Cherryh, C J - Alliance-Union 08 (33 page)

"This is the man who says Novgorod would be too foreign."

"Us. You and me. I wouldn't worry then."

A long pause. Justin held the napkin of wafers still in his hands. "I wish to hell there was a place."

"Don't worry about it." It was not Novgorod Grant meant. Of a sudden the shadow was back. The cold was back in the wind. "Don't. It's all right."

Justin nodded, mute. They were so close. He had had letters from Jordan. They looked like lace, with sentences physically cut from the paper. But they said, in one salutation:
Hello, son. I hear you and Grant are well. I read and re-read all your letters. The old ones are wearing out. Please send more.

His sense of humor is intact, he had commented to Grant. And he and Grant had read and re-read that letter too, for all the little cues it had given him about Jordan's state of mind. Read and re-read the others that got through. Page after page of how the weather was. Talk about Paul—constantly,
Paul and I.
That had reassured him too.

Things are moving, Denys had said, when he brought up the subject of sending voice tapes. Or making phone calls, carefully monitored.

And they had been so close to getting that permission.

"I can't help but worry," Justin said. "Grant, we've got to be so damn clean for the next little while. And it won't finish it. It won't be the last time. You or I don't have to have done anything."

"They brought the girl there. They didn't stop us from coming. Maybe they didn't expect what happened, but it wasn't our doing. A roomful of psychologists—and they froze. They cued the girl. She was reading
them,
not us. It's that flux-thinking again. Born-men. They didn't want what happened; and they
did
want it, they set up the whole thing to show Ari off, and she was
doing
it—she was proving what they've worked to prove. And proving nothing. Maybe we cued her. We were watching her. I got caught at it. Maybe that made her curious. She's four years old, Justin. And the whole room jumped. What's any four-year-old going to do?"

"Run to her mother, dammit. She started to. Then everybody relaxed and she picked that up too. And got this look—" He twitched his shoulders as a sudden chill got down his neck. Then shoved his imagination back down again and tried to think. The way no one had, last night.

"Does it occur to you," Grant said, "the fallibility of CIT memory? Flux-thinking. You have prophetic dreams, remember?
You
can dream about a man drinking a glass of milk. A week later you can see Yanni drinking tea at lunch and if seeing him do that has a high shock-value, you'll super the dream-state right over him, you'll swear you dreamed about him doing that, exactly at that table, and even psychprobe can't sort it out after that. It's happened to me twice in my life. And when it does, I take my tape out of the vault and betake myself to the couch for a session until I feel better. Listen to me: I'll concede the child's behavior may have been significant. I'll wait to see how it integrates with other behavior. But if you want my analysis of the situation, every CIT in that room went dream-state. Including you. Mass hallucination. The only sane people in that room for thirty seconds were the azi and that kid, and most of us were keyed on our CITs and bewildered as hell."

"Except you?"

"I was watching you
and
her."

Justin gave a heavy sigh and some of the tension went out of him. It was nothing, God knew, he did not
know.
It was what Grant said, a roomful of psychologists forgot their science. Flux-thinking. Shades of values. "Hell with Hauptmann," he muttered. "I'm becoming an Emoryite." Two more quiet breaths. He could remember it with less emotional charge now and see the child—instead of the woman.
I'm going to a party at Valery's.

Not a touch of maliciousness in that. She had not been playing her game then. She had looked up with a face as innocent as any child's and offered a let's-be-friends opening. Them and Us. Peace-making, maybe. He was not in touch with his own four-year-old memories. Jacobs, who worked that level in citizen psych, could tell him what a four-year-old CIT was like. But he could haul up a few things out of that dark water: Jordan's face when he was in his thirties.

Himself and Grant feeding the pond-fish. Four or five or six. He was not sure. It was one of his oldest memories and he could not pin it down.

And he sweated, suddenly, shying off.

Why? Why do I do that?

What's wrong with me?

Walls.

Children—had not been an interest of his. Emphatically—not an interest of his. He had mentally shied off every chance to learn, fled his own childhood like a territory he was not going back to; and the preoccupation of Reseune with the Project had disgusted him.

Twenty-three years old and a fool, doing routine work, wasting himself, not thinking to left and right. Just straight down a track. Not checking out much tape because tape meant helplessness; because tape opened up areas he did not want opened.

Throwing down those walls to
then,
to Jordan, to anything that had been—brought the anger up, made his palms sweat. Getting involved—

But they had
become
involved.

"It's a trap, isn't it?" he said to Grant. "Your psychset won't let you see what I saw. But is it valid for
her,
Grant? She has that flux-dimension, and so do all us CITs."

Grant gave a humorless laugh. "You're conceding I'm right."

"It was a roomful of CITs being fools. But maybe we saw something you didn't."

"Flux. Flux. Klein bottles. True and not-true. I'm
glad
I know what planet I'm standing on, all the time. And I saw what I saw without supering the past
or
the future."

"Damn. Sometimes I wish I could borrow your tape."

Grant shook his head. "You're right too. About seeing things I don't. I know you do. I'm worried. I'm worried because I know I can't see the situation the way a CIT does. I can logic my way through what you'll do, but damned if I can understand the flux."

"You mean your pathways are so down azi-tracks you don't see it." He could not let the Hauptmann-Emory debate pass; Grant nattered at him with it all the time, and Grant was trying him with it now. Under the other things, a little touch of clinical perspective:
get out of it, Justin. Don't react. Think.

"I mean," Grant said, "if we were all azi we wouldn't
have
this problem. And
she
wouldn't: they could install the damn psychset and she'd be exactly what they wanted. But she isn't. They aren't. Rationality isn't what they're after, it's not what they're practicing. From where I stand, you're as upside down as they are, and I wish to hell you'd listen to me and keep your head down, throw out the hallucinations, and don't react. Any possible trouble is years away. There's time to prepare for it."

"You're absolutely right: we're not dealing with azi mindset here. They're not a hell of a lot careful. If anything goes wrong with their precious project next week they'll know it was my fault. Anytime that kid crosses my path—there's no way I can be innocent. Facts have nothing to do with it. She's just damn well killed any chance of getting any give in Jordan's situation; hell, they may not even let the letters through—"

"Don't
look
for blame. Don't act as if you have it. Mark me: if you go around reacting, they'll react."

Ari's voice. Out of the past.
Sweet, get control of yourself. Boy, I do appreciate your distress, but get a grip on it. Are you afraid of women, sweet? Your father is. Family is such a liability.

He rested his head in his hands and knew even when he did it that he had lost his edge, lost everything, scattered it as thoroughly as he could manage it—all the fine-edged logic, all the control, all the defensive mechanisms. He walked Reseune's corridors like a ghost, laid himself open to everyone, shielded no reactions.
See, I'm harmless.

No one had to worry about him. He was all nerves and reactions. He detected everyone's vague distaste and their caution around him. Jordan's calamity and his own guilt over precipitating it had taken the fight out of him, maybe made him half crazy, that was what they had to think.

Except the handful who had seen the tapes. Who had seen those damnable tapes and knew what Ari had done, knew why he waked in cold sweats and why he shied off from people touching him or being near him. Especially Petros Ivanov knew, having probed his mind after Giraud and everyone had done with him.
I'm going to do a little intervention,
Petros had said, patting his shoulder while he was going under; it had taken three large Security men to get him over there to hospital and several interns to get the drug into him. Giraud's orders.
I'm just going to tell you it's all right. That you're safe. You've been through trauma. I'm going to close off that time. All right? Relax. You know me, Justin. You know I'm on your side. . . .

O God, what did they do to me? Ari, Giraud, Petros—
He wept. Grant put a hand on his arm. Grant was the only one, the only one who could. The child had touched his hand. And he had flashed-back. It was like touching a corpse.

He sat like that for a long time. Until he heard voices, and knew other people were on the walk, far across the quadrangle. There was a hedge to hide them. But he made the effort to pull himself together. "Justin?" Grant said. "I'm all right. Dammit." And, which he had never said to Grant: "Petros did something to me. Or Giraud did. Or Ari. Don't you see it? Don't you see a difference?"

"No."

"Tell me the truth, dammit!"

Grant flinched. A strange, distant kind of flinching. And pain, after that. Profound pain.

"Grant? Do
you
think they did something to me?"

"I don't understand born-men," Grant said.

"Don't give me that shit!"

"—I was about to say—" Grant's face was white, his lips all but trembling. "Justin, you people—I don't understand."

"Don't lie to me. What were you going to say?"

"I don't know the answer. God, you'd been shocked over and over; if you were azi you'd have gone like I did. Better if you could have. I don't know what's going on inside you. I see—I see you—"

"Spit it out, Grant!"

"—You're not—not like you would have been if it hadn't happened. Who could be? You learn. You adjust."

"That's not what I'm asking.
Did they do anything?"

"I don't know," Grant said. All but stammered. "I don't know. I can't judge CIT psychsets."

"You can judge
mine."

"Don't back me into a corner, Justin. I
don't know.
I don't know and I don't know how to know."

"I'm psyched. Is that what you see? Come on. Give me some
help,
Grant."

"I think you've got scars. I don't know whether Petros helped or hurt."

"Or knocked me the rest of the way down and did it to me like Ari did. The kid—" It had been a jolt. A severe jolt. Time-trip.
I'm afraid of the tape-flashes. I shut them out. I warp myself away from that time. That in itself is a decision, isn't it?

Petros: "I'm going to close it down."

Wall it off.

God. It's a psychblock. It
could
be.

They weren't my friends. Or Jordan's. I know that.

He drew a deep, sudden gulp of air.
I'm blocking off everything I learned from her. I'm scared stiff of it.

"Justin?"

The kid's shaken it loose. The kid's thrown me back before Petros. Before Giraud. Back when there was just Ari.

Back when I didn't believe anything could get to me. I walked in her door that night thinking I was in control.

Two seconds later I knew I wasn't.

Family is a liability, sweet.

What was she telling me?

"Justin?"

Would she
want
what Reseune is becoming? Would she
want
that kid in Giraud's hands? Damn, he was in Ari's pocket while she was alive. But after she died—

"Justin!"

He became aware of Grant shaking at him. Of real fear. "I'm all right," he mumbled. "I'm all right." .

He felt Grant's hand close on his. Grant's hand was warm. The wind had gone through him. What he was looking at, he did not know. The garden. The pond. "Grant, —whether or not that kid's Ari reincarnate, she's smart. She's figured out how to psych
them.
Isn't that what it's all about? She's figured out what they want, isn't that what you say about Hauptmann's subjects? She's got them believing all of it. Denys and Jane and Giraud and all of them.
I
don't have to believe in it to believe what can happen to us if Giraud thinks we're a threat."

"Justin. Let it alone. Let's go. It's cold out here.

"Do
you think they ran a psychblock on me?" He dragged himself back from out-there; looked at Grant's pale, cold-stung face. "Give me the truth, Grant."

A long silence. Grant was breathing hard. Holding back. It took no skill to see that.

"I think they could have," Grant said finally. The grip on his hand hurt. There was a tremor in Grant's voice. "I've done whatever I could. I've tried. Ever since. Don't slip on me. Don't let them get their hands on you again. And they can—if you give them any excuse. You know they can.

"I'm not going under. I'm not. I
know
what they did." He took a deep breath and drew Grant closer, hugged him, leaned against him, exhausted. "I'm doing all right. Maybe I'm doing better than I have been in the last six years."

Grant looked at him, pale and panicked.

"I swear," Justin said. He was beyond cold. Frozen through. Numb. "Damn," he said. "We've got time, don't we?"

"We've got time," Grant said. And pulled at him. Come on. You re freezing. So am I. Let's get inside."

He got up. He threw the rest of the food to the fish, stuffed the napkin into his pocket with numb fingers, and walked. He was not thoroughly conscious of the route, of all the automatic things. Grant had no more to say until they got to the office in Wing Two.