Cherryh, C J - Alliance-Union 08 (95 page)

"It's all right," he said, to relieve the worst of Grant's fears. "Went pretty well. A lot better than it could have." He sat down, drew a breath or two. "She's asked me to teach her."

Grant did not react overmuch. He shrugged finally. "Denys will put the quietus on that."

"No. I don't know
what
in hell it is. She got us transferred. I," he said as Grant showed alarm, "got us transferred
back
to Yanni's wing. But right now—and until she gets it straight with Security—we're not Wing One. That's how serious it is—if she's telling the truth; and I haven't a reason in the world to doubt it. She
wants
me to work with her. She's been talking with Yanni about my work, Yanni told her—damn him—he thinks I'm on some kind of important track, and young sera
wants
what I know, wants me to show her everything I'm working on."

Grant exhaled a long, slow breath.

"So, well—" Justin swung the chair around, reached for his coffee cup and got up to fill it from the pot. "That's the story. If Security doesn't come storming in here— You want a cup?"

"Thanks. —Sit down, let me get it."

"I've got it." He retrieved Grant's cup and gave him the rest of the pot and a little of his own. "Here." He handed Grant the cup. "Anyway, she was reasonable. She was—"

Not quite the little kid anymore.

But he didn't say that. He said: "—quite reasonable. Concerned." And then remembered with a flood of panic: We're in her administration at the moment; if there's monitoring going on, it's not routed just to Denys, it's going straight to her. My God, what have we said?

"We'll be under her security for a little while," he said with that little Remember the eavesdroppers sign, and Grant's eyes followed that move.

Trying to remember what he had said, too, he imagined, and to figure out how a young and very dangerous CIT could interpret it.

AE2: Base One, enter: Archive. Personal.

I think I ought to keep these notes. I feel a little strange doing it. My predecessor's never told me to. But they archived everything I did up to a few years ago. I imagine everything on Base One gets archived. Maybe I should put my own notes in. Maybe someday that'll be important. Because I think I
am
important.

That sounds egotistical. But that's all right. They wanted me to be.

I'm Ari Emory. I'm not the first but I'm not quite only the second either. We've got so much in common. Sometimes I hate my uncles for doing what they did to me—especially about maman. But if they hadn't—I don't know, I wouldn't want to be different than I am. I wouldn't want to not be me. I sure wouldn't want to be other people I could name. Maybe the first Ari could say that too.

I know she would. I know it even if she never told me.

I'd say: That's spooky.

She'd say: That's damned dangerous.

And I know what she'd mean. I know exactly what she'd mean by that and why she'd worry about me—but I know some things she didn't, like how I feel and whether the way I think about her is dangerous, or whether being a little different from her is dangerous. I'm pretty sure I'm all right, but I don't know if I'm close enough to her to be as smart as she was or to take care of the things she left me, and I won't know the things that made me smart enough until I'm good enough to look back on how they made me and say—they needed that. Or, they didn't.

I'm riding about fifteen to twenty points above her scores in psych—at the same chronological age. And I'm two points ahead of her score two years from now. Same in most of my subjects. But that's deceptive because I've had the benefits of the things she did and the way she worked, that everybody does now. That's spooky too. But that's the way it'd have to be, isn't it? Tapes have gotten better, and they've tailored so much of this for me, specifically, off her strong points and weaknesses, it's no wonder I'm going faster. But I can't get smug about it, because there's no guarantee on anything, and no guarantee I'll stay ahead at any given point.

It's spooky to know you're an experiment, and to watch yourself work. There's this boy out on Fargone, who's like me. Someday I'm going to write to him and just say hello, Ben, this is Ari. I hope you're all right.

Justin says they're easier on him than on me. He says maybe they didn't have to be so rough, but they couldn't take chances with me, and when I'm grown maybe I can figure out what they really could have left out.

I said I thought that was damned dangerous, wasn't it? Doing psych on yourself-is real dangerous, especially if you're psych-trained. I'm always scared when I start thinking about how I work, because that's an intervention, when you really know psych, but you don't know enough yet. It's like—my mind is so hard to keep aimed, it wants to go sideways and inside and everywhere—

I told Justin that too. He said he understood. He said sometimes when you re young you have to think about things, because you're forming your value-sets and you keep coming up with Data Insufficient and finding holes in your programs. So you keep trying to do a fix on your sets. And the more powerful your mind is and the more intense your concentration is, the worse damage you can do to yourself, which is why, Justin says, Alphas always have trouble and some of them go way off and out-there, and why almost all Alphas are eccentric. But he says the best thing you can do if you're too bright for your own good is what the Testers do, be aware where you got which idea, keep a tab on everything know how your ideas link up with each other and with your deep-sets and value-sets, so when you're forty or fifty or a hundred forty and you find something that doesn't work, you can still find all the threads and pull them.

But that's not real easy unless you know what your value-sets are, and most CITs don't. CITs have a trouble with not
wanting
to know that kind of thing. Because some of them are real eetee once you get to thinking about how they link. Especially about sex and ego-nets.

Justin says inflexibility is a trap and most Alpha types are inward-turned because they process so fast they're gone and linking before a Gamma gets a sentence out. Then they get in the habit of thinking they thought of everything, but they don't remember everything stems from input. You may have a new idea, but it
stems
from input somebody gave you, and that could be wrong or your senses could have been lying to you. He says it can be an equipment-quality problem or a program-quality problem, but once an Alpha takes a falsehood for true, it's a personal problem. I like that. I wish I'd said it.

And once an Alpha stops re-analyzing his input and starts outputting only, he's gone completely eetee. Which is why, Justin says, Alpha azi can't be tape-trained past a certain point, because they don't learn to analyze and question the flux-level input they get later, and when they socialize too late, they go more and more internal because things actually seem too fast and too random for them, exactly the opposite of the problem the socialized Alphas have—too fast, though, only because they're processing like crazy trying to make more out of the input than's really there, because they don't understand there
is
no system, at least there's no microsystem, and they keep trying to make one out of the flux they don't understand. Which is why some Alphas go dangerous and why you have trouble getting them to take help-tapes: some start flux-thinking on everything, and some just go schiz, de-structure their deep-sets and reconstruct their own, based on whatever comes intact out of the flux they're getting. And after that you don't know what they are. They become like CITs, only with some real strange logic areas.

Which is why they're so hard to help.

I think Yanni is right about Justin. I think he's awfully smart. I've asked my uncle Denys about him, about whether they don't make him a Special because of politics; and Denys said he didn't know whether Justin qualified, but the politics part was definitely true.

Ari, Denys said, I know you're fond of him. If you are, do him and yourself a favor and don't talk about him with anybody on staff—especially don't mention him in Novgorod.

I said I thought that was rotten, it was just because of what his father did, and it wasn't his fault any more than it was mine what my predecessor and his father were fighting about.

And then uncle Denys said something scary. He said: No. I'm telling you this for his sake. You think about it, Ari. He's very bright. He's possibly everything you say. Give him immunity and you give him power, Ari, and power is something he'd have to use. Think about it. You know Novgorod. You know the situation. And you know that Justin's honest. Think about what power would do to him.

I did think then, just like a flash, like lightning going off at night, and you can see everything, all the buildings you know are there, but you forget—you forget about the details of things until the flash comes—and it's gray and clearer than day in some ways. Like there could be color, but there's not quite enough light. So you can see everything the way you can't see it in daylight.

That's what it is when somebody throws light on what you've got all the pieces of.

His father is at Planys.

That's first.

Then there are all these other things—like him being my teacher. Like—we're best friends. But it's like Amy. Amy's my best friend but Florian and Catlin. And we couldn't get along till Amy knew I could beat her. Like she was going to
have
to do something about me until she knew she couldn't. Then we're all right.

Power stuff. Ari was right about that too—about us being territorial as hell, only territory is the wrong word. Territory is only something you can attach that idea to because we got used to the root concept when we were working with animals.

That's what Ari called science making itself a semantic problem. Because if you think territoriality you don't realize what you're really anxious about. We're not bettas.

The old Greeks talked about moira. Moira means
lot
in Greek. Like your share of things. And you can't grab somebody else's—that's stealing; you can't not do your own; that's being a coward. But figuring out what yours is would be a bitch, except other people and other animals help you define what your edges are when they react back: if they don't react back or they don't react so you can understand them you get anxiety reactions and you react with the fight or flight bias your psychset gives you, whether you're a human being or a betta. I got that from Sophocles. And Aristotle. And Amy Carnath and her bettas, because she's the first CIT friend I ever had I worked that out with, and she breeds fighting fish.

It's not territory. It's equilibrium. An equilibrated system has tensions in balance, like girders and trusses in a building.

Rigid systems are vulnerable. Ari said that. Equilibrated systems can flex under stress.

The old Greeks used to put flex in their buildings, moving joints, because they had earthquakes.

I'm leading up to something.

I think it has to do with me and Justin.

I don't trust too much flex any more than too little. Too much and your wall goes down; too little and it breaks.

I'm saying this for the record. If I was talking to Justin or Yanni or uncle Denys I'd say:

Non-looping paths don't necessarily have to be macro-setted on an individual level.

Except then—

—then you have to macro-set the social matrix, which you can do—

—but the variables are real killers to work out—Justin's proved that.

God, talking with yourself has some benefits.

That's
what Ari meant by macro-values. That's what she was talking about. That's how she could be so damned careless about the random inputs with her designs. They all feed into a single value: the flux always has to reset off the central sets. That's what Justin was trying to explain to me: flux re-set functions.

Gehennans identify with their world. That's the whole center of what Ari did with that design. And no flux-thinking can get at that.

But where does that go?

Damn! I wish I could tell it to Justin. . . .

Define: world. There's the worm. God! It could be one, if you could guide that semantic mutation.

Pity we have to input words instead of numbers. Into a hormone-fluxed system.

Justin says.

Justin says semantics is always the problem; the more concrete a value you link the sets to, the better off your design is with the computers—but that's not all of it. The link-point has to be a non-fluxing thing—Justin says—

No! Not non-flux. Slow-flux. Flux relative or proportional to the rest of the flux in the sets—like a scissors-joint: everything can move without changing the structure, just the distance down the one axis—

No. Not even that. If the flux on the macro-set has a time-lag of any kind you're going to increase the adaptive flux in the micro-sets in any system. But if you could work out that relevancy in any kind of symbological matrix—then you can get a numerical value back.

Can't you?

Doesn't that do something with the Field Size problem? Isn't that something like a log, if the internal change rates in the sets could be setted; and then—

No, damn, then your world is fine until it gets immigrants; and the first random inputs come in and give you someone who doesn't share the same values—

Immigration—on Gehenna—

Could change the definition of
world .
. . couldn't it?

Damn, I wish I could ask Justin about these things. Maybe I know something. Even if I am sixteen. I know things I can't tell anybody. Especially Justin. And they could be terribly dangerous.

But Gehenna's quarantined. It's safe—so far. I've got time. Don't I?