Cherryh, C J - Alliance-Union 08 (123 page)

That's what he's trying to figure out—trying to estimate where I am in this, and whether Grant is safe, and how much I'm a young fool and how much I've got him fluxed and how much he can believe now of anything I say or do.

I'm not the kid he knew. He's begun to figure that; and he's started to wonder when it happened, and how far it's gone, and who was working on him while he was under kat. He's scared—
and
embarrassed about being scared of me; but he knows he has every right to be afraid now.

The brain has to rule the flux, Art-elder; I think I've finally understood what you mean. Whether he slept with me or not, I'd have come round to this, I do think I would: you didn't bring up a fool, Ari-elder. Neither did maman and my uncles.

Ollie doesn't write because he values his neck, that's the truth. This universe is dangerous, and Ollie's just as upset as Grant is back there, alone, with strangers. He's trusted nothing since maman died.
He
works for Reseune Administration.

"We can talk now," she said, with a slide of her eyes toward the rear of the plane where the regular Security people sat. The engine noise was as good as any Silencer, given that Security did not have any unreported electronics back there; but the carry-bag at Florian's feet had its own array of devices, which one had to trust was up to what Florian vowed it was—and Florian's Base One clearance was quite adequate for him to find out whether it was up to date.

"An explanation would do," Justin said. "What are you doing?"

"I'd be ever so happy if I knew. I'm not choosing the timing on this. I'm afraid Councillor Corain is and it's not like him. I'm afraid the information has gotten to someone else, like Khalid, and he had to jump fast to be first—which is why it came out in the middle of the funeral, not tonight."

Justin looked taken off his balance. "You know about things like that.

I'm sure I don't."

"You
know,
Justin, you know damn well, you just haven't had uncle Giraud's briefings; and it
still
caught us. Giraud knew there was a leak. He knew what your father would say; he warned me what your father would say if he got a chance. The question isn't even whether it's true. Let's assume it is."

He was going to slip her, she saw it coming, and she maintained his attention with an uplifted finger, exactly,
exactly
Ari senior's mannerism: she knew it.
"What
does it do for your father?"

"It gets him the hell out of Planys. It gets him clean, dammit, it gets him his standing with the Bureau—"

"All of which I'm not averse to—in my own time. My own time isn't now. It can't be now.
Think
about it, Justin; you can handle Sociology equations. Try this one, try this one near-term, like the next few years—tell me what's going to happen and what's going to result from it.
That's
first. That's the thing that matters. What does it do to him, what's going to happen? Second question: where does he stand, where does he think he stands, what side has he just taken—and don't tell me your father's naive,
no
one in Reseune is naive, just under-briefed."

He said nothing. But he was thinking, deep and seriously,
on
what she had said, and around the peripheries: who am I dealing with, what is she up to, has Denys choreographed this business? He was much too smart to take anything at one level.

"Did you leak it to Corain?" he asked.

Oh. That
was
a good one. It jolted a thought loose. "
I
didn't. But, God, Denys might have, mightn't he?"

"Or Giraud," Justin said.

She drew a long breath and leaned back. "Interesting thought. Very interesting thought."

"Maybe it's the truth. Maybe whoever leaked it is in a position to know it's the truth."

Florian was interested: Florian was watching Justin with utmost attention. She reckoned that Catlin was. God, Ari thought, and found herself smiling. He's not down, is he? I
see
how he's survived.

"Easier to answer that," she said, "if I had an idea what happened that night, but there's no evidence. I thought there might have been a Scriber record. There was just the Translate. There's nothing there. The sniffers were useless; there'd been too many people in and out before they thought about it. Psychprobe would have been the only way. And that didn't happen. And won't. It doesn't matter. Giraud talked about 'the Warrick influence.' Giraud made an enemy. Now what do we do about that enemy?"

A slower man, an emotional man, would have blurted out:
Let him go.
She sat watching Justin think, relatively sure of some of the tracks—the fact that Jordan's name was in Paxer graffiti; that Jordan's ideas had opposed her predecessor; that there was one election shaping up in Science and another virtually certain in Defense, both critical, both of which, if the Centrists won—could destroy Reseune, shift the course of history, jeopardize all Reseune's projects, and all her purposes. . . .

Perhaps three, four, minutes he sat there, deep-focused and calm as kat could have sent him. Then, in with careful control:

"Have
you
run the projections of Jordan's input?"

She drew breath, as if one of a dozen knots about her chest had loosed.

There
is
an echo,
she thought, imagining that dark place, that floating-in-null place. She took her own time answering. "Field too large," she said finally."
I
don't aim at him. I want him safe. The problem is—he's quite intelligent, quite determined, and even if he didn't leak that message—what's he going to do if he gets in front of the news cameras? What's he going to do to every plan for solving this that I could have come up with?"

"I can solve it. Give me fifteen minutes on the phone with him."

"There's still a problem. He won't believe a word of it. Giraud said it: that tape was an intervention. Your father saw it—" He reacted to that as if it had hit in the gut. "You haven't," she said, "have you? Ever. You don't know what Ari did. You should have asked to see it. You should have gone over that damned thing as often as it took. It fluxed me too, fluxed me so I wasn't thinking straight: it took Giraud to point out the obvious. If
I
could see what Ari did, so could your father. Your father didn't see it as a seventeen-year-old kid, your father saw it as a psychsurgeon who had to wonder exactly how often and how deep Ari's interventions had been. He had to wonder how far they'd gone. You and Grant worry about each other when you've been separate three days. I know. You know they can't run an intervention on Jordan—but don't you think he has to wonder—after twenty years—just whose you are?"

Justin leaned forward and picked up his drink from the table, breathing harder: she marked the flare of his nostrils, the intakes and the quick outflow. And the little body moves that said he wanted out of that round. "Florian," he said, "would you mind terribly—I thank I'd like something stronger." She could read Florian too, instant suspicion: Florian distrusted such little distracting tactics, with thoughts engendered of lifelong training. He was not about to turn his back on an Enemy. "Florian," she said, "his usual."

Florian met her eyes, nodded deferentially then and got up, not even looking at Catlin, who sat beside her: there was no question that Catlin was on, and hair-triggered.

"You can talk to your father," she said to Justin, "but I doubt he's believed you entirely for years. Not—entirely. He
knows
you were psychprobed, over and over again; and he doesn't believe in Reseune's virtue. If you try to reason with him—I'm afraid what he's going to think, do you see? And I'm not just saying that to get at you, Justin, I'm
afraid
what he's going to think, and I don't think you can do anything to stop him, not with reason."

"You forget one thing," he said, leaning back against his seat.

"What's that?"

"The same thing that keeps Grant and me alive. That past a certain point you don't care. Past a certain point—" He shook his head, and looked up as Florian brought the drink back. "Thank you."

"No problem, ser." Florian sat down.

"If he gets into public," Ari took up the thread of thought, "he can do himself harm, he can do me harm, of course—which I don't want. It's possible that your father has been psychologically—very isolate, for a very long time: insular and insulated from all the problems going on in the world. If he was protecting you against the release of that tape—which may be a real motive for him lying until now—he evidently believes you're capable of handling it or he's been told something by someone that makes him desperate enough to risk you as well as himself—if that message actually came from him, which is a question . . . but it doesn't really matter. What he'll do—that matters. And we have an image problem in all this mess, you understand me?"

Justin
was
understanding her, she thought so by the little motions of his eyes, the tensions in his face. "What is there to do?" he said. "You've left Grant back there; I don't know what they're doing to my father at Planys—"

"Nothing. They're not going to do anything to him."

"Can you guarantee that?"

She hesitated awhile over that answer. "That depends," she said. "That very much depends. That's why you're with me.
Someone
has to do something. I'd wanted to be inconspicuous for a while more, but I'm the only face the media knows and I'm the only one who has enough credit with them to patch this mess up—but I need you, I need your help. Possibly you'll double on me. I don't know. But whether it's true or false what they're saying, it's going to be terribly hard for your father to handle this or to back away from the cameras if he gets the chance. You're my hope of stopping that."

Another small silence. Then: "How did you get Denys's permission for this move?"

"The same way I've gotten you into my residency. I told Denys you're mine, that I ran a major intervention, that Grant is far more of a hold on you than your father is; that you'd choose him over your father if it came to a choice, because your father can take care of himself; while Grant—" She shrugged. "That kind of thing. Denys believes it."

That got through to him, just about enough threat to make sure he understood. Justin sat there staring at her, mad, very mad. And very worried. "You're quite an operator, young sera."

The compliment made her smile, though sadly. "Giraud died too soon. The Paxers aren't going to sit still in all this commotion. The elections are going to be chaos, there may be more bombings, more people dead—the whole thing is going to blow wide if we don't head it off. You know all of that. Your work is exactly in my field. That's one thing at stake. So you can put your father in a position where he has to do something desperate and put himself out front of something he can't control and I don't think he has any idea exists; or you can help me defuse this, calm him down and let me run a little game with Denys—put your father wise to it if you can, I don't mind; encourage your father to wait until I
do
run Reseune. We can double-team Denys, or you can blow everything to hell with the newsservices—by asking to get your father in front of the cameras; by doing things that make you look like you're under duress—"

"The truth, you mean."

"—or by doing things that give you a bad image. You can't look like a traitor to your own father. You're very good with bright people and design-systems; but you don't know where the traps are, you're not current with the outside world, you're not used to the press and you're not used to picking up on your own public image. For God's sake take advice and be careful. If you get stubborn about this you can lose every leverage you've got."

He stared at her a long time, and sipped his whiskey. "Tell me," he said finally, "exactly what sort of thing I should watch out for."

Grant watched, entranced by the precision, as the cards crackled into a precise shuffle in the girl's fingers. "That's amazing," he said.

"This?" Sera Amy looked pleased and did it again. "My mother taught me, God, I guess from the time my fingers were big enough." She shot a series of cards to her and to him. Quentin AQ was the silent presence in the room, a tall, well-built young man in Security uniform, who sat and watched—a young man altogether capable of breaking a neck in a score of different ways: Grant had no illusions about his chances if he made a move crosswise of Amy Carnath. He had looked to spend the time confined to his room at best and under trank or under restraint at worst; but young sera had instead made every attempt to reassure him:
It won't take long, they'll meet with the Bureau, I don't doubt they'll have everything straightened out in a couple of days:
and she had finally, after a mid-afternoon lunch, declared that she would teach him to play cards.

He was touched and amused. Young Amy was taking her recently-acquired Alpha license very seriously, and doing outstandingly well: the game did keep his mind off what, if he were half-tranked and locked in solitude, would have been absolute hell—a situation which was still hell, what time he let himself worry whether the plane had landed yet, whether Justin was safe, what was going on with Jordan in Planys.

He wished he were on that plane; but he figured he was actually doing more good for Justin as a hostage, being civil and cool-headed and not pouring fuel on the fires of juvenile excitement—or Administration paranoia.

Poker was also an interesting game, in which Amy said an azi had two considerable advantages, first, profound concentration, and second, the ability to conceal one's reactions. Sera was right. He very much wanted to try it with Justin.

When Justin got home.

It was the little thoughts like that, that sent panic rushing through him, with the thought that something could happen, that somehow an order could come through that sera Amy could not resist or that authorities elsewhere could take Justin into custody; and, Reseune holding his Contract, they might not meet again. Ever.

Then he might not sit placidly waiting for retraining. Then he might do something incredibly unlikely for an azi designer, and get his hands on a weapon: in a very fluxed way it seemed what a CIT might do and what was the best thing to do. At other moments—he was fluxing that wildly—he knew that his own personal CIT might fight to be free, but he would never turn a weapon on sera Amy, nor on Quentin AQ, and that Justin could never—he had told the truth to ser Denys—never harm any of the people who had harmed him. His CIT might threaten with a weapon, but pull the trigger— Justin could not, not even if it was Giraud, who was dead anyway.