“And you’re going to go over to her apartment and talk to her. No.”
“Not her apartment. I don’t think I can handle that. But somewhere.”
vi
Justin took a sip of Scotch as the waiter at Changes brought the three to their table—Ari in an ice-green blouse with metallic gray beading, Florian and Catlin in evening black.
Evening at Changes was a dress occasion. He and Grant had taken pains, both of them in their best. Dress shins and jackets.
“Thank you,” Ari said, when the waiter pulled the chair back. “Vodka-and-orange for the three of us, please.”
“Yes, sera,” the waiter murmured. “Will you want menus?”
“Give us a while,” Justin said. “If you will, Ari.”
“That’s fine.” She settled in her chair and folded her hands on the table. “Thank you for coming,” Justin said as soon as the waiter left. “I apologize for this afternoon. For Grant and myself. It was me. Not you. Absolutely not you.”
Ari shifted back in her seat, her lips pressed to a thin line.
And said not a thing.
“Has your uncle Denys called you?”
“Have you called him?”
“No. I don’t think he wants to hear what happened. I don’t know to what extent he can come back on you—”
“Only because he’s the Administrator,” Ari said. “There’s nothing he’ll do to me.”
“I wasn’t sure.” He saw the waiter coming back with the drinks, and waited during the serving.
Ari sipped hers and sighed. “Whose credit is this on?”
“Mine,” Justin said. “Don’t hesitate.” As the waiter discreetly took himself off. It was a private corner, quite private: a sizeable addition to the bill assured it. “I want to assure you first of all—I’m perfectly willing to go on working with you. I want to tell you—what you’re doing—is full of problems. But it’s not empty exercise. You’ve got some ideas that are—fairly undeveloped right now. I still don’t know to what extent you’ve modeled this on reality—or borrowed from your predecessor. If it’s considerable borrowing—it would be remarkable enough that someone so young is working integrations at all. If any portion of it is original—I have to be impressed; because there is a center of this that, if I were going faster, and not taking the time to demonstrate your problems—I would simply throw into research, because I think it’s a helpful model.”
“You can do that, if you like.” Not spitefully. Reasonably. Quietly. “Perhaps I’ll do both. With your permission. Because I’m very afraid it’s classified.”
“Grant can do it.”
“Grant could do it. With your permission. And Yanni’s. We work for him.”
“Because you refused to be transferred. I can still do that.”
He had not expected that. He took a drink of Scotch. And was aware of Grant beside him, subject to whatever mistakes he made. “I wouldn’t think,” he said, “that you’d be thinking about that after the scene this afternoon.”
Redirect. Shift directions.
She sipped at the vodka-and-orange. Sixteen, and fragile—in physiology. In emotions that the alcohol could flatten or exacerbate. Flux-thinking at its finest, Grant was wont to say. Puberty, hormones run wild, and ethyl alcohol.
Oh, God, kid, back off it: it did me no favors.
Power. Political power that was still running in shockwaves across Union; threats of assassination. And all the stress that went with it.
“I’m glad you want to talk about it,” Ari said, on a slight sigh following the vodka. “Because I need you. I study my predecessor’s notes—on kat. I know things. I’ve talked to Denys about putting the stuff into print. Organizing everything. I said I wanted you to do it and he didn’t want that. I said the hell with that.”
“Ari, don’t swear.”
“Sorry. But that was what I said. I could have sat down and said I wouldn’t budge. But it’s real good, politically, if the Bureau gets it about now. Sort of proof that I’m real. So you’ll know pretty soon what’s mine and what’s Ari’s. I’ll tell you something else you can guess: not all the notes are going out. Some aren’t finished. And some are classified.” She took another sip. The glass hardly diminished. “I’ve thought about this. I’ve thought real hard. And I’ve got a problem, because you’re the one who’s working on deep-sets, you’re the one who could teach me the actual things I need—Giraud’s very bright; but Giraud’s not down the same track. Not at all. I don’t want to do the things he does. Denys is bright. He’s very near-term and real-time. Do you want to know the truth? Giraud isn’t really a Special. Somebody had to have it, to get some of the protections Reseune needed right then. The one who is, is Denys; but Denys wouldn’t have it: it would make him too public. So he arranged it to get Giraud the Status.”
He stared at her, wondering if it was true, if it could be true.
“It’s in Ari’s notes,” Ari said. “Now you know something on Denys. But I wouldn’t tell him you know. He’d be upset with me for telling you. But it’s why you should be careful. I’ve learned from uncle Denys for years. I still do. But the work I really want is macro-sets and value-sets. You’re the only one who’s working on the things Ari wanted me to do. I listen to her.”
“Listen to her—”
“Her notes. She had a lot to tell me. A lot of advice. Sometimes I don’t listen and I’m generally sorry for it. Like this afternoon.”
“Am I—in the notes?”
“Some things about you are. That she talked Jordan into doing a PR. That she and Jordan did a lot of talking about the Bok clone problem and they talked about the psych of a PR with the parent at hand—and one like the Bok clone, without. It’s interesting stuff. I’ll let you read it if you want.”
“I’d be interested.”
“Stuff on Grant, too. I can give you that. They’re going to hold that out of the Bureau notes, because they don’t want it in there, about you. Because your father doesn’t want it, uncle Denys says.”
He took a mouthful of Scotch, off his balance, knowing she had put him there, every step of the way.
Not a child. Wake up, fool. Remember who you’re dealing with. Eighteen years asleep. Wake up.
“You didn’t walk in here unarmed,” he said. “In either sense, I’ll imagine.”
She ignored that remark, except for a little eye contact, deep and direct. She said: “Why don’t you like me, Justin? You have trouble with women?”
A second time off his balance. Badly. And then a little use out of the anger, a little steadiness, even before he felt Grant’s touch on his knee. “Ari, I’m at a disadvantage in this discussion, because you are sixteen.”
“Chronologically.”
“Emotionally. And you shouldn’t have the damn vodka.”
That got a little flicker. “Keeps me quiet. Keeps me from being bored with fools. Drunk, I’m about as eetee as the rest of the world.”
“You’re wrong about that.”
“You’re not my mother.”
“You want to talk about that?” Off the other topic. “I don’t think you do. Shows what the stuffs doing to you.”
She shook her head. “No. Hit me on that if you like. I threw that at you. So you’re being nice. Let’s go back to the other thing. I want just one straight answer—since you’re being nice. Is it women, is it because I’m smarter than you, or is it because you can’t stand my company?”
“You want a fight, don’t you? I didn’t come here for this.”
Another shake of the head. “I’m sixteen, remember. Ari said adolescence was hell. She said relations with CITs always lose you a friend. Because people don’t like you up that close. Ever. She said I’d never understand CITs. Myself—for my own education—once—I’d like to have somebody explain it to me—why you don’t like me.”
The smell of orange juice. Of a musky perfume.
This is all there is, sweet. This is as good as it gets.
Oh, God, Ari.
/>
He caught his breath. Felt his own panic, felt the numbing grip on his wrist.
“Sera,” Grant said.
“No,” he said quietly. “No.” Knowing more about the woman eighteen years ago than he had learned in that night or all the years that followed.
And reacting, the way she had primed him to react, the way she had fixed him on her from that time on—
“Your predecessor,” he said, carefully, civilized, “had a fondness for adolescent boys. Which I was, then. She blackmailed me. And my father. She threatened Grant, to start running test programs on him—on an Alpha brought up as a CIT. Mostly, I think—to get her hands on me, though I didn’t understand that then. Nothing—absolutely nothing—of your fault. I know that. Say that I made one mistake, when I thought I could handle a situation when I was about your age. Say that I have a reluctance when I’m approached by a girl younger than I was, never mind you have her face, her voice, and you wear her perfume. It’s nothing to do with you. It’s everything to do with what she did. I’d rather not give you the details, but I don’t have to. She made a tape. It may be in your apartment for all I know. Or your uncle can give it to you. When you see it, you’ll have every key you need to take me apart. But that’s all right. Other people have. Nothing to do with you.”
Ari sat there for a long, long time, elbows on the table. “Why did she do that?” she asked finally.
“You’d know that. Much more than I would. Maybe because she was dying. She was in rejuv failure, Ari. She had cancer; and she was a hundred twenty years old. Which was no favorable prognosis.”
She had not known that. For a PR it was a dangerous kind of knowledge—the time limits in the geneset.
“There were exterior factors,” he said. “Cyteen was more native when she was young. She’d gotten a breath of native air at some time in her life. That was what would have killed her.”
She caught her lip between her teeth. No hostility now. No defense. “Thank you,” she said, “for telling me.”
“Finish your drink,” he said. “I’ll buy you another one.”
“I knew—when she died. Not about the cancer.”
“Then your notes don’t tell you everything. I will. Ask me again if I’m willing to take a transfer.”
“Are you?”
“Ask Grant.”
“Whatever Justin says,” Grant said.
vii
“We’ve got a contact,” Wagner said, on the walk over to State from the Library, “in Planys maintenance. Money, not conscience.”
“I don’t want to hear that,” Corain said. “I don’t want you to have heard it. Let’s keep this clean.”
“I didn’t hear it and you didn’t,” Wagner agreed. A stocky woman with almond eyes and black ringleted hair, Assistant Chief of Legal Affairs in the Bureau of Citizens, complete with briefcase and conservative suit. A little walk over from Library, where both of them happened to meet—by arrangement. “Say our man’s working the labs area. Say he talks with Warrick. Shows him pictures of the kids—you know. So Warrick opens up.”
“We’re saying what happened.”
“We’re saying what happened. I don’t think you want to know the whole string of contacts…”
“I don’t. I want to know, dammit, is Warrick approachable?”
“He’s been under stringent security for over a year. He has a son still back in Reseune. This is the pressure point.”
“I remember the son. What’s he like?”
“Nothing on him. A non-person as far as anything we’ve got, just an active PR CIT-number. Defense has a lot more on him. Doppelganger for papa, that’s a given. But apparently either Warrick senior or junior has pressured Reseune enough to get a travel pass for the son. He’s thirty-five years old. Reseune national. Reseune had so much security around him when he’d come into Planys you’d have thought he was the Chairman. There’s an azi, too. An Alpha—you remember the Abolitionist massacre over by Big Blue?”
“The Winfield case. I remember. Tied into Emory’s murder. That was one of the points of contention—between Warrick and Emory.”
“He’s a foster son as far as Warrick is concerned. They don’t let him out of Reseune. We can’t get any data at all on him, except he is alive, he is living with the son, Warrick still regards him as part of the family. I can give you the whole dossier.”
“Not to me! That stays at lower levels.”
“Understood then.”
“But you can get to Warrick.”
“I think he’s reached a state of maximum frustration with his situation. It’s been, what, eighteen years? His projects are Defense; but Reseune keeps a very tight wall between him and them, absolutely no leak-through. The air-systems worker—we’ve had him for—eighteen months, something like. What you have to understand, ser, Reseune’s security is very, very tight. But also, it’s no ordinary detainee they’re dealing with. A psych operator. A clinician. Difficult matter, I should imagine, to find any guard immune to him. The question is whether we go now or wait-see. That’s what Gruen wants me to ask you.”
Corain gnawed at his lip. Two months from the end of the Defense election, with a bomb about to blow in that one—
With Jacques likely to win the Defense seat away from Khalid and very likely to appoint Gorodin as Secretary.
But Jacques was weakening. Jacques was feeling heat from the hawks within Defense—and there were persistent rumors about Gorodin’s health—and countercharges that Khalid, who had been linked to previous such rumors—was once more the source of them.
But Khalid could win: the Centrist party had as lief be shut of Khalid’s brand of conservatism—but it could not discount the possibility in any planning. The Jacques as Councillor/Gorodin as Secretary compromise Corain had hammered out with Nye, Lynch, and the Expansionists—was the situation Corain had rather have, most of all, if rumors were true and Gorodin’s health was failing, because Gorodin was the Expansionists’ part of the bargain.
Wait—and hope that a new hand at the helm of the military would enable them to work with Defense to get to Warrick in Planys; or go in on their own and trust to their own resources. And risk major scandal. That was the problem.
If Khalid won again—Khalid would remember that his own party had collaborated in the challenge to his seat. Then he would owe no favors.
Then he could become a very dangerous man indeed.
“I think we’d better pursue the contact now,” Corain said. “Just for God’s sake be careful. I don’t want any trails to the Bureau, hear?”
viii
“I didn’t know I was going to do that,” Justin said, and tossed a bit of bread to the koi. The gold one flashed to the surface and got it this time, while the white lurked under a lotus pad. “I had no idea. It just—she was going to find out about the tape, wasn’t she? Someday. Better now—while she’s naive enough to be shocked. God help us—if it goes the other way.”
“I feel much safer,” Grant said, “when you decide these things.”
“I don’t, dammit, I had no right to do that without warning—but I was in a corner, it was the moment—it was the only moment to make the other situation right…”
“Because of the tape?”
“You do understand it, then.”
“I understand this is the most aggressive personality I’ve ever met. Not even Winfield and his people—impressed me to that extent. I’ll tell you the truth: I’ve been afraid before. Winfield, for instance. Or the Security force that pulled me out of there—I thought that they might kill me, because those might be their orders. I’ve tried to analyze the flavor of this, and the flux was so extreme in me at that moment in the office doorway—I can’t pin it down. I only know there was something so—violent in this girl—that it was very hard for me to respond without flux.” Grant’s voice was clinical, cool, soft and precise as it was when he was reasoning. “But then—that perception may have to do with my own adrenaline level—and the fact the girl is a Super
visor. Perhaps I misread the level of what I was receiving.”
“No. You’re quite right. I’ve tried to build a profile on her…quietly. Same thing her predecessor did to me. The choices she makes in her model, the things she’d do if she were in the Gehenna scenario—she’s aggressive as hell, and self-protective. I’ve charted the behavior phases—menstrual cycles, hormone shifts—best I can guess, she’s hormone-fluxed as hell right now; I always watch the charts with her. But that’s never all of it.” He broke off another bit of bread and tossed it, right where the spotted koi could get it. “Never all of it with her predecessor. That mind is brilliant. When it fluxes, the analog functions go wildly speculative—and the down-side of the flux integrates like hell. I’ve watched it. More, she originated the whole flux-matrix theory; you think she doesn’t understand her own cycles? And use them? But young Ari made me understand something I should have seen—we deal with other people with such precision, and ourselves with such damnable lack of it—Ari is having difficulties with ego-definitions. A PR does, I should know; and it can only get worse for her. That’s why I asked for the transfer.”
“Fix her on us?”
He drew several long breaths. Blinked rapidly to clear away the elder Ari’s face, the remembrance of her hands on him.
“She’s vulnerable now,” he said on a ragged breath. “She’s looking for some sign of the human race—on whatever plane she lives on. That’s the sense I got—that maybe she was as open then as I was—then. So I grabbed the moment’s window. That’s what I thought. That she’s so damn self-protective—there might only be that chance—then—hi that two seconds.” He shuddered, a little, involuntary twitch at the nape of the neck. “God, I hate real-time work.”
“Just because you hated it,” Grant said, “doesn’t mean you weren’t good at it. I’ll tell you what this azi suspects—that she would regret harm to one of us. I don’t think that’s true with a CIT. If she ever does take me up on my proposition—No,” Grant said as he took a breath to object; Grant held up a finger. “One: I don’t think she will. Two: if she does—trust me to handle it. Trust me. All right?”