“Whose?” Corain asked. “That’s the question. If an azi did it, who directed it?”
Yanni hesitated over the answer. Then said, “Jordan is certainly one who could have done it. That’s why it’s not so simple to say he’s guilty or innocent. Denys Nye could have done it. Possibly Giraud Nye. Or Ari herself.”
Corain’s brows lifted. “A variation on the suicide theory?”
“She had cancer, ser. Nothing serious, except her rejuv was going. Probably the cancer was a symptom—it might have eventually caused her death, but that wasn’t a sure thing. I’ll tell you something about the first Ari, which I think you know very well: she liked to control the timing of events. And her death was a major, major event—for which it turned out she had amply prepared.”
“So that’s why you say the perpetrator is likely beyond justice.”
“It’s one theory.”
“But why in all reason did Jordan Warrick agree to take the hit? Yes, it was a transfer—but he could have appealed.”
Oh, that was disingenuous. Mikhail Corain hadn’t spoken up for Jordan, back then, hadn’t spoken up loudly at all, and had politically hoped for Jordan’s silence, since the immediate precursor to Ari’s death had been Jordan’s meeting with Corain and with Defense. Jordan had been cutting a deal to trade Reseune secrets and go public with charges—if Jordan could get himself and his son out of Reseune and under Defense Bureau and Citizens Bureau protection.
“Who knows?” Yanni said, equally disingenuous.
“So is his return a controversial matter in Reseune?”
Interesting question. Clever way of putting it.
“Not very. He’s settling in; he doesn’t yet have a practice. His son, you may know, runs an important office in Reseune. Young Emory’s studying, mostly, not directly concerned with external affairs. You could say I want to deliver her a more peaceful universe. I want a universe in which she doesn’t have to start out opposing you…a cooperative universe, with less and less motive to destabilize what works—you know, that antiquated notion of progress by compromise? I think we’ve had enough of fringe groups and extremists. I know you don’t like them any better than I do. I’ve tried to initiate compromise in my tenure. Personal legacy, ser. Personal legacy. That’s my ambition.”
Corain nodded quietly over his coffee.
Whether Corain bought it all was a good question. Nobody trusted a psychmaster. Urban legend invented the word, and amplified it into crazy notions of mind control and telepathy, all sorts of nonsense. The answer was, like most things, complicated. Yanni’s reasons were complicated, and the manipulations were complicated: a little truth, aptly distributed, with very few outright lies.
Divert and divide. Redirect the perception of profit involved. Create a little wedge, Defense interests and Citizen interests—those were easy to split. Defense was naturally Expansionist. Citizens was naturally Centrist. The Paxers’ interests, however, weren’t remotely divisible down that great divide of War years politics. Their name meant peace—but their war being over, nowadays they just wanted the power a large movement offered. Paxer rhetoric and Paxer violence could influence events. Violent acts could recruit the young and disaffected, while the old, canny, and astute Paxer leadership, some of whom were openly interviewed on the news these days, drew satisfaction from the fear that surrounded them.
A clever old warhorse like Corain, head both of the Centrist party, and of the Citizens Bureau—the very constituency that happened to contain most of the Paxer movement—did know what grief his party would come to if the Paxers ever got their wish. This might be the time, Corain might well be persuaded, to move the Centrists closer and closer to the same interests as the Expansionists—at least for this generation. Together, Defense, Information, Science, and Trade, the Expansionists had a strong bloc in the Council of Nine: add Citizens to that, and they had an unbreakable majority—on issues that Citizens could remotely favor.
And when the Nine swung that definitive a weight, the Council of Worlds historically fell into line.
That wrapped it up neatly enough. Yanni sipped his coffee, reminisced a little with the first Ari’s old adversary, and listened as much as he spoke.
They didn’t get into the second bottle of the Sauvignon.
They weren’t that friendly.
BOOK ONE Section 1 Chapter v
APRIL 22, 2424
1545H
Ari wasn’t in a good mood. The smile was bright enough, a broad grin, a second or two in duration, and then it was gone. She went over paper printout with a forced concentration that just wasn’t up to its usual enthusiasm.
Justin Warrick didn’t ask why. It wasn’t profitable to ask, but her mood was bothersome. Ari wasn’t sulking, nothing to do with him, he sensed. She was just trying hard not to be elsewhere this afternoon, and didn’t volunteer the information that anything was wrong, but there was, somewhere in her universe.
Which, if it wasn’t his doing, he had to take as not his business. Her universe in one sense had widened when Denys had died; in another, in the weeks after, it had gotten a lot more focused, more down to the task at hand, and he was fairly sure she was dropping weight. He saw it in the hand that gripped the stylus, in the angle of the back—backbones showed under the silk jersey. She had a few people on her domestic staff, people who were supposed to be seeing to her welfare and making sure she got meals. She certainly had Florian and Catlin to look out for her and serve as confidants. But something wasn’t right, and he’d begun to suspect it was a troublingly unusual complaint in an eighteen-year-old genius-level CIT: far too much study, obsessive study. Too little real sleep. Taking the cataphoric drug too often, trying to let deepstudy hours sub for sleep, and giving herself no time for dream-function. That could lead to some real eetee behavior. Ari didn’t say so, but the signs of that were increasingly there, in the weight loss, the slight rawness of nerves.
“I don’t see it,” she said, after scanning page after page, “Justin, I don’t see it.”
“Maybe a little sleep would be a good thing.”
“I sleep just fine.”
“Sure you do,” he said. “Ari, do me a personal favor. Have a little more of it.”
Now he got the frown, full-force and directed at him. “There’s nothing wrong with my sleep pattern. I’m just not seeing this problem, is all.”
“Well, possibly I’m wrong.” Not likely. He knew the psychset represented in that printout very well, and he knew the particular case in question, and the right answer was obvious to a much lesser operator. On the other hand, he was dealing with a mind that was capable of taking a new approach to a classic problem, and capable of not pinning the solution where every other operator thought it was. It was an interesting point, whether the obviousness of the answer would make her miss the question…or whether she had rejected the classic answer and was after something else which no other examiner had ever caught.
They weren’t going to find it out in five minutes.
“I want you to take this home,” he said. It was near the end of their regular session. “Don’t look at it again until tomorrow morning. And, young sera—”
“Don’t call me that!”
“Ari. Get some sleep. No study tonight. That’s your assignment.”
A quick flash of dark, sullen eyes. “I’m fine.”
“Sure you are. Take the evening off. Take the night off. Think about it.”
“Too damned much thinking,” she said. “I can get this, dammit.”
She had a real bent for macrosets, the big picture, a very, very rare skill; he was an expert at microsets, and he taught her what he knew. It was what he did, these days, regular one-on-one sessions, five days a week. He gave her cases, she figured them, they discussed the answers and sometimes argued them. They were working on actual integration work, putting psychsets together in a community, letting them run in the original generation and two or three more, and seeing how the interface worked.
But
the one he’d given her, and also slipped into the latest mix, was an azi named Young AY-4, who wasn’t theoretical. AY-4 had blown up and attacked his teammates…lethally…during the War. Justin hadn’t told her that. He just pointed out something had gone wrong in the integration, and she’d correctly picked up on AY-4 as the problem. The real-life AY-4 had gotten the self-defense part down, all right, but it had gone bad, very bad, and he had taken himself out along with his teammates, for reasons still debated. The Defense Bureau had trained their own so-called Supervisors for a certain period during the War, over Reseune’s protests. They’d messed with azi psychsets, thinking they’d turn out a better, more obedient soldier, who could work with any officer, not just a Reseune trained Supervisor. That hadn’t worked outstandingly well—witness the AY-4 case. It was a famous case in his generation—an azi designation most anyone of his age would recognize.
One thing was certain: Ari hadn’t cheated and looked the case up in Library. She’d rather be stumped. She’d rather do it herself. That certainly had echoes of her predecessor. So did the temper. But do-it-herself was characteristic of young Ari, too: passion for knowledge was one of her better attributes, so long as she wasn’t sleep-deprived.
“I know you can get it,” he said. Then he added, because she looked so tired: “Do you want a hint?”
“No,” she snapped back, and then the frown mitigated into a worried expression. “I’m sorry, Justin.”
“Sleep’s good,” he chided her. “Try it. You’ll like it.”
The worried look staved. “It’s not study, it’s Yanni.”
Yanni Schwartz. That shed a different light on her week-long mood. “Oh, well, a lot of people have said that.”
“Sometimes I just want to break his neck.” She gathered up her papers, shoved them into the folder she was taking upstairs and got up slowly. “And you’re not supposed to hear me say things like that, so I didn’t, but it’s so, anyway. Damn him!”
Yanni was off doing legislative business in Novgorod. And Justin didn’t want to ask what had happened. He just folded up his briefcase and wished he had a quick fix for what bothered his sole student. By what she said, it wasn’t kid business, though her reaction wasn’t helped by lack of sleep.
“You just take care of yourself. Don’t take any kat tonight. Relax.”
“I’m trying,” she said, and sighed and gave him a pat on the arm as if he were the child, at thirty-odd to her eighteen. “You’re right. I know you are. Probably the answer’s obvious as hell and I’m being terribly thickheaded. Is it a trick question?”
“I’m somewhat interested to see what you’ll come up with. I don’t want to spoil it.”
“You think I’m a fool.”
He laughed; that proposition was so unlikely. But it was the perpetual self-doubt of a young genius mind that never found peers to compare to. “You’re my science project. I’m determined to see the outcome. Keep going on it.”
A very heavy sigh. She took up her briefcase and hit the door button. Florian and Catlin were waiting for her, dark and light, doubtless having tracked the whole four-hour session with the endless patience of their profession. Grant was on his feet, too, across the hall, not in possession of the coms Florian and Catlin used, but taking his cue from them. Grant was supposed to have been busy in the Education Wing office, but he habitually came over to Wing One to gather Justin up around this time.
The sets parted company, he and Grant, Ari and her bodyguards, taking their separate ways at least for the evening. They lived next door to each other, met for lessons in this little downstairs office in Wing One, because it was just more comfortable, and because her security didn’t want her walking about outside Wing One lately, no matter that Wing One was largely depleted of shops, of restaurants, of diversions—even its lab now mostly gutted of equipment. They kept to their separate apartments and didn’t socialize, beyond that.
Teaching her was how he earned a living these days, doing his regular work in psych design two whole days a week, back to back, Thursdays and Fridays, and then five days of afternoon sessions with Ari. His teaching her had been Ari’s idea—her insistence, in fact; and that job had its moments of interest, flashes of brilliance, even excitement, when Ari chased some idea through the undergrowth of other opinions, and when, sometimes, she sparked his creativity, and opened windows for him into her own esoteric field. That was a reward he couldn’t have bought for any price. Some days, many days, Grant sat in on the sessions, and gave his own opinions, and they argued with Ari over coffee and sandwiches—those were the good days.
This hadn’t been one of them. Nor had the day before, nor the day before that, not since Yanni had left, now that he added it up. She turned in her lessons, and her notes, and her projects—his briefcase held her current one, which was a huge integration, nearly town-sized: he was supposed to run that for her on the lab computers—another plus: there was no shortage of computer time, not on young Ari’s budget. Slip your own projects in whenever you want, she’d told him, and that casual little gift could be worth more than the extravagant 10k a month he drew on salary as the director of a non-existent research wing.
But she hadn’t been herself for a week, and Yanni—Yanni, off in Novgorod, seemed to have done something she didn’t like.
He didn’t like to think about the outside world. Didn’t like to think that politics down in Novgorod could ever affect him again. But he was connected to Ari. And it could.
“You’re thinking,” Grant said. Grant, alpha azi, life companion, lover—Grant knew him. Grant could read him like no other. “You’re worried.”
“Tell you later.” he said. Out in the halls was no place to discuss Ari’s business, not even with a friendly power in the Director’s office and no more Nyes anywhere. He found himself tired, after the four hour session—the psychological drag of an upset kid.
Or the fact it was near the end of the week. He hadn’t slept well himself, last night, mostly, he realized now, because he’d gotten increasingly worried about the sessions with the kid, and dreaded having to deal with that temper. “I want to drop by the office and pick up a file, get the computer running on this in downtime.” He could use his own Education Wing office for an access: no indication on the papers as to whether the combination of sets represented a real town, or just hypotheticals: the work itself was just a listing of Library links and job codes. The result, the only thing that mattered, would drop into the Wing One office computer tomorrow, representing what these personalities would be like in three generations, given that the first generation of the class ones would turn CIT and the second generation of the class twos would be born and reared CIT—by the class ones. It was complex, and it contained, in that fifteen pages of links to manuals, a few noted changes to those psychsets, and of course it included the choice of group ethic. That was Integrations. And Ari ran them in her head. He’d had to make her write them down, arguing that the computer didn’t read her mind and he wasn’t going to write it out for her, thank you, or check them the same way she wrote them—let’s be precise, he said, and she’d said, the little minx, Run them in your own head: the computer isn’t always right.
“Is there time for me to chase down some loose ends of my own?” Grant asked.
“About half an hour. Then dinner out. All right? It’s been a long day.”
“Fine with me. Not enough time for my business. I’ll watch you work.”
They shared that office over in Education, their old office, as happened, convenient for the small staff they had—a staff that couldn’t get clearance for Wing One, or his work with Ari. He couldn’t hand Ari’s notes to his staff to deal with, for two reasons: one, that anything she produced was classified, and two, because his staff couldn’t operate on that level. But staff saw to it that the other things got done, when he was gone most afternoons—Em had gotten the rhythm of their schedule, and kept it going when neither he nor Grant was there; and a couple of beta clericals under Em, who could
actually read the prefaces and classify psychsets quite accurately, had the place running like a machine. Things came out of Library, recommendations got printed, results folderized and cataloged, simple requisitions went out, supplies came back. They also handled the routine idiocy from Admin, the inane inquiries like, Please list your monthly case load by origin. State whether resolved or ongoing. It didn’t matter if they sat and threw darts for two days—their salary solely depended on his teaching Ari—but the Admin computers didn’t know that, because Yanni hadn’t ordered technical to fix their classification. Admin computers still added their output into the Education Wing statistics. That could have been an ongoing problem for Wendell Peterson, who was over that Wing. They didn’t contribute greatly to Wing performance ratings. But Grant kept them in the black, at least. And Jordan did—who never even entered the office.
Downstairs, down again, the two of them took the storm tunnels that crossed the quadrangle underground, a long, dingy concrete passage that offered a longer but warmer walk on a cold April day, when wind exceeded the safe limits of the barriers and brought in contaminants the bots and the pigs would have to track down. The tunnel was crowded today, a popular route, past Admin, between Admin and Education—they’d recently installed a bank of vending machines down by the intersection, by the water fountains; but those only produced a traffic jam at noon. Right now people were bent on supper, and restaurants.
The route was particularly convenient for them: the storm tunnel exit in the Education Wing delivered them right near their own office door, in the 100’s of A corridor, in that sprawling building.
Their office was dark. Em and the staff had properly locked up and gone home on schedule, to residences down in the town—the shuttle buses, a whole new fleet of them, ran a heavy service right at 1610h, the whole fleet lining up at the curb ten minutes after shift change. Em and the staff likely had mentally dumped the day’s business and joined the outpouring, blithe and free for their own pursuits of the evening.