“Grant is content,” Catlin said. The azi, she could judge quite well. The born-man, she didn’t attempt.
And that was, of course, a correct answer.
“I wish I could turn things around with Jordan,” she said. “I wish I could figure how to Work him. But he’s stubborn. And he knows all the tricks.” She gave a sigh and got up from the console. Paused, then, looking directly at Catlin, a second time sharply focused on the present, and on Catlin’s and Florian’s problems. “Sending Jordan back to Planys wouldn’t be good, would it, if he has a network there? I’d planned on Strassenburg. But he’ll Work the azi there and try to change them, and they’re all foundational to that city, and that would be a big problem. I could build an ethic around him in that population, but once he’s dead, what will that do? He’d be a rock in the stream. Everything would bend around him. Forever.”
Catlin shook her head. “I’m sure I don’t know any answer, sera.”
“Unfortunately I don’t, either,” she said, and went to her bedroom, and her private bath, and took a headache remedy before she took another deepstudy pill and went back to her bed, leaving everything to them, going back to what she had to do.
There’d been a garden once in legend, a perfect garden. But there’d been a snake in it. The woman hadn’t known what to do about him. And every problem of humankind had started from that. The snake had done a Working, about knowledge, and pride, and the woman had gone off her path and taken all her descendants with her.
She had her own snake under close watch. And she couldn’t let concern about Jordan disrupt her concentration, not when things were starting to gel, not when her essential job for the next few months was absorbing the sum of several sciences, dosing down with kat so often she could almost go deep-state the way Catlin or Florian could learn, just by thinking hard, and become only the thing she was absorbing, without objection, without question, just wide open to unquestioned knowledge.
You had to trust the tapes, you had to really trust them to dose down that far, or to go that open. You had no resistence when you did that. You had no way to say no. You had no extraneous thoughts. You just recorded, embedded the knowledge as fast as possible, burning it into the brain’s pathways, strong, strong, strong pathways.
There was only one source of tapes she’d trust like that: the first Ari’s tapes, stored in Base One, tapes recording Ari I’s thoughts, her opinions on technical questions, her data, her projects, her working life.
If there was any personal prejudice embedded in those records, any Working her predecessor had designed for her beyond the obvious, it was going into her head, too.
If she’d had the choice, if she’d had the leisure, if the world hadn’t been as high-pressure as it was, and if the legislature wasn’t boiling with important decisions Yanni was trying to handle—if all those things were so, and the world were safer, she’d have taken less of the deepteach drug, she’d have taken longer in her learning, she’d have stayed near enough to the surface to let a little of her conscious mind work on the problems, and see more critically what she personally thought.
But in Denys Nye’s fall, Union had gone quietly into crisis, and civilization could make some serious missteps while she lazed her way through, learning at an ordinary pace.
So she took the dose she did, on her off days, and gave up critiquing her predecessor. She wasn’t giving up her conscious mind in the long run—she banked on that. She was strong-willed, she was psychologically knowledgeable, she knew the tricks a person used in Working another, and she had a good memory for where and when she’d learned something, right down to the session. If she ran up against an ethical problem, she’d do her own thinking—eventually. She had tags on all of it.
Was it her own thinking, for instance, that had let her matter-of-factly consider Catlin’s matter-of-fact offer simply to kill Jordan Warrick? She might have been shocked a few months ago. But maybe not. Denys had been trying to kill her. Ultimately they’d killed him. That was a lesson life had given her.
Was it her own thinking, still, that said doing away with Jordan might still be the better, safer answer, that said there might be a way to do the deed quietly, and that Justin might not stay too long in mourning if she did it very cleverly?
She said no. She said no. That was the one mentality in the transaction she could entirely identify. That was her, saying no, and not clearly knowing whether it was the first Ari’s pragmatic sense or her own soft-hearted inexperience behind that answer.
It was scary. Two days ago she’d taken Poo-thing out of his drawer and set him on the dresser, so she could see him from this bed. She’d been too old for him. Now she was old enough to want contact with childhood years he represented. Poor’ battered bear. He’d been through a lot. Denys, in the main. But never discount her predecessor’s intentions, battering her mind into a pattern she was supposed to follow for all her life.
Was rebellion stupidity? Or was it just her genetics snuggling around the first Ari’s precepts, hardheadedness and arrogance trying to find a convenient shape to settle into?
She wanted Florian tonight. She really wanted Florian. But she, and he, had so much work to do…so very much work to do…things about the household, which kept them all fed, and safe…in a Reseune that didn’t all want them to stay alive.
The dose began to take hold. Critical thinking ebbed. The machine started up, a gentle repetitive tone, warning the tape was about to start. She had to press a button to get it to go on. She had that much volition left.
Beginning. The Novgorod designs, the overall structure.
Maybe nobody should examine their own world that closely. She’d been out in the world, however briefly She’d seen the world from the air, seen it from the ground, gone through its corridors and met its violence.
Now she was working directly with the ethics that drove it, examining the ethics set into the azi who had been the foundational citizens. Did she intend to tweak that mix? She could. She could subtly, by sending in other azi into key positions, shift the whole Cyteen electorate.
She could set others at work at Fargone, where Ollie ruled. She knew Ollie’s ethical structure. She had a copy of Ollie’s personal manual, down to the day he left. She could skim it at high speed, and recognize ordinary structures from special ones. She could design azi to fit around Ollie, no question, the foundations of something special, around one that she’d loved, when she was little. She could make all Fargone Station into Ollie’s image.
Ethics were the stop-marks, and the directional choices, in a psych-map. And she knew set after set of the classic ones, the ones from before the first Ari’s time, the ones designed by committee.
She knew the ones that had the first Ari’s peculiar stamp on them. Like those key sets in Novgorod, and at Gehenna—the people that would rise to the top and become important, the leaders, the movers.
She could replicate that at Strassenburg. She could do something else. Yes, she could.
And something else was her choice in building that place.
Surveillance of past projects like Gehenna was her job, the key thing that the first Ari had created her to do. Be the watchdog. Steer the directed populations in a good direction. Understand. Change at need. Know the program, and know how to change it.
Strassenburg would always be closely tied to Reseune, and it would be hers. Her chosen genesets, her chosen CITs, her designed psychsets, never part of Novgorod or any of the rest of Cyteen: something new under the sun. The thetas she was about to manage for sheer practice would be the foundation of a site where her programs ran, not her predecessor’s. Every problem case in Reseune was currently worried that the new facility might serve as a gulag for her opposition—and in fact she had thought of creating a little secure lab there, for the likes of Jordan Warrick.
But there was a problem with secure labs, and the Patil incident had demonstrated that, hadn’t it, abundantly? Secure labs were full of very bright people, who could be very devious
if they wanted to be.
And getting a Special like Jordan involved there would jeopardize the far more important reason for Strassenberg, that the whole town was itself a lab, a control for herself, and for her successor. She wanted to see what her designs grew into, isolated from those at Novgorod.
She intended nothing antithetical to Novgorod, unless intolerance for other ideas was a timebomb developing in the first Ari’s design.
Within decades, Novgorod would meet something on its beloved planet that wasn’t Novgorod, when it had been the only true city in the world for all the world’s existence. Novgorod had had some experience in tolerance, tolerating Reseune itself, Reseune’s autocracy—even needing an Ariane Emory, and voting for her programs.
But would they tolerate diversity when it wasn’t their brand of diversity?
For the good of the planet, they would have to. Or their idiosyncrasy became a problem that she would have to handle with subsequent population surges.
And what she did carried through generations. That was the point of everything: ultimately it was people you were dealing with, people whose psychsets might have been planned like a jigsaw puzzle, groups of the one psychset clicking into place with other groups of another, and tending to bond and procreate with individuals of like psychset, so there was a certain persistence of type—that was setted-in, too. All part of integrations.
No apparent problems in Novgorod. So far. Even the Abolitionists might be healthy. At least people disagreed with the majority.
So let Novgorod meet something Else. In her time, in her successor’s time, let two separate psycharcologies learn each other. That would deliver a poke to the urban organism downriver, to see how it wiggled.
It might also guarantee that her successor would need to exist.
Azi felt a certain pride in the continuance of their type. It was part of their sets. But was it wired into what was basically human?
Curious, curious. She was able to compare herself only against the first Ari. Her successor would at least have a broader field of inquiry in that department.
And perhaps her successor would found yet another colony, just to check things out. She thought if she were that Ari, that thought would certainly occur to her.
But that would complicate the situation long-term, when populations merged and met, as they would when the world grew. Too many variables spoiled the soup, to mix a metaphor.
Forgetting that they were dealing with living, self-willed people spoiled it, too. Too much deepstudy, too much immersion in the theoretical, the give and take only of electrons, not the behavior of whole organisms. The world was more complicated than theory ever yet predicted: that was why she was important. It was her job to see things coming, and figure how to shift the demographics without conflicts. A machine didn’t work, mixing in yet one more metaphor, if it was all one homogenous piece. Neither did a city, or a species.
Finding the glitches was her job. Her problem. Man started out analyzing his environment, graduated into understanding his own psyche, graduated, again, into analyzing the behavior of the human species en masse.
That guaranteed employment for several of her kind, didn’t it?
BOOK ONE Section 2 Chapter vii
APRIL 27, 2424
0117H
Florian was back from down the hill—late. Exhausted. He fell into bed in the dark, and Catlin rolled over and asked, face to face, brow to brow with him: “So. What’s the story? Do we accept these people?”
“I didn’t find anyone to object to. I’ve interviewed them. I’ve ordered them into a single barracks, two days of special tape. They’ll be firmly under our orders and initially operational by, I’d think, the fifteenth of next month.”
“Good.” She eased an arm around him. She was tired, herself, from hour after hour at the screens, and running up and downstairs seeing to the move. He was tired from a day with Hicks and trekking from one end of Reseune to the other, down to the labs and the barracks, back to the offices, meeting upon meeting with prospective help.
“Has sera asked after me?”
“She knows where you’ve been all day. She’s very busy in her studies, but she approves of what we’ve done.”
“Good.” He pulled her close, bestowed a weary kiss on the forehead. She wasn’t that tired, that that didn’t get a reaction. But she stayed tracked, business first. “There was an interesting development on my side today.”
“Oh?”
“Justin called me. Called us. He wanted to know what was on the card. He wanted to distance himself from that inquiry. But he also wanted to know.”
The penalty of interesting information. Florian pushed her back enough to look at her eye to eye. “Curious about the card, is he?”
“Curious and worried. He’s conflicted. He wants to know and he doesn’t want to know. On my own judgment, I told him about the Novgorod doctor to see what his reaction would be, and also to warn him about the nature of the danger. He didn’t know her, not even by name. I ran the clip of his call for sera to hear it.”
“Interesting,” Florian murmured. “And what did she say?”
“Much the same. She found it interesting.”
Hands moved. And stopped. “Do you think sera’s going to call me tonight?”
“Definitely she won’t,” Catlin said. “She skipped supper again and went straight into deepstudy.”
“She shouldn’t do that.”
“I said so, too. She said she’d have a big breakfast in the morning.”
“She’s pushing herself again. It’s not good.”
“It’s not good,” Catlin agreed. “I think she feels we’re in danger. I think she suspects something she can’t identify, the same as us.”
“What’s Unusual?” Florian said. It was the old game, the childhood game. Find the change. Find the anomaly. Find the problem.
“Jordan,” she answered. “Jordan being in Justin’s old office.”
“The card.” He tossed the list of Unusuals back. “Yanni. This Dr. Patil. The new colony. The new wing. The new township. Am I missing anything?”
“I think,” Catlin said, “that the card fits Jordan. Jordan wanting Justin to get caught. Justin giving us the card and being angry at Jordan. Justin calling me this afternoon.”
“Sera studying late,” Florian said, “night after night. She doesn’t feel she’s ready. Or she’s looking for something.”
“Yanni coming to dinner, right after his trip to Novgorod. Talking about Eversnow. Which Patil is going to run. Connection.”
“Hicks suddenly giving us all this staff. Which he was prepared to do before I walked in. Which meant he could have prepared to do it before the card ever came up—or only after he knew about the card he didn’t have—yet—until I gave it to him. Does the card show him some specific danger? Or is he trying to plant a spy on us, by giving us this staff?”
“Sera pulling Justin into the Wing,” Catlin said. “She didn’t even exit the Wing to talk to Yanni. Yanni came here to talk to her—so she’s still regarding our warnings—but she pulled Justin inside our perimeters.”
“She may be going out of the Wing more often than the last couple of months, if we have this new security staff,” Florian said. “That exposes her to danger. Would Hicks want that?”
“We’re about to have domestic staff down in prep,” Catlin said. “That’s an exposure.”
“Hicks seemed to relax once he had the card. He seemed more friendly. That’s an emotional assessment. He’s a born-man. He has authority, despite what we hear about the office. And he is cooperating.”
“So what do we conclude?” Catlin asked. “That something’s moving, one. Jordan’s stirred up, Justin is, ReseuneSec is, that’s two. And we still don’t know what Eversnow and Patil have to do with anybody.”
“Something’s moving,” Florian agreed, “and once we have more staff, sooner or later sera’s going to be going outside the perimeter we’ve established.”
“We?
??ve just got to watch out for her. It’s all we can do.”
“And follow up on Justin and this card.”
“Sera won’t like it,” Catlin said. “But we have to.”
“Justin Warrick is the one piece we can move. We have to. Or we have to ask Yanni about Patil and the card, and I don’t think he’ll tell us the truth.”
“Do you think Hicks will tell us the truth, once he has an answer about the card?”
“Emotional assessment. No. Not for free. So I don’t want to ask, officially, not while we don’t know who talked to Jordan, and why he gave Justin that card.”
Catlin heaved a sigh and put her arms around him. He put his around her. They had sex, purely a tension-reliever, mutual release, mutual pleasure. Afterward Catlin said, side by side on the same pillow:
“At least we’ll have help on staff.”
“We’ll have more to do for a while, watching the watchers. Being sure Hicks isn’t our problem.”
“Good news, if he is being honest. And if his staff is. And we know there’s danger outside. But we’ve been shut in the Wing so long there’s risk of sera losing touch with outside. Isolating herself from Reseune—from Novgorod—she can’t afford that. She has to go outside sooner or later. That’s coming. We just have to be sure of our own staff. That’s basic.”
“True.” He shut his eyes and relaxed with his partner, a long sigh flowing out of him. They could rest, the few hours of someone else’s watch—Marco and Wes took the night shift in the Wing One office. Those two, they could trust.
They did know at least Justin Warrick was safer than he had been, thanks to them getting him into a new office.
The question was whether they might have opened another window for an attack on sera, by letting Justin in—and yet another by accepting Hicks’s offer. There were very many, very skilled people they were letting into the wing.
Catlin objected to things. Catlin was always suspicious, and Catlin had agreed with him in this. He wished she’d seen a major problem up front…because the transition to outside made him very, very uneasy.