Cherryh, C J - Alliance-Union 08 (124 page)

No, when it came to it, Grant thought, studying the hand young sera had dealt him—he could not see himself surrendering to the hospital; but he could not see himself shooting to kill, either.

Young Amy told him that the secret of the game she was teaching him was to keep one's intentions and one's predicaments off one's face. Young Amy was very intelligent, and quite good at it herself, for a CIT. Possibly she was playing more than one game and trying to read more than what cards he held, the same way he was trying to read her for more information than she was willing to give.

So meanwhile he gambled for small markers, because one was supposed to play for money, but he owned none that was not Justin's; and he would not risk that, even at the minuscule levels young Amy proposed. He risked nothing that was Justin's, was very glad to have enough liberty in the apartment to know that Justin's papers were safe, and generally to catch what bits of information he could . . . dumb-annie was a role he still knew how to play.
I'll be all right,
Justin had said to him. And after all was said and done, he had to rely on that, like any azi—while he kept fluxing on Winfield and the Abolitionists and the fact that at thirty-seven he was legally a minor; and Amy Carnath at eighteen was legally an adult.
Dammit,
he wanted to shout at her,
take advice. Tell me what's going on and listen to someone with more experience than you have.

But that was not likely to happen. Amy Carnath took Ari Emory's orders; and whether it was Denys Nye or Ari Emory managing things now—he could not at all figure.

The airport stirred boyhood memories, himself in the terminal gift shop, begging a few cred-chits from Jordan for trinkets and gifts for home: Justin thought of that as they walked the safeway from the plane to the Novgorod terminal, with armed Security going ahead of them and crowding close behind.

No passage through the public terminal: Ari had explained that; no transfer to a car in the open. Things were too dangerous nowadays. They took a side door, hurried downstairs to a garage where cars waited with shielded windows.

There Security laid hands on him and took him apart from Ari and Catlin and Florian. Ari had warned him it would happen and asked him to do exactly what Security told him, but they were damned rough, and their haste and their force getting him into the car was more than it need have been.

He kept his mouth shut about it, sandwiched in between two guards in the back seat, and with a heavy hand on his shoulder as the doors locked.

Then the man let go of him and he settled back, watching as the first few cars left the garage. Their own driver joined the tight convoy, whisking out past
RESEUNE ONE's
wing, along the edge of the field and out a guarded gate where they picked up more escort.

It was the son of official protection, he thought, that must have attended Giraud Nye in these troubled years. He sat between the hard-muscled bodies of two of Reseune's senior House Security, with another, armed, in the front-seat passenger side, and one driving. He watched the road unfold to the river, the bridge and the drive—he remembered it—which led up to the government center, green crops growing in the interstices, a handful of trees which had prospered in the years since he had ridden this road at Jordan's side, taking the tour—

The Hall of State loomed up around a turn, suddenly filling the windshield; and he felt a chill and a sense of panic. "Aren't we going to the Bureau?" he asked his guards quietly, calmly. "I thought we were going to the Science Bureau."

"We follow the car in front of us," the one on the left said.

He figured that much. Damn, he thought, and sat and watched, wishing he had Grant's ability to go Out awhile. He wanted this day done with. He wanted—

God, he wanted to go home.

He wanted a phone, and a chance to talk to Jordan, and to find out the truth, but the truth, Ari had said it, was the least important thing.

He was numb, in overload, total flux. He tried to find answers and there was no information to give them to him, except the ones Ari herself led him through, bringing order where none existed—or finding the only way through, he did not know any longer. He had found himself agreeing to lie to the press, agreeing to deny his father's innocence—to which he himself could not swear—

He found himself doubting Jordan, doubting Jordan's motives, Jordan's love for him, everything in the world but Grant. Doubting his own sanity, finally, and the integrity of his own mind.

Not even Giraud did this to me. Not even Giraud.

Flux of images, the older Ari, the younger; flux of remembered panic, interview in Ari's office:

. . .
You make my life tranquil, sweet, and stand between me and Jordan, and I won't have his friends arrested, and I won't do a mindwipe on Grant, I'll even stop giving you hell in the office. You know what the cost is, for all those transfers you want. . . .

. . . 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. . . .

The convoy drew up under the portico at the side of the Hall of State. He moved when his guards flung the door open and hastened him out and through the doors—not so roughly this time: this time there were news cameras.

Ari stopped and took his arm. The thought flashed through his mind that he could shove her away, refuse to go farther, tell the cameras everything that had happened to him, shout out the fact that Reseune was holding Grant hostage, that they had worked on him to divide him from his father, that Jordan might well have spent twenty years in confinement for a lie—

He hesitated, Ari tugging at his arm, someone nudging him from behind.

"We're going to meet with Secretary Lynch," Ari said, "upstairs. Come on. We'll talk to the press later."

"Is your father innocent?"
someone shouted at him out of the echoing chaos.

He looked at that reporter. He tried to think, in the time-stretch of nightmare, whether he even knew the answer or not, and then just ignored the question, going where Ari wanted him to go, to say whatever he had to say.

"You do this one alone," Ari told him when they reached the upstairs, turning him over to Bureau Enforcement. "I'll be getting the hearing on monitor, but nobody from Reseune will be there. The Bureau wants you not to feel pressured. All right?"

So he walked with blue-uniformed strangers still of Reseune's making, taught by Reseune's tapes—who brought him into a large conference room, and brought him to a table facing a triple half-ring of tables on a dais, where other strangers took their seats in a blurred murmur of conversation—

Strangers except Secretary-now-Proxy for Science Lynch: Lynch he knew from newscasts. He settled into his chair, grateful to find at least one known quantity in the room, at the head of the committee, he supposed. There was a pitcher of water in front of him, and he filled a glass and drank, trying to soothe his stomach. Ari's staff had offered him food on the plane, but he had not been able to eat more than the chips and a bite of the sandwich; and he had had another soft drink after the whiskey. Now he felt lightheaded and sick. Damn fool, he told himself in the dizzying buzz of people talking in a large room, quit sleepwalking. Wake up and focus, for God's sake, they'll think you're drugged.

But the flux kept on, every thought, every nuance of everything Jordan had last said to him; everything Ari had said that might be a clue to what was going on or whether the threat was threat or only show for Denys and Security.

Secretary Lynch came up to the table where he was sitting, and offered his hand. Justin stood up and took it, felt the kindness in the gesture, saw a face that had been only an image on vid take on a human concern for him; and that small encouragement hit him in the gut, he did not know why.

"Are you all right?" the Secretary-Proxy asked.

"A little nervous," he said; and felt Lynch's fingers close harder on his. A little pat on his arm. Giraud's career-long associate, he suddenly remembered that with a jolt close to nausea, and felt the whole room go distant, sounds echoing in his skull in time with the beating of his heart.
Where does Ari stand with him? Is this choreographed?

"You're inside Bureau jurisdiction now," Lynch said. "No Reseune staff is here. Three Councillors are in the city: they've asked to audit the proceedings: Chairman Harad, Councillor Corain; Councillor Jacques. Is there any other witness you want? Or do you have any objection to anyone here? You understand you have a right to object to members of the inquiry."

"No, ser."

"Are you all right?" It was the second time Lynch had asked. Justin drew in a breath and disengaged his hand.

"Just a little—"
Lightheaded. No. God, don't say that.
He thought his face must be white. He felt the air-conditioning on sweat at his temples. "I was too nervous to eat. I don't suppose I could get a soft drink before we start. Maybe crackers or something."

Lynch looked a little nonplussed; and then patted his shoulder and called an aide.

Like a damned kid, he thought. Fifteen minutes, a pastry and a cup of coffee, that little time to catch his breath in an adjoining conference room, and he was better collected—was able to walk back into the hearing room and have Secretary Lynch walk him over to Mikhail Corain and to Simon Jacques and Nasir Harad one after the other, faces he recognized in what still passed in a haze of overload, but a less shaky one: God, he was fluxed. He had had nightmares about publicity, lifelong, felt himself still on the verge of panic—still kept flashing on Security—the cell—the Council hearings. . . .

Giraud's voice, saying things he could not remember, but which put a profound dread in him.

Wake
up,
dammit! No more time for thinking. Do!

"Dr. Warrick," Corain said, taking his hand. "A pleasure to meet you, finally."

"Thank you, ser."

When did that message actually come from my father?
That was what he wanted to ask.

But he did not, not being a fool.
Audit,
Lynch had said: then the Councillors were not here to engage in questions.

"If you need anything," Corain said, "if you feel you need protection—you understand you can ask for it."

"No, ser. —But I appreciate your concern."
This is a man who wants to use Jordan. And me. What am I worth to him? Where would his protection leave me?

Out of Reseune. And Grant inside.

Corain patted him on the arm. Simon Jacques offered his hand, introducing himself, a dark-haired, neutral kind of man with a firm grip and a tendency not to meet his eyes. "Councillor. . . . Chairman Harad." —as he shook Harad's thin hand, meeting a gray stare appallingly cold and hostile.
One of Reseune's friends.

"Dr. Warrick," Harad said. "I hope you can clear up some of the confusion in this. Thank you for agreeing to appear."

"Yes, ser," he said.
Agreeing to appear. Who asked me? Who agreed in my name? How many things have gone out, in my name, and Jordan's?

"Dr. Warrick," Lynch said, taking his arm. "If we can get this underway—"

He took his seat at the table; he answered questions: No, I have no way of knowing anything beyond my father's statements. He never discussed the matter with me, beyond the time—just before the hearing. When he was leaving. No, I'm not under drugs; I'm not under coercion. I'm confused and I'm worried. I think that's a normal reaction under the circumstances. . . . His hand shook when he picked up the water glass. He sipped water and waited while committee members consulted together, talking just under his hearing.

"Why do you believe," a Dr. Wells asked him then, "—or did you ever believe—your father's confession?"

"I believed it. He said so. And because—"
Bring out some of the sexual angle,
Ari had said on the plane.
It plays well in the press. Scandal always gets the attention, and you can work people en masse a lot easier if you've got their minds on sex:
everybody's
got an opinion on that. Just don't mention the tape and I won't mention the drugs, all right?
"Because there was a motive I could believe in—that everyone in Reseune believed in. Me. Ariane Emory blackmailed me into a relationship with her. My father found out."

The reaction lacked surprise. The interrogator nodded slowly.

"Blackmailed you—how?"

He slid a glance toward Mikhail Corain, though it was a committee member who asked the question. He said, watching Corain's reactions in his peripheral vision: "There was a secret deal for Jordan's transfer to RESEUNESPACE. Ari found out Jordan had pulled strings to get past her, and she made a deal with me—not to stop my father's transfer." Corain did not like that line of questioning.
So,
he thought, and looked back at the questioner. "She told me—that she intended me to stay in Reseune; that she meant to teach me; that she saw potential in my work she wanted developed, and that she wanted a guarantee Jordan wouldn't mess up the psychogenesis project. It looked like it would be a few years. Then she said she'd approve my transfer to go with him. Probably she would have. She usually kept her promises."

Slowly, slowly, there began to be consultation.
They knew,
he thought to himself.
They knew—the whole damn committee—even Corain— All these years; my God, the whole damn Council and the Bureau—there was no secrecy about me and Ari. But something I said—they didn't know.

God! What am I into? What deals did Giraud make, what am I treading on?

"You wanted to keep the sexual relationship secret," Wells said. "How long did that continue?"

"A few times."

"Where?"

"Her office. Her apartment."

"Who initiated it?"

"She did." He felt the heat in his face, and leaned his arms on the table for steadiness. "Can I say something, ser? I honestly think, ser, the sex was only a means to an end—to make me guilty enough to drive a wedge between me and my father. It wasn't just the encounter itself. It was the relationship between her and my father. I'm a PR, ser. And she was not my father's friend. I thought I could handle the guilt. I thought it wouldn't bother me. From the other side of the event it looked a lot different; and she was a master clinician—she was completely in control of what was going on and I was a student way out of his limits. My father would have understood that part of it, when I couldn't, at the time. I didn't plan for him to find out. But he did." A thought flashed up with gut-deep certainty out of the flux:
He didn't do it. He couldn't kill anyone. He'd have been concerned for me. He'd have wanted to work the situation, get me clear before he did anything—and I can't tell them that. . . . —
to change an instant later into:
Anyone can do anything under the right stress. If that was the right stress for him—the unbearable point—