“Fine, I’m a test subject.”
“It’s safe. It’s safer, in fact. Avoids the thin-skin problem, the excessive bleeding and bruising; the calcium depletion and the graying effect. You’ll keep your hair color, you won’t lose any major amount of muscle mass, or have brittle bones or premature fatigue. Sterility—unfortunately—is still a problem.”
“I can live with that.” He felt calmer. Damn, he wanted to believe what Wojkowski was saying. “What are its side-effects?”
“Dry mouth and a solitary complaint of hyperactivity. Possibly some deleterious effect on the kidneys. Mostly remember to drink plenty of water. Especially if you’ve been drinking. You’ll tend to dehydrate and you’ll get a hell of a hangover. We don’t know what the effects would be of switching off the regular drug and onto this. Or vice versa. We suspect there could be some serious problems about that. It’s also expensive, over ten thou a dose and it’s not going to get cheaper anytime soon. But especially in the case of a younger patient—definitely worth it.”
“Does Grant—get the same?”
“Yes. Absolutely.”
He felt better, overall, with that reassurance. He trusted Wojkowski’s ethics most of the way. But it did not help get his pulse rate down.
Ten thousand a dose. Reseune was spending a lot on them, on a drug Reseune could afford—and he could not.
Not something you could find on the black market.
Substitutions contraindicated.
A dependency Reseune provided, that Reseune could withhold—with devastating effect; that nothing like—say, the Paxers or the Abolitionists—could possibly provide.
An invisible chain. Damn their insecurities. As if they needed it. But it took something away, all the same: left him with a claustrophobic sense that hereafter—options were fewer; and a nagging dread that the drug might turn up with side-effects, no matter that lab rats thrived on it.
Damn, in one day, from a young man’s self-concept and a trim, fit body he had taken pains to keep that way—to the surety of sterility, of some bodily changes; not as many as he had feared, if they were right; but still—a diminishing of functions. Preservation for—as long as the drug held. A list of cautions to live with.
A favor, in some regards, if it did what they claimed.
But a psychological jolt all the same—to take it at someone else’s decision, because a damned committee decided—
What? To keep a string on him and Grant? In the case they tried to escape and join the Paxers and bomb subways and kill children?
God. They were all lunatics.
The door opened. The tech came in and asked him to undress again.
Tissue sample. Sperm sample. “What in hell for?” he snapped at the tech. “I’m a PR, for God’s sake!”
The tech looked at his list. “It’s here,” the tech said. Azi. And doggedly following his instructions.
So the tech got both. And left him with a sore spot on his leg and one inside his mouth, where the tech had taken his tissue samples.
Likely his pulse rate was through the ceiling again. He tried to calm it down, figuring they would take it again before they let him out, and if they disliked the result they got, they could put him into hospital where he was subject to any damn thing anyone wanted to run, without Grant to witness it, where neither of them could look out for the other or lodge protests.
Damn it, get the pulse rate down.
Get out of here tonight. Get home. That’s the important thing now.
The door opened. Wojkowski again.
“How are we doing?” she asked.
“We’re madder than hell,” he said with exaggerated pleasantness, and sat up on the table, smiled at Wojkowski, trying not to let the pulse run wild, doggedly thinking of flowers. Of river water. “I’m missing patches of skin and my dignity is, I’m sure, not a prime concern here. But that’s all right.”
“Mmmn,” Wojkowski said, and set a hypogun down on the counter, looking at the record. “I’m going to give you a prescription I want you to take, and we’ll check you over again when you come in for your second treatment. See if we can do something about that blood pressure.”
“You want to know what you can do about the blood pressure?”
“Do yourself a favor. Take the prescription. Don’t take kat more than twice a week—are you taking aspirin?”
“Occasionally.”
“How regularly?”
“It’s in the—”
“Please.”
“Two, maybe four a week.”
“That’s all right. No more than that. If you get headaches, see me. If you have any light-headedness, see me immediately. If you get a racing pulse, same.”
“Of course.—Do you know what goes on in the House, doctor?—Or on this planet, for that matter?”
“I’m aware of your situation. All the same, avoid stress.”
“Thanks. Thanks so much, doctor.”
Wojkowski walked over with the hypo. He shed the robe off one shoulder and she wiped the area down. The shot popped against his arm and hurt like hell.
He looked and saw a bloody mark.
“Damn, that’s—”
“It’s a gel implant. Lasts four weeks. Go home. Go straight to bed. Drink plenty of liquids. The first few implants may give you a little nausea, a little dizziness. If you break out in a rash or feel any tightening in the chest, call the hospital immediately. You can take aspirin for the arm. See you in August.”
There was a message in the House system, wailing for him when he got to the pharmacy. My office. Ari Emory.
She did not use her Wing One office. She had said so. She had a minimal clerical staff there to handle her House system clerical work, and that was all.
But she was waiting there now. Her office. Ari senior’s office. He walked through the doors with Grant, faced a black desk he remembered, where Florian sat—with a young face, a grave concern as he got up and said: “Grant should wait here, ser. Sera wants to see you alone.”
The coffee helped his nerves. He was grateful that Ari had made it for him, grateful for the chance to collect himself, in these surroundings, with Ari behind Ari senior’s desk—not a particularly grandiose office, not even so much as Yanni’s. The walls were all bookcases and most of the books in them were manuals. Neat. That was the jarring, surreal difference. Ari’s office had always had a little clutter about it and the desk was far too clean.
The face behind it—disturbing in its similarities and disturbing in its touch of worry.
Past and future.
“I got your message,” Ari said. “I went to Denys. That didn’t do any good. We had a fight. The next thing I did was call Ivanov. He didn’t do any good. The next thing I could do, I could call Family council. And past that I can file an appeal with the Science Bureau and the Council in Novgorod. Which is real dangerous—with all the stuff going on.”
He weighed the danger that would be, and knew the answer, the same as he had known it when he was lying on the table.
“There could be worse,” he said. His arm had begun to ache miserably, all the way to the bone, and he felt sick at his stomach, so that he felt his hands likely to shake. It was hard to think at all.
But the Family council would stand with Denys and Giraud, even yet, he thought; and that might be dangerous, psychologically, to Ari’s ability to wield authority in future, if she lost the first round.
An appeal to the Bureau opened up the whole Warrick case history. That was what Ari was saying. Opened the case up while people were bombing subways and using Jordan’s name, while the Defense election was in doubt, and Ari was too young to handle some of the things that could fall out of that land of struggle—involving her predecessor’s murderer.
They might win if it got to Bureau levels—but they might not. The risk was very large, while the gain was—minimal.
“No,” he said. “It’s not a matter of pills. It’s one of the damn slow-dissolving gels, and they’d have th
e devil’s own time getting the stuff cleared out.”
“Damn! I should have come there. I should have called Council and stopped it—”
“Done is done, that’s all. They say what they’re giving us is something new; no color fade, no brittle bones. That kind of thing. I would like to get the literature on it before I say a final yes or no about a protest over what they’ve done. If it’s everything Dr. Wojkowski claims—it’s not worth the trouble even that would cause. If it costs what they say it does—it’s not a detriment; because I couldn’t afford it. I only suspect it has other motives—because I can’t afford it, and that means they can always withhold it.”
Her face showed no shock. None. “They’re not going to do that.”
“I hope not.”
“I got the tape,” she said.
And sent his pulse jolting so hard he thought he was going to throw up. It was the pain, he thought. Coffee mingled with the taste of blood in his mouth, where they had taken their sample from the inside of his cheek. He was not doing well at all. He wanted to be home, in bed, with all his small sore spots; the arm was hurting so much now he was not sure he could hold the cup with that hand.
“She—” Ari said, “she went through phases—before she died—that she had a lot of problems. I know a lot of things now, a lot of things nobody wanted to tell me. I don’t want that ever to happen. I’ve done the move—you and Grant into my wing. Yanni says thank God. He says he’s going to kill you for the bill at Changes.”
He found it in him to laugh a little, even if it hurt.
“I told uncle Denys you were going on my budget and he was damn well going to increase it. And I had him about what he did to you, so he didn’t argue; and I put your monthly up to ten with a full medical, and your apartment paid, for you and Grant both.”
“My God, Ari.”
“It’s enough you can pay a staffer to do the little stuff, so you don’t have to and Grant doesn’t have to. It’s a waste of your time. It’s a lot better for Reseune to have you on research—and teaching me. Denys didn’t say a thing. He just signed it. As far as I’m concerned, my whole wing is research. Grant doesn’t have to do clinical stuff unless he wants to.”
“He’ll be—delighted with that.”
Ari held up a forefinger. “I’m not through. I asked uncle Denys why you weren’t doctor when you’d gotten where Yanni couldn’t teach you anymore, and he said because they didn’t want you listed with the Bureau, because of politics. I said that was lousy. Uncle Denys—when he pushes you about as far as he thinks he can get away with, and you push back, you can get stuff out of him as long as you don’t startle him. Anyway, he said if we got through the election in Defense, then they’d file the papers.”
He stared at her, numb, just numb with the flux.
“Is that all right, what I did?” she asked, suddenly looking concerned. Like a little kid asking may-I.
“It’s—quite fine.—Thank you, Ari.”
“You don’t look like you feel good.”
“I’m fine.” He took a deep breath and set the cup down. “Just a lot of changes, Ari. And they took some pieces out of me.”
She got up from behind the desk and came and carefully, gently hugged his shoulders—the sore one sent a jolt through to the bone. She kissed him very gently, very tenderly on the forehead. “Go home,” she said. Her perfume was all around him.
But through the pain, he thought it quite remarkable her touch made not a twitch—no flashback, nothing for the moment, though he knew he was not past them. Maybe he escaped it for the moment because it hurt so much, maybe because for a moment he was emotionally incapable of reacting to anything.
She left, and he heard her tell Florian he should walk with them and make sure they got home all right, and get them both to bed and take care of them till they felt better.
Which sounded, at the moment, like a good idea.
xii
B/1: Ari, this is Ari senior.
You’ve asked about Reseune administration.
My father set it up: James Carnath. He had, I’m told, a talent for organization. Certainly my mother Olga Emory had no interest in the day to day management of details.
Even the day to day management of her daughter, but that’s a different file.
I mention that because I fit somewhere in between: I’ve always believed in a laissez-faire management, meaning that as long as I was running Reseune, I believed in knowing what was going on in the kitchens, occasionally, in the birth-labs, occasionally, in finance, always.
An administrator of a facility like Reseune has special moral obligations which come at the top of the list: a moral obligation to humankind, the azi, the public both local and general, the specific clients, and the staff, in approximately that order.
Policies regarding genetic or biological materials; or psychological techniques and therapies are the responsibility of the chief administrator, and decisions in those areas must never be delegated.
Emphatically, the administrator should seek advice from wing supervisors and department heads. All other decisions and day to day operations can be trusted to competent staff.
I devised a routine within the House system coded MANAGEINDEX which may or may not be in use. Go to Executive 1 and ask for it, and it will tell you the expenses, output, number of reprimands logged, number of fines, number of requests for transfer, number of absences, medical leaves, work-related accidents, anti-management complaints, and security incidents for any individual, group of individuals, office, department, or wing in Reseune, and use that data to evaluate the quality of management and employees on any level. It can do comparisons of various wings and departments or select the most efficient managers and employees in the system.
It will also run a confidential security check on any individual, including a covert comparison of lifestyle data with income and output.
It operates without leaving a flag in the system.
Remember that it is a tool to be used in further inquiry and interview, and it is not absolutely reliable. Personal interviews are always indicated.
I was a working scientist as well as chief Administrator, which I found to be generally a fifteen-hour-a-day combination. A pocket com and an excellent staff kept me apprised of situations which absolutely required my intervention, and this extended to my research as well as my administrative duties. Typically I was in the office as early as 0700, arranged the day’s schedule, reviewed the emergencies and ongoing situations via Base One, and put the office in motion as the staff arrived, left on my own work by 0900, and generally made the office again briefly after lunch, whereupon I left again after solving whatever had to be done.
I had a few rules which served me quite well:
I did my own office work while no one was there, which let me work efficiently; I had Florian and Catlin sworn to retrieve me from idle conversations—or from being accosted and handed business. Florian, I would say, handle this. Which usually meant it went to the appropriate department head; but sometimes Florian would check it out, and advise me personally. As he still does. Now that I’m Councillor for Science, it’s much the same kind of thing. I absolutely refuse to be bogged down by lobbyists. That’s what my staff is for. And they’re to hand me investigative reports with facts and figures; which I then have cross-checked by Reseune security, and finally, finally, if there seems to be substance that interests me, I’ll have my full staff meet with the interest group; and I will, if the reports are reasonable—but not in other than a businesslike setting and with a firm time limit for them. It’s quite amazing how much time you can waste.
Delegate paperwork. Insist the preparers of reports include a brief summary of content, conclusion and/or recommended action; and that they follow strict models of style: this will appear petty, but I refuse to search a report for information which should have been prominently noted.
Give directions and reprimands early and clearly: an administrator who fails to make his expectations
and his rules clear is inefficient; an administrator who expects a subordinate to pick up unspoken displeasure is wasting his time.
Learn a little bit about every operation. On one notorious occasion I showed up in the hospital and spent two hours walking rounds with the nurses. It not only identified problems up and down the line, but the whole MANAGEINDEX of Reseune shifted four points upward in the next two weeks.
Most of all, know your limits and identify those areas in which you are less adept. Do not abdicate authority in those areas: learn them, and be extremely careful of the quality of your department heads.
This program finds you have the rank of: wing supervisor.
You are seventeen years old; you have held your majority for: 1 year, 4 months.
You have a staff of: 6.
You have one department head: Justin Warrick, over Research.
He has a staff of: 2.
This program is running MANAGEINDEX.
There have been 0 complaints and 0 reprimands.
There have been 0 absences on personal leave.
There have been 2 medicals in Research.
Your Research department staff has a total of 187 Security incidents, 185 of which have been resolved. Do you wish breakdown?
AE2: No. I’ve read the file. None of these occurred in my administration.
B/1: Projects behind schedule: 0.
Projects over budget: 0.
Project demand: 12.
Project output: 18.
Projects ongoing: 3.
Wing expenses, 3 mo. period: C 688,575.31.
Wing earnings, 3 mo. period: C 6,658,889.89.
This wing has the following problems:
1. security flag on: 2 staff in: Research: Justin Warrick, Grant ALX.
2. security watch on: 1 staff in Administration, Ariane Emory.
3. security alert: flag/watch contacts.
Status: Reseune Administration has signed waiver.
Your wing has an overall MANAGEINDEX rating of 4368 out of 5000. MANAGEINDEX congratulates you and your staff and calls your high achievement to the attention of Reseune Administration.
Your staff will receive notification of excellent performance and will receive commendations in permanent file.