Regenesis

“We can have a museum in Alpha Wing,” she decided. “We can have our own museum. A little one, for some of the paintings. We can have another over in the Admin Wing, where they’ll be safe. I think that’s a good thing. Sam, you can do it–”

“A museum?”

“The first Ari knew people who’d seen the world built. They’re all dead, now. We’re the first generation that doesn’t know anything about Cyteen before there were people here. And all their things, if they aren’t in archive, are just going away, thrown in the cycler. A virtual museum’s a good thing. You can look that up any time you want, but you have to ask for the displays–and you have to know to ask. You need to know what you’re looking for in the first place to look something up, and that necessarily slants it, doesn’t it?”

“Slants it, too,” Sam said, “if somebody picks out what you’ll see.”

“Someone’s always picking for us. But the people who painted those paintings did their own picking about what to paint. You can see the virtuals. You can get any repro you want, if you want to put your hands on it, but if you want to get surprises, that you didn’t askto be face to face with, maybe that’s the idea. You’re right. Maybe I should look at what I don’t expect. It’s why I decided I want the first Ari’s stuff. Maybe it ought to be like that for other people. They need to be surprised. And we need to haul some of the stuff out of the warehouses before it goes into the cyclers and just have it for people to look at. We’re the generation that doesn’t remember the beginning. Maybe we need to look hard.”

Sam stopped still and looked at her a long moment. “Sometimes you don’t make thorough sense, but you always seem like you do.”

She laughed. Not many people would tell her she babbled. She knew she did. She saw things in her head, saw things she didn’t have vocabulary for. The first Ari, people said, had been very spare with words. The first Ari had had ideas in her head, too, which didn’t have words. The first Ari didn’t habitually let those things out. She, on the other hand, tried to talk to the people she thought would understand. And she babbled thorough nonsense, and amused Sam.

“You see through me,” she said to Sam.

“I try to see into your head,” Sam said. “You’re awake all the time, you know that. You’re the most incredibly awake person I know. You want a museum in Admin, sure, you get Yanni Schwartz to agree and give me space, and I’ll figure how to do it. I have to go the slow way and look up things like a regular guy, but you’ll get your museum.”

“I’m not about museums,” she said, “I’m not supposed to be, at any rate. It’s just a side thought. I have to do so many other things. God, Sam. I’m studying. I’m studying all day long. I’m learning the things I’m supposed to, psych, and design, and genetics, and I spend so long at deepstudy I’m starting to go into deepstate without the damn pills, sometimes so I don’t even know I’m doing it. But when I have thoughts that aren’t on‑topic I have to shed them, I just have to turn them loose and shed them or go crazy, because I haven’t got time to do them, and my museum is a thought like that. I had it. I want to get rid of it but I don’t want to lose it, and I’m going to be busy, so you do it, Sam.”

“Ari.” He reached out and gripped her shoulders–a contact Florian and Catlin would allow very few people–and kissed her on the forehead. “Take a break, Ari. Take a day off and take a break.”

She sighed, rested her hands on his arms, looked him closely in the eyes. “You’re a genius, you know it. You really are.”

“That’s a laugh.” He dropped the contact. “That’s the last thing I am.”

“I know it when I see it. You are. Always were. Sam, Take care of yourself. I mean that.”

“Is there any special reason you should say that?”

“Selfishness. I need you. I’ll always need you. I’ll think of you when I’m studying that wretched population equation till my eyes cross.”

Second kiss, this one on the cheek. Like a brother, if she’d been born with one. She’d never had sex with Sam. Never would. That wasn’t the way they were with each other. “You just take care of yourself, Ari, hear me? You’re going too hard, again. But what’s new about that?”

She was so tired, she felt tears start in her eyes, but she wouldn’t shed them. She laughed, instead. “I’m paying for this place,” she said, “or I will. I’m starting real work. High time I earn my keep, I say. You’ll see.”

“Good for you,” Sam said and let her go. And he probably did see the dampness of her eyes and had the common sense not to fuss over it.

It was a rare morning. The bash and clatter of hollow forms and the whine of cutters was hundreds of workers and bots busy keeping Sam’s promises. She made her own promises as they walked back to the exit, and the runabout: that by summer and move‑in, she was going to be in a position to take care of Sam.

Pay for it, indeed. Her whole life paid for it.

Just watch, she said to Yanni, in absentia. Just watch. The first Ari developed most of what we do–what every lab in the wide universe does. I’m starting where she finished. I’ve run through the teaching tapes in three months: everything but this last couple of weeks was basic, and I’m into her notes, and I’m doing integrations. I’ll be working on gammas soon. Alpha sets before New Year’s. Strassenberg population sets by next year. I’ll be able. I’ll know what I’m doing, Yanni.

And that’s not empty bragging. That’s the truth.

BOOK TWO Section 1 Chapter iii

MAY 10, 2424

1328H

Information, encouragingly abundant, in Florian’s opinion, had begun flowing along new channels. The new security team, and the domestic staff, were finally due to arrive for duty in Wing One. The security team was ready as of now, since ReseuneSec had finished their documentation–but they weren’t setting foot in Wing One, and neither were the domestics, until Justin and Grant finished their report, which they said would take longer than they thought.

And there’d been a problem. Justin was waiting on getting general manuals from Library indefinitely postponed, as they found out, because Justin’sinquiry had triggered security alerts, and Justin hadn’t been aware that lower ReseuneSec levels were investigating his request and stalling it purposefully until the probe had gotten high enough in the ReseuneSec system–namely Hicks’ office–to contact sera’s office–as the ones with their finger on Justin.

That was a mistake on their own part, as Florian saw it: they should have foreseen that Justin’s inquiry might have raised a flag–considering his connections. Sera had called Yanni, Yanni had called Hicks, and Hicks had sent out an order to free those items up, so they’d finally gotten to Justin…days late, but ten minutes after sera had found it out.

Catlin had requested a few more rounds of tape‑study on protocols for the security group, to keep them busy until Justin could do his work. The new domestic staff, meanwhile, had finished their preparation and passed sera’s final scrutiny, and they might be brought in once their manuals cleared–much simpler than the ReseuneSec lot, so, given Justin’s prior problems with clearance, Florian called up Hicks’ office and made his own personal request, firmly–which got other manuals liberated, to him, at least, who couldn’t read them–and who had no permission on file to have them. He took them personally to Justin’s office, solving one more bottleneck, and stacking more work on Justin and Grant, who were working extra hours and taking computer time running interface studies among sera’s staff. Most household staffs didn’t get that degree of lookover, but sera’s wasn’t the sort that could ever discharge a member and have them easily plugged in elsewhere. There was too much special knowledge: there were too many security issues.

So they delayed that, too, and by now Justin and Grant were running short of sleep.

But today their own promised ReseuneSec authorization clearances had come through, an apparently earnest demonstration of Hicks’ good will, a pass alleged to give them access to anything in ReseuneSec files, inside Reseune itself–and to ride ReseuneSec access through any door in the outside world–well, any door ReseuneSec itself could pass.

Any door? They tested their new access, just running through local files…not using Base One, but a system‑free set of computers they used for handling any outside contact. They could display the second‑system content on the same set of screens as Base One, they could keyboard to the alternate system from the same station, or switch back and forth between operating systems in absolute security–Florian was rather proud of that finesse. He’d done a fair amount of set‑up, connecting up what would be the new security facility downstairs, so that all of it, the new office and residency as yet unoccupied, and the outpouring of ReseuneSec’s version of classified material via their new link, came smoothly into their office via the same secure pipe–a pipe that flowed both ways, but didn’t ever breach Base One’s isolation.

Everything from those two sources, ReseuneSec and their own upcoming security office, once it had staff, would dump to the system‑free computers in their office, to be carefully gone over before anythingtouched a Base One computer. Base One could reach out to it, read‑only, would compare what ReseuneSec files contained against what it could find internally, and deliver that daily report, too.

There were, on the daily sheet from ReseuneSec, no current takedown operations anywhere in Reseune.

There was a tolerably serious matter involving stolen meds from a pharmacy…case solved. They’d argue that one in court. Base One had interesting information on that: the pilferer was an employee with previous security issues. That would stop.

The list went on, including actionable adultery, minor theft, public nuisance, and other CIT misbehaviors. Azi were rarely involved in any such goings‑on, and if they were, the motives tended to be very different.

“Quiet day,” Catlin remarked.

Real‑time access to ReseuneSec’s daily logs provided them a window on a level of ordinary misdeed they hadn’t hitherto investigated. It was interesting, to pick up the pulse of the house. The town itself, down the hill, had its own brand of mischief: the drunken theft of a tractor, and the destruction of a piglot fence down in AG–the individual was charged the repairs. There had been minor pilferage in the food production unit, solved with a reprimand.

Far from the focus of their interest. Too much concentration on CIT actions could be, for one thing, stultifying, things over which an azi simply had to shake his head in slight puzzlement, never grasping the nature of the fault–except to say it broke rules by which born‑men in responsible jobs and relationships were supposed to abide.

Policing the labs and town was part of the job ReseuneSec did, generally CIT and azi pairs doing that: but none of these things affected Ari’s safety…and their very access of these items, using ReseuneSec’s access, not Base One, left a trail which might interest Hicks–that was actually desirable, so Hicks would see them using the connection. What was intriguing was not the data, which they could always get via Base One, but the extent of the data which Hicks afforded them, which was a test of Hicks and his staff, not the data.

Reseune’s ordinary tenor of domestic life was, in fact, most often quiet–a collection of scientists, administrators, some businessmen, shopkeepers, builders, and service people all observing the law, give or take their personal idiosyncrasies–that was the expected daily event. The largest national upheaval of the afternoon was an ocean storm that had rolled in on Novgorod and taken down three coastal precip towers at the river port, surely a bit of excitement to their south. There was redundancy for that situation, and three towers lost on a web that size was by no means a crisis, though a regional collapse of the shield was certainly newsworthy. The temporary reliance on backup was delaying flights and river cargo out of Novgorod, and disruption in anything–a bargeload of supply orders for Reseune and Big Blue, for instance–could afford an opportunity for dishonest efforts to slip in and do harm.

It was nicely organized data. Tabular, it was certainly easier to read than the absolute flood of information Base One could deliver in a full spate–Base One didn’t sort outstandingly well. Sera said that sorting, in itself, was a bias, best done in your head, if you scanned well.

They were aware of that, they did scan well, at a speed nearly up to sera’s, and Florian wondered what ReseuneSec was hiding from its low‑level agencies by providing them these nicely organized things to look at.

All sorts of things could lie between and behind those neat tables.

“They think they’ll be shipping again by 1800h,” Catlin remarked, from her station.

“1800,” Florian echoed, mildly absent. Me was already chasing down another, much more adventurous track on their shiny new authorizations, one that took him into Planys systems: Hicks had noted their interest in the Patil case and had flagged an item for their attention.

Florian sent the interesting find, a letter, to Catlin’s screen…again, something Hicks wanted them to see.

Dr. Raymond Thieu was the sender. The recipient was Dr. Sandi Patil. The letter was a week old. This and other items turned up on a simple Base One search of the professor’s mailbox. Easy to do, and trackless: ReseuneSec probes left no footprints except in ReseuneSec itself and in Base Two, which was Yanni’s Base. Base One left none at all. The Base One search had already turned up nothing from Patil to Thieu within the last month. The other two letters, also from Thieu to Patil, were not interesting.

“Apparently a mundane letter, which proves Thieu is still writing Patil. This comes from Hicks.”

“Noted,” Catlin said. “She hasn’t answered any of them. She answered prior letters, but not immediately.”

It was a chatty letter, advising Dr. Patil to read this article and that in Scientia, offering a little commentary on the dullness of life at Planys, asking about a dues renewal–Dr. Thieu complained he couldn’t remember whether or not he had renewed his professional membership in the teaching fraternity, and he asked Patil whether she had gotten the solicitation for membership yet because he didn’t want to go through the organization office, reason unstated. He also asked whether she happened to have the recall number of a book, the title of which he couldn’t find on the net…

Odd, since the booklist was a basic function of the scholarly net. Was that some verbal code? Or simply the truth of an old man’s suddenly fading memory?

And Thieu asked, at the end, whether she had heard from Jordan Warrick. It was probably what had made Hicks flag it to them.

…He went back to Reseune. He hasn’t written yet. He’s probably busy. You ought to call him. You remember Jordan. Tall, brown hair. Nice manners…

It went on for two more rambling paragraphs about the too‑spicy restaurant fare in Planys and the need for more variety.

“ ‘Nice manners,’ ” Florian quoted wryly.

“It seems mundane enough,” Catlin said, “at first glance.”

“One could wonder if Thieu didprovide that card.”

“He complains about losing a library title.”

“Let’s see what ReseuneSec wants to tell us about the rest of his correspondence.”

Florian searched down the list, flashed thirty‑four files up at once, windowed a few up with a scroll through. Compared that to what Base One had. “Looks complete.” Base One had already been through the lot. Base One had an interesting little program that could analyze letters for style. If it found stylistic anomalies in what was certainly from the same hand, it could throw a useful spotlight on verbal code. None found, except the new letter.

But re the issue of Thieu’s mental condition–Florian slipped a quiet, trackless Base One inquiry into Planys Medical, and what that pulled up on Thieu indicated Dr. Thieu’s rejuv was indeed failing, as Jordan Warrick had described.

“Failing rejuv and mental lapses. This, from Base One. Maybe the request for the book number is real. He may have entered the wrong title in his search.”

Catlin, meanwhile, had done a little Base One work on her own, last week: Jordan’s Planys records were there, too, sparse, on the medical front. And those results now popped to screen 4. “Contrast with Jordan Warrick. He seems in excellent health. No self‑administered drug use or other complaints.”

“Note the address,” Florian said, flagging the item on the medical record. Jordan’s physical address was listed as #18G in Pleiades Residency. And that had just rung a bell, against the address from Thieu’s medical records.

#19G. Pleiades Residency.

“Next door neighbors, it seems.”

Catlin probed further. “Moved” was the designation that turned up on screen, regarding Jordan’s records this week. “Jordan’s personal files aren’t there, to the ReseuneSec probe. This is interesting. ReseuneSec can’t reach them.”

The Base One record didn’thave those same holes in it. “Note. Those files are still there, for Base One–but they’re gone, to our supposedly highest‑level ReseuneSec inquiry.”

“Well,” Catlin said. “So either our ReseuneSec clearance isn’t quite as high as it might be…or somebody’s blocked those files from them. Yanni could certainly do that.”

“I wonder about Jordan’s minder notes?” Florian said. “We had those last week.”

“Moved.” Base One easily found them–a lengthy list of Jordan’s goings and comings and the occasional note about a need for coffee or Paul’s notes for Jordan about gym schedules. But Thieu’s popped right up, along with all Thieu’s bioprints, as good as a door key. And Jordan’s were still accessible to Base One, which didn’t recognize the fake erasures.

“Curious,” Florian observed, “gone into the same folder as the rest of Jordan’s records. Either Hicks isn’t being allowed to access it…which would warn him that somebody, notably Yanni, doesn’t want him to access those files–or Hicks lied when he said our access would be top level. Oh, this is good, inside Thieu’s minder notes, did you note this? Lunch with Jordan, the day Jordan left Planys–Jordan broke that appointment because he was in the air.”

“And Jordan detested him?”

Florian scanned the appointments. “Once a week or so–lunch with Jordan. Next door neighbors. Or across the hall.” Florian called up a schematic of the residency strip in question. “Actually opposite each other. Certainly looks like a close association.”

“Jordan knew we could check,” Catlin asked, “but he lied, all the same. He gave that card to Justin. He knew we were watching. And ReseuneSec, which takes orders from Yanni, can’t get to these particular files…or our new access can’t. Another lie?”

“ReseuneSec lying doesn’t surprise me too much,” Florian said. “And Jordan’s hard to understand on every level. Including, very clearly, doing things he knows we’ll notice.”

“He claimed to dislike Thieu. Called him a dodderer.”

“And yet has lunch with him regularly. He and Paul.”

“How old is Thieu, actually?” Catlin asked.

Florian keyed back to the medicals, convenient hop on Base One. “Hundred sixty‑four.” Once rejuv began to lose its effect, it took only a matter of months for a man who looked forty to start looking his actual age, losing the attributes of youth, acquiring ailments, losing faculties–and a hundred sixty‑four was definitely in that territory. “If rejuv is failing him, he’ll go fast, at that age. I’d think he hasn’t doddered long, actually.”

“And Jordan was living there for twenty years,” Catlin said, “next door to him, unless there’s been a recent change of residence, and a very recent change in Thieu’s medical status.” Click‑click‑click, from Catlin’s console, Jordan’s medical records going back and back to 2404. “No. Jordan had that address from the week he arrived. Thieu was there, too, from 2398.”

“The information Jordan gave sera is missing some interesting pieces, for sure. Now Thieu dodders. And in his latest letter Thieu jogs Patil’s memory about who Jordan is.”

“Rejuv failure,” Catlin said. “Maybe Thieu’s short‑term memory isgoing.”

“Must be contagious. Forgetfulness seems to have infected Patil, too. She claims no connection with Jordan at all. Yet Thieu, whose memory is going, thinks she’d remember him. I wonder what we could find in herletter files.”

“Worth noting.”

Those records, except what Yanni might have, lay outside Reseune System. “Base Cue could try to crack University System, but it’s not guaranteed to leave no traces.” Florian said. “We probably shouldn’t try it. We can take what Yanni’s got. And his files on Thieu. If Thieu’s dying–whether or not Thieu has all his faculties–that might stir somebody to make a move, whatever’s going on.”

“Thieu couldn’t possibly have anticipated Jordan leaving Planys,” Catlin said. “Jordan didn’t expect security to pull him and Paul out of their office and put them on the plane.”

Florian ran further through medical records. “Thieu’s doctor records cognitive function definitely suffering. Short‑term memory markedly impaired. Long‑term recall can be intact for a time.”

“So back to his giving Jordan the card–did he have enough faculties left for that?”

“Maybe. Maybe Jordan had it without his knowing. Jordan had access in his apartment. The one thing that didn’thappen was Thieu knowing Jordan was being released and giving him the card as something to do once he got out, because he didn’t know Jordan was leaving. As you say, he couldn’t know. That intention was in sera’s mind, but not in any record.”

“The current letter,” Catlin said. “Thieu wants Patil to look up Jordan. He’s trying to get them together. Whatever the state of his mind, that’s apparently somewhere on his agenda, for some reason.”

“And what is Jordan, besides a Special in educational psych design? Very friendly with people in Citizens, in Defense, and people with ties to the Abolitionists.”

“We don’t know that he knew the nature of the Abolitionist connection,” Catlin said.

“He was certainly tapped into the network that moves people and items for the dissidents–some twenty years ago. It doesn’t say he’s trying to establish such connections again. He can’t call outside, anyway. He was barred from mail, to anybody but Justin. He still is. Justin can make a call for him. But Justin didn’t. And a restaurant wasn’t the place to pass on something Jordan didn’t want us to investigate. He was asking for attention.”

“A card is a stupid way to keep an address. It’s just good for passing it on. If Thieu gave Jordan that card and wanted him to call Patil, Jordan could just have memorized the address and phone number, then simply tossed the card into recycling. He didn’t do it in Planys; he didn’t do it here. He either slipped it through a security search, or, more likely in that regard, he actually acquired it–or produced it–here.”

“And then.” Florian said, “he handed that particular card to Justin on a night when he was absolutely certain to be watched. There’s certainly a lot here that doesn’t make sense. CITs don’t make sense. But this one is a real puzzle.”

A moment of silence. Then Catlin said, “It’s still tempting to think he got the card from Thieu. We’re assuming that, because of Thieu’s association with Patil. Thieu didn’t need to give him a card. It doesn’t make sense, except the fact Thieu has been talking about this Dr. Patil for years. Maybe there’s been a long term effort, on both sides of the Tethys Sea, to get those two together–for whatever reason.”

“It opens up a lot of possibilities.”

“It does.”

“The old connections,” Florian said. “Reestablished. He was a friend of Thieu’s. That there was a connection to Patil at Planys doesn’t mean there isn’t a connection to Thieu or Patil here in Reseune. These are born‑men. They have that social dimension. Knowingpeople who know people–those connections matter. Don’t they?” Florian swung his chair around. “The card itself can tell us, with luck. I’m betting ReseuneSec has already run the check on the card’s chip. Let’s see what they found.”

He hit keys in quick succession, macros for their clearances, and a search into ReseuneSec files.

Analysis of the problematic card itself was in. It did include its microscopic markers–a very nice precaution from Giraud’s time as head of ReseuneSec–which indicated that the office supplies used in the card indeed belonged to PlanysLabs.

“Entirely reasonable for ReseuneSec to assume it was printed in Planys,” Florian said. “Planys markers.”

“Physically reasonable to assume it. But anyone with Planys card stock could print it, here or there.”

An e‑card, never manifest as paper, was the common way for CITs to trade addresses, often arriving as an attachment to a sig line, available for print, available to be shot straight into address files if one trusted the sender.

And for office use, it was common to print a card out physically off the signature line of a letter, including even its chip‑load, if the computer in question had the chip‑write feature. Careful offices tended to prefer physical cards for introductions and follow‑up–but they wouldn’t routinely slide a card from some random visitor into their systems. Some cards had proved to carry more than ROM. Some could be quite malicious–a little matter some offices in the world had discovered the hard way.

Content, however, was disappointing. It was Patil’s academic vita on the card, nothing special. Her bibliography, nothing untoward, in surface appearance. Check of the bibliography against her actual record in file in Yanni’s office produced no variances.

“Still possible,” he said, “that Jordan could have brought card stock and paper from Planys. Card stock wouldn’t necessarily be viewed as contraband.”

Catlin clicked keys. “Jordan’s file. List of what they didfind in his luggage’.”

That went to Florian’s second screen.

“ ‘Paper goods,’ ” Florian read. “So we can officially wonder what that encompasses.”

“Or…back to the original assumption,” Catlin said, “Thieu gave it to him and Jordan just walked through customs. Sandwiched in with a stack of blank cards, it wouldn’t show on a quick and dirty scan. But again, he could have printed it here, himself–if he could find a printer that wasn’t micro‑tagged. He doesn’t have access to one.”

“If it came from Planys, Jordan took real pains to get it here and put it in our hands. Yanni said that Thieu was upset with the reactivation of the terraforming project; he’d been an activist scientist, in his day. So was Jordan. That gives Jordan a motive: political. Jordan’s old alliance with Centrists. His tendency to play both sides of the game. His anger against sera.” He swung back to the second screen. “So what else did security find on him, in the search? Personal notes?”

“Repro’ed and already returned to him. Dense. Scientific.” Those had flashed to one screen, at least the initial page, which was overwritten with Jordan’s hand notes. There was computer storage. That was huge, encompassing Paul’s personal manual, specifically, with all its files internal to the computer…nothing reliant on Library. Jordan hadn’t had Library access to other manuals. Just that one. Someone must have given him the entire thing, subfolders and all. There were image files. There were more notes, in the peculiar shorthand of design.

“Not beyond sera to decipher. We could ask her if it’s significant. Or if there’s anything embedded in it. I’m sure Hicks has had to refer the notes to experts. I’m sure Paul’s manual would be significant–if sera could find time to look at it.”

“Jordan and Paul’s computers were returned within the week. His notes came with it. His books. He was complaining two months ago about access to his own past publications. We know the files he’s gotten at since he got clearance. Sera might recognize something in that list that we couldn’t.”

“Interesting thought,” Florian said. “Just a second.” He called up that list and ran a filter. It took a moment.

“Well,” Catlin said.

“Every one of those publications has Ari Senior’s articles, as well as some they co‑wrote. Not too surprising, since they worked together.”

“Interesting, though.”

“Topics…” More keys. “Integrations. Nothing at all to do with Patil.”

“Nothing to do with Patil at all.”

“Integrations was the subject of his quarrel with Justin. And integrations isn’t in his field.”

“Justin’s working in that field. He had a quarrel with that, and with the first Ari’s style.”

“Could he have picked the fight as part of a diversion?” Florian asked. “Possibly preparing Justin or Grant for some intervention?”

Catlin frowned. “That would be somewhat beyond us. Certainly outside the question of the card.”

“Except that Justin became the target of it, after they had a fight about the first Ari’s procedures. I don’t see a connection, unless he’s aiming at something and wants to divert Justin into some scheme of his own. Maybe he really does hate Thieu. Or wants to sabotage Patil, just for spite.”

“Or for profit. Profit would be a reason,” Catlin said. “A re‑contact with old networks. Former alliances. Thathas politics in it. That’smore like what the records say of Jordan Warrick.”

An action, not a gesture, something designed to do exactly what it was doing…getting Patil delayed in her move to Fargone. Possible.

And someone, probably Base Two, in Yanni’s hands, was hiding Jordan’s records from Hicks…or Hicks was hiding them from sera.

“Well,” Florian said, and flicked up the general ReseuneSec Planys office reports on Jordan Warrick. One statistic leapt out. “Jordan received two thousand eight hundred and fourteen security cautions during his tenure at Planys. Persistent note on his file: Immune. Do Not Interrogate.”

“That’s been the problem all along with him.”

“Yanni doesn’t want him in the public eye again. Reseune doesn’t want the first Ari’s murder opened up again. That was what was going on when Denys went down. We’ve got the content of the card chip–nothing overt there, if it’s not a verbal code; and still no absolute assurance where the card itself was made. They can go after where it’s been–testing to destruction if they do. But I think it was made for exactly what it was used for: an introduction, dropped right in front of us.”

“From whom?” Catlin asked. “To whom?”

“Let’s see what ReseuneSec admits it knows about Patil.”

ReseuneSec’s top‑level surveillance of Patil came up easily, creditably meticulous, and ongoing, in Novgorod, within the University where she taught. Her contacts, back inside ReseuneSec files, were all neatly mapped–including letters, some sixty‑three in number, to her old mentor Thieu, and one hundred eighteen from Thieu to Patil, fifty‑two of them in the last half year.

“None to Jordan,” Catlin said. “None from Jordan. As should be. Several from Yanni to Patil.”

“Patil’s house sale is pending. Reseune’s buying it. This week. Yanni’s order. He had some reason. Thatcould hurry up her trip to Fargone.”

Meanwhile the list of Patil’s other possible primary and secondary contacts stretched on and on, listed and identified by ReseuneSec agents in the ReseuneSec files, every class of person from senators and councillors to teaching assistants, radicals, vid personalities, her real estate agent, and the home repair technician who’d recently fixed her refrigerator. She’d made numerous net calls on the local Fargone site, investigating housing, amenities, facilities, reasonable in someone contemplating a move there. She’d made a few tries at getting into the restricted Fargone ReseuneSpace site, on a long lag to Cyteen Station, which held that site and others available in its months‑ago state: data arrived at the speed of ships that picked up that electronic load at Cyteen Station via their black boxes, and delivered that load to somewhere else, and on to Fargone–in a sense, if you sent a message that entered Cyteen Station, it eventually reached every civilized star, and was everywhere at once, until deleted as absolutely irrelevant to the locale where it had ended up. There was no such thing as complete privacy on interstation mail, by the nature of black boxes; and that also went for net data, restricted or not: it got everywhere unless it had a gate restriction that didn’t let it flow to any ships but, say, military, or to no ships at all.

A lot of CITs weren’t aware of that fact of life, or, being aware, so profoundly took it for granted that they didn’t worry about it. Patil’s request for information was certainly widespread by now, so if she’d intended any secrecy, that was blown.

Meticulous, vexatious police work filled other pages, agents patiently tracing out the threads of contact and delving into Patil’s household garbage, a list of items intended to be recycled, and diverted, some of it interesting, in the list items, including unopened physical mail. ReseuneSec’s investigation seemed thorough. It was a fat correspondence folder. The woman didn’t open mail that arrived from unknowns: her system routed it to delete, which deleted a lot of files–or appeared to delete them. ReseuneSec had gotten at the mail source, and been into that, with a resultant long list of would‑be contacts, some of which were red‑flagged.

“Lot of Paxer contact. Lot of complete unknowns,” Florian observed.

“She’d be a fool to send messages of any interesting sort to anyone,” Catlin said. “She deletes their messages–evidently knows who to delete. Some of them are on the watch list.”

Her mailings out to PlanysLabs were all electronic. One mailing was, by title, “Rethinking the Theory of Long‑Period Nanistic Self‑direction,” –the censored Scientiaarticle–sent, with indignation, to Thieu, who had been her teacher. Thieu had replied that it was brilliant. She had written back, decrying entrenched War‑years thinking and Luddism…the commenting agent had flagged that word and supplied a definition. It meant people who were against progress, based on a political movement of 1811 and some years after, against the introduction of weaving machines in pre‑space England.

“Patil has a large vocabulary,” Florian said wryly, “clearly.”

“Why weaving machines?” Catlin wanted to know. But the remark in context seemed metaphorical, not literal.

“I have no idea,” Florian muttered. He was already tracing other things, successfully pulling up ReseuneSec files on the ongoing investigation of Jordan’s Planys apartment, and the people ReseuneSec had sent into Planys were clearly better than the airport security team haste had trusted with the outbound search. Jordan hadn’t gotten to go back to his apartment once he’d been notified he was returning to Reseune: agents had packed for him.

While Jordan and Paul, caught in their office, had perversely or purposefully brought papergoods–either to camouflage something; or simply because, being a person for whom hand notes and writing were a habit, Jordan had wanted materials he hadn’t been sure he’d get easily if he returned to house arrest in Reseune. It might have been innocent. It seemed Jordan Warrick rarely had been innocent–not by that Planys ReseuneSec record.

One thing he knew: sera’s security wouldn’t have let Jordan fly without a body scan, let alone turning out his pockets. The staff at Planys’ airport had searched him for foodstuffs and biological contraband, their usual worry in flights originating from Planys, but nothing more–because, for security reasons, they hadn’t been in on the investigation ReseuneSec was making of Jordan’s apartment and had no idea at all what they were looking for.

Thatwas a major slip; but sera’s orders had been unexpected, and speed had mattered. Not even ReseuneSec at Planys Airport had known why Jordan was being put on a plane, but people were about to die in Reseune, and had already died in Novgorod: it had been just a confused few hours.

The agents at Reseune Airport had naturally confiscated and copied his notes when he landed, but let blank paper pass without, likely, paging through a personal‑use handful of blank sheets. Florian made a mental note of his own, that airport security needed more attention to detail, once sera took Reseune.

And it still boiled down to one question: how had Jordan known about the Patil appointment in Novgorod, in security so tight Base One hadn’t penetrated it? That took the old fashioned sneaker‑net approach. Someone had hand‑carried either the card or actual information about the Patil appointment. Either would do.

So. They could certainly politely askJordan about the card and see if he’d cooperate, but they weren’t to that point yet, and clearly there was no use asking a Special any question to which they didn’t already know the answer.

So Patil’s condo had found a buyer, in Yanni’s office, with a possession date on July 20…whether or not Patil knew that was how it had sold. She was currently saying goodbye to the University in a round of parties attended mostly by academics–one such was scheduled this evening. She had sold most of her furnishings, given other items away to friends and charity; was actively arranging storage for all her non‑data possessions that she planned to keep, perhaps to ship later. She had no known sexual attachments, no children, no relatives.

She was a scholarly woman with a lot of electronic files, preparing to make a long, state‑sponsored and fairly high‑mass move to a new life, accompanied by those data files and a fair number of household goods–plus being a CIT, likely a few items of emotional attachment.

“She’s teaching two classes currently,” Catlin reported, “besides lab courses, and she is maintaining her schedule. I checked other professors. They have more classes. Patil spends a lot of time writing and some time doing correspondence with the military labs out at Beta, which we can’t penetrate. No change of pattern there. She does guest lectures, attends bioethics conferences…”

“The people she’s contacting on Cyteen,” Florian murmured, scanning that list, and the commentary ReseuneSec provided, “old acquaintances, former students, but not many.”

“The majority may be on Beta, in Beta Labs. Security block, there.”

“I’m not going to try to crack that,” Florian said. “Not worth it to go after those–yet.” He kept reading. “Mmm. Here’s a few names on her home system, people ReseuneSec notes for further investigation.” He ran a who‑is on the few, at ReseuneSec level. “Well. Well. Well. How long have we been at this?”

“Two and a half hours.”

“Well, nothing totally new in this. We have some footnotes here from ReseuneSec. But no mischief attaches directly to Patil, except her lectures attract radicals. –Coffee,” Florian said, and got up and poured a cup from the dispenser. A glance at Catlin drew a nod, and he poured another, then looked at the clock himself. Close to time for shift‑change. “I’m going to message Marco and Wes to lie in for another couple of hours. I think we should look through Science Bureau records. Base One can probably get into those.”

“Suits me.” Catlin said. “Try it. Shall I have Gianni send us sandwiches?”

“I could use one,” Florian said, and settled back at his console, pulled out the under‑counter return that kept coffee off the main desk, and set his cup there. Catlin did whatever she was doing. He worked delicately, probed this, probed that, scanned text without storing it, and didn’t get a Base One warning of any unadvertised connections on Yanni’s access, no strings attached.

The files had some background of interest. Defense had apparently had a lot to do with Patil’s career. Black budget funding had been behind the terraforming labs when they were on Cyteen, specifically at a lab just a little outside Novgorod, a lab later razed in favor of a food production facility. Behind closed Council doors, there’d been an intense battle over removal of the nanistics lab out to Beta during the War. Centrists campaigned to keep it at least as close as Cyteen Station, not relegated to the outer system inside a Defense installation. The first Ari had supported the nanistics move to Beta, however, in agreement with Defense, and Centrists had opposed her andDefense, at that time, in a rare configuration of political alliances.

Patil, at a hundred and five years of age, had gone out to Beta when Thieu moved down to Cyteen, had subsequently distinguished herself in ways deeply classified, and then Patil herself had been moved back to Central System and onto Cyteen as a safety measure during the darkest days of the War. Patil, Thieu, and a researcher named Ibsen, Pauline Ibsen, since deceased, age one hundred thirty‑six, had all been sent down to Cyteen, three people who had been working on the blackest of black projects–most likely the production of terraforming nanistics, but theoretically only: any lab work was done out at Beta, as a potential and never‑used weapon of war.

After the War, Patil hadn’tgotten promoted back out to Beta. “Articulate, sharp, and gregarious,” so the report said, she had “fallen into the social milieu of the University,” had found herself a comfortable post and a prosperous side income as a favorite speaker at Centrist and pro‑terraforming conferences and meetings.

Clearly her imminent departure into Reseune’s employment had stirred up the Centrist community. Some comments had hit the general web, the one that any CIT could access. Some Centrists were pleased at the acceptance of what they called a moderating influence into a Reseune post: others were more concerned about losing Dr. Patil’s moderate and respectable voice in Novgorod politics, once she shipped to Fargone, and wondered if it was a means of silencing her voice. None of the reports apparently knew about her relationship to the Eversnow project.

“ ‘Moderate and reasonable,’ they call her,” Florian said, having condensed the flow for Catlin. “ ‘A peacekeeper.’ Which might argue that Yanni’s move to send Patil to Fargone really isn’t the best idea, losing her local influence. The Paxers come to her lectures. She doesn’t appear to support their activities.”

“Moderation might have been what recommended her to Yanni, however,” Catlin said, and they read a while longer.

Then Catlin said, “Read the post under Gulag.”

Interesting word. They were down to CIT political gossip on the Novgorod city net. Florian looked that word up, before investigating the site Catlin had tossed him.

The Gulag writer was passionately angry, convinced Patil’s transfer was a ticket to a Reseune‑run oblivion and possible assassination. Well, there might be a grain of truth, not likely in the second.

And there seemed, according to the ReseuneSec note, another conspiracy theory circulating, quoting a Bureau of Defense argument in committee, that it was a move by Reseune to gut the Beta Station lab: one supporter of that viewpoint maintained Patil was still doing Defense work, and could not legally be transferred from a public university into a Reseune‑run lab.

“It’s not actually the law that she can’t be transferred,” Catlin commented. “they just make it sound illegal. She’s a scientist. Science posts come from Science, even if her post is classified by Defense. She just has a job offer from Science. And if she accepts it, Defense can’t claim there’s a war reason, because the War Powers Act has lapsed.”

Catlin was very much better on law than he was.

But law wasn’t the name of the game. “Politics. Politics is all. Both sides are likely pressuring her for loyalty. But she votes in Science, because that’s what she is, doesn’t she? Check what profession she actually votes in.”

A few key‑taps, Science Bureau records. “Her voter registration is definitely Science. So she’s notregistered military any more, not since 2406. Defense still runs the lab at Beta, and if she went back out there, she’d properly be voting in Defense again. But if she goes to Fargone and works in the new Reseune set‑up, then Defense hasn’t got any complaint. They can’t claim she knows military secrets, none current, at least. No more than Thieu. So the Gulag writer is wrong in his suppositions.”

“And she wantsto go to Fargone. Otherwise she could easily get legal help from Defense and get transferred to them.”

“Which she’s not doing. So she does accept going to Fargone. And so do Defense’s upper echelons, because they agreed with Yanni. And that will be this Eversnow project, when it starts, and it’s likely to be very soon.”

“Why did she accept Yanni’s offer?” Florian asked. “Why is she agreeing to jump ship to Reseune?” Why was one of his favorite questions, best when asked when things seemed neat and wrapped up. And it seemed to fit, here. Understandable if someone didn’t want to be returned to Beta, which was remote and secretive and full of regulations. Fargone was a comfortable station–not the comforts of Cyteen Station, to be sure, but very much better than Beta. There was that. Eversnow, on the other hand, was a frontier. As barren as Big Blue. A bare steel and prefab station. No luxuries. “Novgorod’s the height of comfort. She’s respected. She has an important job. She doesn’t work hard. She’s very well paid. She has very many associates who respect her. Why choose to leave?”

Catlin frowned. It was close on CIT territory, asking the unanswerable: the emotionally founded question posing as born‑man logic, with fartoo little knowledge of the individual. “Either going to something or from something.”

“ ToReseune’s new lab. Or fromNovgorod. Could there be something in Fargone she wants? Or could there be something in Novgorod she’d like to be away from?”

“The work at Eversnow might attract her.”

“Or Novgorod might not be as good for her as it seems. She has the Paxers here. They won’t be there. Some of these people at her lectures are politically intense fringe elements. I’ve got the background summation on people attending. Long, long list.” He flashed it over to her. “Some of these people have third‑degree contacts under intense watch, indirect links to persons undergoing mindwipe in the hotel bombing that tried to kill us.”

“Politics,” Catlin said.

“Politics,” Florian said, and tagged the whole area for re‑reading and absorption. “I’m going to tape this bit–considering how it connects to Yanni, and considering sera’s plans–which don’t wholly agree with Yanni. It still doesn’t answer the timing of the card.”

“Give me the tape,” Catlin said. “That’s a good find. Not the opinion, the names.”

For deepstudy, that is: things they needed to absorb completely, names they needed to know and deep‑associate with Paxer activity. And with Sandi Patil. So they never forgot them.

It was a luxury he and Catlin had never enjoyed before, to sit atop a pyramid of data, with skilled people doing exactly what they were Contracted to do, people tapped into all of ReseuneSec and going over reports from all that organization did on Cyteen and elsewhere. The ReseuneSec access didn’t lead them to new things, but it organized things in a way different from Base One–and that gave them a window into ReseuneSec thinking.

First it seemed to lead them further and further afield from the item they’d started chasing: Jordan Warrick and the infamous card…and then it seemed to lead back again…to Yanni’s office; and Jordan Warrick. And Patil.

“We need to filter this other, too,” Florian said. “The net opinions. Not good to deepstudy it.” Deepstudy diminished critical thinking. This was opinion. A lot of opinion, from untrustworthy people. They just needed the names from the Novgorod CIT net, and the suspicions attached to them.

“I don’t know where we’re going to get the time to do this,” Catlin said. “Sera wants to begin prep for moving.”

It wasn’t convenient, the timing of their complete relocation. Their new staff was delayed. But there was worry on the other side, too, that sera would be less safe if they delayed getting her into a more fortified residence.

“No good complaining,” Florian said. “We just have to do this.” Patil’s data was still flying under his fingers. “We need to understand it. All our lives, we’ll need to. These are the Enemy. This is where it starts. The people that may be against sera now are the people that will be against sera all her life. And for now–for now we just watch Base Two very carefully.”

BOOK

THREE

BOOK THREE Section 1 Chapter i

JUNE 1, 2424

1528H

Growth proceeded at the same breakneck pace, for Giraud, for Abban, for Seek, at fifteen weeks. They were all without significant defect, and on the path to being male. They took in amniotic fluid, practice and pressure alike expanding the rudimentary structures of their lungs, and Abban was now tallest of the three, a bit heavier–in grams, which was the scale on which they existed.

Giraud’s face was broader–hard to see, but it was.

They had human proportions, more or less–their legs were longer than their arms were. Their rudimentary eyes, as yet without an opening in the lids, and not quite on the front of the faces, were growing sensitive to more and less light–a probing beam, into a tank, would get a definite reactive flinch: they didn’t knowthey didn’t like it, but change in what‑was drew response, an instinct to preserve the status quo. It wasn’t fight‑flight yet, just the beginnings of it.

Details had emerged, tastebuds, which would matter a great deal to Giraud, less so to Abban and Seely Those appeared, and simultaneously, the ability to sweat–though sweat was not that useful, in the fluid environment, in the rocking safety of artificial wombs. They continued, enveloped by the soft, variable thump of a human heartbeat, steel mother‑sound, helping set the rhythm of their bodies. Individuality had asserted itself. Their fingerprints differed, as surely as their DNA. And they were not like each other, not at all.

BOOK THREE Section 1 Chapter ii

JUNE 1, 2424

1528H

There’s a reason, I think, that the first Ari wasn’t kind: not many people were kind to her–they just gave her a lot of privileges, or let her get away with what she wanted to do because they didn’t pay attention, and that’s not the same. So I don’t think Ari quite understood about kindness. But I don’t think having had kindness in my life means that I’m less driven to succeed than she was. My brain is as good as hers. I might have just a few different motives–she fought for power and her own protection. I fight to protect the people I love. But she fought, and I fight. That much is the same.

The new wing, Alpha Wing, well–new, in my time, though for you it’s not. It’s where you live now, unless somebody decides otherwise, or unless you decide otherwise, for security reasons, or just because you don’t like my decor any more than I like Denys’. I don’t know how long Reseune can add new wings for every one of us that’s ever born. But there you are. Or there you will be–I hope somewhat safe and comfortable in your day.

And today I’ve given the order that will mean my Uncle Denys gets born in due course, seven years from now, or whenever if I’m sure I can compress the schedule a bit: that’s a decision Yanni has left to me, but Til probably stick to the seven years. If I do, it’s mostly for Giraud’s sake. And I’m going to apologize to you right now about creating Denys, because you’ll probably hate him and you’ll probably have really good reason. But I’m afraid Giraud is going to be too easygoing, without him. And this time Denys will be the young and ignorant kid, not me. I’m afraid by the time you come along, you’ll get the old Denys, the way I did, and I’m sorry for that.

I don’t want to change Denys’s essential nature–it’s his program–but I’ll have to think about that, maybe for quite a few years before I actually order his geneset into the womb. I have plenty of time to get ahead of him. Once you start changing foundational things in our patterns, as you’ll be learning, everything after that has to flex, and that’s rapidly a field‑too‑large problem. A very, very big problem. The variables are terrible.

And I don’t know how well my upcoming move to a new wing will work. Wing One is historic, and it’s important, and if architecture can embody a psychological structure, a lot of what made Reseune is in its walls and its rooms. But I’m trying, at least, to set new patterns, and the new wing is where I’m making my start.

Among first jobs, I want to patch all the things up that my Denys deliberately broke. He sent a lot of people away, people I’d attached to…my playmate Valery, and his whole family, even if they were Yanni’s relatives. I missed him terribly. And they sent Maman and Ollie out to Fargone, and I couldn’t do anything about it. Maybe you’ve had people vanish from your life, too. I hope not. But if they have, pay attention to what I’m doing note. These people I’m calling home to me may be important to you in your own life, if they all live that long, and if I could, substitute Valery for Denys, for your sake, oh, I would do that, so fast. Valery was so kind, so nice, he made me happy as long as I had him for a friend, and they sent him and his mother away precisely because I liked, him. And we were only babies, ourselves, well, nearly so. But I never forgot him. That’s one piece of justice I’m going to do, first and foremost. I don’t know how he’s turned out. That’s one.

And Ollie. He was an alpha azi when I knew him. He was Maman’s companion. Right now he’s Director of the labs out at Fargone…he’s very good at what he does. He’s legally a CIT now, and of course he’s old, far, far past a hundred, and a long time on rejuv, and he’ll do what he wants to. I’d so love to see Ollie again. I’d love to make everything right for him–he’d have grieved so much when Maman died and nobody treated him with any consideration at all, here at Reseune, or out there, at the time. But I won’t order him to come, as old as he is, and knowing the trip itself might be hard on him. Fargone was where she died, and for all I know he may be attached to that place, and it’s certain he has his work out there, that’s very important to Reseune. No matter what I want, I wouldn’t want to tear him away from his place there if he doesn’t want to come back. And between you and me, I really don’t think he will.

And I’ve given invitations to the others, too, not necessarily to live in Alpha Wing, but maybe they will, if they’re nice people. I want them at least to be able to come back to Wing One, where they used to live. Valery’s mother was Andrea Schwartz, who is Yanni Schwartz’s family, and Yanni couldn’t protect her from being exiled: she was out there with Jenna Schwartz, who used to be in charge out there, but she was a fool, and Yanni moved her out. And then there’s Julia Strassen, and I know she’s still alive: she was Maman’s real daughter, and I’ve written to her, too, to bring her back with Valery and Andrea Schwartz. Maman had agreed to bring me up, because she was a scientist, That meant Julia and her daughter Gloria had to stay away from the apartment and not upset me. Gloria was a brat, but her mother hated me for ruining their lives even if she knew it wasn’t really my fault–I was a baby. I think Julia pretty well set up the atmosphere that made Gloria act up whenever they visited. She probably didn’t intend to, which I think shows something about Julia. Their going away–I think that would have happened when I got to a certain age anyway; and I’m sure Denys would have sent them away when he sent Maman. But I’m sure it hurt less for Aunt Julia to be mad at me than it did for her to be mad at her own maman, and being mad at me was certainly a lot safer than being mad at Denys Nye at the time. So she was exiled to Fargone, too, and I don’t know what Maman thought about it, but I’m not sure she liked Julia or Gloria that much at the last.

So it’s time for all those old accounts to be settled, and for me to make amends as best I can–especially to Valery, who never did anything in his life but be my friend without being in the Program.

My maman’s real name, you know by now, was Jane Strassen. And she was a brilliant woman, and very dedicated to the Project, but she wasn’t ever cold to me the way Denys was. Maman really loved me and I loved her, which is probably the first place I deviated from the Program–because the first Ari’s mother wasn’t kind to her at all.

And I’m sure Maman started out loving Julia and Gloria, too, but Gloria certainly wasn’t very loveable by the time I remember anything about her, and Julia just looked daggers at me–that’s all I can remember about her. Maybe she’ll read my invitation and tell me go to hell. I’d honestly be relieved.

Why did Maman get involved in bringing me up, and forget about her own daughter and granddaughter? I found out that Yanni talked her into it and promised her she could get off Cyteen and go back into space where she was from. But at a certain point I think Maman got curious what I’d be like, and maybe she saw things about me that reminded her of the Ari she’d, worked with, and deliberately encouraged some things and corrected others. I can’t remember that part, and I haven’t found all of it in records, but if you can find it, it might be worth looking at, just for your own curiosity–in case it answers some question you hate about me. I think Maman had some inkling of protecting me from Denys, or maybe making the Program work better for some altruistic or scientific reason–because I was an experiment, after all, and Maman was a scientist, not somebody just mindlessly plodding along a track.

I remember one day: Maman comparing Gloria to me and finally telling Julia to take Gloria and get out of the apartment… Gloria was trying to beat my brains in, that day, so there was a reason, but I can still hear Maman telling Julia to get her daughter out of there, and even then I knew it wasn’t the most politic thing she could have said to her daughter. When you live so long–when rejuv lets you go through family after family, the layers get more complicated than nature ever designed us to deal with, I think. The relationships get tangled, adults with kids, this generation’s kids with the other one–they sell a lot of books advising people how to get along with polygenerational families and serial partners and rejuv issues. Maybe by your generation it’ll all be saner, but rejuv was still a new issue in those days, and people didn’t always handle it well. I know Maman’s household was likely upset before I even got there, and my presence just drove Julia over the edge and made her do things that weren’t smart.

And Valery–who wasn’t even part of our family–the Project directors couldn’t have me getting attached to a friend, or have me that happy, so they had to find a way to get Valery away from me. There just wasn’t much of anywhere to send his mother, Andrea, because she was doing classified work. So off they went to ReseuneSpace at Fargone, where they could be in a sealed research community, involved with trying to clone another personality. Look up Rubin, if you’re curious.

Denys was probably the one who ordered Valery to go away–because at a certain point–you understand better than anyone–it was just time for life to get harder for me.

So for starters, they sent Valery away, and Julia and Gloria, and then when I was seven, they sent Maman away. And that was because the first Ari’s mother died at that precise age, and it was time, in the Project, for Jane Strassen to go away–along with Ollie, which was kind of Denys, at least, that Ollie went with her…but I think Denys never even thought about that. They just wanted everybody I loved to leave, and Denys took charge of me one day and told me Maman was gone forever and I had to move in with him, and that was the way things had to be.

I was upset. I was terribly upset. Everything had been good, and then it wasn’t, and he really hated having a child around. He made that clear, fast.

Worse, he particularly hated the first Ari. Or at least what he felt about her was tangled and complicated. If what I think is right, he may be the one who killed her. Or his azi did, to protect him from her. And Abban and Seely are both dead, so nobody can ask them what the truth was, not that it matters, now, anyway.

I hope, I really do, that you don’t have to go through that kind of separation from people you love. But probably you’ve already had to, and maybe you hate me as part of all of it, but likely by now you probably realize why you had to go through it, so I hope you forgive me along with the rest of them. I know I might not have survived my coming of age if I hadn’t been through the fire.

So maybe the first Ari was right, and if I’d had no stress on me I’d be like that poor clone of Estelle Bok. I’d guess you still study that case, along with Rubin, or if you don’t–do. They gave Bok Two the best of everything, and that genius brain just floundered around with no boundaries, until it went way, way off into miserable territory, and became none too sane. Rubin wasn’t a great success, either, or isn’t, so far. He’s just a pretty good chemist. And his predecessor, with every luxury in the world, committed suicide right in the middle of the program. Didn’t that throw my keepers into a fit?

So you are whatever you are, and I am what I became, because they were suddenly hard on me at the right time. The first Ari had had her mother telling her when to breathe in and out, until her life changed suddenly and her mother died and she was just Ari, trying to survive in Reseune and not to have anybody murder her. She suddenly had to fight. So did I. Maybe so do you.

So even at eighteen years old, I’m still sorting out what the Project did to me, and I can say I’m all right and I’m glad I learned to defend myself. But I’m not satisfied with just finding out I’m all right. Now is my time to try to sort out what the Project did to other people–people the Project didn’t give a damn if it hurt. Maybe it will work. Maybe it’s beyond recovery. But I intend to try.

I hope all those people will find a way to love me after all. It’s selfish. But I do hope so. Is that a vulnerability? Maybe. But it’s me.

BOOK THREE Section 1 Chapter iii

JUNE 1, 2424

1540H

Ari shoved back from the console. Replayed the last bit. Struck it out, disturbed by what had come out of her in that rambling account, not sure it was good for her successor to hear that much honesty, whether that it was too stupid, that badly written, too naive to say, or whether it revealed too much–it was embarrassing, was what. It revealed a trigger. A touch‑point. That was worth considering. It was just too personal.

But her successor had to know her. It could be life or death. And she recalled that section, reviewed it, then entered the code that made it, with all the other entries, uneraseable.

BOOK THREE Section 1 Chapter iv

JUNE 6, 2424

1657H

It ought to be suppertime, but it wasn’t, yet–the new domestic staff was finally arriving. Ari had put on a favorite rose sweater and a nicer pair of pants, plus a little jewelry, anxious to have the new people have the best impression of her and the household.

Catlin and Florian had missed their dinnertime, too–there was never a time she met strangers that they weren’t right beside her. Marco and Wes were in the security station, it being their shift as of an hour ago, but the rest of staff was stirring about in the kitchen, getting ready with a nice little party, sandwiches and refreshments for the incomers.

Herself–she was thinking of that pile of sandwiches when the word came that the group had passed building security, presented their IDs, and been logged in. That was about a three‑minute process to reach upstairs via the lift, another to reach her apartment.

Deep breath.

And a group of people exited the lift and approached the apartment. Corey was on duty there, with his partner Mato, the two Marco and Wes identicals. They were spit and polish for the occasion.

And, no question, the group on the other side of the door would be all nerves: they were just Contracted. It was birthdays, weddings, and first jobs all rolled into one bundle and presented to them–and they were Contracted not just to anyclient, mind, but–she could think so without overmuch egotism–to her. With all she meant to make thatmean to them, every advantage, every comfort for her staff. She’d do well for them, and they’d help her run the new place, once they moved over.

She stood in the hallway, hands folded. Corey opened the doors to the newcomers, a handsome lot, mostly male, all wearing the typical azi barracks issue. Her domestics, like Corey and Mato, wore dark blue, her security–like Florian and Catlin, plain black. These wore, at the moment, gray.

The group stopped, shuffled a little, making room for the lot of them in the foyer. They eyed her respectfully.

“I’m Ariane Emory,” she said, and that name would resonate off their Contracts, which was much, much more than paper. The whole group bowed, as if one nerve ran through them all. “I expect,” she said, “that you’re Theo.”

“Theo BT‑384, sera,” the foremost identified himself–a dark, squarefaced man with a cleft in his chin.

“Theo, you’re our new majordomo.”

“Yes,” Theo said cheerfully, and drew forward the woman at his side, a thin‑boned blonde with fine features. “My partner, Jory.”

“Jory will be your direct assistant in your post. Pro tem major domo has been Callie. You’ll work with her to get settled in. Callie will be household administration and chief of supply, hereafter, and answer to you, but no other on staff.”

Theo bowed. Jory did.

“Very satisfactory,” she said. “I’m very pleased with you.” Meeting new Contracts, as their Supervisor, she found it was of utmost importance to offer reassurance, confirmation: they were psychologically exposed, as never in their lives, and so much hung on her expressions and her tone.

“And who is Wyndham?” she asked.

Wyndham stepped to the fore, one of the most anticipated of arrivals, their new cook, with his partner Hiro. That meant that Gianni, who did excellent desserts, could concentrate on his specialty and give the running of the kitchen over to someone who could orchestrate dinner for eight and take great delight in showing off.

Logan, Haze, Tomas, Spessy: they were general work, domestic and repair. The two remaining women, Del and Joyesse, were solely to attend her personal needs, do her hair, handle her wardrobe, and double‑check her appointments and calendar.

And Callie showed up, nodded very respectfully to Theo and Jory when introduced.

“Very well done,” Ari said to Callie, because it was important, too, that the original household staff feel appreciated and by no means diminished in the arrival of more specifically trained individuals. “You’ve all done extremely well, under very trying circumstances. Nothing supplants your respect, and you retain a special place in my regard, for being with me longest and managing everything. I have a special affection for my senior‑most staff: I have every confidence in you in this transition. Understand, this arrival frees you of any extraneous duties, and you will repeat this, verbatim, to all the staff: you are needed and much respected.”

“Sera,” Callie said, and bowed. Her eyes sparkled–that last bit was all keywords, deepset, key to this staff’s feelings of accomplishment, resonating specifically off deepsets like an affectionate caress, and Callie was empowered to pass it on. “Shall I guide the new staff, sera?”

“Do,” Ari said, letting Callie, for her last time, function as chief of staff. She stood quietly for a moment with Mato and Corey “Well done,” she said to them. “Very well done.”

Bows. The spark of pleasure, the little reserve of beta azi very, very secure in their posts and their place in the house. “Sera,” Corey said, for the both of them.

Florian and Catlin–no need to reassure them at all. But she smiled at them simply because she washappy. It felt like walking a tightrope, selecting new staff, taking Contracts, trying to be sure the incomers, totally vulnerable, felt an instant connection and sense of place. She made eye contact with each and every one, saw their expressions, read them, far easier than reading any CIT in their current state.

“In and safe, sera,” Florian said.

She laid a hand on Florian’s arm, and on Catlin’s, not a calm‑down, just gratitude. She felt physically tired, as if she’d given off an energy that outright exhausted her, poured it into those wide‑open faces on whom she’d rely for her comfort and her safety.

Or perhaps it was the immediate letdown of having been absolutely On all day, waiting for these people, her people, picking what she’d say, and planning the way she’d ease staff about their arrival–those things, and the plain fact it was suppertime.

Callie’s tour would end in the kitchens, Wyndham’s new domain, where Gianni had been working on one of his tour de force desserts to impress the new master chef. They’d have supper together, the new staff and old; and meanwhile she found herself ravenous, a good sign. She’d arranged all the staff to be attending the dinner: the fare otherwise was cold cuts and sandwich makings, and that, with two bottles of imported champagne, was waiting for her and her security staff.

Florian and Catlin, too, had worn themselves out trying to be all things and everywhere for months. Now they wouldn’t have to turn a hand to make a bed or find a midnight snack. Anything they wanted, at any time, always, would arrive, double‑quick. They’d never experienced that situation, not since they were all children together, and they’d had Uncle Denys’ staff waiting on them.

“I’m happy,” she said, hugging their arms tight. “I’m starved. Let’s go have supper.”

“Marco and Wes are on duty,” Florian said.

“They can have champagne, too,” she said. “They can come. It’s not as if our enemies will stage a raid.”

“When better?” Florian asked soberly, but she squeezed his arm a second time.

“I love you both, but let’s take the risk, shall we? Champagne, strawberries, and cold sandwiches. It’s a security picnic in the conference room.”

They were bound to worry. It was what they did. And in the end, they called in Marco and Wes, cued the conference room screen to display the security station main screen, and had their champagne and strawberries.

It was mostly for their sake, for the staff. They’d taken care of her through so much, and they did things that weren’t their duty, doing it.

It was one more step toward that apartment. They’d be crowded for a while, but that wouldn’t last long.

Then things began to be Real.

She didn’t want to think about that tonight.

There was a baby, she recalled, a boy named Auguste GYX, the first baby she’d ever seen in the labs, the first time she really began to think about what Reseune did, and she’d said to herself a long time ago that she wanted to be sure that baby turned out all right…that when his Contract came up, she wanted to take it. And he was something around thirteen, still in training–a gamma, clever at a lot of things. And for some reason, with staff coming in, she thought of him and thought: I want to know what they’re prepping him for. I’ve got the power to do that now. I can write a set for him. I can take the thirteen years and just bend it in a direction I choose, something I can eventually use, something to put him on staff–not have him shipped off to Novgorod and have him supering in a factory where I’ll lose track of him.

I can work with a gamma set. I’m going to call in his manual tomorrow. I can write a program for him. It’d be nice if he liked fish.

Things had gotten quiet. She looked at four faces, Florian and Catlin, Wes and Marco, all quite sober–their notion of a wild staff party was a glass apiece–all gazing at her, waiting for her to say something–or to really look at them.

“This,” she said, “is a point of change. From now on out, we don’t depend on Yanni for many things we now ask of him–including my study tape. Wes, tomorrow I want you to walk over to Library and physically pull a manual for me.”

It involved printout. “Shall I call it first?” Wes asked, meaning should he call Library and have it prepared for him to pick up.

“No. Ask there and wait for it.”

At very least, she didn’t want a request on file before she had the GYX general manual in hand–there could well be more than one GYX in progress, and even Wes didn’t need to know which GYX she was interested in until she had that particular file in hand. It wouldn’t remove it from Library, and anyone interested could still get it, with the sort of clearance, for instance, that Hicks or Yanni had–but once she duped that manual in‑house, and began to write changes on that program–she would have her GYX’s particular record, and Yanni wouldn’t. He could find out what tape they’d run down in labs, but he couldn’t find out any oral Working she’d done, and he wasn’t good enough, she’d bet on it, to look at the tape list and immediately know what structure she was building or what her GYX was destined to be.

She had the individual manuals on Theo and Jory and the rest. Those came with them. And thoseindividuals would see changes very soon that weren’t on the lab records. She’d prepare tape of her own creation, and when she was through–they’d be hers, no one else’s, ever. That was the way the system worked.

Justin could pass on that, too, but she’d done more than population dynamics in recent weeks. She’d studied set‑alteration and deep inhibition as well as integrations. And she’d taken a look at some of the first Ari’s set designing, on the Gehenna project.

It wasn’t just history of that project she’d been after. She hoped she could spot a deepteach bug in the azi she’d taken in–that she could spot it, correct it, and have that azi absolutely trustable. It wasn’t brain surgery. In many cases it was plain language, like what the first Ari had instilled at Gehenna: this is your world. Your world–deeptaught in those azi minds–without any reference to the born‑men the military had sent out there deliberately to fail, mess up the planet, and die.

The military had thought they were simply giving Alliance a poison pill, knowing they’d take Gehenna and Union wasn’t in position to. But the poison pill the military hadn’t counted on, in their own planning, had been letting the first Ariane Emory know that herazi were destined to become an embedded, dying and miserably poor population on a planet the Alliance was going to claim. Ariane Emory didn’t dothat sort of thing to herazi, no. She gave them the planet and told them to survive and take care of it. And survive they did–becoming foreign and odd in the reckoning of what was human, but they lived. They succeeded.

The first Ari had, as best she’d ever been able to discover, given her Florian and Catlin, and Yanni had given her Wes and Marco, and she’d taken Callie and all the rest.

There were going to be, very soon, some deep‑sessions for certain staff, not for Florian and Catlin. They would be quiet, refreshing sessions, with some very specific instruction keyed to theirsets–instruction which could make them very devoted, or very dangerous, depending on her skill at intervention.

“You are my first staff,” she said, “and the core of my staff. What you say, I will always hear. And I rely on you for loyalty and intelligence.”

Heads dipped. Eyes fixed on her. Supervisor. They heard that as they’d hear tape, and they drank it in.

“You are special,” she said, “and your decisions matter. The secrets of this house stay in this house. This is for Marco and Wes: if you have to trust someone and you have to make a judgement outside this house, trust Justin Warrick.”

Again, solemn nods–just a little resisting flicker from Florian and Catlin, who’d been excluded from that last sentence. Wes and Marco were absorbing it all–deepstate, as azi could do without the deepteach drug, as almost now, she could do, her concentration could go that deep. And onlywith their Contracted supervisor would azi accept instruction at that level. She looked at Wes and Marco, saw their pupils dilated, a sign of deepstate, which said something on its own.

They were hers. About Florian and Catlin, she had no question at all, never had.

She’d doubted herself at times, which, she thought, was only healthy to do, but now that she’d begun to focus on real things, on taking over, she began to think–I have to. I have no choice, do I? It’s life or death. My staff has to be mine. Especially my security.

BOOK THREE Section 1 Chapter v

JUNE 6, 2424

2122H

She had someone to turn down her bed that night–spooky, at first sight. She wasn’t used to that, not since Nelly had left her. She assumed Joyesse had done it, or ordered it. She put on her nightgown–unaided–draped yesterday’s clothes over the chair and started to go to bed.

But the computer in her room suddenly showed a unique flasher on an otherwise dark screen, a flasher that lit the adjacent wall red, and her heart picked up its beats.

Not a mail notification that blipped quietly in a corner. Log On, it said, across the screen.

She sat down at the counter and did that, no question. And the screen blinked, and became text.

“So you’re making a move toward power,”Base One said in the first Ari’s voice. “And you wonder how I can guess that. Wonder instead who else can guess it, and act appropriately.”

It wasn’t really Base One doing the thinking. It was the first Ari, who’d set certain criteria, and when she met them, things turned up. This one had. And it sent a chill down her back. No good trying to talk to it. It had something to say, and it would say it come hell or high water.

“Correctly identify your allies and your enemies, young Ari. I don’t say friends, because that word is misleading and it can deliver you into a serious mistake. Some people you don’t like are allies and some people you do like are enemies once you choose a certain course of action, and by now you should understand that.”

She did. She had understood it. But Ari Senior put it into words in a particularly cold way that did nothing for the shivers. She wore a thin nightgown in a room cooled for nighttime, and she hugged her arms about herself, because Base One wouldn’t stop once it started, wouldn’t stop, wouldn’t pause, didn’t care about her weaknesses or her excuses.

“Rely on Florian and Catlin. No others.”

There was Justin. Marco. Wes. But, she thought, Elder Ari didn’t know them. But if elder Ari had intended to leave a loophole she would have left it.

“Particularly be cautious about trust. Trust stops reasoning. Look carefully at those you trust. Taking offense stops reasoning, too. You may find a certain person has betrayed you. Limit the offending person so his misdeed cannot possibly repeat itself. Waste no time in regret or sympathy.”

I’m about to do that. I’m ahead of you here, older Ari.

“Assume the worst case where it regards those possessing what you intend to take. Assume violent resistence or clever resistence. Assume sabotage. Once you move, move decisively and pitilessly to protect your own allies. If you have pity, bestow it appropriately, on those helping you. Reward compliance and you’ll be surrounded by the compliant.”

That’s not necessarily a good thing, older Ari.

“…which is not necessarily a good thing, young Ari.”

That was spooky. That was just downright scary.

“You’ll need complete control of ReseuneSec to protect yourself. For the rest, rely on Base One. At need, you can lock anyone out of communication. Your codeword is CannaeCannaeCannae. Input that and the Base you target will only respond to you. You will at that point be able to dispense other codewords, so have them ready, but hand a Base access only to those who are both friends and allies.”

Control on a platter. Elder Ari had set it all up for her, the way elder Ari had had Base One assemble itself out of bits and pieces and come alive. She’d triggered something without intending it or even knowing it existed, and possibly it would just roll on like a juggernaut, without her being able to stop it.

She thought: I don’t know if I want this. I don’t know if I want to lock Yanni out. I’m not ready to do that. Hicks’ people–they could start shooting. Hicks is Yanni’s man, I’m pretty sure. What am I supposed to do about that?

“Key your receipt of this message so the program is sure you heard it. It will replay on demand, should you need to review it. I recommend that.”

She keyed her login. Said yes to the question. And the screen went dark again, shut down.

She hugged her arms around her and stared at it, feeling the cold go numb, the mind–the mind traveling its own starless space.

Joyesse found her that way some time later, and hovered by her, saying, “Sera? Sera? Are you well?”

She knew it was Joyesse. The surface mind still took account of things, but the deeper thoughts didn’t want to be interrupted. She got up, and walked toward the bed, and got in, letting Joyesse draw the covers over her. She shut her eyes, but she wasn’t asleep, wouldn’t sleep, not while her thoughts were going over the dynamic that was Reseune, and the legislature, and the necessity of appropriating ReseuneSec.

She didn’t want to pull the trigger. She didn’t wantto lose Yanni. She didn’t wantto treat Yanni as an enemy, but Hicks had told Florian they were going to have top‑level access and either Yanni was hiding things from ReseuneSec, or ReseuneSec was hiding things from them.

And that wasn’t good.

Hicks was giving them a gift. Did they trust the thirty agents they were getting?

Assume the worst case where it regards those possessing what you intend to take.

I do have to do something. And something we’ve done put Base One on alert. It had a trigger tripped. Something I did, or that Florian or Catlin did, tripped it, and that means Yanni may figure it out, too, or Hicks might.

If it wasn’t us that tripped the alarm–if Yanni’s moved…

It was the middle of the night. She couldn’t call Justin. She shouldn’tcall Justin and ask him to hurry in his assessments on the security sets. That wasn’t the way to get the best results.

Base One, however, could find out how he was doing. Base One could get into any computer in the Wing.

She got up, grabbed a robe from the closet this time, and said, “Base One, on.”

Base One asserted itself in the computer, and turned the terminal on. She sat down. She searched up computers that were active in the Wing and found Justin’s office net with no trouble at all. It was listed as secure, probe‑proof. That meant nothing to Base One, which ran System in the Wing. She simply had a look into the files, and ran a search for recent files involving betas.

There they were, in a folder labeled goddess1.

Goddess, was it? Sarcastic, maybe. Justin could be that. It was certain he had no interest in her thatway. He’d made that clear when she was, oh, much, much too young. And he was settled with Grant. She’d be a fool to mess with that attachment, a really great fool.

She read the notes on the people Hicks had sent her. Justin had started with the bottom, the gammas. Number one gamma, passed, number two, passed.

She read far beyond that. He had left the betas for last, and was two individuals from finishing, which meant he might be done tomorrow.

“Sera?” From the door. Joyesse again. “Sera, would you like anything?”

“Nothing,” she said, and Joyesse went away. Ari delved deeper, deeper into her own understanding of sets, and read Justin’s notes, and absorbed his comments, which made sense. He saw, clear as clear, where the sets were vulnerable to a command, and noted push‑button items that just had to be patched, was all.

Easy to do. She knew the way to do it. People reacted–to expectation of good stimulus, like praise; to fear, linked to imagination–imaginative people feared a wider range of things. And some people had an “off” switch that routed an idea to the analytic faculties, and some–mus, which they didn’t birth many of, were like that–you started them on a track and they’d follow it without a second thought. Mus wanted everything to be the same all the time–they were happier when it was like that–unless what they were assigned linked to a desire for an adrenaline rush, which was a whole other problem…

Betas, however, tended to overcheck and hesitate, and reconsider, and given an adrenaline rush, they dithered a second and then acted. These were guards. They had lightning‑quick fuses where it came to threat against their Contract holders. But she also had to defuse their “pause” switch where it came to reluctance to report something as yet unresolved.

Report any anomaly to Florian or Catlin immediately, she’d tell them: they’ll take the responsibility.

And being azi, the new people would do that, once they took that order deep: they’d wantthat contact with Florian and Catlin–they’d be uneasy and unresolved until they got it, and they’d run to get it.

And if there was some buried contrary instruction in the stack, say, one to report to Hicks or Yanni, something that just somehow hadn’t gotten into the records, that command to go to Florian, emphasized with a hard drug punch, would send them into profound emotional conflict–enough to show up, fast, in a very, very upset azi. If you ever feel conflicted, she’d tell them, additionally, report to Florian immediately.

If you can’t find a bug in a set, elder Ari’s tape had told her, just do something to make the conflict show itself– makethe subject react, never mind finesse. Present a quandary, contrary to the direction you suspect the bug to react, identify it–and excise it.

So just give me the files, Justin. Quit fretting. I need to get to work, and I need these people. Whatever’s been done, if it was done, it’s not going to be in any record. That’s what we have to worry about.

Justin thought she was still studying the basics–maybe thought she was out of her depth with these security sets; or he was, which was possible, he hadn’t really worked with the type before.

She had. From childhood. She knew Florian and Catlin. She looked at the possibilities in a security azi tape…

And she suddenly had a picture of how to solve any problem in a security azi set. It was right in the same place in the set that they attached the compulsion. Just conflict it, and get angst in the subject, and then resolve the angst, leaving the subject feeling oh, so much better. In azi, deep set work was so much easier. Deep set stuff didn’t need to be unhooked from all sorts of randomly acquired born‑man thinking, which ran like a bad cabling job; and it didn’t even have to be unhooked from the later instructions: if there were conflicts, they’d show. The azi in question, above delta level, was very likely to report his own conflicts. Azi were so, so elegantly clean. A thought led to very planned places, economical, and ideally un‑conflicted, everything structured and architectured and efficient.

And she wasn’t. God, she wasn’t. Her thoughts skipped all over the place. They tunneled, they ran riot through completely extraneous topics, they hopped from one point to another–pity the programmer that tried to solve her.

But a beta with a buried directive?

Damn if she couldn’t bring thatto the surface, by exactly such brute‑force mechanics as the first Ari said.

And she’d make the tape for the head of her new Security, beta azi he might be, but she could make the instructional tape herself, right to the deep sets, and be sure of him. She’d send Catlin down to barracks, to sit there and personally see he got it.

And when he woke up, he’d know definitely who was in charge and who could cure any angst he felt. Shecould help him. She would be his first recourse, in any case of doubt, because shewas the highest authority in Reseune, and Reseune was the highest authority on the planet, and an azi who had access to her had access to having his questions answered definitively and absolutely. An azi who obeyed herdirectives was always in the right–as any azi wanted with all his being to be correct. Any delivery of information to anyone other than her chain of command was utterly forbidden; any request from anyone outside her chain of command had to be cleared, and any lingering doubt was utterly overcome by the power she had within Reseune. She owned his Contract, and any azi under that authority could be assured, very assured, that he was psychologically safe following her orders.

She took notes. She took abundant notes on the officer’s set, which she had scanned before she sent it to Justin, and for good measure she looked up deepsets for four of the unrelated gamma genotypes with a related program list, for whom the same tape would be quite, quite sufficient. For three others, again program sets related to each other, she could do a minor modification in the directive, but it sufficed. For the newly arrived Theo and Jory–a little different approach, but much the same. Physically, they were easy to get at. Intervening with Hicks’ incoming security team was logistically a little harder, but Catlin could manage. Catlin would go armed, and if the subjects had a psychotic episode–meaning her rewiring had hit a major or a lethal block–Catlin would deal with it, get the individual sedated, and notify her, specifically, that someone had tried something.

Sorry, Justin, sorry you’ve had to sweat this, and I know you hate real‑time work worse than poison. You don’t need to send it to me: I see your notes, and they help me. They show me what I need to do, and it’s in the deep sets, not the things they’ve hung on it.

No wonder it’s driving you crazy. It’s like a birthday cake, icing all over, decorations here, decorations there, all sorts of programs and routines added on, none of it really showing you what’s underneath. We just need to slice right into it, and you’re far too kind for that.

I can’t afford to be. Maybe later, but not now, not in this.

BOOK THREE Section 1 Chapter vi

JUNE 7, 2424

0821H

Early to the office, early to work, mindful of the extra requests, and there was a note from Ari, time‑stamped yesterday at 1701: Justin: I’m really anxious to have your comments on the sets I gave you. Please hurry.

Hurry. Hell. He’d already hurried.

Then another one, time stamped this morning at 0131: It’s not that urgent. Relax.

Haste makes waste,he messaged back. But I’m hurrying. I should have something for you this evening. And when are you sleeping, anyway?

“Little sera wants miracles,” he said to Grant. “Lunch is going to be in, today.”

“No problem,” Grant said. “Shoot me what you have.”

He shot. Grant took it, and there was silence for an hour, until Grant ran out of coffee.

Grant filled his cup, fuel for the morning.

And into the afternoon.

Grant ordered sandwiches delivered. With cream pastry. Justin devoured his, reading and annotating the while. One set to go, a fairly simple one. He’d been over it twenty times. He’d done all the betas to try to understand the type. He didn’t find a handle on it, anywhere, and it wasn’t right. It wasn’t right, it wasn’tthe level of work that belonged on a Contract she was taking. At first he’d suspected subtlety. Then he’d suspected error. Now he had a different picture. Library censorship. Again.

He said to Grant: “You know what I think? I don’t think Library’s given us all the records yet. Florian thought he had that cleared up. But I don’t think he did.”

“It would answer your objection.”

“We’re two weeks overdue on this. But I’m afraid it’s the fact they’re security. Ari’s going to have to go back to Library one more time on her access. There’s something still we haven’t gotten.”

“It would answer the question,” Grant said. “You’re right, and after the last round, I wouldn’t want to be in the librarian’s shoes. You get to write the memo, born‑man.”

BOOK THREE Section 1 Chapter vii

JUNE 7, 2424

1542H

The azi in question, BR‑283, was a nice‑looking fellow, Catlin observed that on the monitor, while BR‑283, Rafael, was deep asleep–nice face, nice body, dark as Florian–taller than Florian.

But absolutely no attraction here, just an aesthetic note. Rafael BR wasn’t Florian, and wouldn’t be, being a beta–a situation which suited her. Betas took orders. Alphas didn’t need orders, just a goal. Sera had explained the situation to her, as much as, in sera’s judgement, she needed to know, and prime among sera’s instructions was the posited call, every fifteen minutes, while she was on this assignment. She was to beware any food or drink offered by lab staff. She was to disobey any command to leave or submit to detention, herself, but if held, she should not risk injury–just wait for sera to take action…within the next fifteen minutes.

That was advisement enough that sera considered these tapes important to give personally to four of the new security team. The situation itself hardly seemed dicey: walk into the labs with the tape–possibly containing the Contract itself–invoke sera’s name and sera’s order to gain access and order this group to lab, where she personally installed each tape, waving off the assistance of staff.

And it had run for a relatively tedious hour and forty‑two minutes, while Rafael BR and the other three of sera’s choosing slept with eyes occasionally open, and occasionally reacted, or smiled, or concentrated.

Contracting didn’t take long. So what else were the tapes? That wasn’t hard to guess. They were probably primary tapes, a slightly amended refresher on the most basic sets. Tapes like that were generally quite pleasant, an hour or so of confirmation, affirmation–a transcendental experience, when a Supervisor offered it to a troubled or stressed azi. In this case it was likely some patch to enable the four to work together under BR‑283’s direction.

And since sera had the accesses she did, and she’d signed for them and meant to deliver the Contract tape herself, she was perfectly within her rights to order it, and to order that her own staff carry out the request–for BR‑283, and for BG‑8, BJ‑190, and BB‑291, the same, even if the four were listed as ReseuneSec. A note might have gone to Hicks, but Hicks hadn’t intervened.

The other three were in the adjacent rooms, on the other three active monitors, affording a constant view, two of them on the same tape, one on a third, and all, presumably, experiencing primary tape, blissful and content.

They were also all on the same schedule, the tape very soon to run out, by the individual counters. And after that, they would enjoy a little peaceful sleep. Tedious, but she’d stay until they waked naturally. She’d bring them up the hill herself, the core members of the team Hicks had provided, having passed them through a sieve and having assured they were settled, in advance of the others.

More, sera provided her own tape without a ReseuneSec indexing sticker on it: they were ReseuneSec personnel, and the lab had taken a momentary issue with that, and had wanted to call the lab supervisor and Hicks about it, but Catlin had stood fast, maintaining that, indeed, sera did hold the Contracts, was a licensed Alpha Supervisor–there were five such in all of Reseune proper…six, counting Jordan Warrick–and if a Beta tape issued from an Alpha Supervisor’s office, then a Beta Supervisor should accept it and run the tape as requested.

“My principal,” Catlin had reminded the man with some firmness, “ isAriane Emory.”

One could watch the thoughts pass through the Supervisor’s eyes–a born‑man considering his career options, perhaps. He hadn’t been more cheerful after that, but he’d been polite. And he’d let her insert the tapes she’d brought, giving her access to a whole row of lab beds, clearing two other doubtlessly deserving azi who’d been scheduled for the afternoon.

“This is sera’s business,” Catlin had remarked further, as severely as possible, “and intimately pertains to her household. She will appreciate discretion. Your name is John Elway. Mine is Catlin AC‑7892. I will report.”

Reading born‑men was possible, when they were strongly conflicted. The man just nodded, and likely had notmade a phone call to higher levels, even yet.

Twitch of BR‑283’s head. Catlin looked critically at that subject, and let it pass. Possibly he’d just met a small alteration in his program. The dose had been heavy. BR‑283 probably could have taken the tape without the drug…but he was deep enough that a twitch was unusual.

Twitch became a tic. Jerk of the hands. “Let the tape run,” sera had told her. “Let it complete.”

The subject sat bolt upright, eyes staring, then vaulted off the couch, right into the wall–a wall that assuredly was not there in BR‑283’s vision. He rebounded against the couch, fighting for balance.

He was dangerous in this state, dangerous to himself. He hit another wall, hard. His forehead was bleeding.

There was a red button that could call help. Catlin opted not to use it. By the clock, she was due to call base. She touched the com button on her shoulder and said, “Catlin here. There’s been a reaction.”

The micro receiver in her right ear said, in sera’s voice, “ I’m coming.”

The other subjects were getting to the end of their tape sessions withouthurling themselves off their couches. There was onesubject huddled on the floor in a fetal tuck in the corner, one subject in the throes of a psychotic episode from the deeptape he’d been given–and that individual happened to be the officer Hicks had put in charge of the unit. Rafael BR‑283.

That said something. And John Elway had not come to assess the progress of the session. In a little bit more, John Elway would have visitors to the section, visitors who would not be prevented. She watched the other azi, walked to the one‑way glass and looked at BR‑283, who had gotten into a corner the camera didn’t completely reach. He was bleeding down his face, shaking and rocking. It wasn’t a pleasant sight.

It was 1601h, by her watch, when someone came down the hall outside. She drew her sidearm–one never assumed the other side wasn’t prepared to shoot–and faced the opaque door.

It opened, and it was sera, with Florian, a very welcome sight, with Wes for reinforcement. John Elway had come in among them, looking upset, and two of his staff attended, just ahead of Wes, but sera didn’t seem worried in the least about them, only about the business at hand.

Catlin said, holstering her sidearm, “A reaction, sera, in the unit senior.”

“Well,” was all sera said, and sera went to the monitors, on which three azi were quiet, likely asleep; and then went to the window of the first room, assessing the situation. Sera punched that button for communication and said, softly, “Rafael. Rafael.”

The subject convulsed, and knotted himself tighter into the corner.

“This is Ariane Emory, your Contract and your Supervisor. I’ve come to help you. Can you get up?”

Nothing, for a moment. Then a slight response, a leg straightened out of the tuck, folded, knee against the floor.

“This is your Supervisor. Get up, Rafael.”

He moved, unfolded his arms, laid hands on the wall, got a knee under him, and tried to get up.

“Are you all right, Rafael?”

“I can’t see.”

“Yes, you can,” sera said, and Rafael turned his head and stared around him.

“Is that better, Rafael?”

A slight nod.

“I’m your Supervisor,” sera said, in that calm, calm voice she could use–the tone that made Catlin’s own nerves twitch, and brought a silence and quiet from all of the azi present. “I’m your Contract. It’s all right. I have a resolution for you. Are you ready to hear it?”

A nod. “Yes.”

“What you believed true, was true before this. Now something else is true, and I tell you it’s all right. Do you believe me? Do you accept it?”

“I can’t,” Rafael said.

Whatever someone had laid into him, it was a hard block.

Sera said, slightly more sternly: “Rafael.”

“Sera?”

“When I tell you something, it’s true. It will always be true. Do you need to see your Contract, to know that?”

“I want to see it,” Rafael said.

Very high beta, strong‑willed, not easily overcome. Catlin felt it in her own nerves. This azi was Enemy, and resisting, hard.

Sera said, quietly, “Catlin, unlock the door.”

“Sera, show him through the window.”

“Unlock the door, Catlin. It’s all right.”

She was alpha, and her resistance was harder to overcome than any beta ever devised. But she had to, if sera insisted. Florian and Wes were right with sera while she moved back to the console to open the door. If the Enemy went berserk, they’d hit him with all they had. But–

“He’s security, sera.”

“Do it,” sera said.

Sera’s orders, in that tone, were sera’s orders, off her own deep sets, and Catlin moved and did it, watching the subject the while, her heart ticking up another notch as Florian and Wes moved in, right with sera.

“These are your allies,” sera said calmly. “And this is your Contract.” She took a small reader from her coat pocket, and walked toward the subject, whose leaning against the wall could propel him off it in half a heartbeat, and sera was small and fragile in that reckoning, the subject a head taller, bloody‑faced, drenched in sweat, and, at the moment, between loyalties.

Sera calmly held the reader out to him, and he stood away from the wall, took it, and looked at it. Looked for a long time.

It was something, to see one’s real Contract, and read the name on it, for the first time. It was identity, and right, and duty, all those things wrapped up in one. It had to have an effect. Just thinking about it had an effect on every azi in the room, and Catlin moved close to the door, tense as drawn wire, ready to defend herContract if Rafael made a sudden move.

“Do you believe,” sera asked Rafael quietly, “that I’m your Supervisor?”

Nod. Second nod. The eyes flickered. Rafael was processing things. Hard. He shook badly as he gave the reader back. It could go any direction from here. Anydirection.

“It’s all right,” sera said. “You’re one of us. You’re safe. You’re where you belong.”

He felt for the wall behind him. Leaned against it.

“It’s all right. Come here. Come.”

He got his balance. Sera stood there holding out open arms, and that great tall azi came close and let her take his hands. “It’s all right,” sera said. “You only report to me, now and forever. All other claims on you are completely gone. Erased. You don’t have to do the other thing, do you?”

“No,” Rafael said. A huge sigh came out of him, and he said shakily: “I won’t.” Deep breath. “I don’t have to.”

Not a lie, Catlin thought. That had been a Conflict. Bad one. Something in that tape had reached out and presented this azi an irresolvable contradiction, thrown him into a box to which only an appropriate Supervisor had the key.

And sera had come and rescued him, that simply.

Catlin found her leg twitching. She was that wired up. But Rafael was Sera’s now. Safe. She saw the same subtle shift in Florian’s stance, and Wes’s. Three of them might not have been quick enough, strong enough, to take the man out fast enough, as close as sera had pushed it: they had to talk with her about that. But done was done. It was all right. The other three, down the row, they were sera’s, too, peacefully, with no reactions.

This one–this one had been a spy at very least, and sera had found it out.

“You can come up to the Wing with us,” sera told Rafael. “So can the other three. You’ll make things ready for the rest of your command.”

“Yes, sera,” Rafael said. He squared himself on his feet. Gave a little bow of the head.

“My name is Florian,” Florian said then, “sera’s personal security.” A nod over his shoulder. “Catlin.” And left, “Wes. Wes will walk up the hill with you. Everything will be provided for you in the quarters there, including uniforms. You don’t have to bring anything but yourselves. You’ll prepare the place for the others when they come.”

“Yes,” Rafael said. His face had a different look. An azi knew. He was still somewhat in shock, still rattled, the experience having knocked his defenses flat–it was a kind of openness that might never appear in this azi again. Right now he was fragile, entirely, needing protection. When he got where he was going, when he got an official assignment, and knew where he would be and what he was to do, he’d become what he would be, and not until then. Right now he needed help.

“I’ll meet you there,” sera said, “and give you your orders.”

“Yes,” he answered her, and nodded. “Yes, sera.” The waking mind was in fragments. It needed time and quiet to reassemble its boundaries.

“You can go with Wes,” sera said gently. “Go on, now. The others will follow when they wake.”

The door was open. Wes took him by the arm, and steered him out, past John Elway, past the other staff. Sweat stood on Elway’s face…fear forsera, or fear ofhis situation, Catlin was unsure which, and didn’t like that lack of information.

“It’s perfectly all right,” sera said, pausing for a moment to address the man. “I can take care of him. Catlin will stay here and escort the others up the hill. Are we agreed about that?”

Elway nodded slightly, looking pale. Elway might, Catlin thought, be just a little less conflicted than the azi, but sera was going to run Reseune one day, and born‑men in Reseune all knew that. If Elway was supposed to report this, he might decide to be careful what he reported and to whom. He was a very worried born‑man.

And maybe it wasn’t just Rafael sera had Worked, omitting to give Elway any clear indication what he ought to do and what was safe.

Instead sera simply walked off with Florian, behind Wes and Rafael. Rafael was theirs now, very, very little chance he wasn’t.

It was a scary thing to watch. It had been a far scarier moment when sera had walked into that room. But given sera’s work, it was very likely it wouldn’t be the last time sera personally did a thing like that, no matter how they objected.

And her security just had to be in position, and fast. Very, very fast, Catlin thought. And armed with non‑lethals, next time. Sera had surprised her security. It felt wrong to complain about it, but it certainly shouldn’t happen twice, and it was their job to take precautions.

There was another matter. Rafael had come from Hicks, at least by previous Contract.

That was worth talking over with Florian and with sera, on an absolutely urgent basis. For right now, Hicks and all his immediate staff were on her Unreliable list.

BOOK THREE Section 1 Chapter viii

JUNE 7, 2424

1712H

Catlin was back, Ari noted, from the minder link in her office. Florian had escorted herback. Wes was still downstairs, helping Rafael and his three settle into their temporary quarters–Marco had been manning the security station solo the while, and Ari let pass a little sigh, now that everybody was back safely.

Four Contracts down, twenty‑six more to set, and there was a message on the minder this evening from Justin, informing her that he didn’t think Library had given him everything it said it had given them.

No, she noted, at her console, Justin hadn’tquite caught the problem. But she hadn’t either, from a scan of the set–it was there, and you could spend hours and hours looking through the set and the specific individual’s list of tapes given, searching and searching for something to make sense of a set of lines in that program…all the earmarks of reference to deep set, but nothing in the deep set record that would quite satisfy it. It was like an if‑then link, but when you got there, there was nothing listed. Every instruction ever given to that azi was supposed to be recorded in his specific manual–but if it wasn’t?

That if‑then was just a shape without anything to attach to–a point at which hooks could be set to turn an azi into a spy…or assassin, if that was the game; and Justin hadfound something wrong: he just hadn’t assumed it wasn’t him, so he was still looking for the link.

She sent him a memo that said:

All done. You should have trusted yourself. You were right to keep looking, your delay warned me to keep looking, and Library wasn’t lying to us. ‘Night, both of you.

Nasty. It wouldn’tlet Justin get a peaceful sleep. He’d worry about it. He’d reach a right conclusion. And now after one long, hard stretch of work, he knew what ReseuneSec tape looked like, and he’d found a problem and put a finger close to it. Not too shabby an accomplishment on his part, considering she’d been working with security sets for years.

And what someone had done with Rafael…the deep level at which that compulsion had gone in said Alpha Supervisorin blazing letters. A Beta Supervisor could marginally have done it, and it was true it hadn’t been totally neat, but it had been damned deep and resistant, all of which argued only that the perpetrator wasn’t the bestAlpha Supervisor in Reseune. The best? That was, in her private assessment, beginning to be her.

But it left Yanni, Hicks, Jordan Warrick, Justin Warrick. And, postscript, there was also grim old Chi Prang, the head of Alpha section in the azi labs. Prang couldhave done it, at someone’s orders, or in collusion with someone, and she didn’t know the woman.

Fast computer search said Prang was one hundred thirty‑seven years old and had, yes, worked in that capacity during the first Ari’s regime and Denys’ and now Yanni’s. That was a wide range of potential allegiances. Prang had five assistants, any one of which was provisionally alpha‑licensed, which meant they had the skills, but had to have Prang’s oversight. Thatspread the search wider afield, and led, very probably, further and further from the culprit, because subordinates wouldn’t have as immediate a motive. So she was wrong about there being just five people. But the list of original suspects was still the primary list. Yanni, she was relatively sure, could have done a better job, Justin wouldn’t have done it in the first place, Jordan hadn’t had access, and that…

That left the fingerprints of the Director of ReseuneSec, Hicks, who had the rating to handle his own assistant, but who didn’t practice on a wider scale– hiscommand was beta, in the main. Very, very few alphas, and those notsocialized into the general society–specialists, technicals–they’d report their own personal problems to Hicks, but being purely technicals, they weren’t in a position, in their ivory tower, to encounter much angst. That meant Hicks wouldn’t be often in practice. A provisionally licensed, only‑occasional kind of operator wasn’t really up to finesse, unless he’d been shown how to do it, and was following a sort of recipe.

There were two styles of dealing with azi difficulties. One was the meticulous route that figured a Supervisor couldmake a mistake. You searched and researched the files until there was a theory, and a treatment. It was a very soft, very gentle method of going after the problem and fixing it–which didn’t always work at optimum, unless you were as good as Justin; but at least it didn’t generally go badly. If you weregood, you could eventually lay a finger on the specific line in the set that was causing the conflict and change it, with proper annotations on the record. That was very much Justin.

The other was the brute force method–when you wanted something and knew the basic architecture of the set, you could ignore most of the subsequent manual and go right after the primal sets, gut level. You could do that if you didn’t, ultimately, care about the result long‑term, or you could also do it if you were that good, that you couldwork at primary level in a subject, and if you had a clear vision how it could make everything subsequent settle into place.

I’m that good, she thought. She’d taken a chance with it. Was still taking a chance with it, in the sense that she now believed Rafael was clear–because she’d set his Contract very tightly, very exclusively on her, as the resolver of all conflicts, the source of all orders. She’d been brought up on the first Ari’s tapes. She’d been working with two alpha sets for years; and, being the born‑man equivalent of an alpha, what she read in the manuals resonated at gut level; and the differences between an alpha and a theta resonated that way, and, once she got into the manuals, beta level made sense–the same with gamma, zeta, and eta–each with their own constellation of needs and satisfactions. Even for a born‑man…it made sense.

Whywas the key. Whyindividuals did things, even when they had consistently negative outcomes… whypeople had to do things…she’d been asking thatquestion of the universe for years. And born‑men got the worst of it, all their lives.

Why did they have to take Maman away?

Why was Denys nice to me sometimes?

Why is Jordan what he is?

Why does Yanni bring me presents?

Who is Hicks working for?

Those were all, all important questions, and she’d fairly well gotten the answer to all but the last one–which might lie somewhere tangled with the cruel thing someone had done to Rafael.

She was very, very thankful Catlin hadn’t had to shoot Rafael, or that she herself hadn’t broken him down and not been able to fix it.

Typical of the really big problems in the azi world, the fix was actually simple, because the layers were so clean. Born‑men–born‑men were a muddled mess, as if someone had stirred a layered pudding with a knife. But when an azi was in primary conflict, his earliest, most basic self‑protective rule was, “Appeal to a Supervisor.” Second was, “The Contract is the ultimate right.” And when Rafael had been drugged‑down and wide open, she’d laid hands right on the conflict. She’d given him the Contract at the beginning, and that was all right: he’d taken it in, and immediately his reservations had attached, and he’d arranged his safe loophole. And then she’d hit him with the deep set changes, and a reiteration of the Contract, which had torn it all wide open, and set it up for healing.

He’d sleep once he’d carried out her orders to arrange the barracks. He’d work until he dropped, sleep like the dead, and wake up clear and sure of himself and with all his layers in good order.

The compulsion for a dual loyalty had to have been planted way back, from when he was a child; or it had to have been planted fairly near term by someone with the ability to plant it. Which again said Alpha Supervisor.

But say that the compulsion hadbeen there for his whole life.

Fingers flew. Base One slithered quietly across departmental lines and nabbed another azi record, this one from a very young trainee designated for ReseuneSec–another B‑28, BA‑289, to be precise, which meant there were as many as seven more B‑28’s already out there, somewhere.

It took a computer comparison to wade through that training record, proving it was identical to BR‑283’s, and a little research to determine that that particular azi, BA‑289, had been born and started on that path in 2412, before BR‑283 had proved out, so there were three others old enough to be in place somewhere, and, after 283, four more theoretically in the system, younger than 289. You didn’t start proliferating a new routine through a geneset like that until you’d proved it out…not if you were operating by the book.

Was BR‑283 the first of his kind?

Joyesse came in to ask if sera would want supper delayed.

“Ten minutes,” she said, because she was close, and she had an idea exactly what she was looking for.

And there they were. One B‑28 in ReseuneSpace, up on Beta Station. One in Novgorod, in the ReseuneSec Special Operations office. One, oh, delightful! was in ReseuneSpace on Fargone, in Ollie’s service. BR‑280, named Regis, an operations agent, had been born in 2373, and had been in service–in her predecessor’s service, no less–when she died. The first Ari’s security staff had been reassigned–scattered to the edge of space, evidently, when Giraud took over.

Oh, damned right they had scattered them. That staff, if questioned, knew things. And there was no damned reason her predecessor would have created an off‑the‑books routine in this Regis–who was in hersecurity group–unless she hadn’t trusted the security group itself. And that was too many layers to be sane, especially when the first Ari could have peeled any of that group like an onion it she had any suspicion.

No. Someone had actually infiltrated Ari’s staff. And Denys, putatively, had been the agency of her death–which Giraud had pinned on Jordan–and Yanni had shipped Jordan to Planys to avoid a trial. While the original Florian and Catlin had died, and the security detail had been shipped out, scattered to all points of Union space, not one of them left on Cyteen.

Chin on hand, she contemplated that scenario.

ReseuneSec. An azi that had served the first Ari, now with Ollie. Other azi, who had never served Ari, at Beta, in Novgorod. And now she got one, in Hicks’ goodwill gift to her.

If it were the first Ari’s programming, she’d surely have had the finesse to vet the geneset and the psychset of her spies–piece of cake for Ari One. Someone of lesser ability, on the either hand, might have stuck with the first success and built spies like production items…then managed to get his favorite number assigned hither and yon.

Maybe the same person had moved BR‑280 out, fast, with all the others, after the first Ari’s death. To have killed 280 withFlorian and Catlin might have drawn attention to him and his history, and all the others.

She drew in a slow breath.

Hicks could, if he worked at it, reprogram a beta. But Hicks hadn’t been in office, them.

God, this was archaeology. Everything was buried.

First logical query was to be sure the Regis base’ program was identical to Rafael’s, and that all the others were. Base One filched that manual from deep, deep storage–Reseune never erased a manual. Any version of it.

Beyond ten minutes. Joyesse came back, a little diffident.

“I apologize,” Ari said. “This isn’t finished yet. Tell cook I am so sorry. Another twenty minutes. Staff should have their supper.”

Joyesse left. And she let the computer sift through that mountain of material, which took only one of those minutes. It flagged no difference at all.

So BR‑280 was the same as 281. That meant the window for that special routine had always been there in that mindset. And possibly that same routine, which wasn’tin the manual–illegal as hell–had indeed existed in 280. She couldn’t lay hands on 280 to find out, not easily. But she’d bet 280 reported to Hicks…who hadn’t been in charge of ReseuneSec long enough to have set it up that way.

Giraud had been. It had been Giraud’s office.

Oh, lay bets on Giraud. Therewas the mind that might have done it. Hicks had only been number two to Giraud. Hicks might not even have known. But he’d very likely known the special use of the BR‑28 series. And he’d seen to it that one got into her unit.

If that was true, then the Nyes still had tentacles threaded through ReseuneSec, and, through ReseuneSec, into all sorts of places. The dead man’s hand was still on the controls. His programs persisted into the next regime, still on Giraud’s orders.

Thank you, Uncle Giraud. Dear Uncle Giraud. You could so easily have done it to Rafael and all his kind, and the labs are still producing them. You’d do that for Denys, to be sure he got information he wouldn’t know how to chase. You’d do anything for Denys. You set it up so Denys would get his information even if you weren’t there. And the BR‑28s are just the set I know about.

I know one thing, at least. You laid traps you neglected to tell me about. Denys was still alive, and you wouldn’t betray him. I understand that. And I understand Denys was protecting me. But you ended up putting me in danger to give Denys that little advantage in keeping power, because youdidn’t tell me there was anything like this buried in ReseuneSec.

And that makes me just a little mad, Uncle Giraud.

So now I know what you did, and what your mindset is capable of in your next incarnation, toward my successor…all sorts of betrayal, for the one you’re protecting. And I see very well how your own mindset arrived at the notion of this compulsion to report. You made it your own mirror. You so liked information. You never trusted any of your own subordinates. I’ll bet you even planted one on Hicks. On your own second‑in‑command. I’ll bet if I went over his beta assistants, I’d find one with a block very much like that. I bet you did some very special work on that one other azi. And ten of the BR‑28’s?

Oh, that was wicked, Uncle.

But now I do know.

And solving Rafael’s problem, I know what to do about you.

Denys doesn’t need, to be born. Just you do. Just you, to be fixed, on me, Uncle, the way you fixed on Denys.

Denys has just become irrelevant.

Good. That makes me happier. I’m sorry about it, simultaneously, and I wish I didn’t have to, but I think we’re both going to be happier in the long run.

She prepared a letter to Yanni–just in case Yanni had gotten wind of her activity with her new, Hicks‑provided staff. Yanni might be guilty as sin in the first Ari’s death–at least in the cover‑up and blaming Jordan part of it. Yanni might know exactlywhat Giraud had been up to, infiltrating ReseuneSec, ReseuneSpace at Fargone and Beta–and if he did know, and he’d been letting that happen, and not telling her, he was on the verge of becoming irrelevant, too.

Dear Uncle Yanni,she wrote, with a little pain in her heart.

I turned up something. And fixed it, so you know. I think you should be aware. I leave it to you whether to tell Director Hicks his own staff may have a problem. Be discreet. You know what your lines of honest communication are.

Then the stinger:

Please include me in them from now on.

BOOK THREE Section 2 Chapter i

JUNE 11, 2424

2158H

Giraud’s eyes had been changing position slowly. By this seventeenth week they had moved all the way onto the front of his face, so he was much more Giraud than he’d ever been.

He’d gained weight–hadn’t kept up with Abban in size, but was about the same as Seely. He not only twitched to stimuli this week, his bones had begun to harden out of the tough cartilage that earlier comprised his skeleton, and his joints, responding to muscle twitches, had begun to flex and move in a way they would do for the rest of his life.

He’d also gained a new sense: he had actually heard the maternal heartbeat that had timed his life…he heard it when a tech dropped a pan: he couldn’t tell it was different than taste or smell–every stimulus was the same to him, but he reacted, the way a plant might react. His newly functioning joints moved.

His sense of hearing would grow more acute as time passed, but Seely’s would be extraordinary, an asset, in Seely’s future profession.

And something else had changed, radically so, for Giraud. He was solo now. His brother Denys’ sequence number had been active in the birthlab computer until just last week, a soft scheduling that would have let it go to implementation on any given day. That data and that material had gone back to deep storage, the CIT number dumped from lab files, officially disconnected from Giraud’s, so even if he looked, someday, he might find it hard to find his brother until his Base was significantly higher than the lab’s.

Denys might yet be born. There was seven years yet to change that back without deviating from program…seven years had been the gap between the brothers. But for now that data had quietly slipped deep into storage, with no extant string to pull it out. That would have to be rebuilt.

A subsequent generation might change its mind about connecting Denys to Giraud, having both of that set.

This one wasn’t likely to.

BOOK THREE Section 2 Chapter ii

JUNE 11, 2424

2158H

Living next door to Ari had its moments–one of them being about suppertime, when the hall suddenly flooded with ReseuneSec in uniform, and Justin’s plans for dinner out had taken second place to ingrained apprehension. Their door had stayed shut. The mass of black uniforms had, instead, been admitted to young Ari’s apartment, all of them at once.

Well, Justin said to himself, that was unnerving. Thirty was the number of Ari’s own detail, if the records he’d passed on had been all‑inclusive. Had that been thirty? It could be.

And were they safe, for God’s sake? Ari had yanked the initiative back from him, unfinished, said it was all right, he and Grant had been right–

Right? There’d been some sort of problem. He knew there was. Grant agreed. And she went ahead anyway.

“She must have done something,” Justin commented to Grant, who stood at his shoulder to see the minder’s vid image. “She wouldn’t have them all in there, if she hadn’t. Damn, I still can’t find the glitch, and hell if I want to ask her–she’s confident enough, as is.”

The message she’d sent, taking the project back, still rankled. He’d lost sleep on that work. Lost a major amount of sleep. And he still didn’t have an answer, or a real thank you. There had been times, in the last few weeks, when he actually understood his father’s feud with the original.

Grant’s hand landed on his shoulder. “Doesn’t look like a good evening for us to go out,” Grant said.

He ran a capture on the security monitor’s immediate record. “Entertainment,” he said. And dinner out became dinner in.

They popped pizza into the luxury apartment’s very fast oven, and opened a respectable wine while they reviewed the tape… Yes, there were thirty. Thirty who presumably were about to be received and probably instructed inside Ari’s fairly capacious living area…after which they would presumably pour back out into the hall, ready to go on duty.

It was damned certain the thirty, plus the recently acquired domestic staff, weren’t by any means going to fit in that apartment’s staff quarters. So they had to be living somewhere else in the wing, likely downstairs.

“That’s the BR‑283,” Justin said, regarding the tall one with the officer’s silver on his collar. “Classic officer set. Dates from the 2370s. Spooky, how much like Regis he looks.”

“Not spooky,” Grant said with a little laugh. “It would be spooky if he didn’t.”

“I wonder whatever happened to Regis.”

“No knowing,” Grant said. The laugh had immediately vanished.

Dark thoughts. A dark time, a time worth forgetting. The crowd in the hall represented a new age. A new beginning. Regis had vanished, along with the rest of the first Ari’s staff. No one ever saw them again. Rumor had it her Florian and her Catlin had been terminated. No one knew how many others.

Cheerfulness, for God’s sake. The little minx had probably fixed whatever glitch there was in the BR set. Figure howshe’d fixed it inside several weeks of working the problem…that was a question.

“Probably she did exactly what Jordan complained about,” he said to Grant, “and went after the deep set on the BR. Fast fix.”

“That’s one way to get his attention,” Grant said. “It would be logical.”

“Rough on him.”

Grant gave a slow, thoughtful nod. “But it would work. And they’re ReseuneSec. Those are odd sets from the beginning.”

“Cold as hell’s hinges,” Justin muttered, with other unpleasant memories, and tried to shake the mood of that black flood in the hall–his hallway as well as hers. He poured a white wine, poured another for Grant, and reran the tape. “That’s the BB‑19.” Justin said, regarding the thin, long‑faced azi. “I’ve worked with another of that set. A bundle of nerves. Good on details. He’ll likely be scared to death of Florian and Catlin.”

“With probable cause,” Grant said, and, with a pizza wedge for a pointer: “That’s his counterpoint, I’m betting. BY‑10. A lot like the BB‑19. A good combination, those two. One’s detail, the other tends to macrofocus.”

“Males generally get top posts in that house, have you noticed that? Since Florian and Catlin, that’s herpredilection. It was her predecessor’s, too. Not a female in the whole lot.” Flash on that apartment, that time. He’d been, then, around Ari’s age now.

And that night, in the first Ari’s apartment…had there been staff present, besides Florian and Catlin? He couldn’t remember it…didn’t want to remember. He was sorry for Florian and Catlin. He really was. It depressed him to think about it.

“And Theo ended up in authority over Jory on the domestic staff,” Grant said. “ Iwouldn’t have advised that. Jory’s brighter. But they’ll manage. He’ll take advice.”

“You know, Ari is far more social than her predecessor,” Justin said, envisioning that crowd in Ari’s living room–probably being served refreshments and urged to relax–which would make the lot almost comically uncomfortable. No, she actually wouldn’t do it. She knew better. She’d do what wouldmake them comfortable–like brief them, give them information. Those mindsets would like that far better than teacakes, all things considered. But sociality…she’d encourage that, far more than those mindsets had ever seen. “She has a strong inclination to go for company. Not with that lot, but in general.”

“I’ve observed,” Grant said.

“Right from the start. She visited our office. Whenever she got bored, she went looking for people. Cultivated a set of friends. Still does. Denys really didn’t like that habit in her. Of course, Denys didn’t like people in the first place.”

“Neither did the first Ari,” Grant said. “Deviation from the model. Maybe an improvement. Maybe not. I can’t imagine that the first Ari ever had that bent in early years.”

“Our Ari lost Jane Strassen, but she never grew bitter, just took to chasing us. Maybe she’s more people‑oriented because shedidn’t spend her early years wondering if her dear mother would kill her if she disappointed. That’s what they say about Olga Emory.”

“A relationship I can’t imagine,” Grant murmured. “But then, I can’t imagine a mother.” A tilt of Grant’s head. “Just you.”

“I don’t qualify.”

“You absolutely don’t. Which suits me fine.”

They were lovers. They made no particular fuss over it. It was just who they were. There was nobody they trusted more than each other, nobody they loved more than each other. That had been true for years. For a time, in his growing up, if there hadn’t been Grant, he wouldn’t have been sane. If there hadn’t been him–it was equally sure Grant wouldn’t have been what he was.

And if not for the first Ari’s intervention, Grant would have been Jordan’s work, entirely.

And if not for the first Ari’s intervention, so, almost undoubtedly, would he.

“I wonder what she’s building out there behind the wing,” Justin said hours later, when he and Grant were in bed, after a long evening and an entertainment vid. The only light was the clock face on the minder. The security force had, as predicted, departed after a precise hour and forty‑five minutes. Headed for the lift. Assigned, signed, and delivered–

And that gave Ari as much protection as any other agency in Reseune.

“Building behind the wing?” Grant asked, half asleep. “What brought that up?”

“She’s accumulating an army–counting service people, that’s a large staff.”

“You think?” Grant rolled over and managed a half‑awake interest. “What are you thinking?”

“I think it’s not a building to replace the old Wing One Lab. I think it’s a huge extension of this whole wing.”

“You can’t really see it on the monitors.”

“Lot of earthmovers going back and forth, makes the ground floor shake. A lot of stuff landed down at the dock and brought up in that direction. It’s going to be big. Everybody’s saying labs to replace the old one they shut down. I’m saying–I don’t know why Ari wants huge labs attached to this wing, unless she’s setting up to do some work.”

“Makes a certain sense she would,” Grant said.

“Physical labs? She doesn’t need it. She’s theory. She’s computers. She doesn’t really need that kind of thing. I’ll bet you–mark me–I’ll bet a month’s pay the lab story is a blind.” He cast a look up at the ceiling in the dark, not sure they were monitored, never sure they weren’t. “Just a guess.”

“So–if it is–does she move out and we stay here?”

“Would she leave her favorite neighbor behind? Dammit, something in me wants to go take back our old digs, with the worn carpet and the balky green fridge, all of it. I miss the place.”

“I don’t know why. We weren’t safe there.”

“We were, for a while.” He let go a long slow breath, and remembered. “No, I suppose we were just ignorant.” He stretched, hands under the pillow, under his head. “Maybe that’s what I want to get back to. Blissful ignorance.”

“I’ve found little blissful about ignorance. Besides, it’s not in my mindset to tolerate that condition.”

“I’m afraid it’s not in mine, either, ultimately” Two or three slow breaths. “Too big a staff, even for a palace. She’s got staff packed into that apartment. And thirty guards? That’s a lot even for Wing One. I think we’re witnessing an expansion. She’s going to move. Get the whole wing into something that wasn’tshot all to hell by a handful of her staff. Make sure it can’t happen again.”

“It’s a lot of building. That’s certain.”

“If she moves us, at least we’ll be rid of the decor.”

The room…if the lights had been on…or even when they weren’t…was a horror of modern decorating, stark white, stark black, and some mitigating grays. Grant avowed he didn’t mind it much. But Grant, being azi, lived more in his mind than he did in his physical surroundings. For himself, having grown up attached to textures and physical sensations, it was absolutely appalling. Admittedly it was a place to be safe. It was a place to be monitored by reasonably friendly agencies, and to maintain an absolutely incontrovertible record, capable of proving to any inquisitive authority that they hadn’t been up to anything, and couldn’t possibly deserve to be arrested. Again.

Warm, soft place to be, however, it was not–only in this bed, with the lights out, with Grant there, safe. Insulated from the world–and Ari. And from whatever she was doing, filling the hall with a godawful lot of Reseune Security.

Making the place echo with boots.

Advancing power. He could hear it coming.

The phone rang.

“Damn.” He jumped. He couldn’t help it. Nothing good made ever made a phone ring at this hour. He shot an arm out, felt after the phone‑set on the nightstand. Didn’t find it, and it was still going off “Minder? Minder, answer the damn phone!”

“Complying.” the robot voice said; the clock face over on the wall brightened as the room light came up a little. A telltale beside that clock went green, and a new voice came through.

“Ser Warrick?” Female. But not Ari.

“This is Justin Warrick.” He never had blocked off calls after midnight. He’d never needed to. But here it was, after midnight. And he didn’t even know any women outside this wing and Admin. “Who is this?”

“Sandi Patil. Dr. Sandi Patil.”

He sat straight up in bed as Grant lay there a heartbeat, then levered himself up on an arm.

“What do you want?” He was rude. He knew it. But so was Patil, calling him out of nowhere at this hour, on business that couldn’t be good.

“Are you alone?” Patil asked.

“I’m as alone as I choose to be.” He didn’t want any part of this. He waved a hand at Grant, mimed recording the conversation, which took a keypush on the console. He got up to do it himself, on the wall panel near the door, but Grant, starting on that side of the bed, beat him to it, and then turned the room lights up full. “Why don’t you call my father?”

“I can’t reach him. Listen to me. Dr. Thieu is dead.”

Dead. Dead wasn’t a metaphor. Not from this source, at this hour. And he didn’t want to ask, but not getting information could be as bad as hanging up, outright, for the monitoring that went on in this place.

“Dead? How?”

“They’re saying heart attack. But I don’t believe it. They’re monitoring my phone, they’re questioning my friends…”

“Look, if you deal with my father it’s a dead certainty they’ll do that, whoever ‘they’ are…”

“Not Reseune,” Patil said. “It’s not Reseune. They have people inside.”

He made a furious gesture at the other wall, in the direction of next door, Ari’s apartment. Grant understood, grabbed a robe on his way and left, running, wrapping the robe about him like a bath towel.

“What do you mean?” he asked meanwhile, trying to keep the tone even and the conversation going.

“They’ve gotten to Dr. Thieu in the heart of Planys, on the other side of the world. They can get to anyone.”

“Look, somebody gave me your card, I haven’t a clue why, I don’t know who ‘they’ are, and I don’t know why you’d be calling me. What are you into, what do you want with my father, and where in hell did you get my number?”

“I got it from Thieu. Look, I’m in the middle of selling my apartment. All my belongings are in boxes, my physical files are in a mess and I can’t find anything. I’m supposed to be going up to the station, and now everything’s stalled, I don’t know why, and I can’t get an answer out of the Director’s office! Thieu said to talk to your father, now Thieu’s just died and I can’t reach him, your number works, you’reon the inside of the agency that’s hiring me and now not talking to me, so here you are, Ser Warrick, and welcome to my situation! Can you just go down the hall or wherever you are and tell your father I urgently need to talk to him? There’ve been people coming through to look at this place I don’t like the look of, they say it’s sold, but someone arrives today and just walks through, and I didn’t know whether to let them in or not. I don’t want to deal with this, and someone I don’t know phones me to tell me Thieu is dead and hangs up. So what am I supposed to do? When I get hold of Schwartz, he’s going to tell me it’s all fine, I don’t need to worry, and just let them handle everything, but that’s what he said the last time. I need to talk to someone who knows what’s going on.”

“Well, it’s not going to be my father. I think you should call Planys Security tonight and ask them what’s going on. You get a call in the night and you assume it’s even true…”

“Oh, it’s true. It’s true he’s dead. I have no doubt of it. I have no doubt I’m targeted and your father is, and Planys Security can’t even take care of its own, let alone protect me here. These aren’t reasonable people.”

He didn’t like it. His heart had picked up the old familiar heavy beat. On one hand it felt like a trap. On the other…this woman might be inone, and in possession of information ReseuneSec was going to want. And if he could stay on the line and get a record down of this little playlet, naming names, it was safer for him and everyone attached to him.

“I don’t understand why my father has anything to do with this. And if you want protection, I can get ReseuneSec to go wherever you are–”

“Thieu,” she interrupted him, and somewhere in the background there was a noise, a thump, of some sort. “Oh my God,” she said. “Warrick, tell them! Tell them!”

“Tell them what?”

“Clavery! The name is Anton Clavery! Just–”

Something thumped. The phone quit. He grabbed his own robe, shoved his arms into the sleeves and headed past the end of the bed, out of the bedroom, taking down the small, useless table next to the door as he headed down the hall. Lights in the living area had come on, where Grant had passed.

He got that far before the front door opened and black‑uniformed security came bursting in–Marco and Wes, specifically, night shift, with Grant’s conspicuous red head just beyond that tall blot of black uniforms.

“Her phone went dead,” he said, out of breath. “I recorded it, as far as it went.” In that moment Catlin arrived, in a black tee and workout pants, unarmed, to all appearances, and probably straight from bed, while Marco walked over and took a look at the house minder unit. He didn’t know which one to address, or which, Marco or Catlin, was technically in charge. And he had a shaky moment of realizing he, ReseuneSec’s main target for years, had been babbling in that call, urging a woman’s cooperation with ReseuneSec, anxious to keep himself and Grant safe from whatever damned fool thing Jordan had brought on them in his eternal feud with Admin–and too sure, maybe, that his father hadn’t had anything to do with whatever was going on in Novgorod. He felt a vague sense of shame about turning coat on his father. But not enough. That collection of ReseuneSec in the hall–that had been Ari, young Ari, taking real power over a segment of that organization that had repeatedly arrested him. And he had urgently to deal with them–for Grant’s sake. “Catlin, it was Patil on the phone. Something’s wrong. She needs help. Security. Fast. She’s saying Thieu was killed. Someone interrupted her on the phone. Apparently violently.”

Catlin didn’t waste a breath. She had her com unit, and delivered a fast message somewhere that consisted of, “Information on Patil. Code 10. Her residence?” The last was a question aimed at him.

“I think it was,” he said. “Residence.” Second thought. “Maybe her office. I don’t know.”

“Residence andoffice,” Catlin said into the com. “Stat, find her, wherever she is.” She broke the contact. Grant, meanwhile, had gotten past building security at the door, still with the robe held like a towel, and Florian showed up behind him in the bottom half of a workout suit, dark hair in its usual curling disarray.

“Sera’s awake,” Florian said. “Ser Warrick. Did you call Dr. Patil?”

He shook his head. “She called me, out of nowhere. Said Thieu was dead.”

Up went the com unit, same fast contact. Florian said, into it: “Planys‑Sec, report on status of Dr. Raymond Thieu, researcher, retired.”

There was perhaps a brief silence on that contact. Grant made a quiet move toward him. Building security moved to restrain him. Catlin simply lifted a hand, on the phone with someone else, and security stood down, letting Grant through.

He grabbed Grant by the arm, in no mood to have them separately questioned. Gone over. Drugged. Any of those things. “I’m worried about my father,” he said to Florian. “She said someone was inside. On the inside.”

“Thieu is dead,” Florian said. It was a measure of trust that someone of Florian’s nature gave a piece of information to an outsider. And Florian immediately thumbed buttons on the com and called someone else. “Guard alert, Jordan Warrick’s residence. See to his safety. Report.”

“Thanks,” Justin said quietly. Two more individuals in security uniform had shown up at the door, and found their way in, people Justin had seen at Ari’s door this evening, people with the com rig and armament of personnel on duty. Her people. He stood there. He didn’t know what to do. He was in the middle of the mess, as clued in as anyone could be without that vital comlink. Meanwhile Grant, unflapped, dropped half his hold on the robe, calmly sorted out the top of it and put it on, tying it this time.

“Young sera, I believe, is more than awake,” Grant said, indicating it wasn’t all a case of Catlin and Florian running things at the moment.

“Your father has answered his phone, ser,” Florian said, “and agents are on their way to his door.”

That was a relief. He hadn’t known how much relief. He was scared for Jordan. He didn’t know why he was. Jordan hadn’t earned it, giving him that card. But he was glad to know Ari’s version of ReseuneSec was between Jordan and anything else stupid. He moved quietly over to the sideboard, out of the way, his own foyer and his living room having become security central in the last few moments. Feigning calm, he started to ask Grant to pour them both a vodka and orange, but at just that moment Ari showed up in the foyer, in a night robe, and with her dark hair in a pigtail.

“Justin?” she asked.

“It’s the card,” he said. “It’s that damned card. I don’t know what’s going on. Patil called, for no apparent reason, except she found out Thieu’s dead and then something happened when she was calling us. We have noidea. Would you like a vodka and orange?”

“I think I’d love one.”

“Sera,” Catlin said to her, “agents have entered Dr. Patil’s residence. They were on watch. They saw no one. But Patil has fallen out her window.”

“Fatally.”

“Quite fatally, sera. It’s twelve stories.”

“Oh, this is splendid!”

Grant had gone after the drinks. Justin stood frozen, rethinking what Patil had said last.

“Anton Clavery,” he said, then. “She gave that name, before–whatever happened.”

“The name is a new one,” Catlin remarked.

“We recorded everything, from the start. It’s all on the system, fast as Grant could get over and push the button.”

“Why would she call you?” Ari asked.

“I haven’t the least notion,” he began, then: “Hell. Yes, I do. She asked if I could get Jordan down the hall. She had my number, not his. She has–had–no concept of where we live, or the conditions he lives in. She couldn’t get through security to phone him.”

Catlin lifted a pale eyebrow, that was all. He suddenly wondered if that last statement was even true, or if for some unfathomed reason, Patil had specifically wanted to go through him–and just gave a wave of his hand.

“It’s all recorded. It’s what she said. I don’t know if she was telling the truth. She was upset. I guess she had reason.” He wanted to ask if Thieu had died of natural causes, curiosity being as natural to him as breathing; but no, he didn’t want to know that. He didn’t want to know anything about it.

Grant showed up with three drinks, poured the fast way, from the autobar unit. It was rescue. He presented the first to Ari, and only then it occurred to him that Ariane Emory didn’t drink things handed to her by people who’d just occasioned a midnight security alert.

But this Ari did, with only a little lift of her own brow. “Can we sit in your front room? It seems we’re all in the way here. It’s become ops. I do apologize for that.”

“Certainly,” he said, and showed her in, past Grant, at the small bar. “Sorry to have waked the whole house.”

“Thieu and Patil. What do youthink?”

Sideways jolt. She was good at that.

And two new thoughts hove onto the horizon, desperate and little likely. “Maybe someone’s tryingto involve my father. Maybe he thought that card somehow involved me in the first place. I don’t know what went through his mind.”

“Would he be honest with you if you asked?”

Because they couldn’t legally use anything but truthers on Jordan, and Jordan could beat those.

“I don’t know. He’s not speaking to me at the moment. Not since–not since that dinner.”

“I think it’s a good moment for you to talk to him. I think it’s a logical moment.”

One thing Ari had was a sense of timing. He could appreciate it–even if he had rather walk barefoot into the wilderness. “I won’t go there with Grant.”

“Grant won’t stay here,” Grant said.

“Dammit, Grant.”

“I take it I have leave to defend myself.”

“Absolutely,” Ari said.

“Ari.” Justin rounded on her with no hesitation. “If anything happens to him–I will neverforgive it.”

“If anything happens,” she said “Florian will be through, that door faster than you can blink.”

“And if I go there with yourentourage, he won’t say a thing.”

“Try,” she said.

Try. He looked at Grant, not at all liking it. He set the drink down, scarcely touched: he was going to need all his mental resources.

“Sorry to desert you,” he said, pro forma, and went back down the hall to the bedroom, righted the damaged table. Grant followed him.

“Sorry,” Grant said, “but you’re no safer in that apartment than I am. Two of us–”

“My own father,” he said bitterly. “You know, among born‑men, that’s actually supposed to count for something.”

“Two CITs are dead,” Grant said somberly. “And, I repeat, you’re not safe.”

“Damn,” he said, and grabbed random clothes from the closet.

BOOK THREE Section 2 Chapter iii

JUNE 12, 2424

0211H

Press of the button. Possibly the minder was set to ignore commotion at this hour. Justin knocked at the door. Forcefully.

“Ser,” Florian said, and reached past him with a keycard. The door opened, and Florian pushed the door open, but Justin put out an arm, barring his way.

“My father. Let me handle it alone. Please. There’s nothing wrong. Reasonable people are asleep at this hour.”

“Call out to him,” Florian said, not giving an inch.

“Dad?” he called out. “Jordan?”

Lights came up suddenly, throwing the apartment into brightness–an apartment like the one they’d had, once, much the same design, dining counter, kitchen, living area, all together…it evoked nostalgia every time he entered it.

“Go,” he said to Florian. “Wait outside. I’ll get better answers.”

“Block the door open until you’re sure,” Florian said, and went outside, leaving him, and Grant, Grant’s foot blocking the door from automatically shutting.

Paul came out first, in his nightrobe, Paul, looking as well‑groomed and civilized as usual. Jordan followed, much the same.

“Dad,” he said, “there’s an alarm on. You know that card you gave me? Patil’s dead. Thieu’s dead.”

Jordan stood there, raked a hand through his hair, didn’t say anything except, “Come in.”

Grant drew his foot from the door. It shut. Jordan was on his way to the couch. Paul was on his way to the bar.

“No drinks, thanks,” he said, and he and Grant sat down.

“I’ll have one,” Jordan said. “How did you get in?”

“Florian,” he said. Leveling with Jordan was the best policy, if it was something that obvious. “Sorry about that, but if they’re killing off people on Thieu’s social list, I wanted to be sure you were all right. What in hell’s going on?”

He had Jordan at rare disadvantage. And with a clank of glasses and two fast jets from the dispenser behind the bar, Paul was rapidly preparing a distraction.

“Dad.”

“Oh, cut the ‘Dad,’ boy.”

“Well, I try. I’m here. Patil called mebefore she died.”

“Florian’s out there?”

“I figured he wouldn’t add to the social setting. Yes, damned right I called security. Dr. Patil was upset. She wanted me to go down the hall and get you. She said she had my number and called me because she couldn’t get through to you.”

“Nice.” Jordan took the drink Paul handed him, had a sip. “So my own appeal couldn’t get you through my door, but you don’t mind bringing the little dear’s guards to burgle my apartment.”

“I was concerned for your safety. She was talking about somebody inside, Dad. Who would that be?”

“The possibilities are endless. Ari, some CIT–getting an azi past Reseune Supervisors wouldn’t be easy, but with inside help, who knows? Are we worried about assassins?”

“I’m worried for your safety. I’m worried for Grant’s and Paul’s. They didn’t ask to get involved in whatever crazy mess you’re in. Planys is a small place. Everybody knows everybody. Who would have killed an old man who didn’t have long to live anyway?”

“A long list of volunteers,” Jordan said, and took a drink of what looked like vodka. “The man was an insufferable egotist.”

Justin sat back against the couch, crossed one leg over the other. “I thought you were friends.”

“Society there is sparse.”

“Come on, Jordan. Tell me. What happened? I know you didn’t kill Ari. Everybody knows it. You were bitter, you wanted to strangle Denys, that didn’t happen, and you spent nearly twenty years in the company of a doddering old guy with an ego. That, I understand. But if this guy had associates that were getting to him past the security screen at PlanysLabs, where were they? How was Patil involved? Why were you carrying her card around? And why in bloody hell did you dump it on me?”

“So Ari’s got you asking her questions, has she?”

“I’m asking my own damn questions. I wouldn’t have, if you hadn’t shoved that card off on me, and if Patil hadn’t called me in the middle of the night a few minutes before someone shoved her out a twelfth‑story window–I call thatinvolvement. I call that a damned mess, and if you’ve got any key to Thieu’s goings‑on at Planys, I want it!”

“What? Afraid your nice career’s getting tarnished?”

“I’m afraid my father’s trying to tarnish it, thanks. I’m afraid my father’s decided to carry on a stupid war with a dead woman and can’t figure out what year it is!”

“Justin,” Grant said, a calm‑down.

Jordan grinned. “Got to you, did I?”

“It’s not a damn game!”

“Isn’t it? I don’t get out much lately. I need some amusement.”

“At my expense.”

“Anyway I can, son, anyway I can.”

“Oh, poor Jordan. Poor Jordan. I never thought you were a sympathy sponge. But that’s what you want. You want me to feel so sorry for you I’ll ask you what I can do to help you out. Well, hell!”

“You could ask Florian in for a drink.”

“Somehow I don’t think he will. He’s here to protect us both. And there will be guards. I’ll be real damned surprised if there aren’t guards dogging you down the halls, after this. So that’s what you won with this stupid stunt.”

“What stunt? The card? Did I pull the bandage off Reseune’s old sores’? Maybe they deserve airing.”

“Twenty years ago! Normal people don’t carry on a feud with a dead woman for twenty years, normal people don’t blame her daughter, normal people don’t try to get their own sons arrested for a damn joke!”

“You live with her. You never leave her.”

“She’s just a nice kid. You don’t give her a chance. No, you’ve got to play politics, and deadpolitics, at that. What have the Paxers got, since the War ended? Their war stopped, we’ve got the peace they wanted, and they’re still running around in back halls passing cryptic notes to each other and pasting up posters, what time they’re not blowing up children. The Centrists, hell, the lawwon’t let them mess up this planet–” Air went rarified. He didn’t doreal‑time work, but a woman had died tonight while she was talking to him, and he and Jordan were going to be closely guarded for the rest of their natural lives. So what the hell did it matter if Jordan got a year’s jump on what was going to go public anyhow? “You want the truth, Dad? I’m going to breach security right now and give you a name. Eversnow.”

“Actually no surprise. I know about your little secret.”

“Knew about it when you gave me that damned card?”

“I don’t think I want to tell you. Let ReseuneSec figure what to do about it.”

“Patil was your source.”

Jordan shrugged. “Or not.”

“So you know about it. All right. And certain Centrists know, but that doesn’t make them happy, because they’d have to go off in the deep dark and actually build their new Earth, which means no nice, warm offices and no influence in Novgorod, doesn’t it, so some of them aren’t as happy as they could be.”

“That could be true.”

“And then there’s the Abolitionists, oh, ask Grant about them. They know what’s moral for everybody but them. The world is going along pretty much on course, and the War’s over, so it’s unemployment for radical types…everybody’s too comfortable. They’re sending Patil out to handle Eversnow, and now somebody’s killed her. You know, but you don’t want to say how you know, and that doesn’t look damn good, Jordan, it doesn’t. You had your little fling with the Paxer element, which damn near got Grant killed… So what in hell are you involved in this time?”

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

“Dad. Talk to me.”

“So how do you know?”

“You can figure how I heard about it. From Ari.”

“From the little dear. Who keeps you from unemployment until the bills come due and your pretty, safe world blows up in your face. You know what your precious Ari is, son of mine? The same as the first one–a damn self‑contained genius with the power to run mindsets on the whole human species. You get all bothered about terraforming a planet we weren’t born to, oh, the poor microbes–the damn stupid megafauna that’s been turning this planet to desert for twenty million years: we’ve got to save them so they can go on desertifying the planet. We get all worked up about that, and never mind this one woman is imposing her mental design on the whole human species, dictating the social ratios from one end of space to the other, dictating the attitudes, the thoughts, the philosophies, of every single azi that gets his CIT status and turns into a breeding, proliferating citizen of this planet and everywhere else we reach! Every freedman on every station in Union space is teaching his kids the sacred dogma Ari Emory embedded in their psyches. Every planet we ever occupy and every station in Union space is going to be populated with just the right ratio of brilliant to moderately stupid that Ariane Emory decided is just fine and right for humanity. We don’t need a god. We’ve got one!”

“The Bureau of Defense was the one that landed a colony on Gehenna. The first Ari modified it so as notto create a human timebomb.”

“Do we know that?” Jordan fired back. “Seems it did pretty well at being a bomb. Alliance is still trying to figure out how to get the locals out of the bushes.”

“Good question. I’m sure I don’t know what she’s thinking and I don’t know what your Ari thought. But I’m even more sure the Defense Bureau doesn’t know what they’re doing from one campaign to the next, and if you want somebody to blame for this mess, Jordan, blame the people you were dealing with when it all went wrong. They wanted a weapon. A poison pill. They didn’t care how it got mopped up so long as Alliance had to do it, and now we’re not at war with Alliance, and you’re right when you ask what do we do now, sterilize the planet? It’s not going to happen, Dad. It’s what we’ve got to live with. It’s going to be this Ari’s problem.”

“We’ve got a whole new branch of the human species out there, thanks to her. What are we going to do with that, when it wants off its planet? Is it going to like us? We don’t fucking know, do we?”

“We’ll learn from it. And we’ll deal with it.”

“Oh, I’m sure we’ll learn. And I hope your little dear keeps her hands the hell off it before it gets worse. That’llcome back to make us sorry, no way it won’t.”

Deep breath. “So Gehenna worries you. Fine. Meanwhile your precious Centrists want to play god with Cyteen’s ecosystem. Populate the world. Turn it into Earth. And Eversnow’s not going to be good enough for most of them and now Patil’s dead. What do they want, Dad?”

“Well, tonight they haven’t got Thieu and they haven’t got Patil. I wonder how thatbenefits them. Idon’t think it does.”

He shut his mouth. For several seconds. He really didn’t want to know the next answer. “So who does it benefit? Do you know?”

“The short answer is, it doesn’t benefit them. Ergo it wasn’t the Centrists who did it.”

“A split in the Centrists? Centrists who were willing to have Eversnow be the project–versus those that aren’t? Yanni just made a deal with their leadership. I think you know that. I think maybe you’ve even discussed it with him.”

“So let these mythical asymmetrical Centrists all go play at Gehenna. There’s a nice lab. It bites back. They can’t make it worse than it is.”

“You gave me Patil’s card, Dad. Whatin hell was I supposed to do with it?”

“Take it to the little dear. What else would an upstanding lad like yourself do, who wants to keep his precious career spotless? Mine’s done. What do I care?”

“Your career isn’t done. It doesn’t need to be done.”

“My own son won’t work with me! What’s left?”

“For God’s sake don’t try pity, Jordan. I’ve got my own problems. You want my help, take it, or quit whining!”

Silence on the other side. Jordan spread his arms along the back of the other couch, feet extended and crossed. “Dear boy. Whining, is it?”

Somehow that posture conveyed threat. Justin became just a shade cautious. “I’d help you, Dad, I would. But everything I try to do for you is a risk. Not from her. From you. Every time I try to make a gesture, you slap it down. Every time I try to do anything for you, you do something to make me sorry I even tried.”

“Now who’s whining?”

“You dodged the question.”

“Ask it.”

“ Whatwas I supposed to do with Patil’s card? What were you doing with it? Why involve yourself with her? And why is she dead?”

Jordan sat unmoving for a moment, then leaned forward and took a sip of the vodka. “Shoved her out a window, you say? That would account for it.”

“Don’t take that tone with me.”

“The little dear can’t question me under drugs, so you volunteered.”

“I’m worried about you, dammit. Cooperate! You’re not guilty of anything.”

“Thank you,” Jordan said, with a salute of the glass. “Thank you. I appreciate that.”

“Well, then don’t act the part. Tell me what in hell you meant with the card.”

“Thieu talked a lot about her. A lot. Brilliant woman. Going to save the Centrist cause. Ad nauseam. Nothing’sgoing to save the Centrist cause. Never was a chance of it from the moment they passed the law that put Cyteen off‑limits for terraforming–of course, that was afterwe had ReseuneLabs and Novgorod andPlanysLabs already down here, not to mention Big Blue–here we were in the middle of a war, and with the no‑terraforming law that hampered us protecting ourselves, it got downright dicey trying to keep civilization going down here. But on‑world settlements suddenly seemed a good backup in case somebody got a strike in at the station. Military ne‑cess‑i‑ty. So we enacted the Habitation Zones Act–incidentally what I assume the little dear is relying on for this spurt of building I hear she’s indulging in upriver. Turns out she’s the best ally the Centrists have got. One little slip, one breach of quarantine, and they’ll have to designate another big slice of land into the Zones…wouldn’t thatbe ironic?”

“Do you know some specific threat? Somebody planning–”

“Hell if I know. Construction here. Construction upriver. Accidents happen. So Patil’s dead. Thieu’s dead. And Thieu wanted me to call Patil, as if I was a total fool. No, he didn’t give me the card. I didn’t even get it there. Turned up in my coat pocket the day I gave it to you.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. How should I know?”

“How do you think it got there?”

A shrug. “Library, restaurant–breakfast and lunch–I’d been in public places all day. I found it. I figured it for a set‑up like the last set‑up. I routinely leave my coat on my chair, all right? Paul’s usually there. At one point we both went to the salad bar. Possibly I’d left it at a table in Library and we were both off at another station. I do it every day. I don’t even know it happened that particular day. I don’t keep things in my coat pockets. I don’t put my hands there, as a rule. I felt something when I straightened the pocket flap. There was that damned card, like a visit from Thieu. But not. And I didn’t the hell like it. So I just returned it to ReseuneSec. I knew it would get there.”

“You didn’t run it through your computer, did you?”

“No. Am I a fool? I just gave it to you. Maybe your little dear would run it through her computers, if it got to her, precocious little egotist that she is. Maybe it’d just fuck the whole Reseune computer system and I wouldn’t be to blame.”

“My God, Dad, you’re talking like a teenager with a grudge. You don’t want to bring down the house computers.”

“I’m sure I don’t really care.” Jordan lifted his glass, second salute. “But she might port the business home to the agency responsible, whoever that is. Can I offer my son a drink?”

“Had some already. I need to be sober, dealing with you.”

“Excuses. –Grant?”

“No, ser, thank you.”

“At least youdon’t find an excuse.”

“No, ser,” Grant said, “I don’t. And won’t. You meant for Justin to be arrested. That would have made Justin mad at Admin, and it could have caused trouble for Thieu and Patil, maybe, but more likely you found a way to get rid of the card right under security’s nose, and you did it because they can’t ask you how you got it, and you can play games with them. How does that train of logic apply to the facts of the case?”

“Remarkable. You’ve gotten very deviously CIT, Grant.”

“I hope not.”

“Certainly you’ve acquired a great imagination. Very nice. I suppose I have to credit Ari’s work in you.”

“Dammit, Dad, leave him out of this!”

A little smile, cold as ice. “ Youdon’t leave him out of this.”

“I chose to be here, ser,” Grant said calmly. “Forgive me.”

“Oh, I forgive you. I forgive my son. I just don’t forgive her.”

“Is it true?” Justin asked sharply. “Is Grant right? Was it what you were after, getting Thieu investigated? Or nailing whoever gave you that card?”

“Some of both,” Jordan said. “I’d no desire to have Thieu foul up my life. It turns up in my pocket, and I can only assume one of two things–either it’s some devotee of Thieu’s and I’m supposed to use it, or I’m supposed to be caught with it and arrested; so I passed it on in the same generous spirit in which it was given. You–what do you care? You’ve got the little darling to protect you. You’re not going to get in trouble. I had no inclination to call Patil, based on it, and carry on Thieu’s social agenda for some third party–if that’s all it was. I didn’t figure it came from her. Thieu has political contacts, or did, when he was functioning. He always assumed I was what I was sentenced for–assumed I was a poor fellow Centrist, badly done by because I’d murdered Ari. I never disabused him of that notion. It kept him happy, babbling his theories, giving me printouts, all his grand designs for his project that the legislature had axed with the Habitation Zones Act, on and on and on…for twenty damned years. After a while, he didn’t even take the trouble to be clandestine about it. He just rattled on. And so I was supposed to call Patil. I didn’t. So somebody came looking for me to give me a shove. Not my fault.”

“Dad, just talk to Yanni. Tell him all this. Talk to him.”

“Damn Yanni. You deal with him. I don’t have to. The law says I’m off limits to their inquiries. Fine. I was off limits when they sentenced me to that hellhole with that damned fool and the rest of the spacecases. They can come begging, after this. They can damned well give me lab access, access to my work, my license back–They can do thatif they want anything out of me! Those are my conditions.”

Suddenly a handful of things clicked into place, logic, motive. Jordan wasn’t a fool. He was a man who’d been in a hard, hard spot when the first Ari died–and if he’d quarreled bitterly with Ariane Emory, he’d been at outright war with the Nyes, particularly Giraud. “I’ll present that case,” Justin said. “Honestly I will.”

“You don’t have to,” Jordan said, and drank off the melt in his glass. “Her faithful shadow’s out there, isn’t he, and we’re bugged as all hell. They know what I said. They can weigh it for what it’s worth or call me a liar.”

Justin shrugged. Drew in a breath and took a chance. “I might take that drink, Dad.”

“Fix it yourself.” Jordan waved his glass toward the bar, toward him. “Fix me another while you’re at it.”

“I’ll do it,” Grant said, and got up and took the glass with him.

“Could ask Florian in,” Jordan muttered. “Damn spook. He’s getting to look like the first Florian. Getting to act like him, too.”

“He wouldn’t come in,” Justin said. He didn’t want the excuse of the intrusion. “And he won’t drink on duty. But don’t be surprised to see Security in your hallway hereafter. They’re upset, two murders on opposite sides of the world, no explanations, and both of us are at risk.”

“Just one of those little puzzles Security loves, isn’t it? And we’re two of their favorite subjects.”

Grant brought Jordan and him their drinks, and went back to the bar with Paul’s empty glass.

“Personally, I’m still glad Security’s out there,” Justin said, after a first sip. “I don’t want to be getting a midnight call about you.”

“Oh, just look at us. We’re caring about each other. Heartwarming.”

Too easy to come back in sarcastic kind. Jordan invited it, tried to turn everything to vinegar. Justin took another sip from his glass. “Mirror into mirror. We’re too apt to fight. But let’s face it, I have a certain position, one that I fought for in Giraud Nye’s time. He didn’t like me much. Didn’t like you, ergo didn’t like me, and I paid for it.”

“Sorry.” The tone wasn’t.

“Not your fault, particularly. The Nyes knew damned well you were innocent. Maybe that’s why Giraud distrusted me, expecting the wrath of the wronged, maybe–or just misliking the fact I got close to Ari–her doing, not mine. Ari, outside of being the incarnation you deplore, is a pretty good little kid in her spare time. Always has been. She stood between me and Giraud. I returned the favor, as best I could, with the other Nye, when he decided she had to go–because, believe me, you and I weren’t well off during Denys’ tenure, and we’d have been worse off, still, if it weren’t for that young girl. There’s a lot of history, a lot of history you weren’t here for, but she kept me alive, and ever since she did in her uncle, she keeps me able to work, keeps Grant safe, and that’s a fair debt I owe her. She rescued you, if you don’t know it–pulled you out of Planys during the height of the set‑to with Denys and got you behind Reseune’s internal security. Whatever you think about it, you’re alive. So I’m not interested in your feud with her. Sorry. You can’t convert me.” He took a deep pull at the liquid, felt the previous sips finally hitting his nerves with a deceptive calm. “But I do sympathize with you. It may not have involved getting slammed against the wall by security–not my favorite moments, those–but I do understand the sense of restriction. They sent all the problem cases over to Planys during the War. I don’t think it must have been particularly sparkling society, or a particularly happy one.”

“They put us under pressure and bugged the place,” Jordan said, “and we all knew it. Iwas innocent of what sent me there–in deed, if not in thought. And that put me pretty well on the outs, finally, because everybody but Thieu eventually knew I wasn’t guilty–but they courted me for their various causes and tried to put on sympathy for my plight. God, it was a bloody comedy. ReseuneSec should have put me on payroll. I’d go to venues that supposedly weren’t bugged. I was damned sure they were. And I talked, and they recorded, and sometimes certain particularly obnoxious people just went away.” A small, bitter laugh. “I tell you, I was a valuable resource. ReseuneSec wouldn’t have wanted to give me up. But when Giraud Nye died–after that happened, I really watched what I ate and drank. I figured there might be orders floating in the system, maybe posthumous ones from him–maybe current ones from Denys, who knows? I didn’t trust it when the little dear declared bygones were bygones and shoved Paul and me onto a plane…”

BOOK THREE Section 2 Chapter iv

JUNE 12, 2424

0321H

“Interesting comment,” Florian said somberly, when he and Catlin reviewed the record, with Marco and Wes in the room. “If it’s true about the card, possibly someone in ReseuneSec was trying to draw a wrong action out of Warrick. Or maybe it had, as he said, completely different motives, and came from some source that ought not to be inside these walls.”

“Pursue it,” Catlin said. She looked tired. None of them had gotten a great deal of sleep this night.

But they had gotten Justin and Grant home uncontaminated, at least in the sense of poison and deepteach drugs. Justin and Grant were, by now, sleeping it off, sera herself had managed to get some late sleep, after a two in the morning call to Yanni, and by now Rafael and their outward apparatus, within ReseuneSec, were instructed to haul in information and sort it: security assignments, who was in what hall, in the restaurants in question, everything, not to mention who had access to Thieu, and who had come and gone in Patil’s condominium complex.

It was, to all appearances, death by catastrophic heart failure, in Thieu’s case–autopsy had yet to determine more specifics. It was even possible it was naturaldeath, a body which had ceased to renew itself, arteries and veins and cardiac tissue losing their prolonged youthful character, in the sort of fairly rapid decline that attended rejuv failure. It didn’t take much to tip a fragile body off the edge. Somebody might have applied that pressure.

The force, however, that had torn a sealed window out of its mount and sent Sandur Patil ten stories to the roof of an adjacent cooling tower–that was a plainly hostile action, on the shockwave of a grenade hand‑launcher. Sniffers, applied within the hour in the corridor and lifts, had turned up molecular evidence that had yet to match up with anyone in files, which meant the perpetrator had either confounded the scene with a puffer, available, some sophisticated ones quite expensively so, in Novgorod’s CIT underworld. That, or whoever had so spectacularly done in Patil was a novice with a hitherto clean record, and thus not on file. They could run the sniffer data and get an ID of everybody who’d been near that apartment…but on the grounds of the heavy firepower involved, beyond most novices, Florian personally bet on a puffer in use, specifically designed to foil a sniffer and confuse the scene. That was going to take the chemists time to sort out. The launcher, however–that wasn’t a short‑range weapon. It wasn’t the sort of thing a professional took to a quiet assassination. Whoever had done this was making a statement.

In the meanwhile–their whole staff lost sleep.

“No shortage of Paxer talent to produce a bogus card,” Wes said. “Somebody could have done it off any letter she sent with her letterhead.”

“ReseuneSec calls it clean,” Catlin said. “Electronically speaking clean, nanistically clean. No microprint in the typeface, so it was a private printer, but definitely with Planys microtags. That indicates only that the paper was produced to be used in Planys. Not that it was. The printer site could be anywhere.”

“And the card was planted eight weeks before two of the principals die,” Marco said. “The card was planted on the day the Council voted on a black budget for Eversnow. It could be coincidence: it could be connected, but somebody had all the pieces ready–the file, the card stock, the access to Jordan Warrick.”

“News reports,” Florian said, “still say publicly only that there’s new construction for Fargone. Patil’s name wasn’t publicly connected with either the real facts or the published cover. But she wasn’t at all reticent about the fact that she was taking an appointment with Reseune at Fargone. They didn’t forbid her to talk about it, and she talked to colleagues. The University was making adjustments in her teaching schedule for September. It’s possible she wasn’t totally discreet. All it takes is one slip.”

“Defense was still managing her,” Wes said, “even if she was publicly switching to Reseune payroll. She remained under Defense rules.”

“Seems so,” Florian said. “If they’d wanted her silenced, they could have done that with a phone call. So they didn’t object at all to the farewell parties, or she didn’t listen. Maybe it leaked to the Paxers–maybe through office staff, someone she confided in.”

“Defense is in elections,” Wes said. “Jacques is in office, Spurlin and Khalid are running. There are two strong factions in Defense. Only Jacques has the say, Spurlin is generally with Jacques; Khalid–Khalid is a problem. What his feelings are on the Eversnow project, we have no idea.”

“Somebody certainly silenced Patil for good,” Catlin said. “That’s one. And also assured she won’t take that appointment, which Yanni offered her, which at least half of Defense wanted, which Citizens, Information, and Trade all wanted, and which Reseune was funding. She was evidently the most universally acceptable candidate. Her death doesn’t need a card from Planys to threaten Yanni’s interests. One who might, on the surface, have motive, is sera herself. It slows a program she doesn’t favor. But that’s nowhere in question, and we know she didn’t.”

“Suppose someone inside Reseune opposes Yanni, or Eversnow, or the agreement Yanni made,” Florian said. “They could pose a danger. Someone violently opposes Yanni’s program.”

“A problem,” Marco said, “an outsider, can come into Reseune Township on a barge out of Novgorod, with a load of fertilizer. Can live there, if he’s good at blending in. There’s a lot of people in town that don’t need a keycard to survive.”

Wes said, “I don’t think sera is in imminent danger. Taking out Yanni or Hicks would be a safer move, to stop Eversnow…unless they have extraordinary penetration. Sera’s become too hard a target.”

“And the elder Warrick said he knew about Eversnow,” Catlin said. “If that’s true, where did he get his information?”

“I remain worried about sera’s safety,” Marco said. “Certain people might like to have her gone, and Warrick to blame. Again. Even if supporting Jordan Warrick against Reseune Admin is part of the Paxer cause. It’s good cover–to support the innocence of the man they’ve framed.”

“Or maybe,” Wes said, “they want confusion. Patil’s double‑crossed them, in their view. They kill her. And they set up something to stir up trouble and make Warrick an issue again–by getting him arrested for his connection to her assassination. But that requires that card be found in his possession, and it wasn’t…because he wouldn’t have it; he’d given it to Justin. He’s smart; he saw the chance of something aimed at him. He didn’t want to be tagged with it. He got rid of it as fast as he could, in a way that has ReseuneSec and sera’s staff quarreling over it.”

“That part makes sense,” Florian said. The rest of the world didn’t know that sera herself had begun to move on Yanni, and that everything was bound to change soon; and if that leaked and became public, it was going to cause agitation in many quarters. It wasn’t even to be mentioned to Wes and Marco, yet. “We’ve got a safe copy of the code on the card. It didn’t contain anything but Patil’s academic vita…on the surface, no slink or ferret. Hicks’ office has sent the card over to the experts. They’re having their own go at it, just to see if there’s a code in the apparent content. ReseuneSec has their report coming. I want our own done, with a copy of the analysis, directly to us.”

“I’ll let youport it to that wing,” Catlin said to Florian. “ Youtalk to them.”

Florian smiled absently. The dedicated experts, azi, were odd beyond all reason, monofocused alphas who’d rather deal with code than eat or sleep or do most anything. A couple of sensible betas sat as directors over the lot, the human Supervisor, himself a specialist, being almost as eetee as the azi he supervised. “Should have done before now, anyway.” He punched the recording on again.

“I was surprised it was a large plane,”Jordan Warrick said. “I was surprised we weren’t being sent to some even more remote hellhole. I was surprised when we crossed the ocean. I was moderately surprised we ended up landing at Reseune. And I was surprised to learn Yanni was somewhat in charge despite the little darling. Life was just a chain of surprises that week. I still remain surprised we’re alive. That could always change. We’re here. One of Thieu’s connections tried to get me involved with his pet pupil. I declined. She’s dead. He’s dead. I’m here, and I’ll be here for the rest of time. I’m not involved, but nobody’s going to believe it. What more can I do?”

And Justin Warrick, “Just don’t antagonize Admin, for God’s sake, Dad, just settle in, forget the damn card, just answer any questions they ask–”

“The hell!”

“Answer them, dammit! Leave it for Security. Live your life. Ask Yanni for a few cases, and get busy, high‑level, low‑level, it doesn’t matter. I’ll go to him…”

“But you haven’t done it, have you? I seem to remember you were going to do that.”