That whole list of people with higher clearances than mine—can lie to the system and lie to me and I can’t find it out.
Unless I get a higher clearance…and the way I get that is when I do something that gets Base One to do it.
Which means doing everything Ari wants.
Nothing Ari wants, me-Ari, myself, for me. If I’m not the same. If there is a me. If there ever was a me that isn’t Ari. Or if she’s not me.
If I was her, how old would I be? A hundred fifty and twelve, a hundred sixty-two. That’s older than Jane, no, she was born—Jane was a teenager, Jane was a hundred forty-two when she died, and she held the first Ari when she was a baby, so if I’m twelve and Jane was my maman when she was a hundred thirty-four and I was born—and if uncle Denys is right and I was begun on paper the day after Ari died—
It could take more work than making the Filly. And that was tons of figuring. And I’m not an azi, I’m not a production geneset, so that’s nothing fast. So say it was a year, and then nine, ten months, and everything works out that Ari was a hundred—twenty-something.
You can live longer than that. I wonder if that’s when I’m going to die. I wonder what she died of.
Rejuv usually doesn’t go till you’re a hundred forty if you get it started early, and she was pretty, she was pretty when she was older, she was on it early, for sure—
That’s depressing. Don’t think of that. It’s awful to know when you’re going to die.
It’s awful to read ahead what’s going to happen to you. I don’t want to read that stuff in the files. I don’t want to know.
And it’s real stupid not to.
There was a man who could see the future. He tried to change his. But that was his future.
That was his future.
Like changing it—can’t work. Because then you go off what the Base wants and you’re frozen, locked up, no accesses.
I have to do well. I have to do everything they want and then when I grow up I can Get them good.
Damn. That’s exactly what Ari said I should do.
How do I get away from her?
Can I get away from her—and still be me?
ii
She was very careful to keep on time when the Minder woke her, shower fast, grab breakfast—Florian and Catlin cooked it: the eggs got too done, and the cocoa was lumpy, but it was food, and she swallowed it down and headed out for class… Florian and Catlin to clean up and then wait for the deliveries from Housekeeping and check them out and get their stuff installed in their rooms; and stay put, and debug the place, as soon as Housekeeping brought some batteries up for some of the first Florian’s stuff. They had an excuse to miss classes today. She didn’t, and there was no stopping by the fishpond this morning: she had to stop by the pharmacy, and she was going to walk through Dr. Edwards’ door right on the minute.
Dr. Edwards was very relieved to see her: he said that without saying a word; and was uncommonly easy on her in the work—she noticed that and looked up sideways and gave him her wickedest grin. “I suppose uncle Denys told you what happened last night.”
Oh, he didn’t want to talk about that. “In a general kind of way. You know he’d be worried.”
“You tell him I was on time and we didn’t burn up anything in the kitchen.”
“I’ll tell him. Don’t you want to tell him yourself?”
“No,” she said cheerfully, and went back to her frog eggs.
She really put her mind to it in Designs, worked with no nonsense, blasted through two lessons and actually enjoyed it: she got Dr. Dietrich to give her a complete manual on one of the Deltas in Housekeeping management, so she could see the whole picture of a Design, because that was the way she liked to learn, get the idea what the whole thing looked like so that the parts made sense.
She wanted an Alpha set, but Dr. Dietrich said it was better to learn a more typical kind and then work on the exotic cases. That made sense.
Dr. Dietrich said it shouldn’t be anybody she knew. That she wasn’t ready for that.
Nice that she wasn’t ready for something. It made her feel like there was at least a floor to stand on. She had learned a very good word in Dr. Dietrich’s class.
Flux. Which fairly well said what she was caught in.
She didn’t have class with any other kids until just before noon, when she had Economics with Amy and Maddy.
Amy and Maddy hadn’t known about her moving out. They thought she was putting one on them. So she put her card in the nearest House slot in One A, and it started spitting out all these messages she hadn’t known she was going to get, like Housekeeping asking for a verification on an order for a special kind of battery—she knew who had asked that, and punched yes—and a note from Yanni Schwartz telling her that her office in 1-244 was keyed to her card, and he had a secretary and a clerk going to set up in there, whose names were Elly BE 979 and Winnie GW 88690, and their living allowances were now on her card, along with the equipment requisition for another couple of terminals and on-line time on the House system; and a message from Dr. Ivanov that her prescription was waiting at the pharmacy.
That impressed Amy and Maddy, all right.
They looked like they still weren’t sure she hadn’t set this up to Get them, but she told them that tomorrow they were going to get a chance to see, she would take them up where she lived now, all on her own.
And they went funny then, like something was going different.
That was something she hadn’t thought about.
She was thinking about it all the way to the pharmacy, and then she had that package to worry about, up past the Security guards into the lonely terrazzo hallway that was all hers down to the barrier-wall. She used her keycard on the door, and let herself in. The Minder told her that Florian and Catlin were there, and quick as that they showed up from the hall to the kitchen.
“Did Housekeeping get here?” she asked.
“Yes, sera,” Florian said. “We’ve got everything put away. We went all over the apartment.”
That meant the batteries Florian had wanted had gotten there. “Housekeeping was in order,” Catlin said. “We made them set the boxes in the kitchen, no matter what they were, and we went over everything piece by piece before we put it away. We’re warming up lunch.”
“Good,” she said. “Class was fine. No problems.” She walked all the way back through the halls to her office to put down the carry-bag.
Her office, when she had automatically started for her bedroom. But now there was a room for everything. She unloaded the manual there; and took the carry-bag back past Florian and Catlin’s rooms to her own bedroom.
Poo-thing was there, right on her bed where he always was. She picked him up and thought it would be really rotten if uncle Denys had bugged him. She picked him up and set him down again against the pillows.
And sat down and kicked off her shoes, and took out the pills from her carry-bag, the prescription pharmacy had fussed about until they nearly made her late for school, no matter what her keycard said and no matter what the House system told them she was authorized to have.
“75’s,” Florian said, looking at the pill-bottle, after lunch. Ham-and-cheese sandwiches. With nothing burned. “That’s all right. That’s right for a deep dose.”
“Do you want to see what I have to tell you?” She had run out the print, and she had the paper in her lap. “I’ve told the Minder, no calls, no noises. I’ve got everything on the list. But I’d feel better if you looked at it.”
She passed the printout over; they read it, one after the other.
“Sounds reasonable,” Catlin said. “I haven’t any trouble about it.”
“I don’t see any problem,” Florian said. “It won’t take half a minute. If there’s no tape to do.”
It still scared her. It scared her more than anything else.
But she did what it said. They took their pills and she followed what the paper said; and left them to sleep, then.
&nb
sp; And went into her office, shut the door, and used the keyboard with Base One, because she wanted no noise in the apartment at all while they were that far down.
She told Base One the routine was run.
And Base One said: This Base now recognizes their cards.
She read, mostly, late, because she wanted them to wake up before she could rest. She scanned Ari senior’s data, on the words Geoffrey Carnath. And she had understood uncle Denys in what he had said happened. She scanned it all the way to the end, when Ari moved out. She read the worst things and sat there feeling strange, just strange, like it was bad, but nobody had died, that was the worst, if somebody had died.
Then they might Disappear someone else.
And she was mad. Mad about things another Ari’s guardian had done a long, long time ago, which weren’t there, but the Security reports were, right up to when Ari had turned herself and Florian and Catlin over to Security, saying her uncle was abusing Florian.
That was the way Security wrote it. But she knew what had happened. Sort of. She couldn’t make a picture in her mind, but she knew, all the same.
And Ari talked about getting along with her guardian.
I’d have killed him. Like I’d have killed uncle Denys if he’d gone after me.
Because you don’t play games with Security. Not with Seely, not with Denys.
But then where would I be? In a lot of trouble.
In a lot of trouble.
Her stomach went upset. She had known she was in a corner, deep down. Geoffrey Carnath’s security had gotten the better of the first Ari’s. They must have had a fight. Something must have happened.
Florian and Catlin had gone to detention. Ari had gone to hospital.
Ari, hospital, she typed, for that date.
Sedation, it said. Geoffrey Carnath’s order.
Florian, security.
A medic had seen him. He was hurt. So was Catlin. And they had run tapes on him and Catlin. She got the number on them.
She chased the case through files for an hour and chased the move-in order, and the Family council meeting—where senior staff, knowing what had happened, had given Ari senior a place of her own, with her own key and no one to watch over her, because that was what she demanded to have, because she was threatening to go to the news-services and Geoffrey Carnath was too much trouble for even the whole Family to fight him over the guardianship.
True. Everything true, as far as Base One went. Things like that had happened to the first Ari.
They had taken maman. But uncle Denys and uncle Giraud had never done what Geoffrey Carnath had done to the first Ari.
She sat there a long time staring at the screen, and then started looking up some of the words the report had used.
And sat there a long time after, feeling her stomach upset.
She was terribly, terribly relieved when Florian called to her on the Minder and said that he was awake, and all right, just a little sleepy yet.
“I’m here,” Catlin said then, a little vaguely; but Catlin made it into the hall before Ari did. Leaning on the wall. “Is there a problem?”
“Nothing,” Ari said, “nothing right now. Go sleep, Catlin. Everything’s fine. I’m going to fix dinner myself. I’ll call you.”
Catlin nodded and went back into her room.
There were a lot of things in the apartment, once they started going through it—a lot of Ari senior’s clothes that were very nice but too large yet. Ari senior had been—a bit more on top. And taller. That was spooky too, figuring out in the mirror what size she was going to be. Someday.
There was jewelry. Terribly expensive things. Not near as much as maman’s, mostly gold, a lot of what could be rubies, just lying in the chest on the bureau—all these years—but who in the House would steal?
There was a wine cabinet taller than she could reach, which wouldn’t have spoiled, she knew that, it was probably real good by now; and there was whiskey and other things under the counter that wouldn’t have been hurt by all these years of sitting there.
There was a big tape library. A lot were about Earth and about Pell. A lot were on technical things. A lot were Entertainment. And a lot of those…had a 20 Years and Over sticker. And titles that made her embarrassed, and uneasy.
Sex stuff. A lot of it.
It was like looking through Ari senior’s drawers in her bedroom, like it was private, and she would hate if she were grown-up and dead, to have some twelve-year-old kid going through her drawers and finding out she had stuff like that in her library, but it was interesting too, and scary. The first Ari had said there was nothing wrong with the thoughts she had had, just that she was too young and shouldn’t be stupid.
But it was all right when you were Older.
She remembered how the first tape felt. And she closed up the cabinet door and wondered what was in them, and whether they would be like the other one. They were just E-tapes. They weren’t deep or anything like it. They couldn’t hurt you.
If they were hers like everything else in the apartment, then she could do whatever she wanted with them—when she was settled in, when she was sure everything was safe.
It wasn’t like being stupid with people, where sex could hurt you.
Kids were supposed to be curious. And there was no way anybody could find out she was using them. Just Catlin and Florian, and they wouldn’t mess with her stuff. She could do private things now, real private, and uncle Denys couldn’t know.
When she got settled in. You didn’t do Entertainment tapes just anytime you wanted, no more than you had all the food you wanted. You got your regular work done.
Even if you thought about how interesting it would be, and what there was to find out, and how the teaching-tape had felt.
Meanwhile the cabinet stayed closed.
“It’s all right, come on,” she said, and brought Amy and Maddy past the Security guards and up the lift.
She used her keycard on the door and let them in. The Minder told her that Florian and Catlin were not there, they were off in classes doing make-up work, the way she had told them they should.
She saw Amy and Maddy look at each other and look around at the huge front room, real impressed.
Something said to her she ought not let anyone see all of where she lived, or know how things were laid out: she knew Catlin would worry about that. But she showed them the middle of it, which was the big room in front and the kitchen and the breakfast room with the glassed-in garden where nothing was growing yet—and back to the main front room and into the other wing, where there was the big sunken den and the bar and then her office, and her bedroom and the bedrooms that had been Florian’s and Catlin’s (and were again).
They had oh’ed over this and that at the start, when she said that there were rooms down past the kitchen, mostly offices and stuff. And over the garden. But when they got this far, into still another living room with more rooms yet to go, they just stared around them and looked strange.
That bothered her. She was used to figuring people out, and she couldn’t quite figure what they were thinking, except maybe they were worried about there being something dangerous about this, or her, or uncle Denys.
“We don’t have to meet down in the tunnels anymore,” she said. “We can be up here and there’s no way they can find out what we’re doing, because Florian and Catlin have this place checked over so nobody can bug us. Not even uncle Denys.”
“They can still find out who we are,” Amy said. “I mean, they know me and Maddy, maybe Sam, but they don’t know all of us.”
That was it. She had wondered over and over how much to tell them—particularly Maddy. She worried about it. But there were things they had to know, before they got the wrong ideas. “It’s all right,” she said, then took a deep breath and made up her mind on a big secret. “Let me tell you: I’ve got it set up so if any of you or your families gets a Security action, I know it the second it goes in.”
“How can you?” Maddy asked.
/>
“My computer. The Base I’ve got. My clearance is higher than yours—maybe not higher than somebody who could put a flag on and keep me from finding out stuff, but I’ve got my Base fixed so if there’s information I’m not accessing it tells me it’s going on.”
“How?” Maddy asked.
“Because I’m in the House system. Because I’ve got a real high Base and a lot of clearances a kid isn’t supposed to have. They come with this place. Lots of things. You don’t have to worry. I’ve got an eye on you. If anything goes into the system about you, it calls me right then.”
“Anything?”
“Not private stuff. Security stuff. And I’ll tell you something else.” Another deep breath. She shoved her hands into her belt and thought very carefully what she was saying and how much she was giving away; but Amy and Maddy were the highest-up in the gang. “You tell this and I’ll skin you. But you two don’t have to worry anymore. None of my friends do. I know why the Disappearances happened, and I don’t think it’s going to happen anymore. Except if I asked it to. If there was somebody I really, really wanted not to see again. Which isn’t any of you, as long as you’re my friends.”
“Why did they?” Amy asked.
“Because—” Because things had to happen to me. Like Ari senior. That’s too much, a whole lot too much about my business. She shrugged. “Because I wasn’t supposed to know things, because my uncles figured they’d tell.”
They were quiet a long time. Then Amy said, very carefully: “Even your maman?”
A second shrug. “Maman. Valery. Julia Strassen.” She wanted off the subject. “I know why they did it. That’s all.” My maman agreed to go, but I’m not telling anybody that. They’d think she didn’t like me. And that wouldn’t be so. “I know a lot of things. Now they have to watch out, because I know they can’t do anything to me, because anything they do from now on, they know I’ll hold a grudge. And I will, if they Get any of my friends…because I know who they are, and they know how far they can go with me.”