And if one’s Contract was affordable.
Nothing like that existed for a seventeen-year-old azi with an X on his number, and all the political sense a boy could gain, living in Reseune and in the House, advised him that Justin had done something for his sake desperate beyond all reason—
Advised him that the Krugers might well have welcomed a Warrick with an azi he had a valid Contract for, but that there were good reasons they might not welcome that azi by himself.
God knew.
He was, the more he had time to think about it, a liability on all accounts, except for what he knew about Reseune, Ari, and Warrick business, which people might insist he give up; and he had had no instructions on that. He was Alpha, but he was young and he was azi, and all that he had learned only told him that his responses were conditioned, his knowledge limited, his reasoning potentially flawed—(Never worry about your tapes, Jordan had told him gently. If you ever think you’re in trouble, come to me and tell me what you think and what you feel and I’ll find the answer for you: remember I’ve got your charts. Everything’s all right—)
He had been seven then. He had cried in Jordan’s arms, which had embarrassed him, but Jordan had patted him on the back and hugged him the way he hugged Justin, called him his other son and assured him even born-men made mistakes and felt confused.
Which had made him feel better and worse, to know that born-men had evolved out of old Earth by trial and error, and that when Ari had decided he should exist, she had done something of the same thing. Trial and error. Which was all the X on his number meant to a seven-year-old.
He had not understood then that it meant Jordan could not deliver what he promised, or that his life was Reseune’s and not Jordan’s. He had clutched that ‘my other son’ to him like daylight and breath, a whole new horizon of being.
Then he had grown enough, when he and Justin were twelve and Justin discovered girls, to know that sex made things very different.
“Why?” he had asked Jordan; and Jordan had walked him into the kitchen, his arm about his shoulders while he explained that an Alpha was always mutating the instructions the tapes gave him, that he was very bright, and that his body was developing and that he really should go to the azi who specialized in that.
“What if I make somebody pregnant?” he had asked.
“You won’t,” Jordan had said, which he had not asked about then, but he knew later he should have. “You just can’t mess around with anyone in the House. They aren’t licensed.”
He had been outraged. And thought there was a kind of irony in it. “You mean because I’m an Alpha? You mean whoever I go to bed with—”
“Has to be licensed. You don’t get a license at your age. Which lets out all the girls your age. And I don’t want you sleeping with old aunt Mari, all right?”
That had been halfway funny. At the time. Mari Warrick was decrepit, on the end of her rejuv.
It had gotten less funny later. It was hard to stay cool while a Carnath girl put her hands where they did not belong and giggled in his ear; and to be supposed to say: “I’m sorry, sera, I can’t.”
While Justin, poor Justin, got girlish giggles and evasions, because he was Family; and Justin’s azi was fair game—or would have been, if he had only been Beta.
“Lend him, can’t you?” Julia Carnath had asked Justin outright, in Grant’s presence, when Grant knew damned well that Justin was courting Julia for himself. Grant had wanted to sink through the floor. As it was, he had gone blank-faced and proper, and kept very quiet later when Justin sulked and said that Julia had turned him down.
“You’re better-looking,” Justin had complained. “Ari made you perfect, dammit. What chance have I got?”
“I’d rather be you,” he had answered faintly, realizing for the first time that was the truth. And he had cried, for the second time in his life that he remembered, just cried for no reason that he could figure out, except that Justin had hit a nerve. Or a tape-structure.
Because he was made of both.
He had never been sure after that, until Jordan had let him see the structures of his own tapes when he was sixteen and starting into advanced design studies. He had figured out enough of his tape-structures on his own that Jordan had opened the book for him and let him see what he was made of; and so far he had not traced any lines that could lead to fear of sex.
But Alphas mutated their own conditioning, constantly. It was a constant balancing act, over an abyss of chaos. Nothing could dominate. Balance in everything.
Or the world became chaos.
Dysfunction.
An azi who had become his own counselor was begging for trouble. An azi was so terribly fragile. And so very likely to get into a situation he could not handle, in a larger game than anyone had bothered to tell him about.
Dammit, Justin!
He wiped his eyes with his left hand and steered with the right, trying to watch where he was going. He was, he told himself, acting the fool.
Like a born-man. Like I was like them.
I’m supposed to be smarter. I’m supposed to be a damn genius. Except the tapes don’t work that way and I’m not what they wanted me to be.
Maybe I just don’t use what I’ve got.
So why didn’t I speak up louder? Why didn’t I grab Justin and haul him off to his father if I had to hit him to do it?
Because I’m a damn azi, that’s why. Because I go to jelly inside when someone acts like they know what they’re doing and I stop using my head, that’s why. Oh, damn, damn, damn! I should have stopped him, I should have dragged him aboard with me, I should have taken him to the Krugers and gotten him safe, and then he could have protected both of us; and Jordan would be free to do something. What was he thinking of?
Something I couldn’t?
Dammit, that’s the trouble with me, I haven’t got any confidence, I’m always looking to be sure before I do anything, and I don’t do a damn thing, I just take orders—
—because the damn tapes have got their claws into me. They never told me to hesitate, they just make me do it, because the tapes are sure, they’re so damned fucking sure, and nothing in the real world ever is—
That’s why we never make our own minds up. We’ve known something that has no doubt, and born-men never have. That’s what’s the matter with us—
The boat hit something that jolted the deck, and Grant threw the wheel over and corrected furiously, sweating.
Fool, indeed. He suddenly arrived at the meaning of it all and damned near holed his boat, which was the kind of thing that happened to born-men, Justin would say, just the same as anybody else; which was how things worked—a second cosmic truth, in sixty seconds. His mind was working straight or he was scared into hyperdrive, because he suddenly had a sense what it was to be a born-man, and to be a fool right on top of understanding everything: one had to swallow down the doubts and just go, how often had Jordan told him that. The doubts aren’t tape. They’re life, son. The universe won’t break if you fuck up. It won’t even break if you break your neck. Just your private universe will. You understand that?
I think so, he had said. But that had been a lie. Till now, that it jumped into clear focus. I’m free, he thought. Out here, between here and the Krugers, I’m free, on my own, the first time in my life. And then he thought: I’m not sure I like it.
Fool. Wake up. Pay attention. O my God, is that the plane coming back?
As a light showed suddenly behind him.
A boat. O God, O God, it’s a boat back there.
He shoved the throttle wide. The boat lifted its bow and roared along the Kennicutt. He turned the lights on. They shone on black water, on water that swirled with currents, on banks closer than the Volga’s, banks overgrown with the gangling shapes of weeping willies—trees that tended to break as they aged and rot worked on them, trees which shed huge gnarled knots of dead wood into the Volga, navigation hazards far worse than rocks, because they floated and moved continuall
y.
The lights were less risk now, he figured, than running blind.
But there would be guns back there, maybe. Maybe a boat that could overpower the runabout. He would be surprised if Moreyville had had something that could outrun him; damned surprised, he thought, with a cold knot of fear at his gut, watching the light wink out around a turning of the river; and then reappear in his rearview mirror.
A boat out of the precip station, maybe; maybe that end of Reseune had boats. He had no idea.
He applied his attention forward after that brief glance; center of the channel, Justin had warned him. Justin at least had taken the boat back and forth to Moreyville and down to precip ten; and he had talked to people at Moreyville who had gone all the way to Novgorod on the river.
Justin had done the talking; and Grant had paid attention mostly to the Novgorod part, because that had been what he was curious about. He and Justin—talking together about taking a boat that far someday, just heading down the river.
He steered wildly around a snag floating with one branch high.
A whole damned tree, that one. He saw the root-mass following like a wall of tangled brush in the boat’s spot; and swerved wider, desperately.
God, if one of those came floating sideways—if the bow caught it—
He kept going.
And the light stayed behind him until he saw the lights Justin had promised him shining on the right, out of the dark—Ambush, he thought in the second heartbeat after he had seen them, because everything had become a trap, everything was an enemy.
But they were too high, they were too many: lights that twinkled behind the screen of weeping willies and paperbarks, lights that were far too high for the river, lights blinking red atop the hills, warning aircraft of the obstacles of precip towers.
Then his knees began feeling weak and his arms began shaking. He missed the light from behind him when he looked to see; and he thought for the first time to put Justin’s note in his pocket, and to take the paper that had been under it, in the case someone returned the boat to Reseune.
He throttled back, seeking some dockage, alarmed as the spotlight showed up a low rusty wall on the riverside, and another, after that—
Barges, he realized suddenly. Kruger’s was a mining settlement. They were ore barges, not so big as the barges that came down from the north; but the whole place was a dock; and there was a place for a little boat to nose to, there was a ladder that went up from a lower dock to an upper one, which meant he was not in the wild anymore, and he could breach the seals: but he did not do that. He did not think he ought to use the radio, since Justin had not told him anything about it; and he was not sure how to work it in any case. He just blew the horn, repeatedly, until someone turned the dockside lights on, and people turned out to see what had come to them from the river.
v
“You have a phone call,” the Minder said, and Justin started out of what had become sleep without his knowing it, lying as he had all night curled up on the living room couch; the sound brought him up on his elbow and onto his arm and then, as the Minder cut in and answered it, to his feet—“I’m here,” he said aloud, to the Minder, and heard it tell the caller:
“Justin is in. A moment, please.”
He rubbed a face prickly with the faint stubble he could raise, eyes that refused to focus. “I’m here,” he said, his heart beating so hard it hurt, and waited for bad news.
“Good morning,” Ari said to him. “Sorry to bother you at this hour, Justin, but where is Grant?”
“I don’t know,” he said. Time. What time? He rubbed his eyes and tried to focus on the dim numbers of the clock on the wall console. Five in the morning. He’s got to be at Kruger’s by now. He’s got to. “Why? Isn’t he there?” He looked beyond the arch, where the lights were still on, where Grant’s bed was unslept-in, proof that everything was true, Grant had run, everything he remembered had happened.
We can’t have gotten away with it.
“Justin, I want to talk with you, first thing when you get in today.”
“Yes?” His voice cracked. It was the hour. He was shivering.
“At 0800. When you get in. In the Wing One lab.”
“Yes, sera.”
The contact went dead. Justin rubbed his face and squeezed his eyes shut, jaw clamped. He felt as if he was going to be sick.
He thought of calling his father. Or going to him.
But Ari had given him plenty of latitude to do that; and maybe it was what he was supposed to do, or maybe it was Ari trying to make him think it was what he was supposed to do, so that he would shy away from it. Trying to out-think her was like trying to out-think his father.
And he was trying to do both.
He made himself a breakfast of dry toast and juice, all he could force onto his unwilling stomach. He showered and dressed and paced, delaying about little things, because there was so much time, there was so damned much time to wait.
It was deliberate. He knew that it was. She did everything for a reason.
Grant might be in the hands of the police.
He might be back at Reseune.
He might be dead.
Ari meant to drop something on him, get some reaction out of him, and get it on tape. He prepared himself for anything she could say, even the worst eventuality; he prepared himself, if he had to, to say: I don’t know. He left. I assumed he was going to you. How could I know? He’s never done anything like this.
At 0745 he left his apartment and took the lift down to the main hall; passed Wing One security, walked to his own office, unlocked the door, turned on the lights, everything as he usually did.
He walked down the corridor where Jane Strassen was already in her office, and nodded a good morning to her. He rounded the corner and took the stairs down to the lab-section at the extreme end of the building.
He used his keycard on the security lock of the white doors and entered a corridor of small offices, all closed. Beyond, the double doors gave onto the dingy Wing One lab, with its smell of alcohol and chill and damp that brought back his early student days in this place. The lights were on. The big cold-room at the left had its vault door standing wide, brighter light coming from that quarter.
He let the outer doors shut and heard voices. Florian walked out from the vault-door of the lab.
Not unusual for a student to be here, not unusual for techs to be in and out of here: Lab One was old, outmoded by Building B’s facilities, but it was still sound. Researchers still used it, favoring it over the longer walk back and forth to the huge birthlabs over in B, preferring the old hands-on equipment to the modern, more automated facilities. Ari had been down here a lot lately. She kept a lot of her personal work in the old cold-lab, as convenient a storage for that kind of thing, he had figured, as there was in Wing One.
Rubin project, he thought. Earlier her presence down here had puzzled him, when Ari did not need to do these things herself, when she had excellent techs to do the detail work. It no longer puzzled him.
I’ll be wanting to oversee the process myself—just a desire to have hands-on again. Maybe a little vanity…
It was also private, the kind of situation with her that he had spent weeks trying to avoid.
“Sera is expecting you,” Florian said.
“Thank you,” he said, meticulously ordinary. “Do you know what about?”
“I would hope you do, ser,” Florian answered him. Florian’s dark eyes said nothing at all as he slid a glance toward the cold-lab door. “You can go in.—Sera, Justin Warrick is here.”
“All right,” Ari’s voice floated out.
Justin walked over to the open door of the long lab where Ari sat on a work-stool, at a counter, working at one of the old-fashioned separators. “Damn,” she complained without looking up. “I don’t trust it. Got to get one out of B. I’m not going to put up with this.” She looked up and the hasty lift of her hand startled him as his hand left the vault door. He realized he had m
oved the door then, and caught it and pushed the massive seal-door back, steadying it in frustration at his own young awkwardness, that rattled him when he most wanted composure.
“Damn thing,” Ari muttered. “Jane’s damn penny-pinching—you touch it, it swings on you. That’s going to get fixed.—How are you this morning?”
“All right.”
“Where’s Grant?”
His heart was already beating hard. It picked up its beats and he forced it to slow down. “I don’t know. I thought he was with you.”
“Of course you did.—Grant stole a boat last night. Sabotaged the other one. Security tracked him to Kruger’s. What do you know about it?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all.”
“Of course not.” She turned on the stool. “Your companion planned the whole thing.”
“I imagine he did. Grant’s very capable.” It was going too easily. Ari was capable of much, much more; of spinning it out, instead of going straight to the point. He held himself back from too much relief, as if it were a precipice and the current were carrying him too quickly toward it. Florian was still outside. There were no witnesses to what she said—or what she ordered. There was a lock on the doors out there. And there might well be a recorder running. “I wish he had told me.”
Ari made a clicking with her tongue. “You want to see the security reports? You both went out last night. You came in alone.”
“I was looking for Grant. He said he was going to borrow a carry-bag from next door. He never came back.”
Ari’s brows lifted. “Oh, come, now.”
“Sorry. That’s what I was doing.”
“I’m really disappointed in you. I’d expected more invention.”
“I’ve told you everything I know.”
“Listen to me, young friend. What you did is theft, you know that? You know what happens if Reseune files charges.”
“Yes,” he said, as calmly, as full of implication as he could make it. “I really think I do.”