Cyteen

  Never mind the mess Denys made of those arrangements.

  “He operated during the last half year with a slate so clearly in order that those of us he was briefing could have walked into his office, picked up that agenda and known exactly where all the files were and exactly what had to be priority. He confessed he was afraid of dying. He certainly would have been glad to stay around another fifty years. He never expressed remorse for anything he’d done; he never asked my forgiveness; he only handed me the keys and the files and seemed touched that I did forgive him. That was the Giraud I knew.”

  She left it at that.

  I have the files. That was deliberate, too. The way she had done with the press.

  Not to undermine Lynch, damned sure. Denys refused the seat and someone had to hold it; Reseune was in profound shock. Certain people were urging Yanni to declare for the seat, challenge Lynch.

  No, Denys had said, focused enough to foresee that possibility. No challenge to Lynch from anyone. He’s harmless. Leave him.

  What Yanni thought about it she was not sure. She did not think Yanni wanted that honor.

  But Denys’ refusal had jerked a chance at Reseune Administration out of Yanni’s reach. And that, she thought, however much any of them in Reseune had suspected Denys would refuse the seat, that had to be a disappointment.

  She made a point of going over to Yanni after the services, catching his arm, thanking him for his support and making sure the whole Family saw that.

  Making sure that the whole Family knew Yanni was not out of the running in future, in her time. “I know what you’re doing,” she said fervently, careless of just who could hear, knowing some would. “Yanni, I won’t forget. Hear?”

  She squeezed his hand. Yanni gave her a look—as if he had not believed for a second it was more than a salve to his pride and then caught on that it was altogether more than that, in that subtle way such indicators passed in the Family.

  Not a word said directly. But there were witnesses enough. And Yanni was profoundly affected.

  Hers, she reckoned, when it came down to the line, in the same way Amy and Maddy and the younger generation were.

  And others in the House would see the indicators plain, that she had declared herself on several fronts, and started making acquisitions, not on a spoils system for the young and upcoming, but for a passed-over senior administrator who enjoyed more respect in the House than he himself imagined.

  Signal clearly that Yanni was hers and let Yanni collect his own following: Yanni took no nonsense and let himself be taken in by no one. Yanni had stripped his own daughter of authority when she had abused it, and favored no one except on merit: that was his reputation—when Yanni thought of himself as a simple hardnosed bastard.

  Yanni had some reassessing to do. Figure on that.

  Yanni was not going to be taken in by the bootlickers and the Stef Dietrichs in the House or elsewhere.

  He had been one of maman’s friends. She thought with some personal satisfaction, that maman would approve.

  iv

  She took the outside walk back to the House, around the garden wall, toward the distant doors: it was, thank God, quiet, after the pressure of the interviews. Damn Victoria, she thought, and reckoned that Maddy had wanted to sink out of sight.

  “Do you wonder why we do such things?” she murmured to Florian and Catlin. “So do I.”

  They looked at her, one and the other. Catlin said, in Florian’s silence: “It’s strange when someone dies. You think they ought to be there. It was that way in Green Barracks.”

  Ari put her hand on Catlin’s shoulder as they walked. Memories. Catlin was the one who had seen people die. “Not slowing down, are you?”

  “No, sera,” Catlin said. “I don’t intend to be talked about.”

  She laughed softly. Count on Catlin.

  Florian said nothing at all. Florian was the one who would have taken in every signal in the crowd; and work over it and work over it to make it make sense. Florian was the one who would worry about the living.

  “He’s gone,” Ari said finally, at the doors. “Damn, that is strange.” And looked at Florian, whose face had just gone quite tense, that listening-mode that said he was getting something attention-getting over the Security monitor. One or the other of them was always on-line.

  “Novgorod,” Florian said. “Jordan Warrick—has declared his innocence—He says—he was coerced. Reseune Security is issuing orders to place him in detention—”

  Ari’s heart jolted. But everything came clear then. “Florian,” she said while they were going through the doors, “code J Red, go. We’re on A; go for Q and we’re Con2.”

  Make sure of Justin and Grant: Catlin and I are going for Denys; get home base secure and stay there; force permitted, but not as first resort.

  That, before they were through the doors, while a Security guard whose com would not be set on that command-priority gave them a slightly puzzled look at their on-business split-and-go.

  “They’re not saying much,” Catlin said as they went.

  “Out to the news-services?”

  “That, first,” Catlin said. “Com 14 is loaded with incomings.”

  Reporters at the airport, at the edge of a major news event and hemmed in by an anxious, noncommunicative Security.

  “Damn, is Denys on it? What in hell is he doing?”

  Catlin tapped the unit in her ear. “Denys is still in the lab; Base One, relay Base Two transmission?—Affirmative, sera. He’s sent word to defer all questions; he’s saying the charges are a political maneuver, quote, ill-timed and lacking in human feeling. He says, quote, the Family is returning from the funeral and people are out of their offices: Reseune will have a further statement in half an hour.”

  “Thank God,” she said fervently.

  Denys was awake. Denys was returning fire.

  Damned well about time.

  v

  It was a good day to stay home, Justin reckoned—given the situation in the House, given a general unsettled state in Security now that its chief was dead: I don’t want to be alarmist, Ari had said in a message left on the Minder, but I’d be a lot easier in my mind if you and Grant didn’t go anywhere you don’t have to for the next few days—work at home if you can. I’m going to be busy; I can’t watch everything; and Security is confused as hell—a little power struggle going on there. Do you mind? Feel free to attend the services. But stay where people are.

  I’ll take your advice, he had messaged back. Thank you. I know you have a lot to take care of right now. I don’t think our presence at the services would be appropriate, or welcome to his friends; but if there should be anything Grant or I can do in the wing to take care of details, we’re certainly willing to help.

  She had not asked anything of them—had more or less forgotten them, Justin reckoned, small wonder with the pressure she was under. The news was full of speculations about Denys’ health, about the political consequences of Reseune yielding up the seat Reseune had held on Council since the Founding—about whether the Centrists could field a viable candidate inside Science, or whether Secretary and now Proxy Councillor Lynch had the personal qualifications to hold the party leadership which Giraud had held.

  “There’s nothing wrong with Denys’ health,” Grant objected, the two of them watching the news in the living room.

  “I don’t know what he’s about,” Justin said. And trusting then to the freedom Ari swore they had from monitoring: “But losing Giraud is a heavy blow to him. I think it’s the only time I’ve ever felt sorry for Denys.”

  “They’re doing that PR,” Grant said; then: “Denys had to get Ari’s backing, isn’t that ironic as hell?”

  “He’s what—a hundred twenty-odd?—and that weight he carries doesn’t favor him. He’d be lucky to see ten, fifteen more years. So he has to have Ari’s agreement, doesn’t he?”

  “It’s not going to work,” Grant said.

  Justin looked at Grant, who sat—they
had found a scattering of red and blue pillows—in a nest at the corner of the couch, his red hair at odds with half of it.

  “Denys has to set the pattern,” Grant said, “has to give him that foundation or there’s no hope for Giraud. I firmly think so. Yanni may have known their father in his old age, but Yanni’s much too young to do for Giraud what Jane Strassen did—not mentioning how they’ve treated him—”

  “He owes them damned little, that’s sure enough.”

  “And there’s always the question what’s in and not in those notes Ari-younger got from her predecessor,” Grant said. “I think Ari knows a lot she’s not putting in those notes. I think our Ari is being very careful what she tells her guardians.”

  “Ari says sometimes—not everything was necessary.”

  “But whatever is necessary—is necessary,” Grant said. “And Denys can’t know—isn’t in a position to know, that’s what I think; and she’s keeping it that way.”

  “The Rubin boy’s going into chemistry, isn’t he?”

  “Fine student—test scores not spectacular, though.”

  “Yet.”

  Grant made a deprecating gesture. “No Stella Rubin. No one to tell him when to breathe. Hell is necessary for CITs, do we make that a given? You warned them not to let up on him too much—but the project is still using him for a control. Put the whole load on Ari; go easy on Ben Rubin; see what was necessary… I’ll bet you anything you like that Denys Nye had more to do with that decision than Yanni Schwartz did. Yanni never went easy on anyone.”

  “Except—Yanni’s got a family attachment in the way. Rubin’s suicide really got him, and Jenna Schwartz, remember, had some little thing to do with that. It could well be Yanni’s going easy.”

  “But Rubin’s still a control,” Grant said. “And what he’s proving—”

  “What he’s proving is, A, you can’t do it with all genesets; B, some genesets respond well to stress and some don’t—”

  “Given, given, but in the two instances we have,—”

  “And, C, there’s bad match-ups between surrogate and subject. Don’t discount the damage Jenna Schwartz did and the damage the contrast between Jenna Schwartz and Ollie Strassen did to the boy.”

  “Not to mention,” Grant said, holding up a finger, “the fact Oliver AOX is male, and Alpha; and Stella Rubin is female and not that bright. I’d like to do a study on young Rubin. No edge to him, not near the flux swings. The instability goes with the suicide, goes with the brilliance—Among us, you know, they call it a flawed set.”

  “And do a fix for it.”

  “And lose the edge, just as often.—Which brings us back to young Ari, who’s maybe given the committee all she knows—which I don’t believe, if she’s as much Ari as she seems, and our Ari—doesn’t take chances with her security. I very much think access to those programs is a leverage of sorts—and do you know, I think Denys would have begun to guess that?”

  Justin considered that thought, with a small, involuntary twitch of his shoulders. “The committee swears no one can retrieve from Ari’s programs without Ari’s ID. And possibly it’s always been true.”

  “Possibly—more than that. Possibly that Base, once activated—can’t be outmaneuvered in other senses. Possibly it’s capable of masking itself.”

  “Lying about file sizes?”

  “And invading other Bases—eventually. Built-in tests, parameters,—I’ve been thinking how I’d write a program like that…if she were azi. The first Ariane designed me. Maybe—” Grant made a little quirk of his mouth. “Maybe I have a—you’d say innate, but that’s a mistake—in-built resonance with Ari’s programs. I remember my earliest integrations. I remember—there was a—even for a child—sensual pleasure in the way things fit, the way the pieces of my understanding came together with such a precision. She was so very good. Do you think she didn’t prepare for them to replicate her? Or that she’d be less careful with a child of her own sets, than with an azi of her design?”

  Justin thought about it. Thought about the look on Grant’s face, the tone of his voice—a man speaking about his father…or his mother. “Flux-thinking,” he said. “I’ve wondered—Do you love her, Grant?”

  Grant laughed, fleeting surprise. “Love her.”

  “I don’t think it’s impossible. I don’t think it’s at all unlikely.”

  “Reseune is my Contract and I can never get away from it?”

  “Reseune is my Contract: I shall not want?—I’m talking about CIT-style flux. The kind that makes for ambivalences. Do you love her?”

  A frown then. “I’m scared of the fact this Ari ran a probe. I’m scared because Ari’s got the first Ari’s notes—which include my manual, I’m quite sure. And what if—what if—This is my nightmare, Justin: what if—in my most fluxed imaginings, Ari planned for her successor; what if she planted something in me that would respond to her with the right trigger?—But then I flux back again and think that’s complete nonsense. I’ll tell you another nightmare: I’m scared of my own program tape.”

  Justin suffered a little sympathetic chill. “Because Ari wrote it.”

  Grant nodded. “I don’t want to review it under trank nowadays. I know I could take enough kat to put me flat enough I could take it—but then I think—I can handle things without it. I can manage. I don’t need it, God, CITs put up with the flux and they learn from it. And I do—learn from it, that is.”

  “I wish to hell you’d told me that.”

  “You’d worry. And there’s no reason to worry. I’m fine—except when you ask me questions like that: do I love Ari? God, that’s skewed. That’s the first time I ever wondered about it in CIT terms. And you’re right, there’s a multi-level flux around her I don’t like at all.”

  “Guilt?”

  “Don’t do that to me.”

  “Sorry. I just wondered.”

  Grant shifted position in the nest of pillows, against the arm. “Have you ever scanned my tape for problems?”

  “Yes,” Justin said after a little hesitation, a time-stretch of hesitation, that felt much too long and much too significant. “I didn’t want to make it evident—I didn’t want to worry you about it.”

  “I worry. I can’t help but worry. It’s too basic to me.”

  “You—worry about it.”

  Grant gave a small, melancholy lift of the brows, and seemed to ponder for a moment, raking a hand through his hair. “I think she asked something that jolted me—deep. I think I know where. I think she asked about my tape—which, admittedly, I have a small guilt about: I don’t use it the way I’m supposed to; I think she asked about contact with subversives; and I dream about Winfield, lately. The whole scene out at Big Blue. The plane, and the bus with those men, and that room…”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that?”

  “Are dreams abnormal?”

  “Don’t give me that. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because it’s not significant. Because I know—when I’m not fluxed—that I’m all right. You want me to take the tape, I’ll take it. You want to run a probe of your own—do it. I’ve certainly no apprehensions about that. Maybe you should. It’s been a long time. Maybe I’d even feel safer if you did.—If,” Grant added with a little tilt of the head, a sidelong glance, a laugh without humor. “If I didn’t then wonder if you weren’t off. You see? It’s a mental trap.”

  “Because you got a chance to see Jordan. Because the damn place is crazy!” Of a sudden he felt a rush of frustration, an irrational concern so intense he got up and paced the length of the living room, looked back at Grant in a sudden feeling of walls closing in, of life hemmed around and impeded at every turn.

  Not true, he thought. Things were better. Never mind that it was another year of separation from his father, another year gone, things no different than they had ever been—things were better in prospect, Ari was closer than she had ever been to taking power in her own right, and her regime, he sincerely believed it—promised
change, when it would come.

  They’re burying Giraud today.

  Why in hell does that make me afraid?

  “I wish,” Grant said, “you’d listened to me. I wish you’d gone to Planys instead.”

  “What difference? We’d have still been separate. We’d still worry—”

  “What then? What’s bothering you?”

  “I don’t know.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Being pent up in here, I think. This place. This—” He thought of a living room in beige and blue; and realized with a little internal shift-and-slide that it was not Jordan’s apartment that had come back with that warm little memory. “God. You know where I wish we could go back to? Our place. The place—” Face in a mirror, not the one he had now. The boy’s face. Seventeen and innocent, across the usual clutter of bottles on the bathroom counter, getting ready for an evening—

  Tape-flash, ominous and chaotic. The taste of oranges.

  “—before all this happened. That’s useless, isn’t it? I don’t even want to be that boy. I only wish I was there knowing what I know now.”

  “It was good there,” Grant said.

  “I was such a damned fool.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Justin shook his head.

  “I know differently,” Grant said. “Put yourself in Ari’s place. Wonder—what you would have been—on her timetable, with her advantages, with the things they did to her—You’d have been—”

  “Different. Harder. Older.”

  “—someone else. Someone else entirely. CITs are such a dice-throw. You’re so unintentionally cruel to each other.”

  “Do you think it’s necessary? Can’t we learn without putting our hand in the fire?”

  “You’re asking an azi, remember?”

  “I’m asking an azi. Is there a way to get an Ariane Emory out of that geneset—or me—out of mine—”