Cherryh, C J - Alliance-Union 08 (30 page)

Reseune was
not
going to farm out anything to do with the Project. It was farming out some of the azi production runs, to clear personnel time. It would have been an economic crisis, except the military had thrown money at Reseune's extension at Fargone and Reseune's extension in Planys, money which funded more tanks, more computers, more production
and
those tunnels. Meanwhile Jordan Warrick was doing everyone a favor by actually handling the physical set-up over in Planys, which had Warrick happier than he had been since Ari's demise, turning out real work again—no small gain in itself, since it made Defense happy. They had lost Robert Carnath from House Operations and promoted him over the Planys lab: Robert was no friend of Warrick's and a sharp enough administrator to keep all the reins in his hands. They had lost other staff out to the Fargone lab construction and they were going to lose more, when that lab went active and the Rubin project kicked in. Reseune had been overstaffed when the thing began and now it was actually buying azi contracts from hackers like Bucherlabs and Lifefarms, rejuving every azi over forty and driving staff berserk with retraining tapes. Fifteen barracks were empty down in the Town, and they had just signed a buy-back deal with Defense for certain Reseune azi approaching retirement: it saved Defense expensive retraining and pensioning, it made certain azi damned happy when they learned they were going on working and getting staff positions at RESEUNEAIR and in freight and production and wherever else an azi whose outlook otherwise was transfer to some dull government work center could fill a slot and look forward instead of back. It gave Reseune a large pool of discipline-conscious, security-conscious personnel—instantly. Mistakes and glitches were bound to proliferate in Reseune's smooth operations, but
not
on the Project, where there were no new faces, and where the top talent could consequently pay full attention to their jobs.

The military buy-back had saved them. Denys was proud of that stroke. It
took
something to multiply a Project designed for one subject into four—counting Rubin and the two azi. And to coordinate the project-profile
and
the finance
and
the covert aspects of it. Giraud handled the latter. Denys had had the rest in his lap for long enough he felt
he
had just given birth.

"It's not easier from here," he told Petros. "From here on, it's going to be a race between that kid and profile-management. If anyone fouls up,
I
want to know about it. If she gets an unscheduled sniffle, I want to know about it. Nothing's minor until we've got results to check against profile."

"Hell of a way to go, developing the profile while it's running."

"We'd have to anyway. There are
going
to be differences. We'd always be altering it. And we'd never know where we're going anyway. If that kid is Ari in any measurable degree, we'll never damn well know, will we?"

No laughter at all.

Justin poured, wine swirling into Grant's many times emptied glass. Poured another for himself and set the dead bottle down. Grant looked at his glass with a slightly worried look.

Duty. Grant was getting drunk and thinking about the fact. He knew. He knew the way he could tell that Grant was not going to say a thing, Grant had just decided that duty was not the operative word tonight.

They talked about the office. They talked about a design sequence they had been working on. A bottle of wine apiece did not do much for the design—the connections were getting fuzzy.

But Justin felt better for it.

He felt a strange dissatisfaction with himself. A baby arrived and he went through the day in a state of unreasoning depression. Reseune was aflutter with: "Is she cute?" and "How is she doing?" and he felt as if someone had a fist closed around his heart.

Over a baby being born, for God's sake. And while a kind of a party was going on in the techs' residencies, and another one over in Wing One residency, he and Grant held their own morose commemoration.

They sat in the pit in the apartment that had been home when they were both small, the apartment that had been Jordan's, crackers and drying sausage slices on the plate, two dead wine bottles standing in cracker crumbs and moisture-rings on the stone table, and a third bottle a third gone. And that was finally enough to put him at distance from things.

Wish a little baby would die? God, what kind of thinking is that?

He lifted his next glass when he had filled it, and touched it to Grant's with labored cheerfulness. "Here's to the baby."

Grant frowned and did not drink when he did.

"Come on," Justin said. "We can be charitable."

Grant lifted his eyes and made a small motion of his fingers.
Remember they could have us monitored.

That was always true. They played games with the House monitors, but they had to go outside to have a word or two they did not have to worry about.

"Hell, let them listen. I don't care. I feel sorry for the kid. She didn't ask for this."

"No azi does," Grant said sharply. Then a frown made a crease between his brows. "I guess no one does."

"No one does." The depression settled back over the room. He did not know what was going to happen to them, that was what. Reseune was changing, full of strange faces, assignment shifts, the azi were—unsettled by the rejuv order. Elated by that, elated by the fact that they must have pleased someone, and distressed at the reassignments and the transfers and the arrival of strangers. Not harmfully distressed, just—having more change fall on them than they had ever had to cope with: Supervisors' interview schedules were overcrowded and Supervisors themselves were asking for relief that did not exist.

While over in Wing One residency there was an apartment shut up like a mausoleum. Not dusted, not touched, not opened.

Waiting.

"I don't think they'll have any better luck than they did with Bok," Justin said finally. "I really don't.
Jane Strassen,
for God's sake. The endo—" Endocrinology was not a thing one could say after a bottle and a half of wine. "Damn chemistry. Works fine on the machines. Just nature's way of getting at the thresholds. Nice theory. But they'll end up driving her crazier than Bok. They'd have better luck if they outright ran deep-tape on her. The creativity factor's a piece of garbage. Bring her up to
like
Ari's work, deep-tape a little
empathy,
for God's sake, and turn her loose. The whole project's a damn lunatic obsession. It's not Ari's talent they want, not a nice bright kid, it's Ari! It's the
power
they want back, it's personality! It's a clutch of rejuved relics staring at the great The End and having Reseune's budget to squander. That's what's going on. It's a damn disaster. It's too many people's lives and too damn little caring upstairs, that's what they're doing. I feel sorry for the kid. I really feel sorry for her."

Grant only stared at him a long while. Then: "I think there is something about creativity and tape—that we
don't
have it to the same degree—"

"Oh, hell." Sometimes he trod on Grant without knowing he had done it. Sometimes he opened his mouth and forgot with Grant the sensitivity he made his living using with azi down in the Town. And hated himself. "That's a lot of garbage. I damn sure don't believe it when you fix a design a dozen senior designers have been sweating on for a month."

"I'm not talking about that. I
am azi.
Sometimes I can see a problem from a vantage they don't have. Frank is azi too, but he's not what I am. I can get a little arrogant. I'm entitled. But every time I have to argue with Yanni I feel it right in the gut."

"Everybody
feels it in the gut. Yanni's a—"

"Listen to me. I don't think you feel this. I can do it. But I know every bit of what makes me tighten up fits right in that book in the bedroom, and what makes you do it wouldn't fit in this apartment. Look at what they're doing with Ari. They had to build a damn tunnel in the mountain to hold what she was."

"So what's it mean that at lunch the day the war started she had fish and she was two days into her cycle? That's crap, Grant, that's plain crap, and that's the kind of thing they built that tunnel to hold."
Along with those damn tapes, that's there. Till the sun freezes over. That's what people will remember I was.
"You choke up with Yanni because he's got a three-second fuse, that's all. It's his sweet nature, and losing the Fargone post didn't improve it."

"No. You're not listening to me. There is a difference. The world is too complicated for me, Justin. That's the only way I can explain it. I can see the microstructures much better than you. My concentration is all on the fine things. But there's something about azi psychsets—that can't cope with random macrostructures. That whole tunnel, Justin. Just to hold her psychset."

"Psychset, hell, it's full of what she
did,
and who she hurt, and she was a hundred twenty years old! You want to go to Novgorod and buy councillors, you'd fill that tunnel up too, damn fast."

"I couldn't. I couldn't see behind me. That's what it feels like."

"You've lived in these walls all your life. You could learn."

"No. Not the same things. That's what I'm saying. I could learn everything Ari knew. And I'd still focus too tight."

"You don't either!
Who
saw the conflict in the 78s?
I
didn't!"

Grant shrugged. "That's because born-men make most of their mistakes by rationalizing a contradiction. I don't make that leap without noticing it."

"You read
me
with no trouble at all."

"Not always. I don't know what Ari did to you. I know
what
happened. I know I wouldn't have been affected the same way." They could talk about that now. But rarely did. "She could have restructured me. She was very good. But she couldn't do that to you."

"She did a damn lot." It hurt. Especially tonight. He wanted off the topic.

"She couldn't. Because you don't have a psychset that only fills one book.

You're too complicated. You can change. And I have to be very
careful
of change. I can see the inside of my mind. It's very simple. It has rooms. Yours is Klein bottles."

"God," Justin snorted.

"I'm drunk."

"We're drunk." He leaned forward and put his hand on Grant's shoulder. "And we're both Klein-spaced. Which is why we're back where we started and I'm willing to bet my psychset is no more complicated than yours. You want to work it out?"

"I—" Grant blinked. "You want an example? My heart just skipped. That embarrasses hell out of me. It's that Supervisor trigger. I don't want to do that because I don't think it's smart to mess with your mind; and I jump inside like it was an order."

"Hell, I hate it when you go self-analytical. You don't want to do it because you don't know when Security is listening; and it's personal and you've got manners. All your deep-sets just describe the same thing I feel. Which is why I stay out of your head."

"No." Grant held up a finger. Earnest. A near hiccup. "The profound reason why we're different. Endo-endo—hell! hormones work—in learning— Blood chemistry reacts—to the environment. A given stimulus—sometimes adrenaline is up—sometimes down—sometimes some other thing—shades of gray. Variability—in a random environment. You remember some things right, some wrong, some light, some heavy. We—" Another near hiccup. "—start out from the cradle—with cataphorics. Knock the damn thresholds flatter than anything in nature. That means—no shades in our original logic set-up. Things are totally true. We can trust what we get.
You
take your psychset in through your senses. Through natural cataphorics. You get your
informational
learning through tape and your psychset through senses. Chancy as hell what you get out of anything you see or hear. You learn to average through the flux because you know there'll be variances. But
we've
had experts eliminate all logical incon-inconsistencies. We
can
take in every detail; we have to, that's the way we process—right. That's why we're damn good at seeing specific detail. That's why we process faster on some problems you can't hold in your head. We go learning-state without kat and our early memories didn't come from endocrine-learning; we have no shades of truth. You're averaging and working with a memory that has a thousand shades of value and you're better at averaging shades than you are at remembering what really happened, that's how you can process things that come at you fast and from all sides. And that's what we're worst at. You can come up with two contradicting thoughts and believe both of them because there's flux in your perceptions. I can't."

"Oh, we're back to that again! Hell, you work the same as I do.
And
you forget your keycard
more
than I do."

"Because I'm processing something else."

"So do I. Perfectly normal."

"Because I have a dump-reflex just like you: I can go through ac-actions that are purely body-habit. But I'm socialized, I rarely take tape, and I've got two processing systems. The top level I've learned in the real world; endocrine system learning. The bottom, where my reactions are, is simple, damn simple, and merci-mercilessly logical. An azi isn't a human
lacking
a function. He's got the logical function underneath and the random function on top. And you're backwards. You get the random stuff first."

"I'm
backwards."

"Whatever."

"God. An Emoryite. You
test
that way because the cataphorics engrave the pathways they establish so damn deep they're the course of least resistance and they're so damn structured they
trigger
the endo-en—docrine system in Pavlovian patterns that experience alone wouldn't. For every test that supports Emory there's another one that supports Hauptmann-Poley."

"Hauptmann was a social theorist who wanted his results to support his politics."

"Well, what in hell was Emory?"

Grant blinked and took a breath. "Emory asked
us.
Hauptmann socialized his subjects till they'd figured out what he wanted them to say. And how he wanted them to test. And an azi
always
wants to please his Supervisor."