Cherryh, C J - Alliance-Union 08 (54 page)

"It's home," Jordan said. "It's gotten to be home. You have to understand the mentality out here. Our news and a lot of our music comes in from the station. We're real good on current events. Our clothes, our books, our entertainment tapes, all of that—get flown in when they get around to it, and books and tapes don't get into the library here until Security vets the addition. So there's a lot of staff silliness—you have to amuse yourself somehow; and the big new E-tape is
Echoes.
Which ought to tell you something."

Three years since that tape had come out. "Damn, I could have brought you a dozen."

"Listen, anything you can do for library here will be appreciated. I've complained. Everyone on staff has complained. The garrison snags everything.
Military
priority. And they do the luggage searches. I couldn't warn you. I hope to hell you haven't got anything in your overnight kit that's in short supply here, because they've got a censored number of soldiers over at the base really desperate for censored, censored, and censored. Not to mention toilet paper. So we're not the only ones."

He laughed, because Jordan laughed and Paul laughed, and Jim-the-guard laughed, because it was desperately, bleakly funny to think of, when there was so much that was not at all funny in this isolation; because it was so much relief to know Planys finally, not as a totally barren exile, but as a place where humanness and humor were valuable.

They talked and argued theory till they were hoarse. They went to the lab and Jordan introduced him to the staffers he had never met, always with Jim and his azi partner Enny at left and right of them. They had a drink with Lel Schwartz and Milos Carnath-Morley, neither one of whom he had seen since he was seventeen; and had dinner with Jordan and Paul—and Jim and Enny.

He had no intention of sleeping. Neither did Jordan or Paul. They had allotted him a certain number of hours to stay and he could sleep on the plane, that was all.

Jim and Enny traded off with two others at 2000 of the clock. By that time Jordan and Paul were both arguing ideas with him, criticizing his structures, telling him where he was wrong and teaching him more about sociological psych integrations than he had learned from all Yanni's books.

"Oh, God," he said, toward 0400 in the morning, in a break when they were all three hoarse and still talking, "if we could consult together—if you were there or I was here—"

"You're retracing a lot of old territory," Jordan told him, "but I don't call it a dead end. I
don't know,
you understand, and I don't say that too often, pardon my arrogance. I think it's worth chasing—not that I think you'll get where you're going, but I'm just curious."

"You're my father. Yanni says I'm crazy."

"Then Ari was."

He looked sharply at Jordan. And his gut knotted Up just hearing Jordan name the dead without rancor.

"She told me," Jordan said, "when I suggested she'd rigged the Aptitudes—politely, of course—that it was your essay question cinched it. I thought that was her usual kind of snide answer. I'm not so sure, now, having seen where you've taken it. Did she help you with this?"

"Not this one. The first—" Few, he almost said. Till she died. Till she was killed. Murdered. He shuddered away from the remembrance. "You didn't take me seriously, then."

"Son, it was pretty bright for a youngster. Ari evidently saw something I didn't. Now so does Yanni."

"Yanni?"

"He wrote me a long letter. A long letter. He told me what you were working on. Said you were crazy, but you were getting somewhere. That you were getting integrations on deep-sets that he could see, and that he'd run them through Sociology's computers and gotten nothing—indeterminate, insufficient data, field too wide. That sort of thing. Sociology hates like hell to have its computers give answers like that; you can imagine how nervous it makes them."

Jordan started back to the table with the tea, and sat down. Justin dropped into his chair, shivering from too little sleep, too late hours. And leaned on his folded arms and listened, that was all.

"Ariane Emory helped map those sociology programs," Jordan said. "So did I. So did Olga Emory and James Carnath and a dozen others. You've at least handed them something that exceeds their projective range, that the computer's averaging can't handle. It's what I said.
I don't know
is a disturbing projection—when it comes from the machines that hold the whole social paradigm. Sociology, I think, is less interested in what you've done than in the fact that your designs refuse projection: Sociology's computers are very sensitive to negatives. That's what they're programmed to turn up."

He knew that.

"And there's either no negative in the run or it can't find it. It carried it through thirty generations and kept getting an
I don't know.
That may be why Administration sent you here. Maybe Reseune is suddenly interested. I am. They have to wonder if I'd lie—or lie to myself—because I'm your father. . . ."

Justin opened his mouth and stopped. So did Jordan stop, waiting on him; and there were the guards, there was every likelihood that they were being taped for later study by Security. And maybe by Administration.

So he did not say:
They can't let me succeed. They don't want me to call their Project into question by being anything like a success.
He clamped his mouth shut.

Jordan seemed to sense the danger. He went on quietly, precisely: "And I would lie, of course. I have plenty of motives. But my colleagues at Reseune wouldn't: they know there's something in this, Yanni says so, the Sociology computers say so, and they certainly don't have ulterior motives."

They could lock me away like you, couldn't they? What doesn't get out, doesn't breach Security. No matter what it contradicts.

Except—except I said it to Denys: if I go missing from Reseune, there are questions.
"

I don't know if there's a hope in hell of getting you transferred to Planys," Jordan said. "But I'll ask you the question first: do you
want
to transfer?"

He froze then, remembering the landscape outside, the desolation that closed about him with a gut-deep panic.

He hated it. For all its advantages of freedom and relief from the pressure of Reseune, Planys afflicted him with a profound terror.

He saw the disappointment on Jordan's face. "You've answered me,

"No, I haven't. —Look, I've got a problem with this place. But it's something I could overcome. You did."

"Say I had a limited choice. Your choice is real. That's what you can't overcome. No. I understand. Your feelings may change with time. But let's not add that to the problems. We're certainly going to have Yanni in the loop. No way they're going to let us send anything anywhere without someone checking it for content. We'll just work on it—as we can, when we can. They're curious right now, I'm sure. They aren't so locked on their Project they can't see the potential in an unrelated idea. And that, son, is both a plus and a minus. You see how concerned they are for my well-being.

"Ser," the guard said.

"Sorry," Jordan said, and sighed, staring at Justin for a long while with somber emotions playing freely across his face.

Not free here, not as free as seems on the surface.

Succeed and gain protection; and absolutely protected, become an absolute prisoner.

He felt a lump in his throat, part grief, part panic. For a terrible moment he wanted to leave, now, quickly, before the dawn. But that was foolishness. He and Jordan had so little time. That was why they stayed awake and drove themselves over the edge, into too much honesty.

Dammit, he left a kid, and I'm not sure how he sees me. As a man? Or just as someone grown? Maybe not even someone he knows very well. I know him and he knows so little what I am now.

Damn them for that.

There's no way to recover it. We can't even say the things to each other that would lei us know each other. Emotions are the thing we can't give away to our

He looked away, he looked at Paul, sitting silent at the table, and thought that their life must be like his with Grant—a pressured frustration of things

It's no different from Reseune, here,
he thought.
Not for Jordan. Not really, no matter what the appearance they put on it. He can't talk. He doesn't dare. Nothing, for us, is different from Reseune.

"Working late?" the Security guard asked, stopping in the doorway, and Grant's heart jumped and kept up a frantic beat as he looked up from his desk.

"Yes," he said.

"Ser Warrick's out today?"

"Yes."

"Is he sick?"

"No."

Where
Justin was fell under Administrative need-to-know. That was one of the conditions. There were things he could not say, and the silence was irritating to a born-man. The man stared at him a moment, grunted and frowned and continued on his rounds.

Grant let go his breath, but the tension persisted, the downside of an adrenaline rush, fear that had only grown from the time Justin had told him he was going to Planys.

Justin
was going—alone, because that was one of the conditions Administration imposed. He had brushed off Justin's worry about him and refused to discuss it, because Justin would go under whatever conditions, Justin had to go: Grant had no question about it.

But he was afraid, continually, a fear that grew more acute when he saw the plane leave the ground and when he walked back into Reseune alone.

It was partly ordinary anxiety, he told himself: he relied on Justin; they had not been apart since the incidents around Ari's death, and separation naturally brought back bad memories.

But he was not legally Justin's ward. He was Reseune's; and as long as Justin was not there to obstruct Administration and to use Jordan's leverage to protect him, he had no protection and no rights. Justin was at risk, traveling completely in the hands of Reseune Security—which might arrange an incident; but much more likely that they might take an azi down to the labs where they could question him or, the thing he most feared, run tape on him.

There was no good in panic, he told himself, since there was nothing, absolutely nothing he could do about it, nowhere he could hide and nothing he could do, ultimately, to stop them if that was what they intended.

But the first night that he had been alone with all the small lonely sounds of a very large apartment and no knowledge what was happening on the other side of the world, he had shot himself with one of the adrenaline doses they kept, along with knock-out doses of trank, in the clinical interview room; and taken kat on top of it.

Then he had sat down crosslegged at the side of his bed, and dived down into the innermost partitions he had made in himself, altering things step by step in a concentration that slicked his skin with sweat and left him dizzy and weak.

He had not been sure that he could do it; he was not sure when he exited the haze of the drug and the effort, that the combination of adrenaline and cataphoric would serve, but his heart was going like a hammer and he was able to do very little more after that than fall face down on the bed and count the beats of his heart, hoping he had not killed himself.

Fool was the word for a designer who got into his own sets and started moving them around.

Not much different, though, from what the test-unit azi did, when they organized their own mental compartmentalizations and controlled the extent to which they integrated new tape. It was a question of knowing one's own mental map, very, very thoroughly.

He turned off the computer, turned off the lights and locked the office door on his way out, walking the deserted hall to go back to that empty apartment and wait through another night.

Azi responses, dim and primal, said go to another Supervisor. Find help. Take a pill. Accept no stress in deep levels.

Of course doing the first was extremely foolish: he was not at all tempted. But taking a pill and sleeping through the night under sedation was very, very tempting. If he sedated himself deeply enough he could get through the night and go meet Justin's plane in the morning: it was only reasonable, perhaps even advisable, since the trank
itself
would present a problem to anyone who came after him, and if they were going to try anything at the last moment—

No, it was a very simple matter to delay a plane. They could always get more time, if they suddenly decided they needed it.

Mostly, he decided, he did not trank himself because he felt there was some benefit in getting through this without it; and that thought, perhaps, did not come from the logical underside of his mind—except that he saw value in endocrine-learning, which the constantly reasonable, sheltered, take-a-tape-and-feel-good way did not let happen. If it were an azi world everything would be black and white and very, very clear. It was the grays of flux-thinking that made born-men. Shaded responses in shaded values, acquired under endocrine instability.

He did not enjoy pain. But he saw value in the by-product.

He also saw value in having the trank in his pocket, a double dose loaded in a hypospray, because if they tried to take him anywhere, he could give them a real medical emergency to worry about.

Nelly, Ari reflected, was still having her troubles.

"We have to be careful with her," Ari said to Florian and Catlin, in a council in Florian and Catlin's room, while Nelly was in the dining room helping Seely clean up.

"Yes, sera," Florian said earnestly; Catlin said nothing, which was normal: Catlin always let Florian talk if she agreed. Which was not to say Catlin was shy. She was just that way.

And Nelly had taken severe exception to Catlin showing Ari how to do an over-the-shoulder throw in the living room.

"You'll hurt yourself!" Nelly had cried. "Florian, Catlin, you should have better sense!"

Actually, it was Florian who was the one with the complaint coming, since Florian was the one on the floor. He was being the Enemy. Florian was all right: he could land and come right back up again, but Catlin wasn't teaching her what to do next, just first, and Florian was lying down being patient while Catlin was showing her how to make sure he wouldn't get up.