“—master the flux,” he said. Straight Emory theory, contrary to the Hauptmann-Poley thesis. “Control the hormones. Instead of the other way around.”
Grant picked up his wine-glass, held it up and looked at it. “One glass of this. God. Revelation. The man accepts flux-theory.” And then a glance in Justin’s direction, sober and straight and concerned. “You think it’s working—for Emory’s reasons?”
“I don’t know anymore. I really don’t know.” The soup changed taste on him, went coppery and for a moment unpleasant; but he took another spoonful and the feeling passed. Sanity reasserted itself, a profound regret for a little girl in a hell of a situation. “I keep thinking—if they pull the program from under her now—Where’s her compass, then? When you spend your life in a whirlwind—and then the wind dies down—there’s all this quiet—this terrible quiet—”
He was not talking about Ari, suddenly, and realized he was not. Grant was staring at him, worriedly, and he was caught in a cold clear moment, lamplight, Grant, the smell of geranium, in a dark void where other faces hung in separate, lamplit existence.
“When the flux stops,” he said, “when it goes null—you feel like you’ve lost all contact with things. That nothing makes sense. Like all values going equal, none more valid than any other. And you can’t move. So you devise your own pressure to make yourself move. You invent a flux-state. Even panic helps. Otherwise you go like the Bok clone, you just diffuse in all directions, and get no more input than before.”
“Flow-through,” Grant said. “Without a supervisor to pull you out. I’ve been there. Are we talking about Azi? Or are you telling me something?”
“CITs,” Justin said. “CITs. We can flux-think our flux-states too, endless subdivisions. We tunnel between realities.” He finished his soup and took a sip of wine. “Anything can throw you there—like a broken hologram, any piece of it the matrix evokes the flux. The taste of orange juice. After today—the smell of geraniums. You start booting up memories to recollect the hormone-shifts, because when the wind stops, and nothing is moving, you start retrieving old states to run in—am I making sense? Because when the wind stops, you haven’t got anything else. Bok’s clone became a musician. A fair one. Not great. But music is emotion. Emotional flux through a math system of tones and ratios. Flux and flow-through state for a brain that might have dealt with hyperspace.”
“Except they never took the pressure off Bok’s clone,” Grant said. “She was always news, to the day she died.”
“Or it was skewed, chaotic pressure, piling up confusions. You’re brilliant. You’re a failure. You’re failing us. Can you tell us why you’re such a disappointment? I wonder if anyone ever put any enjoyment loop into the Bok clone’s deep-sets.”
“How do you do that,” Grant asked, “when putting it in our eminently sensible sets—flirts with psychosis? I think you teach the subject to enjoy the adrenaline rushes. Or to produce pleasure out of the flux itself instead of retrieving it out of the data-banks.”
The waiter came and deftly removed the empty soup-bowls, added more wine to the glasses.
“I think,” Justin said uncomfortably, “you’ve defined a masochist. Or said something.” His mind kept jumping between his own situation, Jordan, the kid in the courtroom, the cold, green lines of his programs on the vid display, the protected, carefully stressed and de-stressed society of the Town, where the loads were calculated and a logical, humane, human-run system of operations forbade overload.
Pleasure and pain, sweet.
He reached for the wine-glass, and kept his hand steady as he sipped it, set it down again as the waiters brought the main course.
He was still thinking while he was chewing his first bite, and Grant held a long, long silence.
God, he thought, do I need a state of panic to think straight?
Am I going off down a tangent to lunacy, or am I onto something?
“I’m damn tempted,” he said to Grant finally, “to make them a suggestion about Ari.”
“God,” Grant said, and swallowed a bite in haste. “They’d hyperventilate.—You’re serious. What would you suggest to them?”
“That they get Ari a different teacher. At least one more teacher, someone less patient than John Edwards. She isn’t going to push her own limits if she has Edwards figured out, is she? She’s got a whole lot of approval and damned little affection in her life. Which would you be more interested in, in the Edwards set-up? Edwards is a damned nice fellow—damned fine teacher, does wonders getting the students interested; but if you’re Ari Emory, what are you going to work for—Edwards’ full attention—or a test score?”
Grant quirked a brow, genuine bemusement. “You could be right.”
“Damn, I know I’m right. What in hell was she looking for in the office?” He remembered then what he had thought of when they made the reservations, that Security could find them, Security could bug the damned geranium for all he knew. The thought came with its own little adrenaline flux. A reminder he was alive. “The kid wants attention, that’s all. And they’ve just given her the biggest adrenaline high she’s had in years. Sailing through the interview. Everyone pouring attention on her. She’s happier than she’s been in her poor manipulated life. How can Edwards fight that when she gets back? What’s he got to offer, to keep her interested in her studies, against that kind of rush? They need somebody who can get her attention, not somebody who lets her get his.” He shook his head and applied his knife to the roast. “Damn. It’s not my problem, is it?”
“I’d strongly suggest you not get into it,” Grant said. “I’d suggest you not mention it to Yanni.”
“The problem is, no one wants to be the focus of her displeasure,” Justin said. “No one wants to stand in that hot spot, no more than you or I do. Ari always did have a temper—the cold sort. The sort that knew how to wait. I’m not sure how far it went, I never knew her that well. But senior staff did. Didn’t they?”
vi
They got out of the car with Security pouring out of the other cars, and Ari stepped up on the walk leading to the glass doors, with uncle Giraud behind her and Florian and Catlin closing in tight to protect her from the crush of their Security people and the reporters.
The doors opened. She could see that, but she could not see over the shoulders around her. Sometimes they frightened her, even if it was her they had come to see and even if it was her they were trying to protect.
She was afraid they were going to step on her, that was how close it was; and she was still bruised and sore.
They had driven around and seen the docks and the Volga where it met Swigert Bay, and they had seen the spaceport and places that Ari would have given a great deal to have gotten out to see, but uncle Giraud had said no, there were too many people and it was too hard.
Like at the hotel, where they had spent the night in a huge suite, a whole floor all to themselves; and where people had jammed up in the lobby and around their car. That had scared her. It scared her in the Hall of State when they were stopped in the doors and they started to close while she was in them; but Catlin shot out a hand and stopped them and they got through, all of them.
The Hall of State was the first thing they had really gotten to see at all, because there were all these people following them around, and all the reporters.
It was the way it looked in the tapes, it was huge and it echoed till it made you dizzy when you were looking around at it, with all the people up on the balconies looking down at them: it was real, the way the Court had been just a place in a tape, and now she knew what the room at the top of the steps was going to look like the moment uncle Giraud told her that was where the Nine met.
The noise died down. People were all talking, but they were not shouting at each other, and the Security people had put the reporters back, so they could walk and look at things.
Uncle Giraud took her and Florian and Catlin upstairs where she shook hands with Nasir Harad, the Chairman of the Nine:
he was white-haired and thin and there was a lot of him that he didn’t give away, she could tell that the way she could tell that there was something odd about him, the way he kept holding her hand after she had shaken his, and the way he looked at her like he wanted something.
“Uncle Giraud,” she whispered when they were going through the doors into the Council Chamber, “he was funny, back there.”
“Shush,” he said, and pointed to the big half-circle desk where all the Councillors would sit if they were here.
It was funny, anyway, to be asking Giraud whether anybody was a friendly or not. She looked at what he was telling her, which seat was which, and where Giraud sat when he was on Council—that was Science, she knew that: they had driven past the Science Building, and Giraud said he had an office there, and one in the Hall of State, but he wasn’t there a lot of the time, he had secretaries and managers to run things.
He had Security push a button that opened the wall back, and she stood there staring while the Council Chamber opened right into the big Council Hall, becoming a room to the side of the seats, with the Rostrum in front of the huge wall uncle Giraud said was made out of stone from the Volga banks, all rough and red sandstone, just like it was a riverside.
The seats all looked tiny in front of that.
“This is where the laws are made,” uncle Giraud said, and his voice echoed, like every footstep. “That’s where the Council President and the Chairman sit, up there on the Rostrum.”
She knew that. She could tape-remember the room full, with people walking up and down the aisles. Her heart beat fast.
“This is the center of Union,” uncle Giraud said. “This is where people work out their differences. This is what makes everything work.”
She had never heard uncle Giraud talk like that, never heard uncle Giraud talk in that quiet voice that said these things were important. He sounded like Dr. Edwards, somehow, doing lessons for her.
He took her back outside then, where it was noisy and Security made room for them. Down the stairs then. She could see cameras set up down below.
“We’re going to do a short interview,” uncle Giraud told her, “and then we’re going to have lunch with Chairman Harad. Is that all right?”
“What’s going to be for lunch?” she asked. Food sounded good. She was not so sure about Chairman Harad.
“Councillor,” an older woman said, coming up to them, and put her hand on uncle Giraud’s sleeve and said: “Private. Quickly. Please.”
It was some kind of trouble. Ari knew it, the woman was giving it off like she was about to explode with worry, and Giraud froze up just a second and then said: “Ari. Stand here.”
They talked together, and the woman’s back was to them. The noise blurred everything out.
But uncle Giraud came back very fast, and he was upset. His face was all pale.
“Sera,” Florian said, very fast, very soft, like he wanted her to say what to do. But she didn’t know where the trouble was coming from, or what it was.
“Ari,” uncle Giraud said, and took her aside, along by the wall, the huge fountain, and down to the other end where there were some offices. Security moved very fast, Florian and Catlin went with her, and nobody was following them. There was just that voice-sound, everywhere, murmuring like the water.
Security opened the doors. Security told the people inside to go into a back office and they looked confused and upset.
But: “Wait out here,” uncle Giraud said to Florian and Catlin, and she looked at them, scared, uncle Giraud hurrying her into an empty office with a desk and a chair. They were going to follow her, not certain what to do, but he said: “Out!” and she said: “It’s all right.”
He shut the door on them. They were scared. Uncle Giraud was scared. And she didn’t know what was going on with everyone, except he took her by the shoulders and looked at her and said:
“Ari,—Ari, there’s news on the net. It’s from Fargone. I want you to listen to me. It’s about your maman. She’s died, Ari.”
She just stood there. She felt his hands on her shoulders. He hurt her right one. He was telling her something crazy, something that couldn’t be about maman, it didn’t make sense.
“She died some six months ago, Ari. The news is just breaking over the station net. It just got here. They’re picking it up out there, on their comlinks. That woman—heard it; and told me, and I didn’t want you to hear it out there, Ari. Take a breath, sweet. Ari.”
He shook her. It hurt. And she couldn’t breathe for a moment, couldn’t, till she got a breath all at once and uncle Giraud hugged her against him and patted her back and called her sweet. Like maman.
She hit him. He hugged her so she couldn’t, and just went on holding her while she cried.
“It’s a damn lie!” she yelled when she got enough breath.
“No.” He hugged her hard. “Sweet, your maman was very old, very old, that’s all. And people die. Listen to me. I’m going to take you home. Home, understand? But you’ve got to walk out of here. You’ve got to walk out of here past all those people and get to the car, you understand me? Security’s going to get the car, we’re going to go straight to the airport, we’re going to fly home. But the first thing you have to do is get to the car. Can you do that?”
She listened. She listened to everything. Things went past her. But she stopped crying, and he set her back by the shoulders and wiped her face with his fingers, and smoothed her hair and got her to sit down in the chair.
“Are you all right?” he asked her, very, very quiet. “Ari?”
She got another gulp of air. And stared through him. She felt him pat her shoulder, and heard him go to the door and call Catlin and Florian.
“Ari’s maman has died,” she heard him say. “We just found it out.”
More and more people. Florian and Catlin. If all of them believed it, then it was truer and truer. All the people out there. Maman was on the news. The whole of Union knew her maman had died.
Uncle Giraud came back and got down on one knee and got his comb and very carefully began to comb her hair. She messed it up and turned her face away. Go away.
But he combed it again, very gentle, very patient, and patted her on the shoulder when he finished. Florian brought her a drink and she took it in her good hand. Catlin just stood there with a worried look.
Dead is dead, that was what Catlin said. Catlin didn’t know what to do with a CIT who thought it was something else.
“Ari,” uncle Giraud said, “let’s get out of here. Let’s get you to the car. All right? Take my hand. There’s no one going to ask you any questions. Let’s just walk to the car.”
She took his hand. She got up and she walked with her hand in Giraud’s out into the office and outside again, where all the people were standing, far across the hall; and the voice-sound died away into the distance. She could hear the fountain-noise for the first time. Giraud shifted hands on her, and put his right one on her shoulder, and she walked with him, with Catlin in front of her and Florian on her other side, and all the Security people. But they didn’t need them. Nobody asked any questions.
They were sorry, she thought. They were sorry for her.
And she hated that. She hated the way they looked at her.
It was a terribly long walk, until they were going through the doors and getting into the car, and Florian and Catlin piling in on the other side, while uncle Giraud got her into the back seat and sat down with her and held her.
Security closed the back doors, one of them got in and closed the doors and the car started up, fast and hard, the tunnel lights flashing past them.
“Ari,” Giraud said to her on the plane, moving Florian out of his seat to sit down across the little table from her, once they were in the air. “I’ve got the whole story now. Your maman died in her office. She was at work. She had a heart attack. It was very fast. They couldn’t even get her to hospital.”
“Where are my letters?” she asked, looking straig
ht at him, looking him right in the face.
Giraud looked at her straight too. “At Fargone. I’m sure she read them.”
“Why didn’t she answer me?”
Giraud took a moment. Then: “I don’t know, Ari. I truly don’t know. I don’t know if I can ever answer that. I’ll try to find out. But it takes time. Everything between here and Fargone—takes a long time.”
She turned her face away from him, to the window where the outback showed hazy reds.
She had not had her maman for six months. And she had never felt it. She had gone on as if nothing had happened, as if everything was still the same. It made her ashamed. It made her mad. Terrible things could have happened besides that, and it would take that long to know about them.
“I want Ollie to come home,” she said to Giraud.
“I’ll see about it,” Giraud said.
“Do it!”
“Ollie has a choice too,” Giraud said. “Doesn’t he? He’s your maman’s partner. He’ll have taken care of your maman’s business. He’ll have seen that things went right. He’s not a servant, sweet, he’s a very good manager, and he’ll be handling your maman’s office and handling her affairs for her. He’d want to do that. But I’ll send and ask him what he wants to do.”
She swallowed at the lump in her throat. She wished Giraud would go away. She didn’t know what she thought yet. She was still putting it together.
She thought of that long walk and everybody in the Hall staring at her. And she had to do that again at Reseune—everybody staring at her, everybody knowing what was going on.
It made her mad. It made her so mad it was hard to think.
But she needed to. She needed to know where people were lying to her.
And who would want to take things from her. And whether that was what had happened to maman.
Who are they, where are they, what have they got?
She looked at Giraud when he was not looking, just looked, a long time.
vii