The girl in the picture looked just exactly like her, but it was not her maman; but it was the right name for her papa. It was all wrong. It was her standing there. It was. But the front doors were not like that. Not quite. Not now.
She felt her stomach more and more upset. Uncle Denys turned the page and showed her pictures of old Reseune, Reseune before the House was as big, before the Town was anything but old barracks, and the fields were real small. There were big buildings missing, like the AG barn, and like a lot of the mills and half the town, and that Ari was walking with her maman down a Town Road that was the same road, toward a Town that was very different.
There was that Ari, sitting in her same classroom, with a different teacher, with a kind of screwed-up frown on her face while she looked at a jar that was like her saying Ugh, she could feel it right in her stomach and feel her own face the way it would be.
But she never had a blouse like that, and she never wore a pin like that in her hair.
She felt herself all sick inside, because it was like it was all real, maman had tricked her, and she was stupid like she had been afraid she was, in front of Catlin and Florian, in front of everybody. But she couldn’t not look at these things, she couldn’t do anything but sit there with her arm aching in the dumb cast and herself feeling light-headed and silly being out here in the dining room in her robe and her slippers, looking at herself in a place that was Reseune a long, long time ago.
A long time ago.
That Ari had been born—that long ago. Her maman’s friend, uncle Denys had called her; and she had not thought when he said that, just how old maman was.
A hundred thirty-four years. No. A hundred forty-one, no, two, she was real close to her ninth birthday and maman was that old now.
A hundred forty-two…
She was close to her ninth birthday and maman’s letter had to come, any day now, and maybe maman would explain some of these things, maybe maman would send her all the letters maman must have written too, all at once, like hers…
“There’s your maman,” uncle Denys said, and showed her a picture of her and a bunch of other kids all playing, and there was this pretty woman with black hair, with her maman’s mouth and her maman’s eyes, only young, with her, but she was about five or six. A baby. Maman had had another Ari, first, a long, long time ago.
It hurt to see maman so pretty and not with her at all, not really, but with that other baby. It had stopped hurting until then. And it made her throat ache.
Uncle Denys stopped and hugged her head against his shoulder gently. “I know. I know, Ari. I’m sorry.”
She shoved away. She pulled the book over so it was in front of her and she looked at that picture till she could see everything about it, what her maman was wearing, what that Ari was wearing, that proved it was not something she had forgotten, it was really not her, because everything about it was old-fashioned and long-ago.
“That’s your uncle Giraud,” uncle Denys said, pointing to a gangly boy.
He looked like anybody. He didn’t look like he was going to grow up to be nasty as Giraud was. He looked just like any kid.
She turned the page. There was that Ari with her maman, and a lot of other grown-ups.
Then there was her with Florian and Catlin, but it was not them, they were all in the middle of old-time Reseune.
She felt another deep chill, like when she flew off Horse and hit the ground. She felt scared, and looked at Florian and Catlin for how they saw it.
They didn’t ask. They wouldn’t ask. They were being proper with uncle Denys and not interrupting, but she knew they were confused and they were upset, because they had both gone completely azi, paying real close attention.
She couldn’t even reach to Florian to squeeze his hand, it was the side with the cast.
“Do you recognize them?” uncle Denys asked.
“Who are they?” Ari asked, angry, terribly angry of a sudden, because it was not making sense, and she was scared, she knew Florian and Catlin were scared, everything was inside out.
“You’re not the only one who’s come back,” Denys said very softly. “There was one other Catlin and one other Florian: they belonged to that other Ari Emory. They protected her all their lives. Do you understand me, Florian? Do you, Catlin?”
“No, ser,” Florian said; and: “No, ser,” Catlin said. “But it makes sense.”
“Why does it make sense?” uncle Denys asked.
“We’re azi,” Catlin said, the most obvious thing in the world. “There could be a lot of us.”
But I’m a CIT, Ari thought, upset all the way through. Aren’t I?
“You’re Alphas,” uncle Denys said, “and, no, it’s not ordinary with Alphas. You’re too difficult to keep track of. You change so fast. But you’re still a lot easier to duplicate than a CIT, you’re right, because azi start with very specific tape. Teaching Ari has been—ever so much harder.”
Teaching me. Teaching me—what? Why?
But she knew that. She understood all across the far and wide of it, that uncle Denys was saying what she was, and not saying it to her, but to Florian and Catlin, because it was something she could not understand as easily as her azi could.
Do you know, maman had asked her, the day she saw the babies, the difference between a CIT and an azi?
I only thought I did.
Denys left that page open a long time. “Ari,” he said. “Do you understand me?”
She said nothing. When you were confused, it was better to let somebody else be a fool, unless you were the only one who knew the question.
And uncle Denys knew. Uncle Denys was trying to tell her what he knew, in this book, in these pictures that weren’t her.
“Your maman taught you,” uncle Denys said, “and now I do. You’re definitely a CIT. Don’t mistake that. You’re you, Ari, you’re very exactly you, exactly the way Florian is Florian and Catlin is Catlin, and that’s hard to do. It was ever so hard to get this far. Ari was a very, very special little girl, and you’re taking up everything she had, everything she could do, everything she held and owned, which is a very great deal, Ari. That you hold Florian and Catlin’s contracts is all part of that, because you all belong together, you always have, and it wouldn’t be right to leave them out. You own a major share of Reseune itself, you own property enough to make you very, very rich, and you’ve already proved to us who you are, we haven’t any doubt at all. But remember that I told you Reseune has enemies. Now some of those enemies want to come in here and take things that belong to you—they don’t even know there is an Ari, you understand. They think she died, and that was all of her, and they can just move in and take everything that belonged to her—that belongs to you, Ari. Do you know what a lawsuit is? Do you know what it means to sue somebody in court?”
She shook her head, muddled and scared by what uncle Denys said, getting too much, far too much from every direction.
“You know what judges are?”
“Like in a court. They get all the records and stuff. They can send you to hospital.”
“A civil suit, Ari: that’s different than a criminal case. They don’t send you to hospital, but they can say what’s so and who owns what. We’ve lodged a suit in the Supreme Court, in Novgorod, to keep these people from taking everything you own. They can’t, you understand, if somebody owns it, really owns it. The only thing is, people don’t know you exist. You have to show up in that court and prove you’re really Ari and that you have a right to Ari’s CIT-number.”
“That’s stupid!”
“How do they know you’re not just some little girl all made up and telling a lie?”
“I know who I am!”
“How do you prove it to people who’ve never seen you?”
She sat there trying to think. She had the shivers. “You tell them.”
“Then they’ll say we’re lying. We can send the genetic records, that can prove it, beyond any doubt. But they could say we just got that out of the l
ab, because of course the Ari geneset is there, isn’t it, because you were born out of the lab. They could say there isn’t any little girl alive, and she hasn’t got any right to anything. That’s what could happen. That’s why you have to go, and stand in that court, and tell the judges that’s your genetic record, and you’re you, Ariane Emory, and you own all that stuff these people in the Council want to take.”
She looked at her right, at Florian and Catlin, at two pale, very azi faces. And back at uncle Denys. “Could they take Florian and Catlin?”
“If you don’t exist, you can’t hold a contract, can you?”
“That’s stupid, uncle Denys! They’re stupid!”
“You just have to prove that, don’t you? Dear, I wish to hell I could have saved this till you felt better. But there isn’t any time. These people are moving fast, and there’s going to be a law passed in Council to take everything, everything that belongs to you, because they don’t know about you. You’ve got to go to Novgorod and tell the judges it does belong to you and they can’t do that.”
“When?”
“In a few days. A very few days. There’s more to it, Ari. Because you’ve been a secret, your enemies haven’t known about you either. If you go to Novgorod they will know. And you’ll be in very real danger from then on. Most of them would sue you in court and try to take what you’ve got, that kind of enemy; but some of them would kill you if they could. Even if you’re a little girl. They’re that kind.”
“Ser,” Catlin said, “who?”
“A man named Rocher, for one. And a few random crazy people we don’t know the names of. We wish we did. If Ari goes to Novgorod she’ll have a lot of Security with her. Armed Security. They can stop that kind of thing. But you have to watch out for it, you have to watch very closely, and for God’s sake, leave any maneuvering to the senior Security people, you two. Just cover Ari.”
“Do we have weapons, ser?”
“I don’t think Novgorod would understand that. No. Just cover Ari. Watch around you. Keep her safe. That’s all.”
Ari drew a deep breath. “What am I supposed to do?”
“You talk to the judges. You go in front of the court, you answer their questions about when you were born, and where, and what your name and number are. Uncle Giraud will be there. Giraud knows how to argue with them.”
She went cold and clammy all over. “I don’t want Giraud! I want you to come.”
“Dear, uncle Giraud is especially good at this. He’ll show them all the records, and they won’t have any trouble believing you. They may take a little cell sample. That’ll sting a little if they do that, but you’re a brave girl, you won’t mind that. You know what that’s for. It proves you’re not lying. Everyone in the world has seen pictures of Ari Emory—you won’t have any trouble with that. But there will be other people to deal with. People not in the court. Newspeople. Reporters. There’ll be a lot of that. But you’re a little girl, and they can’t be nasty, they’d better not be, or your uncle Giraud will know exactly what to do with them.”
She had never thought it could be a good thing to have uncle Giraud. But uncle Denys was right, uncle Giraud would be a lot better at that.
If he wasn’t with the Enemy in the first place. Things were getting more and more complicated.
“Florian and Catlin are going for sure?”
“Yes.”
“The judges can’t just take them, can they?”
“Dear, the law can do anything; but the law won’t take what belongs to you. You have to prove you’re you, that’s the whole problem. That’s what you’re going there for, and if you don’t, nothing is safe here either.”
So Ari sat in a leather seat in RESEUNE ONE, a seat so big her feet hardly reached the floor; and Florian and Catlin sat in the two seats opposite her, taking turns looking out the windows, only she had one right beside her, with the real outback under them for as far as you could see.
They would land at Novgorod, they would land at the airport there, but before they landed they were going to see the city from the air; they would see the spaceport, and the Hall of State and the docks where all the barges went, that chugged past Reseune on the Novaya Volga. They were going to see Swigert Bay and the Ocean. The pilot kept telling them where they were and what they were looking at, which right now was the Great West Sink, which was a brown spot on the maps and a brown place from the air with a lake in the middle. She could talk back to the pilot if she pushed a button by her seat.
“We’re coming up on the Kaukash Range on the right side,” the pilot said.
They had let her go up front for a little while. She got to see out past the pilot and the co-pilot, when they were following the Novaya Volga.
The pilot asked if she liked flying. She said yes, and the pilot told her what a lot of the controls were, and showed her how the plane steered, and what the computers did.
That was the best thing in days. She had him show Florian and Catlin, until uncle Giraud said she had better sit down and study her papers and let the pilot fly the plane. The pilot had winked at her and said she ought to, they were spilling uncle Giraud’s drinks.
She wished she had her arm out of the cast, because that was a nuisance; and gave uncle Giraud an excuse to tell her she ought to stay belted-in in her seat.
Most of all she wished they were all through the court business and the reporters, and they could get to the things uncle Denys told her they were going to get to see while they were in Novgorod. That would be fun. She was going to have her birthday in Novgorod. She wanted to prove everything and then get to that part of it.
Most of all she was worried what would happen if uncle Denys was wrong.
Or if uncle Giraud couldn’t prove who she was.
The court couldn’t make a mistake, uncle Denys said, over and over. Not with the tests they had, and the law was the law: they couldn’t take what belonged to somebody without suing, and then it was going to be real hard for them to sue a little girl. Especially because Giraud had a lot of friends in the Defense Bureau, who would classify everything.
That meant Secret.
The reporters are going to be a bigger problem than the court, uncle Denys had said. The reporters will pull up a lot of the old pictures of the first Ari. You have to expect that. They’ll talk about a little girl Reseune birthed a long time ago, a PR off Estelle Bok. It didn’t work right. You’ve beaten all that little girl’s problems. If they say you’re like that other little girl they’re being nasty, and you answer them that you’re you, and if they doubt that they can wait and see how you grow up. I’ve no doubt at all that you can handle that sort of thing. You don’t have to be polite if reporters start being nasty, but you can get a lot more out of them if you act like a nice little kid.
It sounded like a fight. That was what it sounded like. She figured that. It was one of the only times uncle Denys had ever talked to her about Working people, but uncle Denys was good at it, and she was sure he knew what was what.
The Enemy cheats, Catlin always said.
It worried her, about whether the Court ever did.
“Sera,” Catlin had come to whisper in her ear that night when they were all going to bed, Florian and Catlin on their pallets, and herself in her own bed with her arm propped up again, “sera, who’s our side in this?”
Florian was usually the one who asked all the questions. That was one of Catlin’s best ever.
And Catlin waited while she thought about it, and motioned Catlin up close and whispered back: “I am. I’m your side. That’s all. You never mind what anybody says, that’s still the Rule. They can’t say I’m anybody else, no matter what.”
So Catlin and Florian relaxed.
She looked at the papers uncle Giraud had given her to study about what the reporters and the judges could ask, and wished she could.
iii
There was very little work getting done in Wing One, or likely anywhere else in Reseune on this morning, and if there was a port
able vid no matter how old not checked out or rented anywhere in the House and the Labs, it was well hidden.
Justin and Grant had theirs, the office door shut—some of the junior designers were clustered together in the lounge downstairs, but the ones in some way involved with the Project sealed themselves in offices alone or with closest associates, and nothing stirred, not even for phone calls.
The cameras were the official ones in the Supreme Court, no theatrics, just the plain, uncommentaried coverage the Supreme Court allowed.
Lawyers handed papers to clerks, and the Court proceeded to ask the clerk if there were any absences or faults in the case.
Negative.
There was a very young girl sitting with her back to the cameras, at the table beside Giraud, not fidgeting, not acting at all restless through the tedium of the opening.
Listening, Justin reckoned. Probably with that very memorable frown.
The news-services had been right on it when the plane landed, and a single news-feed from the official camera set-up at the airport reception lounge had given the news-services their first look at Ari Emory, no questions allowed, until after the ruling.
Ari had stood there with her good hand in uncle Giraud’s, the other arm in a cast, wearing a pale blue and very little-girl suit, with black-uniformed Florian and Catlin very stiff and looking like kids in dress-up, overkill in mimicking elder Ari—until a piece of equipment clanked, and eyes went that way and bodies stiffened like the same muscle moved them.
“That’ll send chills down backs,” Justin had muttered to Grant. “Damn. That is them, no way anyone can doubt it. No matter what size they are.”
The news-services had done archive filler after, brought up split-screen comparisons between the first and second Ari and Catlin and Florian, from old news photos; and showed a trio so much like them it was like two takes in slightly different lighting, Ari in a different suit, standing beside Geoffrey Carnath instead of Giraud Nye.