Cyteen

i

The landing gear extended as they made their approach at Planys and Grant looked out the window while the blue-grays and browns of native Cyteen passed under the right wing. His heart beat very fast. His hands were sweating and he clenched them as the wheels touched and the plane braked.

He was traveling with Reseune Security: Reseune Security flew with everyone who came and went from Planys, they had told him that. But he was still afraid—afraid of nameless things, because his memory of plane flights involved suspicion, Winfield and Kruger, the crazy people who had tried to re-program him, and an utter nightmare when Reseune Security had pulled him out, drugged and semiconscious, and flown him away to hospital and interrogations.

Twelve hours in the air, and chop and finally monotony over endless ocean in the dark—had calmed him somewhat. He had not wanted to tell Justin—and had not—what an irrational, badly fluxed anxiety he had worked himself into over this trip.

Transference, he told himself clinically, absolutely classic CIT-psych transference. He had gathered up all his anxieties about Justin's safety at home, about his own vulnerability traveling alone into Planys and about knowing no matter what Justin and Jordan insisted, he was not the one of them Jordan wanted most to see—and the plane flight was a convenient focus.

The plane would go down in the ocean. There would be sabotage. There were lunatics who would attempt to shoot it down– The engines would simply fail and they would crash on takeoff.

He had spent a great deal of the flight with his hands clenched on the armrests as if that levitation could hold the plane in the air.

He had been nervous in flight when he had been seventeen, but he had not had cold sweats—which showed that, over the years, he had become more and more CIT.

Now, with the wheels on the ground, he had no more excuses. The anxieties had to attach where they belonged, on meeting Jordan, and the fact that, azi that he was, he did not know what to say to the man he had once called his father; and who had been, whatever else, his Supervisor all during his childhood.

The thought of disappointing Jordan, of being that disappointment—was almost enough to make him wish the plane had gone down.

Except there was Justin, who loved him enough to give him the chance to go, who had fought for it and held out for it through all the contrived delays, the breaks in communication—everything, so that when permission came to travel again– he could go first. They hoped there would be another chance directly after. But there was no guarantee, there was never a guarantee.

Please, he had said to Jordan, in that last phone call before the flight. I really feel awkward about this. Justin should come first.

Shut up, Justin had said over his shoulder. This time is yours. There'll be others.

I want you to come, Jordan had said. Of course I want you.

Which had affected him more than was good for him, he thought. It made a little pain in his chest. It was a CIT kind of feeling, pure flux, which meant that he ought to take tape and go deep and let Justin try to take that ambivalence away before it disturbed his value-sets. But Justin would argue with him. And that curious pain was a feeling he wanted to understand: it seemed a window into CIT mentality, and a valuable thing to understand, in his profession, in the projects he did with Justin. So he let it fester, thinking, when he could be more sensible about it: maybe this is the downside of the deep-set links. Or maybe it's just surface-set flux: but should it make such physiological reactions?

The plane rolled up to the terminal: Justin had said there was no tube-connection, but there was, and there was a good long wait while they got the plane hosed down and the tube-connect sealed down.

Then everyone began to get up and change into D-suits, the way Justin had said they would.

He did as the Security escort asked him. He put on the flimsy protection over his clothes and walked out into the tube and through into Decontamination.

Foam and another hose-down, and a safety-barrier, where he had to strip the suit off and step out, without touching its exterior—

In places he had been, like Krugers', if one had to make a fast transfer, one held one's breath, got to shelter, held an oxy mask tight to one's face with one hand and stripped with the other under a hosing-down that was supposed to take any woolwood fiber down the drain.

Planys was terrifyingly elaborate, a long series of procedures that made him wonder what he had been exposed to, or whether all this was just to make people at this desolate place feel safer.

"This way, ser," one of the Decon agents said, and took him by the elbow and brought him aside into a small alcove.

Body-search. He expected this too, and stripped down when they told him and suffered through the procedure, a little cold, a little anxious, but even Reseune Security people got this treatment going in or out of Planys. So they said.

Not mentioning what they did to the luggage.

"Grant," Jordan said, in person, meeting him in the hall, and:

"Hello, ser," he said, suddenly shy and formal, the surface-sets knowing he should go and embrace Jordan, and the deep-sets knowing him as a Supervisor, and knowing him from his childhood, when all instruction had come from him, and he was God and teacher.

This was the man Justin would have become, if rejuv had not stopped them both a decade earlier.

He did not move. He could not, suddenly, cope with this. Jordan came and embraced him instead.

"My God, you've grown," Jordan said, patting him on the back. "Vid didn't show how tall you'd grown. Look at the shoulders on you! What are you doing, working docks?"

"No, ser." He let Jordan lead him to his office, where Paul waited– Paul, who had doctored his skinned knees and Justin's. Paul embraced him too. Then the reality of where he was began to settle through the flux and he began to believe in being here, in being welcome, in everything being all right.

But there were no guards in the office. That was not the way Justin had warned him it would be.

Jordan smiled at him and said: "They'll send the papers up as soon as they've been over them—Justin did send that report with you, didn't he?"

"Yes, ser. Absolutely."

"Damn, it's good to see you."

"I thought—security would be more than it is." Are we monitored, ser? What's going on?

"I told you it's been saner here. That's one of the things. Come on, we're closing up the office. We'll go home, fix dinner—not as fancy as Reseune, but we've got real groceries. We bought a ham for the occasion. Wine from Pell, not the synth stuff."

His spirits lifted. He was still anxious, but Jordan, he thought, was in charge of things; he relaxed a bit into dependency, azi on Supervisor, which he had not done with Justin—

–had not done since he was in hospital, recovering from Giraud's probes. Had never done, after, because he was always either Justin's caretaker or Justin's partner.

It was like years of pressure falling away from him, to follow Jordan when he said Come, to sink into azi simplicity with someone he could trust—someone, finally, besides Justin, who would not harm him, who knew the place better than he did, and whose wishes were sane and sensible.

It was finally, one brief interlude in all these years, not his responsibility.

Only when he thought that, he thought: No, I can't stop watching things. I can't trust anything. Not even Jordan—that far.

He felt exhausted then, as if just for a few weeks he would like to go somewhere and do mindless work under someone's direction, and be fed and sleep and have responsibility for nothing.

That was not what he could do.

He walked with them to the apartment they had; and inside, and looked around him– Things are very grim there, Justin had said. Very primitive.

It was certainly not Reseune. The chairs were plastic and metal; the tables were plastic; the whole decor was plastic, except a corner full of real geraniums, under light, and a fish-tank, and a general inefficient pleasantness to the place that had all the stamp of CITs in residence . . . what Justin called a homey feeling, and what he thought of as the CIT compulsion to collect things charged with flux and full of fractals. A potted geranium represented the open fields. The fish were random, living motion. The water was assurance of life-requirements in abundance; and made a fractally repetitive sound which might be soothing to flux-habituated, non-analytical minds. God knew what else. He only knew Justin had let all the plants die after Jordan left, but when things started to go well, Justin began to fuss with a few plants, which always died back and thrived by turns—in time to the rise and fall of Justin's spirits.

Healthy plants, Grant reckoned, were a very good sign among CITs.

Things felt safe here, he thought as he gave his jacket up and let Paul hang it in the closet, people were tolerably happy here.

So the improvements in the world, the changes that had made this last couple of years more livable, even happy—had gotten to Planys too, despite the frustrations of the Paxer scare. All the same he wished Jordan knew even a few of the multitudinous signals he and Justin had worked out, the little indicators whether a thing was to be believed.

Maybe Jordan picked up his nervousness, because Jordan looked at him, laughed and said: "Relax. They monitor us from time to time. It's all right. Hello, Jean!" —to the ceiling.

"We know each other," Jordan said then. "Planys is a very small establishment. Sit down. We'll make coffee. God, there's so much to talk about."

ii

It was very lonely, the apartment without Grant. There was ample justification for worry, and Justin swore he was not going to spend four uninterrupted days at it.

So he read awhile, did tape awhile, an E-dose only, a piece of fluff from library. And read again. Ari had given him an advance copy of Emory's IN PRINCIPIO, the first of the three-volume annotated edition of Emory's archived notes, which the Bureau of Science was publishing in cooperation with the Bureau of Information, and which was now selling as fast as presses could turn them out in the Cyteen edition and already on its way on ships which had bid fabulously for it, a packet of information destined for various stations which would in turn pay for the license, sell printout and electronic repros to their own populations and sell more rights to ships bound further on.

Even, possibly, more than possibly, to Earth.

While Reseune accounts piled up an astonishing amount of credit.

Every library wanted copies. Scientists in the field did. But it was selling in the general market with a demand that could only be called hysteria: a volume of extremely heavy going, illustrated, with annotations so extensive there were about three lines of Emory's notes to every page, and the rest was commentary, provided by himself and by Grant, among others: he was the JW and Grant was the GALX; YS was Yanni Schwartz; and WP, Wendell Peterson; and AE2 was Ari, who had gotten the original text out of Archive and provided reference notes on some of the most obscure parts. DN was Denys Nye; GN was Giraud; JE was John Edwards; and PI was Petros Ivanoy, besides dozens of techs and assistants who served in editing and collation—each department head and administrator to read and vet the material from his own staff.

Dr. Justin Warrick, it said in the fine print in the table of contributors. Which, secretly, like a little child, he read over and over just to see it confirmed. Grant, they listed as Grant ALX Warrick, E.P., emeritus psychologiae, which meant an azi who should have a doctorate in psych, and would have, automatically, if he became CIT. It pleased Grant more than Grant would let on.

CIT silliness, Grant had said. My patients certainly don't care.

But it was there, in print. And meanwhile the general public was buying copies, long waiting lists at booksellers—the Bureau had figured on strong library interest, but never anticipated average citizens would buy them, and certainly was bewildered that they were selling at that rate at a pre-publication price of 250 cred per volume—until an embarrassed Bureau of Information cut the price to 120 and then to 75, based on advance orders; and that brought in an absolute flood of orders. There were precious few sales in fiche or tape, except to the libraries: the actual books, printed on permasheet, thank you, were status objects: one could hardly display a microfilm to one-up one's neighbors.

Young Ari avowed herself completely bewildered by the phenomenon.

People know, Justin had said to her, that your predecessor did tremendously important things. They don't know what she did. They certainly can't understand the notes. But they feel like they ought to understand. What you ought to do, you know—is write a volume of your own notes: your own perspective on doing the volume. The things you've learned from your predecessor. You ask the BI if they'd be interested in the rights to that.

Not surprisingly, Information jumped at the chance.

Now Ari was struggling to put her own notes in shape. And coming to him with: Do you think . . . and sometimes just chatter—about the hidden notes, about things as full of revelations as the books he had spent a year helping annotate with the barest explanations of the principles involved.

She had sent a copy of IN PRINCIPIO to Jordan.

"Because it has your name in it," Ari had said to him, "and Grant's."

"If it gets through," he had said. "Planys Security may not like it. Not to mention Customs."

"All right," she had said. "So I'll send it with Security. Let them argue with that."

She did thoughtful things like that. In a year and a half in her wing she had come through with every promise she had made, gotten him and Grant a secretary, taken the pressure off—

If something went wrong or something glitched, Florian was on the phone very quickly; and if Florian could not resolve it, it was—Wait, ser, sera will handle it—after which Ari would be on the line, with a technique that ranged rapidly between This has to be mistaken— to a flare that department heads learned to avoid. Maybe it was a realization Ari might remember these things in future. Maybe—Justin suspected so—it was because that voice could start so soft, go to a controlled low resonance uncommon at her age—then pick up volume in a punch that made nerves jump: that made his jump, for certain, and evoked memories. But she never raised that voice with him, never pushed him, always said please and thank you—until he found himself actually on the inside of a very safe circle and liking where he worked—with a small, niggling fear that he was losing his edge, becoming less worried, less defensive, relying too much on Ari's promises—

Fool, he told himself.

But he grew so tired of fighting, and the thought that he might have reached a situation where he could draw breath awhile, that he might actually have found a land of safety, even if it meant difficulties to come. . . later was all right.

Ari was well aware of what came in and out of her wing, was aggressively defensive of her staffs time—her attention to pennies and minutes was, God, the living echo of Jane Strassen; so that, beyond the annotations which totaled about a hundred twenty pages between himself and Grant, and three months' intensive work, she accepted only design work for her wing, only troubleshooting after others had done the brute work, and it went, thank God, immediately back to junior levels in some other wing when he or Grant had provided the fix, no returns, no would-you-mind's? and no 'but we thought you could do that, we're running behind.'

So he critiqued Ari's work, answered Ari's questions, did the few fixes her wing ran, and had the actual majority of his time to use on his own projects—as Grant did, doing study of his own on the applications of endocrine matrix theory in azi tape, which Grant was going to get a chance to talk over with Jordan—Grant was very much looking forward to it.

They were, overall, happier than he remembered since—a long time; and it was the damnedest thing, waking up in the middle of the night as he did, with nightmares he could not remember.

Or stopping sometimes in the middle of work or walking home or wherever, overwhelmed by a second's panic, of nothing he could name except fear of the ground under his feet, fear that he was being a fool, and fear because he had no choice but be where he was.

Fear, perhaps, that he had not won: that he had in fact lost by the decisions he had made, and it would only take some few years yet to come clear to him.

All of which, he told himself severely, was a neurotic, compulsive state, and he resisted it—tried to weed it out when he found it operative. But take tape for it, he would not; not even have Grant run a little tranquilizing posthyp on him—being afraid of that too.

Fool, he told himself, exasperated at the track his thoughts tended to run, and marked his place and laid the book aside.

Emory for bedtime reading.

Maybe it was the fact he could still hear that voice, the exact inflection she would use on those lines he read.

And the nerves still twitched.

He rattled around an empty apartment in the morning, toasted a biscuit for breakfast, and went to the office—not the cramped, single office he and Grant had used for years, but the triple suite that Ari had leased—physically in the Ed Wing, which was back, in a sense, to where they had begun—simply because that wing had space and no one else did: an office apiece for himself and Grant, and one for Em, the secretary the pool had sent, a plump, earnest lad quite glad to get into a permanent situation where he could, conceivably, come up in rating.

He read the general advisories, the monthly plea from catering to book major orders a week in advance; a tirade from Yanni about through-traffic in Wing One, people cutting through the lower hall. Em arrived at 0900, anxious at finding the office already open, and got to work on the filing while he started on the current design.

That went on till lunch and during—a pocket-roll and a cup of coffee in the office; and a concentration that left him stiff-shouldered and blinking when the insistent blip of an Urgent Message started flashing in the upper left corner of the screen.

He keyed to it. It flashed up:

I need to talk to you. I'm working at home today. —AE.

He picked up the phone. "Ari, Base One," he told it.

Florian answered. "Yes, ser, just a second." And immediately, Ari: "Justin. Something's come up. I need to talk to you."

"Sure, I'll meet you at your office." Is it Grant? God, has something happened?

"Meet me here. Your card's cleared. Endit."

"Ari, I don't—"

The Base had gone off. Dammit.

He did not meet Ari except with Grant; except in the offices; except sometimes with Catlin and Florian, out to lunch or an early dinner. He kept it that way.

But if something had happened, Ari would not want to argue details over the phone; if something had happened with Grant—

He keyed off the machine, and got up and went, gathering up his jacket, telling Em to shut down and go home, everything was fine.

He headed over to the wing where Ari's apartment was, showed his card to Security at the doors and got a pass-through without question.

Dammit, he thought, his heart pounding, it had better be a good reason, it had better be business—

It had better not be because Grant was momentarily not in the picture.

"Come in," Florian said, at the door. "Sera is waiting for you."

"What does she want?" he asked, not committing himself. "Florian, —is this a good idea?"

"Yes, ser," Florian said without hesitation.

He walked in then, sweating, not only from the trip over. The room, the travertine floors, the couch—was a vivid flash of then and now. "Is it Grant?"

"Your jacket, ser? Sera urgently needs to talk with you."

"About what? —What's happened?"

"Your jacket, ser?"

He pulled the jacket off, jerked a resistant sleeve free, handed it to Florian as Ari arrived in the living room from the right-hand hall.

"What in hell's going on?" he asked.

She gestured toward the sunken living room, the couch; and came down the steps to take a seat there.

He came and sat down at the opposing corner. Not the private living room: thank God. He did not think he could have held together.

"Justin," she said, "thank you for coming. I know—I know how you feel about this place. But it's the only place—the only one I'm absolutely sure there's no monitoring but mine. I want you to tell me the truth, now, the absolute truth: Grant's safety depends on this. Is your father working with the Paxers?"

"My– God. No. No. —How in hell could he?"

"Let me tell you: I've got a report on my desk that says there are leaks out of Planys. That your father—has been talking with a suspect. Security is watching Grant very carefully. They fully expect Jordan to attempt an intervention with him—"

"He wouldn't! Not—not on something like that. He wouldn't do that to Grant."

"Your father could manage something like that without tape, without anything but a keyword, with someone of Grant's ability. I know what Grant's memory is like."

"He won't do it. It's a damned set-up."

"It may be," she said quietly. "That's why I wanted to talk to you, fast, before Security has a chance, because I'll do this: I'll look for all the truth. I'm the one it's against. And I've been aware of this—for a while; from long before Grant got that pass. Grant's gone into the middle of a Security operation that I don't want to agree with. I don't want to think that Grant could work against me, or that you could, but I have to protect myself—which is why I took this chance."

"I don't understand." He felt the old panic—too experienced to give way to it. Keep the opposition calm, keep the voices down, go along with things. He did not think Ari was at the head of whatever was going on, not with what he knew of where authority was in the House. "Ari, tell me what's going on."

"People who protect me ... don't want me near you. That's why I waited and let Grant go—because I knew—I know very well that it's a set-up against you, which is why I called you to come here."

"Why is that? What do you want?"

"Because I have to know. That's first. And I know how you hate this place, but it's the only place, the only place I can trust." She reached into her left-hand pocket, and pulled out a little vial. Amber glass. "This is kat. It's a deep dose. You can help me or you can leave now. But this is the chance I have. You go in the tape lab and take this, and let me get you on tape—I promise, I promise, Justin, no lousy tricks. Just the truth on tape, for me to use. This is what I need. This is the kind of documentation I can use with the Bureau, if I have to go that far. This is the chance I have to believe you."

He flashed badly, totally disoriented, unable to think for a few breaths. Then he reached out for the vial and she gave it to him.

Because there was no choice. Not a thing he could do. He only thought– God, I don't know if I can do this. I don't know if I can stay sane.

"Where?" he said.

"Florian," she said; and he got up shakily and went after Florian as Florian indicated the hallway to the right.

An open door on the right again was the tape library, with a couch with all the built-ins for deep-study. He walked in and sat down there, set the vial down on the couch beside him and pulled off his sweater, feeling lightheaded. "I want Ari here," he said, "I want to talk to her."

"Yes, ser," Florian said. "There's no lead, ser, it's just a patch, let me help you."

" I want to talk to Ari."

"I'm here," she said at the door. "I'm right here."

"Pay attention," he said shortly. And uncapped the vial and took his pill, while the cardiac monitor flashed red with alarms. He looked at the flashes and concentrated, willing himself calmer. "Your patient tends to panic, sera, I hope to hell you remember that."

"I'll remember," Ari said, very quietly.

He worked with the monitor, staring at that, concentrating only on the rate of the flashes. A thought about his father leaked through, about Grant, a single second, and the light flickered rapidly; slow, he thought, that was all, while the numbness started and panic tried to assert itself. He felt a touch on his shoulder, heard Florian urging him: "Lie down, ser, please, just lean back. I've got you." '•

He blinked, thinking for a moment of the boy-Florian, spinning through the years to Florian grown strong enough to handle his weight, Florian bending over him—

"Be calm, ser," his gentle voice said. "Be calm. Are you comfortable?"

He felt an underlying panic, very diffuse. He felt the numbness growing, and his vision started going out. His heart began to speed, frighteningly, run– away.

"Calm," Ari said, a voice that jolted through his panic, absolute. "Steady down. It's all right. Everything's all right. Hear me?"

iii

"Has your father ever worked with these people?" Ari asked, sitting by the side of the couch, holding Justin's limp hand.

"No," he said. Which meant, of course, to the limit of Justin's knowledge. No, no, and no. She saw the cardiac monitor flash with a very strong rise in heart rate.

"Conspired with anyone against Reseune Administration?"

"No."

"Have you?"

"No."

Not conspiring with anyone. Against Reseune. Against Ariane Emory.

Justin, at least, was not aware of any plot.

"Don't you ever get frustrated with Security?"

"Yes."

"Do you think things will ever change?"

"I—hope."

"What do you hope?"

"Keep quiet. Live quiet. People believe me. Then things change."

"Are you afraid?"

"Always."

"Of what?"

"Mistakes. Enemies."

He hoped if he could work with her—it would prove something about himself and his father, in a calmer world—

He was afraid for Grant more than Jordan. Jordan had his Special's status to protect him. Grant—if they interrogated him—would be subject to things they might try to impose on him, ideas and attitudes they might try to shape– Grant would resist it. Grant would throw himself into null and stay there: he had before. But if they kept working at him—

If he were arrested, here, in Reseune, if Reseune Administration was determined to make a case, then they could do that. He thought that could be the case—that politics always mattered more than truth. And more than a Warrick life—always.

"Jordan's not a killer," Justin said. "He's not like that. Whatever happened was an accident. He made his mistake in trying to cover it, that's what I know happened."

"How do you know it?"

"I know my father."

"Even after twenty years?"

"Yes."

He was close to the upturn, when the drug would fade. And she was all but hoarse from questions and from strain.

She thought: I almost know enough to take on what Ari did. Almost. But he's not the boy she worked with.

I could Work him to make him want me. So easily. So easily.

She remembered the tape, remembered it with sexual flashes that troubled her.

And thought, thinking of the possible intersections with so many, many knot-ups in his sets: Damn, no. Damn, damn, Ari, not so fast, not so reckless.

I could make him happy. I could take all of that away—

Politics is real and everything else takes second place, he knows that—There's that on top of everything that's wrong in him.

I could make him worry less. I can make him trust me more.

Is even that—fair? Or safe—in the world the way it is, or inside Reseune?

She got up, cut the recorder off and sat down on the edge of the couch beside him. She touched his face very gently, saw the monitor blips increase. "Hush, it's all right, it's all right—" she said, until she could get the monitor blips down again.

"Justin," she said when it was running even, "I believe you. You'd never hurt me. You'd never let me be hurt. I know all those things. I don't think they're going to make a move on Grant—not now that I've got you on record. I can tell my uncle what I have, and at the same time I'll tell him Grant's in my wing, and he'd better not move against him. That's what I'm prepared to do, because I believe you. Do you understand me?"

"Yes." A little flutter from the monitor.

"Don't be anxious about this place. This is my home. My predecessor isn't here anymore. That's all gone. That's all gone. You're safe here. I want you to remember these things. I can't get what I'd like out of hospital, without them knowing I'm doing this—but I want you to do the deep-fix for me, the way Grant could do it. Can you do that? Bear down hard, feel good, and remember this."

"Yes. . . ."

"I want you to think: I'm going to believe this forever. I promise you, if you trust me, if you come to me and if Grant comes to me when you need help, I'll do the best I can. You can rest now. You'll wake up feeling fine, and you'll be all right. Do you hear me?"

"Yes."

No flutter now, just a strong, steady beat. She got up, signaled Florian and Catlin to be very quiet, patted Justin gently on the shoulder. You stay with him, she signaled Florian.

And to Catlin, in the hall, she said: "What's the news?"

"Nothing more than we had," Catlin said.

"Stand by in case Florian needs you." She went to her own office and phoned Denys directly.

"Seely," she said, "I need Denys, right now." And when Denys came on: "Uncle Denys, how are you?"

"I'm quite well, Ari, how are you?"

"I wanted to tell you something. I've gotten very nervous about the situation, you know, with Grant being out and all, and Grant is vulnerable, so I asked Justin to talk with me about it—"

"Ari, this involves exterior Security. I strongly suggest you let this alone."

"I've done it already. I want an order, uncle Denys, for Grant to be immune to Security, I don't care if something should go on at Planys with Jordan, I have an agreement with Justin—"

"I'm sorry, Ari, this isn't at all wise. You don't tie down your Security people. You have no business making promises to Justin, especially to Justin. I've talked to you about this."

"This is the agreement, uncle Denys. Justin's agreed to take a probe with my security."

"Ari, you're interfering in a matter you have no expertise in whatsoever, that involves your safety. I won't have that."

"Uncle Denys, I've been thinking a lot. It runs like this: I'm getting a lot more grown-up. People couldn't ever make a campaign out of killing a cute kid. Paxers and all these groups haven't come out into the open all at once just by coincidence. They see me getting older, they know that I'm real, they know I'm going to be a lot of trouble to them someday, and they're going to throw everything they've got at me in the next few years. But you know what occurs to me, uncle Denys? That could be true on this staff too, inside Reseune. And I'm not going to have my staff tampered with by anybody except me."

"Ari, that's halfway prudent, but you're meddling with a kind of situation you're not equipped to deal with."

"I perfectly well am, uncle Denys. I'm not going to be reasonable on this. I want Grant back without any problems. Florian's going to meet the plane and bring him up here, and I'm going to talk to him, myself, with trank. If I find out anyone else has, I'm going to be real upset. I don't care if it's Jordan, or if it's Reseune Security, either one, I'm going to be real upset."

"Ari, —"

"I'm just telling you, uncle Denys. I know you don't like it. And I don't want to fight with you. Look at it from my point of view. You're getting up there in years, you could have a stroke or something—where would that leave me, if I don't have control of my own wing? I'd have to trust a lot of people all of a sudden, without knowing what's going on. And I don't ever want to be in that situation, uncle Denys."

"We've got to talk about this."

"We can. Only I want your promise that you're not going to let Security touch Grant even if you think Jordan did something to him: I'll tell you how Justin feels about it—if Jordan did something like that, Justin would be real mad. And that would mean Justin would be on my side about it. But if you did, then Justin would be mad at me. There's an old proverb about muddying up the water, do you know it? I'm getting old enough I don't want other people's notions of what's good for me muddying up the waters I have to swim in for the rest of my life, uncle Denys. That's exactly what it comes down to."

"I appreciate your feelings, Ari, but you'd better gather your data before you interfere with an operation, not after."

"We can talk about this as much as you like and you give me advice I know is going to be worth listening to. But then's then. Now is, I'm not going to have them messed with by anybody. They're in my wing and I've made promises I'm going to keep. If you do anything else, you cut me down with my own staff, and I'm not going to have that, uncle Denys. That's a promise."

There was a long silence on the other end. "Have you discussed with Justin the chance that Grant might have been tampered with?"

"He's afraid of it. He's the one brought it up with me. He's willing to trust me in this, uncle Denys, not Reseune Security, strange as that may seem—but then, by what he tells me Reseune Security isn't very polite. I've got his deposition that Grant went out of here clean, uncle Denys. I've got it under deep probe, and I'm quite sure of it. So we'll find out when Grant gets back, won't we? I'll be happy to lend you a transcript of the interview."

Another long silence. "That's very kind of you. Dammit, Ari, Justin's got medical cautions, he's got major problems, I don't care if he thought this would be better, you're a seventeen-year-old kid—"

"Eighteen in two months, which is going on twenty in the way Base One reckons. And damned good, uncle, damned good ... or what's all your work good for, you want to answer me that one, uncle Denys? I've been running interventions on Florian and Catlin for more than five years, so I'm not really likely to slip up, am I?"

"I'm telling you, Ari, dammit, you've seen the tape Ari made, you know you're dealing with a man with a damn tenuous hold on sanity where you're concerned, and you want to go running interventions on him? We're talking about a thirty-six-year-old man who's lived half his life with a problem, and you want to meddle with it, alone, without any protection for yourself or him if he has a heart attack or slides over the mental edge. You want to know what you're meddling with, young sera, you could be working in your office, minding your own business someday, and have that young man come through the door with a knife, that's what you're playing with. We're dealing with a grown man a long time and a whole lot of business past that incident when he was your age—he's changed, what Ari planted in him has had time to mutate unwatched, he won't go in for therapy, and like a fool, because I agreed with him, he had to become self-guiding, I let him decline therapy. Now it's turned out to be a major mistake. I had no idea my niece was going to let her glands interfere with her common sense, my dear, I certainly had no idea she was going to take this unstable young man to her bosom and make an adolescent fool of herself, no indeed, I didn't. And, my God! the kind of pressure you can put on this young man with your well-intentioned meddling– Don't you understand, child, Reseune has never intended any harm to Justin Warrick? We know his value, we've worked with him, we've done the best we could to secure his future and to prevent him from precisely the kind of blow-up you're courting with your meddling. And whose fault will it be then?"

"All that's very fine, uncle Denys, but I know what I'm doing, and my reasons stand."

A long silence.

"We'll talk about this," Denys said then.

"Yes. We will. But in the meantime you call Planys and call Security there and tell them be damned careful they don't lay a hand on Grant."

"All right, Ari. You get your way on this. We'll talk about it. But I don't just get that transcript. I get the tape of the session. You know what a transcript is worth. If you want my support in this let's try a little cooperation, shall we?"

"That's all I want, uncle Denys. You're still a dear."

"Ari, dammit, we're not talking about a little thing here."

"My birthday's coming up, uncle Denys. You know I'd like a party this year. I really would."

" I don't think this is the time to discuss it."

"Lunch, the 18th?"

Back, then, to Base One to be sure that call went the way uncle Denys said.

Be careful, Ari senior had said, using the information in the expanded base, because it was so easy to slip up and reveal what one should not have known—like exactly what Security was doing half a world away.

So one lied. One tried to get very good at it.

She went back to the library, because Catlin reported that Justin was coming out of it, quietly, still a little fuzzed—which was not a bad time to explain something.

So she sat down on the couch where Justin lay drowsing with the lights dimmed, with a light blanket over him and Florian keeping watch near him.

"How are you?" she asked.

"Not uncomfortable," he said, and a little line appeared between his brows as he tried to move. He gave that up. "I'm a bit gone yet. Let me rest.

Don't talk to me."

On the defensive. Not the time with him, then. She laid her hand on his shoulder. "You can try to wake up a bit," she said. That was an intervention too, but a benign one. "Everything's fine. I knew you were all right. And I've talked to uncle Denys and told him keep hands off Grant, so Grant's going to be safe, but I do need to talk to you. Meanwhile you're going to stay in the guest room tonight. I don't think you ought to go back to your apartment till you're really awake."

"I can leave," he said.

"Of course you can, when you're able to argue, but not tonight. If you like, I'll have Florian guard your door all night, so it'll be very proper. It's completely in the other wing from my room. All right? As soon as you can walk all right, Florian will put you to bed."

"Home," he said.

"Sorry," she said. "I need to talk to you in the morning. You shouldn't leave before then. Go to sleep now."

That was, in his state, a very strong suggestion. His eyelids drifted lower, jerked, lowered completely.

"Guest bedroom," she told Florian. "Soon as he can. I do want you to stay with him, just to be sure he's safe."

iv

It was a strange bed, a moment of panic. Justin turned his head and saw Florian lying on his stomach on the second bed, fully dressed, boyish face innocent in the glow from the single wall-light. Eyes open.

He thought that he remembered walking to this room, that it was down a hallway he could remember, but he was still disoriented and he still felt a touch of panic at the remembrance of the drugs. He thought that he ought to be distraught to be where he was, flat-tranked as he was. He lay half-asleep, thinking that as the numbness let up he would suffer reactions. He was still dressed, except his sweater and his shoes. Someone had put a blanket over him, put a pillow under his head. It was, thank God, not Ari's bedroom.

"You're awake, ser?"

"Yes," he said, and Florian gathered himself up to sit on the edge of the other bed.

"Minder," Florian said aloud, "wake Ari. Tell her Justin is awake."

Justin shoved himself up on his hands, caught his balance, rubbed at his stubbled face.

"What time—?"

"Time?" Florian asked the Minder.

"0436," it said.

"We should start breakfast," Florian said. "It's near enough to the time sera usually gets up. There's a guest kit in the bath, ser. A robe if you like, but sera will probably dress. Will you be all right while I check on my partner?"

"Sera is almost ready," Catlin said, and poured him coffee, Catlin—whose blonde hair was for once unbraided, a pale rippled sheet past black-uniformed shoulders. "Cream, ser?"

"No," he said, "thank you."

Kids, he thought. The whole situation should be funny as hell, himself—at his age—virtually kidnapped, tripped, and finally solicitously fed breakfast by a pack of damned kids . . .

Not feeling too badly, he thought. Not as rough as one of Giraud's trips, in any sense. But he was wrung out, his lungs felt too open, and his limbs felt watery and altogether undependable.

Which they would, considering what a physiological shock that much cataphoric was; which was the reason for the mineral and vitamin pill Catlin put on a dish and gave to him, and which he took with his coffee without arguing.

It was a cure for the post-kat shakes, at least.

Ari arrived, in a simple blue sweater and blue pants, her black hair loose as she almost never wore it nowadays. Like Ari-the-child. Ari pulled back the chair at his right and sat down. "Good morning. —Thanks, Catlin." As Catlin poured coffee and added cream. And to him: "How are you feeling? Are you all right?"

"You said you had something important to say," Justin said. "About Grant," Ari said, straightway. Then: "—We can make anything you want for breakfast."

"No. Thanks. Dammit, Ari, let's not do games, shall we?"

"I'm not. I just want to make sure you get something to eat. Have some toast at least. There's real honey."

He reached for it, smothering temper, patiently buttered it and put on a bit of the honey. An entire apiary set-up over in Moreyville, along with several other burgeoning commercializations. Fish. Exotics. Frogs. Moreyville was talking about expanding upriver, blasting out space on the Volga and creating new flats for agricultural use.

"This is the thing," Ari said, "I talked to uncle Denys last night and Denys pulled Security away from Grant. We had a bit of a fight about it. But I told him I couldn't trust having people in my wing gone over by people I don't know. It came down to that. So this is the deal we made. I run my own Security checks, and if I'm satisfied, that's all that gets done. What you have to do is agree that if there is a question, —I do an interview and get it settled." He stared at the piece of toast in his hand, without appetite. "Meaning you run another probe."

"Justin, I hope there won't be any more questions. But this Pax thing is really dangerous. It's going to get worse—because they're seeing I'm serious. There aren't very many people anywhere I can trust. There aren't very many people anywhere you can trust either, because when politics gets thick as it's going to get—you know better than I do how innocent people get hurt. You remember you asked me to do something for your father. Well, I have: I probably stopped him from being arrested last night, at least on suspicion, and I know I stopped Grant from getting probed by Security. Probably your father won't even know how close it was, and if you'll take my advice, please don't tell him. Grant's going to get home all right. Your father's safe. And you're not any worse off this morning than yesterday, are you?"

"I don't know." Shaken up, dammit, which I wasn't, yesterday. I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, and, God, where's a choice?

"You don't want to deal with Security," Ari said. "Giraud doesn't like you, Justin, he really doesn't like you. I don't need professional psych to pick that up. I want you to stay; and that means everybody in the universe will know you could be a pressure point against me—they could put pressure on you, or Grant, or Jordan. Giraud certainly is going to put the pressure on and try to prove something against you or your father—if we don't have contrary evidence that you're working with me. That's what I need. I need it from you and I need it from Grant, and if you do that, then you'll be my friend and you'll have Security working to protect you. If you don't—I've got to put you and Grant out—outside, where you can't be trusted, because every enemy I've got will think of you and Grant and Jordan just as levers to be used. That's the way it is. And I think you know that. That's why you told me last night you hoped if you stayed close to me—you could make things better. You said that. Do you remember?"

"I don't remember. But I would have said that."

"I want you to be in my wing, I want you to work with me—but being on the inside of my Security means if I have the least idea something could be wrong, —I have to ask questions. That's the way it is."

"Not much choice, is there?" He took a bite of the toast, swallowed, found the honey friendlier to his stomach than he had thought it would be. "You expect me to order Grant to take a probe from a seventeen-year-old kid?"

"I don't want him to be upset. I wish you'd at least explain to him."

"Dammit, I —"

"He's safe, isn't he? When you see him off the plane, you'll know I kept my promise; and you can tell him why I'm doing it. Then you'll both be safe from anybody else. You won't have to worry about people making mistakes anymore, or blaming you for things. And I'm not a kid, Justin. I'm not. I know what I'm doing. I just don't have much real power yet. That's why I can't reach out of my wing to protect my friends, that's why I'm doing such a damn stupid thing as bringing you on the inside under my Security wall—you and a few others of my friends."

"Us. Grant and me. Sure, Ari. Sure, you are. Let's have the truth for a minute. Are you working some maneuver around your uncles—or did Giraud suggest this?"

"No. I trust you."

"Then you're damn stupid. Which I don't think you are."

"You figure it. You and Grant are the only adult help I can get that, first, I have to have, because I need you; second, that I can constantly check on, because there's nobody but you who needs something I can do, that only I'm willing to do. Sure I can hire help. So can my opposition."

"So can your opposition—threaten my father."

"Not—past my net. You're part of it. You'll tell me if you think he's threatened. And you figure it: are you safer on your own? Is Grant? Not at all. Besides which—if your safety is linked to mine—it's not really likely your father would make a real move against Reseune, is it?"

He stared at her, shocked; and finally shrugged and took another bite of toast and washed it down.

"You know, I tried this same move with your predecessor when I was seventeen," he said. "Blackmail. You know what it did for me."

"Not blackmail. I'm just saying what is. I'm saying if you go out that door and I put you out of my wing—"

"I get it from Giraud faster than I can turn around, I get it and Grant gets it, every time he finds an excuse. That's real clear. Thanks."

"Justin—Giraud might make up a case. I hate to say that. There's a lot good about Giraud. But he's capable of things like that. And he's dying. Don't tell that. I'm not supposed to know. But it's changed a lot of his motives. He and Jordan never got along—not personally, not professionally, not at all: they had a terrible fight when Jordan was working with Ari—really, terribly bitter. He disagrees with what he sees as a whole Warrick attitude—an influence toward a whole slant of procedure, a kind of interventionist way of proceeding that in his mind permeated Education and got out into the tapes through what he called 'Warrick's influence.' Which isn't so. Ari knew what she was doing. She knew absolutely what she was doing, and what Giraud hates so much was really Ari's—but you can't make him understand that. In Giraud's mind Jordan was the source of that whole movement—in fact, I think in Jordan's own mind Jordan was the source of the whole movement—which was never true. But Giraud won't believe it. He wants to settle the Centrists before he dies, because Denys is getting on in years too, and Giraud foresees a time when his generation will be gone and I'll still be vulnerable. He sees your father as a pawn the Centrists could use. He sees you as a reservoir of Warrick influence in Reseune, me as a kid thinking with her glands, and he's desperate to get you away from me. So I've not only got to convince myself you're clean-clearance, I've got to convince uncle Denys and Giraud I'm absolutely sure what I'm doing. I can handle them, however crazy I make it sound . . . because I'm going to tell them I've got Ari's notes on your case." He swallowed hard. "Have you?"

"That's what I'm going to tell them."

"I heard what you're going to tell them! I also know you just evaded me. You do have them, don't you?"

"You also know that whatever I say occasionally about what I'd like to be the truth, I do lie sometimes. Yanni says there are professional lies and they're all right. They're what you do for good reasons."

"Dammit—"

"I'm lying to protect you."

"To whom? You have her kinds of twists, young sera. I hope to hell it doesn't extend deeper."

"I'm your friend. I wish I were more than that. But I'm not. Trust me in this. If you can't—the way you say—who can you? I've kept you out of Detention. And I'll give you the session tape, I always will. With Grant too. I don't ever want you to doubt each other."

"Dammit, Ari."

"Let's be honest. That's an issue, and I'm disposing of it. Let's try another. You think I'll intervene with you—the way I'm going to tell Denys. You know—let's be plain about it—you're safer with me running unsupervised than with Giraud with all the safeguards there are. You're worried about trusting yourself and Grant to a kid. But I'm Ari's student. Directly. And Yanni's. I'm not certified . . . not just because I've never bothered to be. There are a lot of things I can do that I don't want on Bureau records yet. I confess to some very immature thoughts. Some very selfish thoughts. But I didn't do it. You woke up down the hall, didn't you?"

He felt his face go red. And expected a flash, in this place, under strained circumstances, but it was faint and almost without charge, just the older face, Ari getting ready for work, matter-of-factly, leaving him there with the kind of damage he had taken. . . .

He felt resentment, that was all... resentment much more than shame.

"You did something," he said to the seventeen-year-old. His seventeen-year-old.

"I told you calm down about this place," she said. "I figured it would bother you. I didn't think that was unethical."

"Ethics had nothing to do with it, sera. No more than with her."

She looked a little shocked, a little hurt. And he wished to hell he had kept that behind his teeth.

"Sorry," he said. "I didn't mean that. But, dammit to hell, Ari! If you've got to take these trips, stay off the peripheries with me!"

"It's embarrassing for you," she said, "because I'm so young, —isn't it?"

He thought about that. Tried to calm down. Temper. Not fright. And what she had said. "Yes, it's embarrassing."

"For me, too. Because you're so much older. I feel like you're going to critique everything I do, all the time. It makes me nervous, isn't that funny?"

"That's not the word I'd pick for it."

"I will listen to you."

"Come on, Ari, let's not do games, didn't I say? Don't play little-girl with me. You've stopped listening to everyone."

"I still listen to my friends. I'm not my predecessor. You'll remember me saying that top, —don't you?"

Another jolt at nerves. "I think that's only a question of semantics."

She reacted with a little flicker of the eyes, and a laugh. "Point. But there, you're pretty quick this morning. Aren't you?"

It was true. That self-analysis was what kept him from total panic. "You have a lighter touch than Giraud," he said. "I give you that, young sera." Young sera annoyed her. He knew it did. He saw the little reaction on that too. A man didn't go to bed with young sera. And she was being honest. He saw the little frown he expected, that, by all that was accurate about flux, said that she was probably being straightforward this morning—or the reactions would have showed. "But I want the tape of what you did. And I want to talk to Grant."

v

It was riding with Amy that afternoon—herself on the Filly, Amy on the horse they called Bayard—Amy had found that in a story, so the third filly had a name, unlike goats and pigs who were usually just numbers, except a few who were exceptional.

Filly's just the Filly, Ari had said. And the Mare's Daughter they called the Daughter, or Filly Two, and Filly Two was Florian's even if he couldn't own her: no CIT was ever to ride her. But the third was Bayard, and that was Amy Carnath's horse; and the fourth and fifth and sixth belonged to Maddy and Sam and 'Stasi, what time they were not doing little runs into the fields, doing work, delivering items out where trucks would crush the plants and a human walking was too slow.

There was going to be a stable and an arena just for the horses someday, Ari had decided. Space in the safe zones was always at a premium and uncle Denys called it extravagant and refused to allow it.

But she had notions of exporting to Novgorod, animals just to look at and watch for a few years, but someday to sell use of, the way the skill tapes of riding and of handling animals sold as fast as they could turn them out—to people who wanted to know what pigs and goats and horses were like and how they moved, and what riding a horse felt like. Spacers bought those skill tapes, marketed as entertainment Sensatape. Stationers did. People from one end of space to the other knew how to ride, who had never laid eye or hand on a horse.

That more than paid for the stable and the arena, she had argued; and the earth-moving and the widening of Reseune's flat-space: the horses did not need the depth of soil that agriculture did, and the manure meant good ground.

They eat their weight in gold, Denys had objected, with no, no, and no.

Grain is a renewable resource, she had said, nastily. It likes manure.

No, said Denys. We're not undertaking any expansions; we're not making any headlines with any extravagance in this political atmosphere; it's not prudent, Ari.

Someday, she had said, defeated.

Meanwhile the horses were theirs, unique, and did their small amount of work.

While out in the riding pen was the best place in Reseune besides her apartment to go to have a talk without worrying about security; and it had its own benefits, when it came to being casual and getting Amy Carnath to relax and talk about really sensitive things.

Because Amy was not happy lately. Sam had taken up with Maria Cortez-Campbell, who was a nice girl; Stef was back with Yvgenia; and Amy—rode a lot and spent a lot of time studying and tending the export business, which had sort of drawn her into a full sub-manager rating in the whole huge Reseune Exports division and a provisional project supervisor's rating in the Genetics Research division.

Amy was always the brightest. Amy was getting a figure, finally, at seventeen, at least something of a figure. She was getting pretty in a kind of long-boned way, not because she was pretty, but because she was just interesting-looking, and might get more so.

And Amy was too damned smart to be happy, because there just happened to be a shortage of equally smart boys in her generation. Tommy was the only one who came close, and Tommy was Amy's cousin, not interested in the same field, and mostly interested in Maddy Strassen anyway. That pair was getting halfway serious, on both sides.

"How are things?" she asked Amy when they were out and away from everyone, under a tranquil sky. And prepared herself for a long story.

"All right," Amy said, and sighed. That was all.

Not like Amy at all. Usually it was damn Stef Dietrich, and a long list of grievances.

She didn't know this Amy. Ari looked at her across the moving gap between the horses, and said: "It doesn't sound all right."

"Just the same old stuff," Amy said. "Stef. Mama. That's the condensed report."

"You'll be legal this month. You can do anything you damn please. And you've got a slot in my wing, I always told you that."

"I can't do any damn thing," Amy said. "Justin—he's real. I've got a pack of stuff in Exports. Merchandising stuff is all I do. That's all I use my psych for. That's not your kind of business. I don't know what you'd want me for."

"You've got a clean Security clearance, cleanest of all my friends. You're good at business. You'd be a good Super, you'd be good at most anything you wanted to take on, that's your trouble. You get small-focused into doing it instead of learning it; and I want you learning for a while. Remember when I snagged you into the tunnels and we started off the whole gang? That's why I asked you out here before I talked to anybody. You were always first."

"What are you talking about?" Amy suddenly looked scared. "First at what?"

"That this time it's for real. That this time I'm not talking about kid pranks, this time I'm talking about getting a position in the House. Things are shifting, they're shifting real fast. So I'm starting with you, the same way I did back then. Will you work for me, Amy?"

"Doing what?"

"Genetics. Whatever project you want to come up with for a cover. A real one. A put-together till you can make up your mind. I don't care. You go on salary, you get your share of your own profits—all that." Amy's eyes were very large.

"I want you and Maddy in two different divisions," Ari said, "because I'm not going to put you two one over the other. That'd never work. But between you and me, you're smarter than she is, you're steadier, and you're the one I'd trust with the bad stuff. And there could be. Giraud is on the end of his rejuv. That's secret. A very few people know, but probably more and more will guess. When he dies, that's an election in Science. That's also about the time the Paxers and the rest of the people who want me dead—for real, Amy."

"I know it's real."

"You know why they made me and how they taught me, and you know what I am. And you know my predecessor had enemies who wanted her dead, and one who killed her. The closer I get to what she was, the more scared people get—because I'm kind of spooky, Amy, I'm real spooky to a lot of people who weren't half as afraid of my predecessor– Are you scared of me? Tell me the truth, Amy."

"Not– scared of you. Not really. Spooky is a good word for it. Because you're not—not the age you are; and you are, with us. Maddy and I have talked about it, sometimes. How we—sometimes just want to do something stupid, just for relief sometimes. Like sometimes—" Amy rode in silence a moment, patting Bayard's shoulder. "My mama gets so mad at me because I do spooky things, like she thinks I'm a kid and she worries about me, and she treats me like a kid. One time she yelled at me: Amy, I don't care what Ari Emory does or what Ari Emory says, you're my daughter—don't you look at me like that and don't you tell me how to bring you up. And she slapped me in the face. And I just stood there. I—didn't know what to do. I couldn't hit her. I couldn't run away crying or throw things. I just—stood there. So she cried. And then I cried, but not because she hit me, —just because I knew I wasn't what she wanted me to be." Amy looked up at the sky. There was a glitter of tears in the sunlight. "So, well, mama's got the notion I'm going to leave when I can, and she's sorry. We had a talk about it, finally. She's the one who's scared of you. She doesn't understand me and she thinks you're all to blame for me not having a childhood. That's what she says. You never got a chance to be a child. I don't know, I thought I had a childhood. We had a hell of a good time. Stuff mama doesn't know. But I don't like it anymore. I'm tired of little games, Ari, you know what I mean. I'm tired of Stef Dietrich, I'm tired of fighting with mama, I'm tired of going to classes and playing guessing-games with Windy Peterson on his damn trick questions and eetee rules and catch-you's. I think Maddy's about the same."

"Can you work with Sam?"

"Hell, he's got that airbrain of his—that's not nice to say, is it? I can't see what he sees in her."

"Don't mess him up, Amy."

"I won't. I'm through with all of it. You know what I want? I want exactly what you've got with Florian. No fuss. No petty spats. No jealousy. Moment I can afford it—"

"You want to take me up on the offer, I'll reckon you'd be a lot more efficient with an assistant. My feeling is you'd be frustrated as hell with anything but an Alpha and there's probably only a handful of those still unContracted. I'll give you a printout of all the numbers there are. Green Barracks is the most likely source. Which means somebody more like Catlin, but still, —you could fix that."

Amy just stared. And blushed a little.

"Someday," Ari said, "you'll be a wing Super yourself. That's what I intend. Someday I'll run Reseune, and we're not playing just-suppose now, we're dealing with long-term. I want you to have the kind of support you're going to need; I want you to have somebody capable of protecting you and of handling jobs you're too busy to do, and in your case, male and smart are two real necessities. Another female—you'd kill. Do I psych you right?"

Amy laughed suddenly, and colored a little. "I don't know. —I need time to think about this."

"Sure. You've got five minutes."

"No fair, Ari."

"Same thing as under the stairs. Same thing as then. I need my friends now, I need you first. And there's a real danger—-if I'm a target, you could be too."

Amy bit her lip. "I don't mind that. I really don't. I mind the row it's going to make with mama. You know what I think? She wants to hang onto me. She sees you as more of an influence than she is, and she always planned me to go into Ed psych, never mind I'm better at other things."

"Hell, look at me. You think a PR doesn't have to figure out who's who?"

"I know that. But your—predecessor—isn't around to give you looks across the breakfast table."

"Whose life are you going to live? Yours or hers?"

Amy nodded finally. "Or mine or yours? I'm mine, Ari. I don't want you supporting me. If it's a real job, if it's my money, I'm fine."

"Deal."

"Deal," Amy said.

"So now we go get Maddy. And then we go for Sam. And Tommy."

" 'Stasi's all right," Amy said. " I don't mind her. But Stef Dietrich can go walk, for what I think."

"Stef's not in my crew," Ari said. "No hard feelings, but he's a troublemaker, and I don't need him." She stretched in the stirrups and settled again and said: "We get Maddy. Sam and Tommy. 'Stasi, I've got no objection to. But everybody comes in in just the same order they always did. Seniority. Something like that. I'll tell you: I've got one major problem, one major vulnerability, and one major help—and they're all Justin Warrick. He'll help us. But there's a lot coming at him. And he and Grant are the only ones with us who aren't us, you know what I mean."

"He's smart enough to be trouble," Amy said. "I've thought about that. My uncles don't want him near me. The Warrick influence, they call it. They say he's poison. I know other things. I can tell you stuff, Amy, if you're in with me."

"I am."

"Denys is interested in Ari's notes—Ari's notes and the psychogenesis project—but I've held back on him. I put all the stuff in three blocs: one, I don't talk about. And the general notes—that's the published stuff, and the stuff that's going to be published. The Rubin project stuff: that's mostly secret, but that whole security wall is a farce—I'm public, and anybody who understands endocrine theory can figure a lot of what happened to me– You know one of the things they really want to keep secret? Justin Warrick. Because he's not Jordan, but he's sure not a Bok clone either, and he could become a voice inside Reseune—if they ever let him have a forum; because he's smart, he understands what I am, and he's a Special in everything but title, one of Ari's students—that's something they don't publicize either—another Special, PR of a Special, a lot more important than Rubin, no matter what they've sold the Defense department. Ari worked him like everything—but they don't tell Defense that either, because they're scared as hell of him and his influence. I think Denys is sure Ari worked with him. Denys is the one who's kept him from getting treatment—for things that really bother him, things Ari did with him—and her murder really messed him up, terribly, not just that his father did it, but that he needed her—so much."

"What did she do?"

"A real major intervention. Right before she was murdered. Something she never finished, something that pretty well set the pattern of Justin's life. Beyond that—it's personal to him, and I won't say. But it was rough."

"Like the stuff they did to you?"

She thought about that a moment. "A lot, yes. A lot. With some differences. Jordan wanted him to be like Jordan. He wouldn't have been. Ari knew what she wanted out of that geneset and she got it. That's the real story. She manipulated CIT deep-sets . . . with real accuracy." Amy gave her a look.

"Psychogenesis can go two ways," Ari said, "just like any other kind of cloning. Either an identical—or a designer job. I'm as close an identical as you're likely to get. I told Justin I wasn't my predecessor and he said that was only a game of semantics. And I think he's right about that. There were real differences: my maman; Ollie; Denys—he wasn't Geoffrey Carnath, not by half, thank God. A lot of different things happened. But I had Florian and Catlin; I had no doubt the theories I was handed—worked. I could feel it work. I know what put me ahead of Ari. I had to work. I was scared. I couldn't just sink into out-there and survive on people taking care of me. I learned to focus-down and to work real-time, and to think out-there too.

That's the real lesson. Bok's clone never came in out of the dark, never owned anything, never was anything. You know what I'd have answered to the land of questions that poor woman got? Go to hell! And if piano-playing was what I did, damn, I'd do it! And maybe I'd spit in the eye of math teachers who didn't teach me the kind of things Bok must have learned—like being in space, dammit! Like living like a spacer! Like knowing math is life and death! —Bok's clone got dry theory. She was creative, and they gave her dry dust. They cushioned her from everything. And they couldn't understand her music. She was a lousy pianist. She couldn't transcribe worth shit. But I wonder what kind of music she heard in her head, and why she spent more and more time there? I'm not sure she did fail. Maybe the damn geniuses couldn't talk to her. Maybe their notation didn't work for her. I wonder what the whole symphony was, and whether she was playing accompaniment. —Huh." She shook herself. "That's spooky, too, isn't it?"

"They ran her stuff through computer analysis. It came up neg."

"With Bok's theories. Yes. But she never knew her genemother."

"With her teachers' stuff?"

"Might be. Or something completely off in the beyond."

"I'd like to pull those files. Just to see what they tried."

"Do it. Do any damn thing you want. We're research, aren't we? You pull all your projects out of the other wings, you put them into our budget, and our credit balance will hold just fine for that kind of tiling. The guppies and the bettas can buy a lot of computer time."

vi

The airport lobby was mostly deserted, RESEUNEAIR'S regular flights all departed, the passengers that came and went in this small public area of Reseune all on their way to Novgorod or Svetlansk or Gagaringrad. There was the usual presence of airport security, and a handful of black-uniformed Reseune Security down from the House, waiting to meet their comrades in from Planys. The same as he was there for Grant, Justin thought; nothing more.

But Florian had gone off into the deplaning area he had no admittance to, had assured him: "Sera Amy Carnath is just across the room, ser, and so is Sam Whitely, both friends of sera's: I've asked them keep their distance, so if you do get in trouble here, they have a pocket com and they can advise me, but I'm on the regular Security band—" This with a touch near the small button Florian wore next to his keycard. "I'll be monitoring Security. If anything should happen, go along with it and trust we can unravel it."

The two watchers kept to their side of the lounge, a big-boned, square-faced youth who was already huge, hard muscle and a way of sitting that said he was no accountant—Whitely was a Reseune name, but from the Town, not the House; Justin remembered seeing him in Ari's crowd. And Julia Carnath's girl Amy, Ari's frequent shadow, thin and bookish, and sharp, very sharp, by her reputation among the staff. Denys Nye's niece and a boy who looked like he could bend pipe barehanded—a combination that would give Security pause, at least, Security tending to abhor noisy incidents. He felt safer with the kids there.

Damn, he had lived this long to be protected by children. To be co-opted by a child who was the same age as himself when he had fallen victim to her predecessor—that was the peculiarly distressing thing. Not that he had a chance, taking on Ari in the prune of her abilities, but that her successor reached out so easily, and just—swept him in and put him in this situation, with Grant on the other side of those doors likely wondering what Ari's personal bodyguard was doing involving himself in the baggage check and in the body search Florian was bound to insist on– Grant would start with a little worry in his look, an initial realization that something was amiss, and quietly go more and more inward, terrified, going through the motions because in that situation there was nothing to gain, nothing to do except hope to get through to his partner and hope that his partner was not already in Detention. Florian had refused to take so much as a note: I'm sorry, ser; I have to follow regulations here. I'll get him through as quickly as I can.

Not knowing what was toward, not knowing what could have happened to his partner, and that partner waiting to tell him—

God, to tell him he was going up to Ari's floor. That he was going to have to take a probe. That it was all right—because his partner said so, of course, having just had one himself.

He thought it remarkable that he could sit through this nightmare, sit watching the guards in their small group, the two kids talking, listening to the ordinary sounds from the baggage department that meant they were active back there, probably lining up the luggage on the tables where Reseune Security would go through it and check everything item by item, nothing cursory on this one, he figured. Examination right down to the integrity of seams on one's shaving kit or the contents of opaque bottles.

He was used to packing for Security checks. No linings, everything in transparent bottles, transparent bags, as little clothing as possible, all documents in the briefcase only, and those all loose-leaf, so they could feed through the scanners.

Take sweaters. Shirts rumpled untidily in searches, and Security always questioned doubled stitching and double-thick collars.

He stretched his feet out in front of him, leaned back and tried to relax, feeling the old panic while the minutes went by like hours. Sure, it's all right, Grant. I'm sure I wasn't tampered with. Like hell. But what have we got, else? Where can we go, except hope Ari's reincarnation isn't going down Ari's path?

If she's got those notes, dammit, she knows what her predecessor meant to do with me. She can change it—or she can finish it the way the first Ari would have, make me into what the first Ari planned. Whatever that is. I thought once that might have been the best thing—if Ari had lived. If there ever was a design. Now it's too imminent. Now it's not what Ari could have given me. I'm the adult. I've got my own work, I've got my own agenda—

And Grant, my God, Grant—what have I dragged him into? What can I do?

The doors opened, and Grant came out, carrying his own briefcase, Florian behind him with the luggage.

"Bus, ser," Florian said, waving a hand toward the doors as Justin stood up and started toward Grant.

Their paths in that direction intersected.

"I'm certainly glad to see you," Grant said. He had that slightly dazed look that went with a transoceanic flight and a complete turnabout of hours. Justin threw an arm about him, patted him on the back as they walked.

"How was the trip?"

"Oh, the ground part was fine, Jordan and Paul—everything's all right with them, I really enjoyed the time; just talk, really—a lot of talk—" Doors opened behind them, and Grant's attention shifted instantly, a glance back, a loss of his thought. "I—"

The doors ahead opened automatically, one set and the others, onto the portico where the bus waited.

"Are we all right?" Grant asked.

"Ari's being sure we are," Justin said, keeping a hand on Grant's back, cautioning him against stopping. Florian put the luggage right up onto the bus deck and got up after, giving a sharp instruction to the driver to start up as Grant stepped up onto the deck and Justin followed him on the steps.

"We've ten more passengers," the driver objected.

"I've a priority," Florian said. "—Get aboard, ser."

Justin crowded a step higher as Grant edged his way past, as Florian shut the door himself.

The driver started the motor and threw them into motion.

"You can come back down after the others," Florian said, standing by the driver as Grant sat down on the first bench and Justin sat down beside him.

"What are we doing?" Grant asked quietly, reasonably.

"We're quite all right," Justin said, and took Grant's wrist and pressed it, twice, with his fingers where the pulse was. Confirmation. He felt Grant relax a little then.

Florian came back and sat down across from them. "Catlin will hold the elevator for us," Florian said. "House Security at the doors will be just a little confused when the bus comes without the rest of the passengers. There's nothing really wrong. They'll probably move to ask the driver what's going on, and we just walk right on through—absolutely nothing wrong with what we're doing, ser, only we just don't need a jurisdictional dispute or an argument over seniority. If we're stopped, absolutely there's no problem, don't worry, don't be nervous, we can move very smoothly through it if you'll just let me do the talking and be ready to take my cues. Ideally we'll walk straight to the doors, through, down to the elevator—-Catlin and I have double-teamed senior Security many a time."

"That'll take us up to Wing One residencies," Grant said quietly.

"That's where we're going," Justin said. "There's a little boundary dispute going on. Ari's coordinating this through the House systems so we don't end up with Giraud."

"Fervently to be wished," Grant said with a shaky little sigh, and Justin patted him on the knee.

"Terrible homecoming. I'm awfully sorry."

"It's all right," Grant murmured, as undone as Justin had seen him in many a year. Justin took hold of his hand and squeezed it tight and Grant just slumped back against the seat with a sigh, while the bus started the upward pitch of the hill.

Florian was listening to something through the remote in his left ear. He frowned a little, then his brows lifted. "Ah." A sudden twinkle in the eyes, a grin. "Security was complaining about the bus leaving. House Security just reported it's a request from sera; ser Denys just came on the system to confirm sera's authority to take Grant into custody. We're going to go through quite easily."

"We are in some trouble," Grant said. "Aren't we?"

"Moderately," Justin said. "Did you have trouble at Planys?"

"None," Grant said. "Absolutely none."

"Good," he said, and, considering they were within earshot of the azi driver, did not try to answer the look Grant gave him.

The lift doors let them out in the large, barren expanse of Ari's outside hall, baggage and all—which Catlin and Florian had appropriated, and Florian spoke quietly to empty air, advising Ari they were on the floor.

The apartment door opened for them, down the hall.

And Justin slipped his hand to Grant's arm as they walked. "We got into a bit of trouble," Justin said in the safety of Ari's private hall. "We have Giraud on our backs. They were going to plant something on you, almost certain. We've got a deal going with Ari."

"What—deal?"

He tightened his fingers, once, twice. "Take a probe. Just a handful of questions. It's all right, I swear to you."

"Same deal for you?" Grant asked. Worried. Terribly worried. Not: do you promise this is all right? But: Are you all right?

Justin turned Grant around and flung his arms about him, a brief, hard embrace. "It's all right, Grant. She's our kid, all right? No games, no trouble, she's just taking our side, that's what's going on."

Grant looked at him then, and nodded. "I haven't any secrets," Grant said. His voice was thin, a little hoarse. "Do you get to stay there?"

"No," he said. "Ari says—says I make her nervous. But I'll be in the room outside. I'll be there all the while."

Justin flipped pages in the hardprint Florian had been thoughtful enough to provide him—the latest Science Bureau Reports, which he managed to lose himself in from time to time, but the physics was hard going and the genetics was Reseune's own Franz Kennart reporting on the design of zooplankton, and he had heard Franz on that before. While a biologist at Svetlansk had an article on the increasing die-off of native Cyteen ecosystems and the creation of dead-zones in which certain anaerobic bacteria were producing huge methane pockets in valleys near Svetlansk.

It was not, finally, enough to hold his attention. Even the pictures failed, and he merely read captions and isolated paragraphs in a complete hodgepodge of data-intake and stomach-wrenching anxiety, old, old condition in his life—reading reports while waiting for arrest, doing real-time life-and-death design-work while awaiting the latest whim of Administration on whether he could, in a given month, get word of his father's health.

He flipped pages, backward and forward, he absorbed himself a moment in the diagrams of Svetlansk geology and looked at the photos of dead platytheres. There seemed something sad in that—no matter that it made room for fields and green plants and pigs and goats and humans. The photo of a suited human providing scale, dwarfed by the decaying hulk of a giant that must have lived centuries—seemed as unfeeling as the photos from old Earth, the smiling hunters posing with piles of carcasses, of tiger skulls, and ivory.

For some reason tears rolled down his face, startling him, and his throat hurt. For a damn dead platythere. Because he was that strung, and he could not cry for Grant, Grant would look at him curiously and say: Flux does strange things, doesn't it?

He wiped his eyes, turned the page and turned the page again until he was calm; and finally, when he had found nothing powerful enough to engage his attention, thought: O God, how long can a few questions take?

The first Ari did Grant's designs. She's got access to those. She's got the whole manual. The same as Giraud.

Giraud left him a z-case.

Has he gone out on her?

They'd call me. Surely they'd call me.

He laid the magazine on the table in front of him and leaned his elbows on his knees, ground the heels of his hands into his eyes and clasped his hands on the back of his neck, pulling against a growing ache.

Suppose that Jordan did plant something deep in him—Grant could do that, could take it in, partition it—

Jordan wouldn't do that. God, surely, no.

The door opened, in the hall; he looked up, hearing Ari's voice, hearing her light footsteps.

She came out into the front room, not distressed-looking. Tired.

"He's sleeping," she said. "No trouble." She walked over to the couch where he was sitting and said: "He's absolutely clean. Nothing happened. He's asleep. He was upset—of course he had reason. He was worried about you. I won't stop you from waking him. But I've told him he's safe, that he's comfortable. I'll give the tape to Giraud; I have to. Giraud's got a real kink in his mindsets on what he calls your influence. And you know what he'd think if I didn't."

"Whether you do or not, he's still going to think it. If that tape proved us innocent beyond a doubt—he'd find one."

She shook her head. "Remember I told Denys I've got Ari's working notes? I just tell him I'm quite well in control of the situation, that when I'm through it won't make any difference what Jordan did or didn't do, that if he's worried about the Warrick influence he can stop worrying, I'm working both of you."

It was credible, he thought; and of course it sounded enough like the truth under the truth to feed into his own gnawing worries and remind him of Emory at full stretch—layers upon layers upon layers of truth hidden in subterfuge and a damnable sense of humor. He rubbed the back of his neck and tried to think, but thoughts started scattering in panic—except the one that said: No choice, the kid's the only force in the House that ultimately matters, no choice, no choice, no choice.

. . . Besides which— he heard her saying over the breakfast table – if your safety is linked to mine—it's not really likely your father would make a real move against Reseune, is it?

"Let me tell you about Giraud," she said. "Sometimes I hate him. Sometimes I almost love him. He's absolutely without feelings for people he's against. He's fascinated by little models and microcosms and scientific gadgets. He views himself as a martyr. He's resigned to doing dirty jobs and being hated. He's had very few soft spots—except his feud with your father, a lot of personal anger in that; except me—except me, because I'm the only thing he's ever worked for that can put arms around him and give him something back. That's Giraud. We're on opposite sides of him. I don't say that to make you feel sorry for him. I just want you to know what he's like."

"I know what he's like, thanks."

"When people do bad things to you—it makes this little ego-net problem, doesn't it, isn't that what I learned in psych? There's this little ego-net crisis that says maybe it's your fault, or maybe everybody thinks you're in the wrong, —isn't that what goes on? And ego's got to restructure and flux the doubt down and go mono-value on the enemy so there's no doubt left he's wrong and you're right. Isn't that the way it works? You know all that. If you think about that mono-value it restarts all the flux and it hurts like hell. But what if you need to know the whole picture about Giraud, to know what you ought to do?"

"Maybe nobody ever gets that objective," he said, "when it's his ass in the fire."

"Giraud fluxed you. Fluxed you real good. Are you going to let him get away with it or are you going to listen to me?"

"You do this under kat, sera?"

"No. You'd feel the echo if I had, —wouldn't you? You're so fluxed on me you can't think straight. You're fluxed on me, on Giraud, on Jordan. On yourself. On everybody but Grant. That's who you'll protect. That's the deal, and I'm the only one who can offer it in the long run. Giraud's dying."

He stood there, adrenaline coursing through him, but the body got duller with overload. The brain did. And flux just straightened out, even when he knew she was Operating, even when he knew step by step what she was doing: even when he realized there had been deep-level tweaks that had prepared for this, even when he felt amazement that she did it from around a blind corner and improvising as she went.

The knot unkinked. He was wide-open as drugs could send him, for one dizzy instant.

"All right," he said. "That's got one little flaw: Grant's not safe when you can meddle with him."

"Grant would never do anything against you. That's as controlled as I need. I'd be a fool to meddle with the one stable point you've got—when what I want is to be sure where you are. You're the one I'd intervene with—if I was going to do it. But if Grant's safety is assured, you're going to remember—anytime you think about doing anything against me—that much as your father might want to, he hasn't got the power to protect himself, much less you; and I have. I'll never hurt Jordan. I'll never hurt Grant. I can't promise that with you. And right now you know exactly why—because you're my leverage on a problem that threatens a whole lot more than just me."

It was strange that he felt no panic. Deep-set work again. He felt that through a kind of fog, in which intellect took over again and said: And you're my leverage. Aren't you?

But aloud, he said: "Can I see Grant?"

She nodded. "I said so. But you will stay here—at least for a few days. At least till I get it straightened out with my uncles."

"It's probably a good idea," he said, quite calm, even relieved, past the automatic little flutter of alarm. Flux kicked back in. Defenses came up all the way. He thought about the chance that Giraud would arrest them even over Denys' objections.

Or arrange their assassination. Giraud was not a man who worried about his own reputation. A professional—in his own nefarious way—who served a Cause, Ari was right about that. Giraud would sacrifice even Ari's regard for him—to be sure in his own mind, that Ari was safe.

Giraud would do it dirty, too. It was Ari's regard for them he had to terminate. It was his ideas Giraud had to discredit.

There had been a plot to incriminate him through Grant. He was sure of that. Every trip to Planys was a risk. They were cut off again. No more visits. No chance to see Jordan. They were lucky to get Grant back unscathed. And if Giraud could work on Jordan, indirectly—

Jordan knowing his son and his foster-son had joined Ari's successor—

There was no end to the what-ifs, no way to untangle truth and lies. Anyone could be lying. Everyone had reason. Every move Jordan made in Planys—was a risk. Failing to get to them, Giraud might well move on Jordan to get leverage on them in Reseune, to create doubts in Ari's mind—

And Ari said– I'm working both of you—

God.

He went to the hall and to the open library door; and into the dim room where Grant lay on the couch, asleep and very tranked. Florian was there, shadow in the corner, just sitting guard. Catlin was not. Catlin was somewhere else in the apartment, in the case he had violated instructions to stay to the front rooms, he thought.

He laid his hand on Grant's shoulder and said: "Grant, it's Justin. I'm here, the way I said."

Grant frowned, and drew a deep breath and moved a little; and opened his eyes a slit.

"I'm here," Justin said. "Everything's all right. She said you're all right."

A larger breath. Eyes showing white and pupil by turns as Grant struggled up out of the trank and reached after him. He took Grant's hand. "Hear me?" Double press on the inside of the wrist. "It's all right. You want Florian and me to carry you? You want to go to bed?"

"Just lie here," Grant murmured. "Just lie here. I'm so tired. I'm so tired—"

His eyes closed again.

vii

"I'm doing quite well," Ari said, over a bite of salad; lunch, at Changes, the 18th December. "They're back in their own residency. Everyone's happy. There's no problem with Jordan, no lingering messiness. I just wasn't about to let them out where Giraud could get at them. You shouldn't worry. I can take care of myself. Is that enough said?"

"You know what I think about it," Denys said.

"I appreciate your concern. But," she said with a small quirk of her brow, a deliberate smile, "you probably worried about Ari senior this way too."

"Ari was murdered," Denys said.

Point.

And feeler? Denys was upset. Giraud was upset. Giraud hated disorder and his own impending death was creating maximum disorder: there were beginning to be rumors in the House—no leak: Giraud's own appearance, increasingly frail despite his large bones—was its own indicator of a man in failing health.

"One thinks she was murdered," Ari said. "Who knows? Maybe the pipe just blew. I've tried that door. A breath of air would disturb it, at certain points. A blown cryo line is just that. Isn't it? The line blows, she gets caught in the spray, falls, hits her head. The door closes quite naturally. Maybe murder was a useful story. Murder let you take fairly extreme measures."

"Is that what Justin says?"

"No. Dr. Edwards."

"When did John say a fool thing like that?"

"Not specifically. He just taught me scientific procedure. I never rule anything out. I just think some hypotheses are more likely than others."

"Confession makes it more likely, doesn't it?"

"I suppose it ought to. All things equal." She cut up a cucumber slice. "You know the kitchen's getting a little lazy. Look at this." She impaled a large lettuce rib. "Is that a way to serve?"

"Let's stay to business, dear, like why in hell you're being a fool about this man. Which has much more to do with glands than you want to admit. If you don't realize your vulnerability, I can assure you it's going to dawn on him, just as soon as the waves stop."

"Except one thing, uncle Denys: Justin's not Jordan. And he can't kill. He absolutely can't, for the same reason he can't work real-time. He'd freeze. He can't even hate Giraud. He feels other people's pain. Ari exacerbated that tendency in him. She leaned on it, hard. You see I do have those notes. I know something else, too: Jordan was hers. She just couldn't use his slant on things, so she conned Jordan into a replicate, and she took him, she absolutely took him. If she hadn't died, Justin would have slid closer and closer to her over the years—either healed the breach with Jordan or broken with him—because there's something very sad about his relationship to Jordan, and he would have learned it."

"What's that, mmmn?"

"That Jordan would have smothered him. Ari was never afraid of competition. Jordan was; and that relationship—Justin and his father—would have become more and more strained under Ari's influence. That's exactly what I project. Jordan is an arrogant, opinionated man who had intentions for his replicate, but they weren't going to work, because his son, with a good infusion of independence from Ari's side, was going to go head to head against him and make his life miserable; and I don't think Jordan's ego would ever let him see that."

"You don't even know Jordan Warrick."

"Ari did. It's my predecessor talking now. She set his whole life up. She provided Grant as an ameliorating influence on Justin, a partner of equal potential—Grant's predecessor was a Special, remember?—but deep-setted to be profoundly supportive of his Contract, which is exactly what a boy being pressured by his father to succeed—would rely on, wouldn't he, for the unqualified emotional support he'd need? Grant was always the leverage Ari would have to get Justin away from Jordan when the time was right; and now I have him. I'm going on Ari's instructions on this. She valued Jordan's abilities, she just wanted them to support her work—which, by what everyone tells me, is exactly the point where she and Jordan clashed: Jordan accused her of taking his ideas and claiming them. Justin's voiced similar reservations, of course. And he's confessed to resentments. But I've got that covered."

"How, pray tell?"

"I'm a little smarter than my predecessor. I've kept him out of my bed and dealt strictly with his professional qualifications."

"I'm relieved."

"I thought you would be. I know Giraud will be ecstatic. I know what he thinks went on while Justin was in my apartment. You can tell him not. I may have scared Justin out of good sense, but I've never scared him too much. I've behaved myself, I did a few psych-tweaks on Ari's intervention with him; while he was under, and he's really glad I let him alone. Pretty soon, he'll be [ all the way over to grateful."

"You know, young sera, you're getting entirely too confident for your age."

"I'm a lot of things too much for my age, uncle Denys. Most people find that completely uncomfortable. I really appreciate it that I can be myself with you. And with Giraud. I really do. I appreciate it too that you can be sensible with me. You're not dealing with little Ari anymore. I'm much, much more like my predecessor. More than I've let on in public, which is exactly, of course, what she'd do in my position. My enemies think they've got more time than they do, which is one way of dealing with the problem. And positioning myself. —Which is why I've really, urgently got to talk to you about Giraud, uncle Denys."

"What about Giraud?"

"You're really very fond of him, aren't you? He's very much your right hand. And what are you going to do when he dies?"

Denys drew in his breath and rested his hand beside his plate. Score one. Denys looked as taken off guard as she had ever seen him. There was an angry frown, then a clearer expression. "What do you suppose I'll do?"

"I don't know. I wonder if you're thinking about it."

"I'm thinking about it. We're both thinking about it." Still the anger. "Your actions aren't helping. You know how volatile the situation in Council is going to be."

"I know Giraud's worried. I know how worried he is about me. 'The Warrick influence.' God, I've heard that till I'm deaf. . . . Let me tell you: Justin's not plotting against me." She saw the unfocusing of Denys's eyes, and rapped the table sharply with her knuckles. "Listen to me now, uncle Denys." The focus came back. "Stop thinking I'm a fool, all right? I need him for very specific, very professional reasons. He's working in an area I need, or will need, in future."

"Nothing you couldn't do, young sera."

"Maybe. But why should I, when I can have someone else do it, on his level, and save myself the time?"

"He'll like that."

"Oh, he'll get credit. I've told him. And unlike Jordan, Justin grew up number two in everything. He's got a good deal more flexibility than Jordan."

"What are you going to do with Jordan in your administration, pray tell?

Let him loose? That would be abysmally stupid, Ari. And that's exactly what your young man is going to ask of you—what he already has asked of you, why not be honest? I'm sure he has, just the same as he connived his way into your sympathy."

"He's asked. And I asked him if he thought Jordan himself would be safe—or whether Jordan could defend himself against people who'd want to use him. Like the Paxers."

"Young woman, you are meddling."

"It doesn't take my abilities, uncle Denys, to guess what kind of stuff Giraud would like to have planted on Grant and Jordan—about the time you break the news the Centrists are in contact with him. I'm sorry to mess Giraud up. I know he's furious with me. I'm sorry about that. But Giraud's messing up a much more important operation—mine. And I won't stand for it." She poured more wine. They had chased the waiter away and asked for him to respond only to the call-button. "You just don't give me enough credit, uncle Denys. Remember what I said about muddying the waters. I don't like that. I don't like it at all. Giraud's not thinking straight and I wish you'd straighten him out; he's tired, he's ill, and in this, I just don't know how to talk to him."

"I thought you knew everything."

"Well, say that I know enough to know he's not well, he's trying to hide that from the world, he doesn't want to admit it to me, and it's a guaranteed explosion if I try to reason with him. Excluding trank, which I'm not about to do to my uncle. You're the only one he'll listen to in this, you're the only one who can get him calmed down, because he knows you're objective and he won't believe that about me. And there's something else I want you to tell him. I want you to tell him ... the Warrick influence isn't the only thing going in Reseune. He should believe ... he should definitely believe . . . the Nye influence is terribly important to me. Indispensable to me ... and to Reseune."

"That's gratifying."

"I haven't gotten to my point yet. This is terribly delicate, uncle Denys. I don't want you to take this wrong. And it's so hard to discuss with Giraud—but . . . Giraud's so hardheaded practical, and he's been such an influence—on me; on Reseune– What do you think he'd feel—about having a replicate done—like me?"

Denys sat still, a long, long moment. "I think he'd be amazed," Denys said. "He'd also point out that he's not documented to the extent you are."

"It's possible it'll work. It's even probable. All I'd need is the ordinary House stuff. Damn, this is so awkward! I don't know how to approach asking him. I don't know how he feels about dying. He's—never brought it up with me. I gather he doesn't want me to know. But I know a lot more about psychogenesis than you knew when you started; I know a lot I haven't written up—I know it from the inside, I know what matters and what doesn't and where you came close to a real bad mistake. And I really think I could run it with Giraud. If he'd let me."

"Dear, when one's dead, there's not a precious lot one can do to stop you from any damn thing, now, is there?"

"It matters what you want. And what Giraud wants, I mean, his opinion is the most important, because that has to do with his psychsets, and whether his successor would be comfortable with what he is. That's critical. And there's who would be the surrogates. You're not young yourself, to take on another kid. I thought about Yanni, Yanni's got the ability, and the toughness. Maybe Gustav Morley. But you'd be best, because you know things no one else can remember about your upbringing, and you can be objective, at least you could with me. But you weren't related to me. That's a difference to think about. That could be a lot of stress, and I'm not sure you want to cope with that now, with Giraud."

Denys had laid the fork down altogether. "I'd have to think about that."

"At least talk to him. Please make him understand—I don't want to fight with him. I need him, I'll need him in things I can't foresee yet. That's why I want to do this. Tell him—tell him I love him and I know why he's doing these things to stop me, but tell him I know something too and he should let me alone and let me operate. Tell him—tell him I understand all his lessons. I've learned from him well enough to protect myself. —And tell him if he wants to know what it's like to be a successor—I can tell him."

"I'd find that a point of curiosity too," Denys said after a moment, "what degree of integration there is. Is there identity?"

Gentle smile. "Profiles? Say they're real close. What it feels like, uncle Denys, what it feels like—is, you think,– I'd never do that. But eventually you would. You almost remember– remember things. Because they're part of the whole chain of events that lead to the point you go on from. Because you are a continuance, and what your predecessor did was important and the people she knew are still there, the enemies and the friends are still there for reasons of what she was and what she did—more, you understand what she felt about things and how it all fitted, from the gut, in your glands, in your bloodstream, and, oh, it makes more and more sense. You see yourself on an Archive tape and you feel this incredible—identity—with that person. You see a little slump; you straighten your own shoulders– Stand straight, Ari, don't slouch. You see a little upset—you feel personally threatened. You see anger. Your pulse picks up a bit. I will write a paper someday, when the subject's much more commonplace. But I don't think it's a thing I want to have in the Bureau Reports right now. I think it's one of those processes Reseune can bastardize for the other agencies that want to do it with easy types. But they'll always send the Specials to us, because they're going to be the real problem cases: Alphas always are. Even CITs. And that means more and more of the best talent—begins at Reseune."

Denys gazed at her a long time without speaking. "I am very much the woman you knew," she said. "Never mind the kid's face. Or the fact my voice hasn't settled yet. There is a kind of fusion. Only I'm already working on Ari's final notes, not her starting hypotheses. Psychogenesis is a given with me. I'll do much more, much more than she did. Isn't that what you wanted?"

"Much—more than we expected."

She laughed. "Which way do I take that?"

"That we're very proud of you. I—personally—am very proud of you."

"I'm glad. I'm very glad. I'm very grateful to you, uncle Denys. And to Giraud. I always will be. You see: Ari was such a cold bastard. She learned to be, for very good reasons. But that part didn't have to be exact. I can love my uncles, and I can still be a cold bastard when I have to be, just because I'm very self-protective—because no matter what the advantages I've had, I'm a target and I know it. I won't be threatened. I'll be there first. That's the way I am. I want you to know that."

"You're very impressive, young sera."

"Thank you. So are my uncles. And you're both dears and I love you. I want you to think about what I want to do—about Giraud; and talk to Giraud, and tell me how he feels about it."

Denys cleared his throat. "I don't think—I don't think he'll turn you down."

Is there identity?

She knew damn well that Denys was asking for himself.

What's it like?

Will—I—remember? That was the really eetee one, which a sane man knew better than to wonder. So she flirted it right past him now; and made him sweat.

"I'll tell you where an interesting study might be, uncle Denys. Getting me and Giraud together someday and letting us compare notes. I have the illusion of memory. I wonder if he will."

Denys had not taken a bite in a half a minute. He sat there a helpless lump.

Shame on you, she thought to herself. That's awful, Ari.

But something in her was quite, quite satisfied.

What in hell's the matter with me?

I'm madder than hell, that's what. Mad that I'm young, mad that I'm dependent, mad that I'm trapped here and Denys is being Denys, and mad that Giraud's timing is so damn lousy, leaving me no way to get that seat. Dammit, I'm not ready for him to die!

Denys' fork rattled, another bite. He was visibly upset.

How can I enjoy doing that? My God. He's an old man. What's gotten into me?

Her own appetite curdled. She poked at the salad, extracting a bit of tomato.

She thought about it that night, listlessly dividing attention between a light sandwich Florian had made her, the evening news, and doing a routine entry on the keyboard—which she preferred to the Scriber when she was listening to something: the fingers were output-only, and what they were out-putting was in a mental buffer somewhere. Pause. Tick-tick-tick. Pause. While the visual memory played out lunch and uncle Denys and the logical function worked on the politics of it. Is there identity? —An eetee kind of question in the first place, never mind that she had eetee feelings about it—she knew how to explain them, in perfectly solid and respectable terms: she was used to deep-study, she could lower her threshold further by wanting to than most people could on E-dose kat, the tapes involved a person identical to her in the identical environment, and the wonder would be if the constant interplay of tape-flash and day-to-day experience of the same halls, the same people, the same situations—did not muddle together in a flux-habituated brain.

Denys understood that, surely, on the logical level.

People surely understood that.

Damn, she was not dealing well with that aspect of it. She dealt with massive movements in the populace. Microfocus failed her.

The average, harried, too-busy-for-deepthink Novgorod worker.

Listen and learn, Ari, sweet: ordinary people will teach you the truest, the most sane things in the world. Thank God for them.

And beware anyone who can turn them all in one direction. That one is not ordinary.

People were aware . . . of Reseune's power, of the power her predecessor had wielded.

IN PRINCIPIO was a phenomenon, Ariane Emory's basic theories and methodologies and the early character of Reseune, set almost within the most educated laymen's grasp, so that there was, in the public mind, at least the glimmering of what no demagogue could have made clear before that book aroused such strange, such universal interest in the popular market.

It had spawned eetee-fringe thinkers of its own, a whole new and troublesome breed who took Emory for their bible and practiced experimental so-called Integrations on each other, in the idea it would expand their consciousness, whatever that was. There were already three cases down in the Wards, Novgorod CITs who had all drug-tripped their way to out-there on massive overdoses, run profound interventions on each other and now outraged staid old Gustav Morley by critiquing his methodology. A handful of admirers had outraged Reseune Security, too, by trying to leave the lounge down at the RESEUNEAIR terminal and hike up toward the House, proclaiming that they had come to see Ariane Emory—with the result that Reseune was urgently considering building a new terminal for commercial flights, far down from the old one where, in the old days, Family and ordinary through travelers using RESEUNEAIR had once mingled with casual indifference. A handful of would-be disciples had turned up over in Moreyville looking for a boat, until wary locals, thank God, had figured out what they were up to and called the police.

My God, what do I do if I meet one of these lunatics? What are they after?

It's a phase. A fad. It'll go. If it weren't this they'd be getting eetee transmissions on their home vids.

Why didn't we see this?

But of course we saw it. Justin saw it. There's always the fringe. Always the cheap answer, the secret Way—to whatever. Novgorod's in chaos, Paxers threatening people, wages aren't rising to meet spot shortages—

Danger signs. People yearning after answers. Seeking shortcuts.

Seeking them in the work of a murdered Special—

In the person of her replicate, as the Nyes fade, as the unstable period after that assassination births more instabilities, elections upon elections, bombings, shortages, and the Child—the Child verges on womanhood and competency in her own right, announcing herself with the recovery of Ari senior's legendary lost notes—

Damn well what I expected Science to understand—

But Novgorod's understanding it at a completely different level . . .

The children of azi's children—the constituency of Reseune: Ari's own creation, no theory in a Sociology computer. It's there. It's ready.

And Giraud, damn him, can't hold on to that seat long enough for me.

"Vid off," she said, and leaned back and shut her eyes, feeling that general pricklishness that meant her cycle was right on schedule.

Tomorrow I should work in, stay away from people.

I hurt Denys today. I Had him, I didn't need to take that twist. Why in hell did I do that?

What am I mad about?

Adrenaline high, that's what's going on. Not mentioning the rest of the monthly endocrine cocktail.

Damn, that was an underhanded shot I took. Denys didn't deserve that.

I know what Ari came to. Her temper, her damnable temper—the anger she was always afraid to let out—

Frustration with the irrational—with a universe moving too slow for her mind—

God, what's going on with me?

She tasted blood, realized she had bitten her lip, and unfocused.

She pressed her hands against her forehead, leaning back in the chair, shut her eyes . . . thinking about that tape, Justin's tape, thinking—

God, no. Not when she was fluxing this bad. Not when she could think of it as surrogate. Leave the damn thing in the cabinet, locked up, safe. Let it be.

It was—oh, God! not for entertainment—

Dammit, Ari, get off it!

Watch the damn fish. Watch the fish procreate and breed and spawn and live their very short lives, back and forth, back and forth in the tank beside the desk.

Sex and death. Breeding and devouring their own young if god did not take precautions and intervene with the net. How long can an ecosystem survive, inputting both the biomass of its own dead and its own births, and the artificial sunlight?

If you put them with big fish there won't be any blue fish at all. . . .

Do you know whether a fish sees colors? . . .

Breathing grew more even. Time reached a slower pace. Eventually she could sigh, bring the emotional temperature down, and postpone thinking. She got up and logged off and went to her bedroom, quietly, not to draw Florian and Catlin's notice.

She just wanted bed, that was all. But she sat staring at the dresser-top corner, where Poo-thing rested, well-worn and disreputable. No condemnation there.

She thought about putting him in the drawer. What if she had brought Justin to her room while he was here; and there was poor Poo-thing to laugh at?

That was the whole trouble—that there were no more games, there was no more give-and-take with friends, no more throwing a dart to see if it got one back, and having uncle Denys come back at her, hard-edged wit, a little sting to put her in her place. She tried to get a rise out of him and there was no bounce-back, no humor, nothing but the wary fencing of an old man who was no longer the power—just the threatened.

Floating-in-black-space.

Welcome to the real world. Poo-thing's worn out. Denys is a scared old man. And you're what he's scared of. People won't argue with you: who wants to lose all the time?

I could do any damn thing I want in Reseune. Like take anybody, anything, teach them what I could do—in one day, I could scare hell out of this place, make them understand I'm holding in—

Everybody'd love me then, wouldn't they?

Poo-thing stared, with wide black eyes.

I ought to take you to work, set you on the desk. You're the best conversationalist in Reseune.

Dammit, someone pull a prank on me, someone make me laugh, someone for God's sake answer me.

I can see all the star-stations, all the azi-sets, the whole thing in slow flux, so damned slow, and so dangerous—

Where's the advice, Poo-thing?

Amy, and Maddy and Tommy and Sam. Florian and Catlin. Justin and Grant. Yanni. And Andy down in AG.

It's talking, fool. The whole universe is talking. Listen and be amazed.

Nelly. Maman and Ollie. Denys. Giraud-present and Giraud-soon-to-be.

The static of the suns.

"... Sera?"

She drew a long breath.

Short-focused again, black-clad figure in the doorway, tall and blond. Worried.

"I'm fine," she said; and discovered her legs asleep. Foolish predicament, gratefully foolish. She rubbed her aching thighs and levered herself up with absolute gracelessness, leaning on the headboard.

When she could stand she went over to the dresser, picked up Poo-thing and put him in the drawer.

Catlin looked at her strangely for that too. But she doubted Catlin had ever understood Poo-thing in the first place.

viii

Punch and sugary cookies. Ari nipped one off the table herself, ignoring the kitchen's more elaborate confections, savored the plain flavor, and took a drink of the green punch which she preferred, thank you, from the nonalcoholic bowl.

A little girl slipped up through the crowd of Olders and snatched a handful; and a second. Fast escape. That was Ingrid Kennart, aged six. Ari chuckled to herself, on a fleeting memory. And frankly could not recall for a second whether it was a flash off some Archive tape or out of her own past.

New Year's, God, of course it had been a New Year's. The music changed, live this year—a handful of the techs had a band, not bad, either. But the glitter was the same. And maman and Ollie—

She caught a flash of silver jewelry out of the corner of her eye and for a second saw a ghost—but it was only Connie Morley, who was tall and thin and wore her dark hair upswept and elegant—

She had a second of triste, no reason, just looked away across the floor where Olders were sitting—Denys: Giraud was in Novgorod this season. Petros Ivanov. Dr. Edwards. He could, she swore, never be John to her, no matter how old she got. And old Windy Peterson and his daughter, out dancing, Peterson trying to learn the new step.

Maddy Strassen was beautiful, really beautiful in silver-blue satin—no shortage of partners for her or 'Stasi, her faithful shadow. And Amy Carnath—Amy was out on the floor with a very correct, very confused-looking young azi who was, however, doing quite well with the step—blond, crewcut, and terribly handsome: Security, stiff as they came when Amy had gotten her hands on him, but loosening up a bit, to the amusement of all of them and the evident disquiet of Amy's mother. The lad was Alpha, and social as far as Green Barracks went—yes, sera! with a real snap in the voice. Quentin, his name was: Quentin AQ-8, who just might have ended up being Contracted to House Security or RESEUNESPACE, or outside, if any of a small handful of qualified agencies had wanted to pay the million and a quarter for his Contract, for an azi who had to be Supered directly from Reseune, and whose reflexes were dangerously fast. Quentin AQ would have found himself in someone's employment in another year.

Quentin was, Florian and Catlin reported, a very happy, if very overanxious young man. And Amy was—

–in love, probably described it. At least it was a very healthy dose of infatuation, which made Amy Carnath insist Quentin was her partner, Quentin was going out onto the floor, fashions and customs changed, and people were forgetting why the old rules existed with the earliest azi: it had gotten to have completely different reasons, and it was going to stop. The youngers did it at their parties; the Olders could just accept it, so there: thus Amy Carnath.

Florian, Ari had said then, so Amy and Quentin were not out there alone.

And after a while there were a few others.

But mostly Florian and Catlin shadowed her very closely, and Florian refused 'Stasi with an earnest: I'm terribly sorry. I'm on duty.

That was the way the world changed. In the House, Florian and Catlin were shadowing her with the attention they had used in Novgorod.

No relaxing. No let-down.

The Novgorod authorities were scared out of their minds about the New Year's crowds and the chance of an incident.

Hell of a thing. The Paxers were not Ari's design, she was more and more convinced. A cultural inheritance, an ugly little side-trip in the independence-prioritied mindsets that had founded Union. The grandsons and granddaughters of rebel scientists and engineers—blew up kids in subway stations, and wanted to run the government.

They talked about potential Worms in Justin's designs twenty, thirty generations down. Union had a few after three generations, real serious ones, and she was scared going into a controlled situation like New Year's with Family and staff, with Florian and Catlin to watch with a trained eye for anything Unusual. To have a Novgorod citizen's choice—kilometers of walking in ped-tunnels or twice daily percentaging the headlines and the mood of politics to decide whether to risk a ten-minute subway ride—not mentioning the chance of some ordinary z-case putting the push on you for your keycard– hell of a way to live. But Novgorod citizens hated the idea of a master-system for keycards: a danger to their freedom, they argued.

They had, she thought, a higher anxiety threshold than she did; but they were holding their own, that was the good part, hell with the Paxers, people held on; and she, Ari Emory, she followed the situation and wondered if there was perhaps merit in the idea of a major program to buy-off thousands of military azi still rejuvable, bring them back to Reseune for re-training, exactly the way they had done before she was born—

No question then of the bad precedent of having armed troops keeping order in Novgorod, but a loan of a civilian agency from Reseune Administrative Territory to the municipality of Novgorod. If these were the times they lived in, as well have a response for it, if it meant enforcement standing line-of-sight in every ped-tunnel and subway in Novgorod.

Manpower was the original reason Reseune existed; and she was working out the proposal to land on Denys' desk. And expected Denys to say no. Reseune was making profit again and Denys was determined to hold the line against what he called her out-there ideas.

She sighed, watching uncle Denys from across the room, and seeing a tired lump of a man who had some very strange turns: who had, she had discovered it in Denys' Base in the House system—a huge volume of unpublished work that she ached to talk with him about, work on inter-station economics that was bound to cause a ripple when it did come to light. . . she did not understand it, but it was very massive and very full of statistics; a huge work on the interaction of economics with the Expansionist theory of government that was absolutely fascinating; a massive study of the development of consumer society in azi-descended population segments, including specific tracing of psychsetted values in several generations of testing; a study of replicate psychology; a history of Reseune from its inception; and work on military systems, of a kind that looked very much like Giraud's work—until she put her finger on the telltale phrases and turns of speech and realized to her shock that Giraud did not write the things published under Giraud's name. They were Denys' writings. And this secret store of them, this absolute treasure-house of ideas, —kept in Archive? Never brought forward, just meddled with from time to time, adjusted—an enormous work-in-progress, from a man so obsessively retiring that he maneuvered his brother into a Special's status so that Giraud could have the reputation and do the public things, while Denys stayed in the background, appearing to devote himself exclusively to administrative work and the day-to-day decisions and approvals for R&D and implementations.

Besides bringing up a kid for a few years—letting her into that intense privacy, hosting birthday parties and putting up with Nelly and two junior Security trainees—while writing these things that never appeared, only grew and grew.

Strange man, she thought, objective about Denys for the first time in her life. Willing to take on Giraud's replicate—oh, yes. Beyond any doubt. And facing Giraud's death with—not quite grief: a sense of impending catastrophe.

No difficult question at all why Denys had been so willing to take her in, why he had thrown all Reseune into turmoil to recover Ariane Emory's abilities for Reseune: Denys was brilliant, Denys had the old problem with Alphas—that lack of checks, lack of boundaries, that floating-in-black-space problem, that meant no minds to bounce off, no walls to return the echo. Denys was brilliant, and quite eetee and self-defensive: and incapable, perhaps, of believing his work was finished—hence the perpetual adjustments. A mind working on a macro-system that only kept widening ... a perfectionist, with the need to be definitive.

No need of people at all. Just a student of them.

And facing death—Giraud's and his own—with incredulity. Denys was the center of his own universe, Giraud his willing satellite, and of course Denys was interested in psychogenesis, Denys was so damned interested he had almost lost his balance with her, Denys wanted immortality, even without personal continuance—and she had only to hold out the promise: if Giraud was essential to the universe—who more than Denys?

She turned, set the cup on the edge of the table, and started, expecting the person behind her to be Florian, about to take the cup; but it was Justin; and she was chagrined in that half-second, at being that on-edge, and at being caught being foolish.

He took her hand, said: "I think I remember how," and offered the other hand.

She stared at him, thinking: How much has he had? and lifted her hand to his, fingers locked in fingers, the two of them moving out onto the floor to an older, slower number. He had been drinking, probably no few drinks, but he moved with some grace, surely as aware as she was of the fact other dancers broke step to gawk at them, that the music wobbled and recovered.

He smiled at her. "Ari never danced. But her dinners were always good for a week of office gossip."

"What in hell are you trying to do?"

"What I'm doing. What you did—with Florian—and young Amy. Good for you. Good for you, Ari Emory. Damned right. —I thought—a little social rehab—twice in a night—figuring you have a sense of humor—"

Other dancers were in motion, recovering their graces. And Justin's smile was thin, deliberately held.

"You're not in some kind of trouble, are you?"

"No. Just thinking—I've lost a big piece of my life—staying inconspicuous. What the hell. Why not?"

She caught a glimpse of Denys' chair, near the door. Vacant.

And thought: God. Where are the edges of this thing?

The music finished. People applauded. She stared a second at Justin, a second that felt all too long and public.

I've made a serious mistake.

Cover it, for God's sake, it's like the Amy/Quentin thing, people will take it that way with cue enough—

She walked with Justin hand-in-hand from the floor, straight for Catlin. "Here's the one to teach you the new steps. She's really amazing. —Catlin, show Justin, will you?"

As the band started up again, and Catlin smiled, took Justin by the hand and took him back to the floor.

Grant—was over by the wall, watching, with worry evident.

"Florian," she said, "go ask Grant what the hell Justin's up to."

"Yes, sera," Florian said, and went.

Denys was gone from the room. So was Seely.

Justin's linked himself with me—publicly. Not that everyone didn't know. But that I let it go—that, they'll gossip about.

She looked to the floor, where Justin made a brave and even marginally successful attempt to take up on Catlin. And to the corner of the room, where Florian and Grant were in urgent converse.

Denys—walked out.

Florian came back before the end of the dance. "Grant says: it's CIT craziness. I had no notion of this. Grant asked your help but he says if he intervenes it may be public and tense. He says Justin's been on an emotional bent ever since he and Grant went back to their own residency—Grant says he's willing to speak to you about it, but then he said: Sera intervened: ask sera if this is the result of it."

Ari frowned. "Dammit."

"Maddy," Florian said.

Which was a better idea than she had, fluxed as she was. "Maddy," she said. "Go." Dammit, dammit! He's pushing, damned if this is innocent. Denys was here, the whole Family watching—

She took a deep breath. No more easy course. He's no kid. Denys isn't. Now they're not dealing with me as a kid either, are they? Grant thinks this is an emotional trip – or that's what Justin's told Grant to say.

Damn, I should haul him in for a question-and-answer on this little tricky damn, I should.

And he'd never trust me, never be the same Justin, would he?

Catlin and Justin were leaving the floor. Maddy Strassen moved in with Maddy's own peculiar grace, said something to Catlin and appropriated Justin's arm, walking him over to the refreshments while the band took a break; and 'Stasi Ramirez was moving in from the other side.

Thank God.

She drew quieter breaths, sure that Denys had his spies in the room, people who would report to him exactly the way things went.

Like Petros Ivanov.

Which could only help, at this point.

Grant—stayed as unobtrusive as Grant's red-haired elegance could ever be, over in a corner of the room, having a bit of cake and a cup of punch. And talking to young Melly Kennart, who was twelve. Completely innocent.

Maddy partnered Justin through two dances. Ari took the second one with Tommy Carnath, who was looking a little grim. "Patience," Ari said, "for God's sake, we've got a problem."

"He's the problem," Tommy said. "Ari, he's moving on you. Your uncle's mad."

If Tommy saw it, so did a lot of other people.

And nothing could cover it. All she could do was signal she was not responding to the overture.

Embarrass him and send him off? He was vulnerable as hell to that. Laying himself wide open to it. Betting his entire career and maybe his life on that move, and not stupid, no, no way that a man who had run the narrow course he had run all his life suddenly made a thorough break with pattern on a flight of emotion. No matter if he was drunk. No matter what. Justin had thought about what he was doing.

And put her on the spot. Support me in front of the whole Family or rebuff me. Now. I'll kill him. I'll kill him for this.

ix

"Ser Justin's here," Florian said, via the Minder, and Ari said, without looking up from her desk:

"Damn well about time. Bring him to the den. Him, not Grant."

"Grant's not with him," Florian said.

Florian had not let him in yet: the Minder always beeped in her general area to let her know when an outside access opened. It did then; and she waited to finish her note to the system before she stirred from her chair, told Base One log-off, and walked down the hall to the bar and the den.

Justin was there, in the room that held so many bad memories—walking the narrow margin behind the immense brass-trimmed couch, looking at the paintings. While Florian waited unobtrusively by the bar—unconscious echo on Florian's part: he and Catlin had never seen the tape.

She chose this place.

Favor for favor.

"I want to know," she said, to his back, across the wide expanse of the wood-floored pit, "what in hell you hoped to accomplish last night."

He turned to face her. Indicated the painting he had been looking at. "That's my favorite. The view of Barnard's. It's so simple. But it affects you, doesn't it?"

She took in her breath. Affects you, indeed. He's Working me, that's what he's after.

"Grant asked me for help," she said. "You've got him scared. I hope you know that. What are you trying to do? Unravel everything? It's damned ungrateful. I kept Giraud off your tail. I kept you out of Detention. I've taken chances for you—What do you expect I should do, shout across the room? I do you a favor. I do every damn thing I can to help you. What do you do for me? Push me in public. Put me in a situation. I don't think I'm that much smarter than you are, Justin Warrick, so don't tell me you were just going from the gut. I'll tell you you wanted me in a corner. Back you or not, on your damn timetable; and if Tommy Carnath saw it and Florian saw it and 'Stasi Ramirez saw it, you tell me whether Yanni Schwartz or Petros Ivanov or my uncle missed it."

He walked around the edge of the pit, to the front of the bar.

"I apologize."

"Apologize won't handle it. I want to know—simply and clearly—what you want."

"You can always ask that. Isn't that the agreement?"

"Don't push me. Don't push me. I'm still trying to save your butt, hear me?"

"I understand you." He leaned against the bar and looked at Florian.

"Florian."

"Ser?"

"Scotch and water. Do you mind?"

"Sera?"

"My usual. His. It's all right, Florian." She walked down the steps and sat down on the couch, and Justin came down and sat. Put his elbow on the couch-back in the same way as all those years ago, unconscious habit or scene-following as deliberate as hers ... she did not know. "All right," she said, "I'm listening."

"Not much to say. Except I trusted you."

"Trusted me! —For what, a damned fool?"

"It was just—there. That's all. What would I do? Work in your wing, be your partner another twenty years till Denys dies? Keep my head down and my mouth shut and attend all those damn parties, twenty lousy years of going through every social function, all the department functions, everything—with every CIT in the House feeling like he has to explain himself to Security or your uncle if he's spotted talking to me? Hell of a life, Ari."

"I'm sorry," she said shortly. Which was true: she had had a dose of it too, in growing up; and she had seen it happen to him and felt it in her gut. "But that still doesn't say why you did it. Why you had to wait for a damned sensitive time—I just got things smoothed over with Denys, I just got things settled, and you throw me a move like that."

"Sorry," he said bitterly.

"Sorry?"

"Times are always sensitive– Always. It's always something. I'm cut off from my father again, dammit, because of Giraud. I've got your word he's safe. That's all I've got."

His voice wobbled. Florian set the whiskey down by his hand, on the shelf behind the couch, and ghosted her direction, putting the vodka-and-orange by hers.

"Which," he continued, after a drink, "I don't doubt. But that's why. Others do doubt my father's safety. Giraud is one. So damned easy to have an incident—a confusion on the part of some poor sod of an azi guard—isn't it? Terrible loss—a Special. But as you say —Giraud's dying. What can he care? You underestimate him—if you think he's not going to try to be rid of my father—except—except if he finds things aren't settled at Reseune, and I'm a threat he can't get at. Next to you. Then he'll doubt. And Giraud, scheming bastard that he is, —never makes precipitate, reckless moves. I want his attention. I want it on me until he's dead. It's that simple."

It made sense, it made a tangled, out-of-another-mindset sense, if you were Justin Warrick, if you knew Giraud, if you had no power and nothing to bluff with except Ari Emory and a potential for trouble.

"So," he said, "I just—saw a chance. I didn't thoroughly plan it. I just saw what you did with the Carnath girl—Amy—and thought—if you blew up, well, maybe I could patch it. If you covered me—it'd get to Giraud. Maybe it'd look like more than it was and worry hell out of him. I'm sorry if it's fouled you up; but I doubt it has; fouled up your plans to keep me pure in Security's sight, maybe; worried Denys, I'm sure; —but messed up anything for you, personally, —I very much doubt it."

"Nothing like the mess you've made for yourself."

"Good. On both counts."

"You're a damned fool! You could tell me, you know, you could trust I can keep an eye to Jordan—"

"No, I can't trust that. I can't trust that, when you're not in contact with the military, when you're not in Giraud's position and you're not in Denys' chair either. I can't depend on your knowing what they're up to, I'm sorry."

He didn't know Base One's extent. Had no idea. And there was no telling him. Not on any account. She sipped her vodka-and-orange, set it down and shook her head.

"You could at least have consulted me."

"And put you on your guard? No. Now done's done. I'm being honest, since you've asked. I'm asking you one more thing: run a probe if you like, but don't give the tape to Denys."

"Who said I did?"

"I don't know. I just have my suppositions what would appease Denys. Don't give this one out. It can only harm my father. It sure won't make me look any better to either one of the Nyes."

"Except if I don't they'll be sure I'm going along with what you did."

"So you are turning the tapes over."

"The ones I admit to running. I've never let them have Ari's notes on you. I've never shown them what I did to settle some of the damage Ari left. The unresolved stuff. I've never shown them the little intervention that lets you be here, this close to me, without sweating."

"Without worse than that. Without much worse than that. I'm still getting tape-flash now and again. But most of the charge is gone. I only remember—at much more distance than I've ever had—or I never could have done what I did at the party; never could have come here; never could have contemplated—my real plan for irritating Giraud."

"That being?"

"Going to bed with you."

That jolted, hard. It was so matter-of-fact she was half embarrassed, only dimly offended at first blink.

"Not," he said, "that I thought of doing anything you hadn't flatly asked me—once and twice, and recently. Make you happy—make Giraud quite, quite unhappy. And not in a way that could hurt you ... I never wanted that. To be honest, I wasn't sure I could. So I just—took a different course when it offered itself, that's all. I hope I don't offend you. And I wouldn't mention it, except I'd rather explain it with my wits about me, thank you, where I can at least string things together in my own defense. So there you are. That's why."

It was a deliberate move that made it psychologically harder for her to insist on a probe . . . quieten things down: defuse the situation. And tell enough of the truth to make everything reasonable.

Come in here without Grant, too. That, when he knew he was potentially in trouble.

Damn, possibilities multiplied ad infinitum when it involved motives and an unacknowledged Special whose stresses came from everywhere and everyone—not least the fact that she had Worked him under kat, grabbed hold of things which were profoundly important to him and tried, at least, to tie up the old threads—far as one could in a mind that had changed so much since Ari's notes; and considering the psychological difference of their reversed ages.

Very tangled. Very, very tangled.

"You've messed up work of mine," she said. "You've made me problems. I've got reason to be mad. And I supported you out there, dammit."

"Yes," he said. "Which I hoped you'd do."

"It's a damn mess." She swallowed down any assurances she could give of Jordan's safety. Or how she knew. Frustrating as it was to look like a fool, better that than be one. "Dammit, you've put me at odds with Giraud. I don't see why I should have to handle problems you've made me because you could betray my interests and trust I'd forgive you. That's a hell of a thing."

"I didn't have a choice."

"You damn well did! You could have told me."

He shook his head, slowly.

"You're really pushing me, Justin. You're damn well pushing me."

"I didn't have a choice."

"And now I've got to cooperate and keep Giraud's hands off you or he'll blow your whole little scheme, is that it?"

"Something like. What else can I say? I hope you will. I hope you will; and I don't hope for too much in my life."

"Thanks."

He nodded, once, ironically.

"So you get off cheap," she said. "You get everything you want and you don't even have to go to bed with me."

"Ari, I didn't mean that."

"I know. Not fair."

There was a deep-link in his sets—to Ari. And she knew that. Knew that it was active, in this place, at this time.

That it was double-hooked. He hoped to snare her into it—to irritate Giraud. He was still maneuvering: she knew where it was going.

But there were deeper hooks than he knew.

"You want me to?" he asked.

"I don't know," she said. Then: "No. Not like it was pay for something. There's a security wall down the hall. There's a guest accommodation on the other side. You go there. Florian will get you through. I'll call Grant to come up. Florian and Catlin will supervise Housekeeping, shutting down your apartment, packing up what you'll need. If they leave anything out, you can go back with them to get it."

He looked shocked.

"You want my help," she said, "it does cost. It costs you the apartment you have. It costs you your independence. It costs you convenience the way it costs me. But you're not going to go into Security and you're damn sure not going to spill what you know about me to Giraud either. Which is the other part of your threat, isn't it?"

"I don't know what I know—"

"I'm sure you could figure it. You come and go through that security door; your cards will admit you. You'll move into Wing One facilities, and I don't know who I'm going to have to bump to make room for you, but you're going inside Wing One security, and inside my security; and I don't want any argument about it."

"None," he said quietly.

x

"Grant is here," the Minder said, and Justin leapt up off the couch, was at the door almost before Grant could open it, as Grant came alone into the apartment.

"Are you all right?" Grant asked, first-off.

"Fine," Justin said, and embraced him. "Thank God. No trouble?"

Grant shook his head, and drew a breath. "I got the call, I told Em hold the office down—I walked out into the hall and Catlin picked me up. Walked me all the way to the lift. She said she'd go to the apartment and bring essentials and anything we call down for."

No questions, nothing. Habit of half a lifetime. "We can talk," Justin said, realizing that fact—that there was nothing, now, that could be secret if Ari wanted it, nothing that anyone but Ari was going to reach, here, in this place. It was a moment of vertigo, old cautions tumbling away into dark on either side. The thought shook him, left him lonely for reasons he could not understand. "God, it's not home, is it?"

Grant held on to him. He felt himself shivering, suddenly, he had no notion why, or what he feared, specifically, only that nothing seemed certain any longer . . . not even their habits of self-defense.

Not home. Not the place he had always lived, not the obscurity they had tried to maintain. They were closer and closer to the center of Reseune.

"No probe," he said. "Ari asked why—reasonable question. I told her. This is her notion of increased security. I've got to show you around this place. You won't believe it."

He got control of his nerves, turned Grant around and gave him the full perspective of the living room and dining room.

It was a huge apartment by any standards: a front hall mostly stone, roofed in plasticized woolwood; a sitting-room with a gray sectional, black glass tables; and beyond that a dining hall with white tile, white walls, black and white furnishings– My God, Justin's first thought had been, an emotional impact of stark coldness, an irrational: one red pillow, anything, to save your sanity in this damn place—

"It's—quite large," Grant said, —diplomatically, he thought: "isn't it?"

"Come on," he said, and took Grant the tour.

It was better in the halls, pastel blues and greens leading off to a frost-green kitchen and a white hall to a suite of rooms in grays and blues—a lot of gray stone, occasional brown. A sybaritic bath in black and silver, mirrored. Another one, white and frost-green glass.

"My God," Grant said, when he opened another door on the master bedroom, black and black glass and white, huge bed. "Five people could sleep in that."

"They probably have," Justin said. And suffered a moment of flashback, a bad one. "They promise us sheets and supplies. There's some sort of scanning system they run things through, even our clothes. It puts some kind of marker on it. If we pass the door with anything that hasn't gone through scan—"

"Alarm sounds. Catlin explained that. Right down to the socks and underwear." Grant shook his head and looked at him. "Was she angry?"

He did not mean Catlin. Justin nodded. "Somewhat. God knows she's got a right to be, considering. But she's willing to listen. At least—that."

Grant said nothing. But the silence itself was eloquent as the little muscle twitch in the eyes toward the overhead. Do we worry about monitoring?

Because Grant knew—Grant knew everything that he had confessed to Ari and then some, as far as their intention to divert Giraud. But there were things between himself and Ari he could not say where monitoring might exist, things she might go after under probe, but he could not bring them out, coldly, and have her know that Grant knew: the feeling he had had in that room in Ari's apartment, the shifting between then and now—

The gut-deep feeling—passing at every other blink between then and now; to look into Ari's eyes gone by turns young and old—knowing, for the first time since he was younger than she was now—that the sexual feelings that haunted every touch of other human beings, every dealing he had with humanity—had a focus, had always had a specific, drug-set focus—

He might have gone to bed with her. He could have gone to bed with her—in one part of his imagining. More, he had wanted to, for about two heartbeats—until he had flashed, badly, waiting on her answer, and known that he would panic; and was caught somewhere between a fevered hope of her and a sweating terror. As if she was the key.

Or the destruct.

God, what has she done to me?

What keys has she got?

"Justin?" Grant said, and caught his arm. "Justin, —"

He held to Grant's shoulder and shuddered. "O God, Grant. . . ."

"What's wrong?" Grant's fingers gripped the back of his neck, pressed hard. "Justin?"

His heart raced. He lost vision for a moment, broken out in sweat, feeling himself nowhere at all, if Grant were not holding to him.

That's what Ari wanted—all those years ago. Wanted me—fixed on her—

I've lost everything, dragged Grant and Jordan with me—

This is all there'll ever be, sweet—

Worm. Psychmaster. She was the best there ever was—

Pleasure and pain. Deep-set links—

His heart made a few deep, painful beats. But he could adjust to that, the way he adjusted to everything, always. Life was, that was all. One lived.

Even knowing that the worst thing that had been done to him all those years ago was not sexual. Sex was only the leverage.

Endocrine-learning and flux, applied full-force, the kind of wrench that could take a vulnerable, frightened kid and twist him sideways into another research, another path for his entire existence.

She saw to my birth.

One could live. Even with the ground dropping out from under one's feet. Even with black space all around.

"What did she do?" Grant asked him, a sane, worried voice out of that mental dark, a hard pressure around him, at the back of his neck. "Justin?"

"She gave me the keys a long time ago," he murmured. "I knew, dammit, I knew—I should have seen. . . ."

Things began to focus then. Vision came back, the edge of Grant's shoulder, the stark black and white room that was not home, the knowledge that, foreseeably, they would not go back to the friendly, familiar apartment with the brown stone and the little breakfast nook that had always seemed safe, no matter what they knew about Security monitoring. . . .

"She knew she was dying, Grant. She was the best damned analyst going– She could read a subject like no one I ever saw. D'you think she never knew Giraud?"

"Ari senior?" Grant asked.

"Ari. She knew Giraud was no genius. She knew who would follow her. Do you think she didn't know them better than we do? Ari said—I was the only one who could teach her. The only one. That she needs my work. And she's working off Ari's notes, doing what Ari told her to do ... all down the line."

Grant pushed him back. He stared up into Grant's worried face, seeing it as a stranger would, in an objective way he had never looked at Grant, the unlikely perfection—Ari's handiwork too, from his genesets to his psychset.

Everything was, everything. No good, any longer, in fighting the design.

Even Grant was part of it. He was snared, he had always been.

She wanted Jordan. Jordan failed her. She saw to my creation. Designed Grant.

Fixed me on her—in one damnable stroke—

Everything's connected to everything—

Field too large, field too large—

"Justin?"

God, is the kid that good, does she know what she's doing to me?

Whose hand was on the switch in there? Which Ari? Does it even matter—that one could set a path that sure—that the other could operate, just take it up and go—

Grant seized his face between his hands, popped a light slap against his cheek. "Justin!"

"I'm all right," he said.

I'm scaring hell out of him. But I'm not scared. Just—

Cold as hell now. Calm.

Helps, when you know the truth, doesn't it?

"—I'm all right. Just—went a little sideways for a moment." He patted Grant's shoulder, distanced himself a few steps and looked down the hall, the strange, not-home hallway. "Like—I'd waked up. Like—for a moment—I could just shake it all off. Think right past it." He felt Grant's hand on his shoulder, and he acknowledged it with a pressure of his own—scared again, because he was alone where he was standing, and Grant wanted to be with him, but he was not sure Grant could be—that anyone could be. And Ari was out so far ahead of him, in territory that was hers and her predecessor's, in places that he could not reach.

Places Jordan had never been.

Ultimate isolation.

"Our poor kid," he murmured, "is Ari. Damn, she is. No one ever caught up to her. She's going out into that place no one else can get to and no one can really speak to. That's what's going to happen to her. Happening to me . . . sometimes." He blinked and tried to come back. To see the lights again. The damned stark decor. Black and white dining room down the hall. "God, Housekeeping's got to have a red vase or something, doesn't it? Pillows. Pictures. Something."

"What are you talking about?" Grant asked.

The Super's training tried to assert itself. Get yourself together. You're scaring him. "Flux. Not a damn thing human in this apartment. Until we get a few things up from ours. Things with color. Things that are us. God, this place is like a bath in ice water."

"Is that what's the matter?"

"Something like." He blinked rapidly, trying to clear his eyes of the fog and focus short-range. "Maybe just—thinking this was where we would have ended up, if Ari had lived a little longer. This would have been ours."

"Justin, what in hell are you talking about?"

"Common sense. Ari didn't want to ruin Jordan. She needed his abilities. She was dying. She knew the Nyes for pragmatic sons of bitches. Conservative as hell. She wasn't. And they were going to have her successor. Don't you think she worried about that? And if she'd had two more years, even six more months, I think—I damn well know—I wouldn't have been what she took in. I might have been able to fight Giraud. Might have had some input into Ari's upbringing. Might be in Administration, might be high in the Bureau, by now, maybe sitting in Peterson's chair, who knows?"

Now—I'm not that person.

But Ari's following her predecessor's program. Following her notes.

Its a dangerous course for her. If Ari hasn't the perspective to figure that out, to figure me out—it's very dangerous.

Not because I wish her harm.

Because I can't help it. I have ties—I can't shed.

"I don't want to hurt her, Grant."

"Is there a question of it?"

It was too much to say. Ari had sworn there was no monitoring, but that was only the truth she wished were so: her capabilities were another story. Ari would lie by telling what she wished instead of what she would do: Ari had confessed that to him—manipulative in that admission as in anything else she did. Never take me for simple . . . in any sense.

"No," he answered Grant. "Not by anything I want."

Are you listening, Ari?

Do you hear what I'm saying?

xi