Cherryh, C J - Alliance-Union 08 (114 page)

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 starstations, 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.

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 retraining, 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 interstation 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 macrosystem 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.