Cherryh, C J - Alliance-Union 08 (19 page)

"It's possible," Justin said, in a measured, careful tone, "you can misjudge how far you can push me."

"What's he worth?"

"You release him. You don't run tape on him."

"Sweet, he's a little confused. He's been through hell. He
needs
rest and treatment."

"I'll see he gets it. Jordan will. I'm telling you; don't push me too far. You don't know what I'd do."

"Oh, sweet, I know what you can do. A lot of it really exquisite. And I don't have to deal with you about Grant at all. I have some very different kind of tapes. Your father would die, he would outright die."

"Maybe you underestimate him."

"Oh? Have you told him? —I thought not. You have to understand the situation, you see. It's not just his son. It's not 'some woman.' You're his twin. It's
me,
Ari Emory. Not mentioning the azi." She chuckled softly. "It's a marvelously good try, it really is. I respect that. I respect it enough to give you a little latitude. Come here, boy. Come here."

She held out her hand. He hesitated in confusion and finally held out his own within her reach. She took it gently, and his nerves jumped, his pulse fluttered and a flush came over his skin, confusing all his thinking.

He did not jerk away. He did not dare. He could not formulate a sarcasm. His mind was darting too fast in a dozen directions, like something small and panicked.

"You want a favor? You want Grant back? I'll tell you what, sweet: you just go on cooperating and we'll just make that our private little deal. If you and I get along till your father goes, if you keep your mouth shut, I'll make him a present to you."

"You're using deep-tape."

"On you? Nothing to really bend your mind. What do you think, that I can take a normal, healthy mind and redesign it? You've been reading too many of those books. The tapes I used with you—are recreational. They're what the Mu-class azi get, when they're really, really good. You think you can't stand them? You think they've corrupted you? Reseune will do worse than that, sweet, and I can teach you. I told you: I
like
you. Someday you'll be a power in Reseune—here, or Fargone, or wherever. You've got the ability. I'd really like to see you survive."

"That's a lie."

"Is it? It doesn't matter." She squeezed his fingers. "I'll see you at my place. Same time. Hear?"

He drew his hand back.

"It's not like I don't give you a choice." She smiled at him. "All you have to do is keep things quiet. That's not much, for as much as you're asking. 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."

"You sign Grant over to me."

"Next week. In case something comes up. You're such a clever lad. You understand me. Make it 2200 this evening. I'm working late."

The computers flash completion, appealing for human intervention. The chief technician alerts the appropriate personnel and begins the birth-process.

There are no surprises: the womb-tanks, gently moving and contracting, have all manner of sensors. The two ML-8986s, female, Mu-class, have reached the mandated 4.02 kilo birth-weight. There are no visible abnormalities. The two BY-9806s, Gamma-class, are likewise in good health. The techs know their charges. The BY-9806s, highly active, are favorites, already tagged with names, but the names will not stay with them: the techs will have no prolonged contact with them.

The wombs enter labor-state, and after a space, send their contents sliding down into fluid-cushioned trays and the gloved hands of waiting techs. There are no crises. There is little stress. The Mu-class females are broad-faced, placid, with colorless hair; the two Betas are longer, thin-limbed, with shocks of dark hair, not so handsome as the Mu-classes. They make faces and the techs laugh.

The cords are tied, the afterbirth voided from the bottom of the tray, and clean warm water gives the infants their first baths. The techs weigh them as a formality, and enter the data on a record which began with conception, two hundred ninety-five days ago, and which will have increasingly fewer entries as the infants pass from a state of total moment-by-moment dependency into the first unmonitored moments of their lives.

Azi attendants receive them, wrap them in soft white blankets, to be tenderly handled, held and rocked in azi arms.

In intervals between diaper changes and feeding, they lie in cribs which, like the wombs, gently rock, to the sound of human heartbeat and distant voice, the same voice that spoke to them in the womb, soft and reassuring. Sometimes it sings to them. Sometimes it merely speaks.

Someday it will give them instruction. The voice is tape. As yet it is only subliminal, a focus of confidence. Even at this point it rewards good behavior. One day it will speak with disapproval, but at this stage there are no misbehaviors, only slight restlessness from the Betas. . . .

AGCULT-789X is in trouble. The experimental geneset is not a success, and after staff consultations, a tech withdraws lifesupport and voids AGCULT-789X for autopsy.

The azi techs swab out the womb, flush it repeatedly, and the chief tech begins the process that will coat it in bioplasm.

It will receive another tenant as soon as the coating is ready. The staff waits results of the autopsy before it attempts the fix.

In the meanwhile the womb receives the male egg AGCULT-894, same species. This is not the first failure. Engineering adaptations is a complex process, and failures are frequent. But AGCULT-894 is a different individual with a similar alteration: there is the chance it will work. If it fails it will still provide valuable comparisons.

Reshaping the land and altering the atmosphere is not enough to claim a world for human occupation. The millions of years of adaptation which interlocked Terran species into complex ecosystems are not an option on Cyteen.

Reseune operates in the place of time and natural selection. Like nature, it loses individuals, but its choices are more rapid and guided by intelligence. Some argue that there are consequences to this, a culling of the ornamental and nonfunctional elements which give Terran life its variety, with an emphasis on certain traits and diminution of others.

But Reseune has lost nothing. It plans deepspace arks, simple tin cans parked around certain stars, vessels without propulsion, inexpensive to produce, storage for genetic material in more than one location, shielded and protected against radiation. They contain actual genetic samples; and digital recording of genesets; and records to enable the reading of those genesets by any intelligence advanced enough to understand the contents of the arks.

A million years was sufficient for humankind to evolve from primitive antecedents to a spacefaring sapient. A million years from now humankind will, thanks to these arks, have genetic records of its own past and the past of every species to which Reseune has access, of our own heritage and the genetic heritages of every life-bearing world we touch, preserved against chance and time. . . .

The arks preserve such fragmentary codes as have been recovered from human specimens thousands of years old, from Terran genepools predating the development of genebanks in the 20th century, from the last pre-mixing genepools of the motherworld, and from remains both animal and human preserved through centuries of natural freezing and other circumstances which have preserved some internal cellular structure.

Imagine the difference such reference would make today, if such arks had preserved the genetic information of the geologic past. Earth, thus far unique in its evidences of cataclysmic extinctions of high lifeforms, might, with such libraries, recover the richness of all its evolutionary lines, and solve the persistent enigmas of its past. . . .

Reseune has never abandoned a genetic option. It has seen to the preservation of those options to a degree unprecedented in the history of the human species, and, working as it does with a view toward evolutionary change, has preserved all the possible divergences. . . .

Time stopped being. There was just the tape-flow, mostly placid, occasionally disturbing. There were intervals of muzzy waking, but the trank continued—until now, that Grant drifted closer to the surface.

"Come on, you've got a visitor," someone said, and a damp cloth touched his face. The washing proceeded downward, gently, neck and chest, with an astringent smell. "Wake up."

He slitted his eyes. He stared at the ceiling while the washing proceeded, and hoped they would let him loose, but it was not much hope. He wished they would give him trank again, because the fear was back, and he had been comfortable while it lasted.

He grew chill with the air moving over damp skin. He wanted the sheet back again. But he did not ask. He had stopped trying to communicate with the people that handled him and they did not hurt him anymore. That was all he asked. He remembered to blink. He saw nothing. He tried not to feel the cold. He felt a twinge when the tech jostled the needle in his arm. His back ached, and it would be the most wonderful relief if they would change the position of the bed.

"There." The sheet settled over him again. A light slap popped against his face, but he felt no pain. "Come on. Eyes open."

"Yes," he murmured. And shut them again the moment the azi tech left him alone.

He heard another voice then, at the door, young and male. He lifted his head and looked and saw Justin there. He distrusted the vision at once, and jerked at the restraints.

But Justin came to him, sat down on the side of his bed and took his hand despite the restraint that gave him only a little movement. It was a warm grip. It felt very real.

"Grant?"

"Please don't do this."

"Grant, for God's sake— Grant, you're home. You understand me?"

It was very dangerous even to think about believing. It meant giving up. There was no secret sign his own mind could not manufacture. There was no illusion tape could not create. Justin was what they would use. Of course.

"Grant?"

Tape could even make him think he was awake. Or that the mattress gave, or that Justin held him by the shoulder. Only the keen pain in his back penetrated the illusion. It was not perfect.

Reality—had such little discordances.

"They won't let me take you back to the apartment yet. Ari won't. What are they doing? Are you all right? Grant?"

Questions. He could not figure how they fitted. There was usually a pattern. These had to do with credibility. That was the game.

"Grant, dammit!" Justin popped his hand against his cheek, gently. "Come on. Eyes open. Eyes open."

He resisted. That was how he knew he was doing better. He drew several breaths and his back and shoulders hurt like hell. He was in terrible danger . . . because he thought that the illusion was real. Or because he had lost the distinction.

"Come on, dammit."

He slitted his eyes cautiously. Saw Justin's face, Justin with a frightened look.

"You're home. In hospital. You understand? Ari blew them all to hell and got you out."

(Blood spattering the walls. The smell of smoke.)

It looked like hospital. It looked like Justin. There was no test that would confirm it, not even if they let him out to walk around. Only time would do that, time that went on longer than any tape-illusion.

"Come on, Grant. Tell me you're all right."

"I'm all right." He drew a breath that hurt his back and realized he could get things out of this illusion. "My back's killing me. My arms hurt. Can you move the bed?"

"I'll get them to take those off."

"I don't think they will. But I'd like the bed moved. There—" The surface under him flexed like a living thing and shifted upward, bringing his head up. The whole surface made a series of waves that flexed muscles and joints. "Oh, that's better."

Justin settled back on the edge, making a difference in the ripples. "Ari tracked you to Kruger's. Kruger was being blackmailed. He handed you over to the Abolitionists. I had to go to Ari. She got somebody—I don't know who—to go in after you. She said they'd been running tape."

He had had no structure for that time. No division between there and here. He examined the gift very carefully. "How long?"

"Two days."

Possible.

"You've been
here
two days," Justin said. "They let Jordan and me in right after they brought you in. Now they say I can visit."

It frightened him. It wanted to move in permanently, an illusion against which his defenses were very limited. He was losing. He sat there and cried, feeling the tears slip down his face.

"Grant."

"All right." He was nearly gone. "But if I tell you to leave, you leave."

"Grant, it's not tape. You're
here,
dammit." Justin squeezed his hand till the bones ground together. "Focus. Look at me. All right?"

He did. "If I tell you to leave—"

"I'll go. All right. Do you want me to?"

"Don't do that to me. For God's sake—"

"I'll get Ivanov. Damn them. Damn them."

Justin was on his way to his feet. Grant clenched his hand, holding on to him. Held on and held tight; and Justin sat down again and hugged him hard. "Unnnh." It hurt. It felt real. Justin could pull him back. Justin knew what he was doing, knew what was the matter with him, knew why he was afraid. Was his ally. Or he was lost. "It's going to take a while."

"About a week to get you out of here. Ari says." He remembered crises other than his own. He looked at Justin as Justin sat back. Remembered why he had gone down the river. "She give you trouble?"