga.”
“The Poling article—”
“Yes. Of course. And you don’t think corrective tape is necessary.”
“The other scores indicate a very substantial correspondence—”
“What John means—” Edwards said, “is that she’s understanding everything, she knows the words, but so much of her development was precocious, she had an internal vocabulary worked out that for her is a kind of shorthand.”
“There may be a downside effect to insisting on a shift of vocabulary,” Denys said. “Possibly it doesn’t describe what she’s seeing. She simply prefers slang and her own internal jargon, which I haven’t tried to discourage. She does know the words, the tests prove that. Also, I’m not certain we’re seeing the whole picture. I rather well think she’s resisting some of the exams.”
“Why?”
“Jane,” Denys said. “The child hasn’t forgotten. I hoped the letters would taper off with time. I hoped that the azi could make a difference in that.”
“You don’t think,” Edwards said, “that the way that was handled—tended to make her cling to that stage; I mean, a subconscious emphasis on that stage of her life, a clinging to those memories, a refusal—as it were, to leave that stage, a kind of waiting.”
“That’s an interesting theory,” Giraud said, leaning forward on his arms. “Is there any particular reason?”
“The number of times she says: ‘My maman said—’ The tone of voice.”
“I want a voice-stress on that,” Denys said.
“No problem,” Giraud said. “It’s certainly worth pursuing. Does she reference other people?”
“No,” Edwards said.
“Not family members. Not friends. Not the azi.”
“Nelly. ‘Nelly says.’ When it regards something about home. Sometimes ‘my uncle Denys doesn’t mind’ this or that… She doesn’t respect Nelly’s opinions, she doesn’t respect much Nelly says, but she evidences a desire not to upset her. ‘Uncle Denys’ is a much more respectful reference, but more that she uses the name as currency. She’s quite willing to remind you that ‘my uncle Denys’ takes an interest in things.” Edwards cleared his throat. “Quite to the point, she hints her influence with ‘uncle Denys’ can get me a nicer office.”
Denys snorted in surprise, and laughed then, to Edwards’ relief. “Like the party invitation?”
“Much the same thing.”
“What about Ollie?” Giraud asked.
“Quite rarely. Almost never. I’m being precise now. I’d say she used to mention Ollie right after Jane left. Now—I don’t think I’ve heard that name in a long time. Maybe more than a year.”
“Interesting. Justin Warrick???
?
“She never mentions him. I did, if you recall. She was quite anxious to quit the subject. That name never comes up.”
“Worth the time on the computers to run a name search,” Denys said.
On all those tapes. On years of tapes. Giraud let his breath flow out and nodded. More personnel. More time on the computers.
Dammit, there was pressure outside. A lot of pressure. They were prepared to go public finally, to break the story; and they had an anomaly; they had a child far less serious than the first Ari, far more capricious and more restrained in temper. The azi had not helped. There was a little more seriousness to the child lately, a little gain in vocabulary: Florian and Catlin were better at essay than she was, but the hard edge was not there, maman was still with Ari in a very persistent sense, and the Warrick affair, Yanni’s sudden revelation that young Justin had handed them something that stymied the Sociology computers—
Give it to Jordan, Denys had suggested. Send him to Jordan. The Warricks are far less likely to cause trouble with the Project if they’re busy, and you know Jordan would work on the damned thing, no matter what it was, if it gave him a chance to see his son.
Which was trouble with Defense: they were jealous of Warrick’s time. There was a chance Defense would take official interest in Justin Warrick: there was no way to run him past their noses unnoticed, and in the way of Defense, Defense wanted anything that might seem to be important, or useful, or suddenly anomalous.
Damn, and damn.
Ari wanted him, Yanni had said. And, dammit, there’s something there.
There was the paradox of the Project: how wide the replication had to be. How many individuals, essential to each other? Thank God the first Ari’s society had been extremely limited in terms of personal contacts—but it had been much more open in terms of news-services and public contact from a very early age.
“We’ve got to go ahead,” Giraud said. “Dammit, we’ve got to take her public, for a whole host of reasons, Lu’s out of patience and we’re running out of time! We can’t be wrong, there’s no way we can afford to be wrong.”
No one said anything. It was too evident what the stakes were.
“The triggers are all there,” Petros said. “Not all of them have been invoked. I think a little more pressure. Academic will do. Put it on her. Frustrate her. Give her things she’s bound to fail in. Accelerate the program.”
That had consistently been Petros’ advice.
“She hasn’t met intellectual frustration,” Denys said, “—yet.”
“We don’t want her bloody bored with school, either,” Giraud snapped. “Maybe it is an option. What do the computers say lately, when they’re not running Warrick’s school projects?”
“Do we run it again?” Peterson asked. “I don’t think there’s going to be a significant change. I just don’t believe you can discount the results we have. Accelerating the program when there’s an anomaly in question—”
Petros leaned forward, jaw jutting. “Allowing the program to stagnate while the anomaly proliferates is your answer, is it?”
“Dr. Ivanov, allow me to make my point—”
“I know your damn point, we know your damn point, doctor.”
Giraud poured another glass of water.
“Enough on it,” he said. “Enough. We run the damn tests. We take the computer time. We get our answers. Let’s have the query in tomorrow, can we do that?”
Mostly, he thought, the voice-stress was the best lead. All those lesson-sessions to scan.
The Project ate computer time at an enormous rate. And the variances kept proliferating.
So did the demands of the Council investigating committee, that wanted to get into documents containing more and more details of Science Bureau involvement in the Gehenna project, because Alliance was asking hard questions, wanting more and more information on the Gehenna colonists, and linking it to the betterment of Alliance-Union relations.
The Centrists and the Abolitionists wanted the whole archives opened. Giraud’s intelligence reported Mikhail Corain was gathering evidence, planning to call for a Council bill of Discovery to open the entire Emory archives, charging that there were other covert projects, other timebombs waiting, and that the national security took precedence over Reseune’s sovereignty: that Reseune had no right to the notes and papers which Ariane Emory had accrued while serving as Councillor for Science, that those became Union property on her death, and that a bill of Discovery was necessary to find out what was Reseune’s and what of Emory’s papers belonged to Union archives.
There were timebombs, for certain. The essential one was aged eight, and exposing her to the vitriol and the hostility in Novgorod—making her the center of controversy—
Everything came down to that critical point. They had to go public.
Before they ended up with a Discovery bill opening all Ari’s future secrets into public view, where a precocious eight-year-old could access them out of sequence.
v
In mornings it was always lessons, and Ari took hers with Dr. Edwards in his office or in the study lab, but it was not just mornings now, it was after lunch in the library and the tape-lab, so there was a lot of follow-up and Dr. Edwards asked her questions and gave her tests.
Catlin and Florian had lessons every day too, their own kind, down in the Town at a place they called Green Barracks; and one day a week they had to stay in Green Barracks overnight. That was when they did a Room or did special drill. But most times they were able to meet her at the library or the lab and walk her home.
They did this day, both of them very proper and solemn in their black uniforms, but more solemn than usual, when they walked down to the doors and out to the crosswalk.
“This is as safe as we can find to talk,” Catlin said.
“But you don’t know,” Florian said. “There’s equipment that can hear you this far if they want to. You can’t say they won’t, you can just keep changing places so if they’re not really expecting you to say something they want right then they won’t bother. Set-up is a lot of work if your Subject moves around a lot.”
“If they didn’t hear us last night, I don’t think they would be onto us,” Ari said. She knew how to be nice enough not to get in trouble without being too nice and making people think she was up to something. But she didn’t say that. She walked with them along toward the fishpond. She had brought food in her pocket. “What were you going to tell me?”
“It’s this,” said Catlin. “You should hit your Enemy first if you can. But you have to be sure, first thing, who it is. Then how many, where are they, what have they got? That’s the next thing you have to find out.”
“When your Enemy is an Older,” Florian said, “it’s real hard to know that, because they know so much more.”
“If he’s not expecting it,” Catlin said, “anybody can be Got.”
“But if we try and miss,” Florian said, “they will try to Disappear us. So we re not sure, sera. I think we could Get them. For real. I could steal some stuff that would. They put it in Supply, and they’re real careless. They ought to fix that. But I can get it. And we could kill the Enemy, just it’s real dangerous. You get one chance with an Older. Usually just one.”
“But if you don’t know where his partners are,” Catlin said, “they’ll Get you. It depends on how much that’s worth.”
That made a lot of things she was thinking fall into place. Click. She walked along with her hands in her pockets and said: “And if you don’t know all those things, it’s more than getting caught; it’s not knowing what one to grab next. There’s things that run all over Reseune, there’s what his partners are going to do, there’s who’s friends and who’s not, and who’s going to take Hold of things, and we can’t do that.”
“I don’t know,” Florian said. “You’d have to know those things, sera, we wouldn’t. I know we could Get one, maybe two, if we split up, or if we could get the targets together. That’s the main ones. But
it’s not near all the ones that would be after us.”
They reached the fishpond. Ari knelt down at the edge of the water and took the bag of fish-food out of her pocket. Catlin and Florian squatted beside her. “Here,” she said, passing them the bag to get their own, and then tossed a bit into the water for the white one that came up, from under the lilies. White-and-red was almost as fast. She watched the rings go out from the food, and from the strike, and the lilies swaying. “He’s not easy,” she said finally. “We can’t Get everything. There are too many hook-ups. Connections. He’s important; he’s got a lot of people, not just in Reseune, and what he’s got—Security, for one thing. I don’t know what else. So even if he was gone—” It was strange and upsetting to be talking about killing somebody. It didn’t feel real. But it was. Florian and Catlin really could do it. She was not sure that made her feel safer, but it made her feel less like things were closing in on her. “—We’d still be in trouble.
“Also,” she said, “they could Get my maman and Ollie. For real.” They didn’t understand that part, she thought, because they had never had a maman, but they looked at her like they took it very seriously. “I’m afraid they could have. They’re at Fargone. I sent letters. They should have got there by now. Now I’m not sure—” Dammit, she was going to snivel. She saw Florian and Catlin look at her all distressed. “—I’m not sure,” she said in a rush, hard and mad, “they ever got sent.”
They didn’t understand, for sure. She tried to think of what she had left out they had to know.
“If there is an Enemy,” she said, “I don’t know what they want. Sometimes I thought maman left me here because it was too dangerous to go with her. Sometimes I thought she left me here because they made her. But I don’t know why, and I don’t know why she didn’t tell me.”
The azi didn’t say anything for a minute. Then Florian said: “I don’t think I’d try to say. I don’t think Catlin can. It’s CIT. I don’t understand CITs.”
“CITs have connections,” she said. It was like telling them how to Work someone. She felt uneasy telling them. She explained, making a hook out of two fingers to hook together. “To other CITs. Like you to Catlin and Catlin to you and both of you to me. Sometimes not real strong. Sometimes real, real strong. That’s the first thing. CITs do things for each other, sometimes because it feels good, sometimes because they’re Working each other. And sometimes they do things to Get each other. A lot of times it’s to protect themselves, sometimes their connections: connections are a lot more in danger, sometimes, if you don’t let your Enemy be sure where your connections are, and whether some of them are to people he’s connected to. Like building-sticks.”