Cherryh, C J - Alliance-Union 08 (97 page)

He said nothing for a long while.

"You know you're not supposed to be telling me this," he said in a whisper. Like they were being bugged; or the habit was there, like it was with her. "Dammit, Ari, you
know
it— What are you trying to do to me?"

"How else am I going to learn?" she hissed back, whispering because he whispered. "Who else is there?"

He fingered the edges of the pages and stared at it. And looked up. "You've put in a lot of work on this."

She nodded. It was why she had blown the last assignment. But that was sniveling. She didn't say that. She just waited for what he would say.

And he
did
see too much. She saw it in his face. He was not trying to hide his upset. He only stared at her a long, long time.

"Are we being monitored?" he asked.

"My uncles," she said, "probably." Not saying that
she
could. "It might go into Archive. I imagine they take every chance to tape
me
they can get, since I threw them out of my bedroom a long time ago. Don't worry about it. It doesn't matter what they listen to. There's no way they'll tell
me
no, when it comes to what I need to learn. Or give you any trouble."

"For somebody who held off the Council in Novgorod," Justin said, "you can still be naive."

"They won't do it, I'm telling you."

"Why? Because you say so? You don't run Reseune, your uncles do. And will, for some years. Ari, —my
God,
Ari—"

He shoved his chair back and got up and walked out.

Which left her sitting there, with Grant on the other side of the cluttered little office, staring at her, not quite azi-like, but very cold and very wary, like something was her fault.

"Nothing's going to happen!" she said to Grant.

Grant got up and came and took the report from Justin's desk.

"That's his," she said, putting a hand on it.

"It's yours. You can take it back or I can put it in the safe. I don't think Justin wants to teach you any more today, young sera. I imagine he'll read it very carefully if you leave it here. But you've grounded him. I don't doubt you've grounded me as well. Security would never believe I wasn't involved."

"You mean about his father?" She looked up at Grant, caught in the position of disadvantage, with Grant looming over her chair. "It doesn't make any difference. Khalid's not going to hold on to that seat. Another six months and there won't be any problem. Defense is going to be sensible again and there won't be any problem."

Grant only stared at her a moment. Then: "Free Jordan, why don't you, young sera? Possibly because you
can't? —
Please go. I'll put this up for him."

She sat there a moment more while Grant took the report and took it to the wall-safe and put it inside. Then Grant left.

Just—left her there.

So she left, and walked down the hall with a lump in her throat.

He was better, at home, with a drink in him. With the report in his lap—he had gotten it from the safe, and when Grant said that it was dangerous to carry about, he had said: So let them arrest me. I'm used to it. What the hell?

So he sat sipping a well-watered Scotch and reading the paragraph on 330 over and over again. "God," he said, when he had gone through it the second time, sifting through the limitation of words for the precious content. It was valuable—was like a light going on—in a small area, but there was nothing small or inconsequential where ideas had to link together. "She's talking about values here. The interlock of the ego-net and the value sets in azi psych and the styles of integration—why some are better than others. I needed this—back at the start. I had to work it out. Damn, Grant, how much else I've done—is already in Archives, just waiting there? That's a hell of a thought, isn't it?"

"It isn't true," Grant said. "If it was,
Ari
would have been doing the papers."

"I think I know why I interested her," he said. "At least—part of it." He took another drink and thumbed through the report. "I wonder how much of this is
our
Ari's. Whether it's something Ari senior suggested to her to do—and gave her the framework on—or whether Ari just—put this together. It's a graduation project. That's what it is. A thesis. And I can see how Ari must have looked at mine—when I was seventeen and naive as hell about design. But there's a lot more in this. The model work is first rate."

"She's got a major base in the House computers to help her," Grant said. "She can pull time on nets you couldn't even consult when
you
were her age—"

"On facilities I didn't know existed when I was her age. Yes. And I hadn't had her world-experience, and a lot of other things— I was younger—in a lot of ways—than she is right now. Damn, she's done a lot of work on this. And typically, she never said a thing about what she was working on. I think it
is
hers. This whole model is naive as hell, she's planted
two
major timebombs in the center-set, which is overkill if she's trying to get a failure—but she's likely going to run it with increasing degrees of clean-up. Maybe compare one drift against the other." Another drink and a slow shake of his head. "You know what this is, it's a bribe. It's a damn bribe. Two small windows into those Archived notes, and both of them completely unpublished material— And I'm sitting here weighing what else could be there—that could make everything I'm doing obsolete before it's published—or be the key to what I
could
do—what I could have done—if Ari hadn't been murdered—And I'm weighing it against losing years of contact with Jordan. Against the chance neither one of us might ever—"

He lost his voice again. Took a drink and gazed at the wall.

"Because there's no choice," he concluded, when he had had several more swallows of whiskey and he was halfway numb again. "I don't even know why, or what part of this report is real, or how much of Gehenna is in here." He looked at Grant; and hated himself for the whole situation he was in, because it was Grant's chances of Planys that had been shot to hell, equally as well as his. Grant had sat at home waiting on all his other visits—because the whole weight of law and custom and the practical facts of Grant's azi vulnerabilities to manipulation and his abilities to remember and focus on instruction—had barred him from Planys thus far.

Now their jailers had the ultimate excuse, if they had ever needed one.

"I had no idea," he said to Grant, "I had
no
idea what she was working on, or where this was going."

"Ari is not entirely naive in this," Grant said. "If Gehenna is what she's working on—and she wants to work on it with you—she knows that won't sit well in some circles;
and
that you'll understand right through to the heart of the designs and beyond. Ari is accustomed to having her way. More than that, Ari is convinced her way is all-important. Be careful of her. Be extremely careful."

"She knows something, something that's got to do with Gehenna, that hasn't gotten into public."

Grant looked at him long and hard. "Be careful," Grant said. "Justin, for God's sake, be careful."

"Dammit, I—" The frustration in Grant's voice got to him, reached raw nerves, even past the whiskey. He set the glass down and rested his elbows on his knees, his hands on the back of his neck. "Oh, God." The tears came the way they had not in years. He squeezed his eyes shut, tried to dam them back, aware of painful silence in the room.

After a while he got up and added more whiskey to the ice-melt, and stood staring at the corner until he heard Grant get up and come over to the bar, and he looked and took Grant's glass and added ice and whiskey.

"Someday the situation will change," Grant said, took his glass and touched it to his, a light, fragile clink of glass on glass. "Keep your balance. There's no profit in anything else. The election count will be over by fall. The whole situation may change, not overnight, but change, all the same."

"Khalid could win."

"A meteor could strike us. Do we worry about such things? Finish that. Come to bed. All right?"

He shuddered, drank the rest off and shuddered again. He could not
get
drunk enough.

He slammed the glass down on the countertop and pushed away from the bar, to do what Grant had said.

Ari,
Justin's voice had said on the Minder,
be in my office in the morning.

So she came, was waiting for him when he got there, and he said, opening the door—he had come alone this time, almost the only time: "Ari, I owe you an apology. A profound apology for yesterday." He had her report with him and he laid it down on his desk and riffled the pages. "You did this. Yourself. It was your idea."

"Yes," she said, anxious.

"It's remarkable. It's a really remarkable job. —I don't say it's right, understand, but it's going to take me a little to get through it, not just because of the size. Have you shown this to your uncle?"

She shook her head. It was too hard to talk about coherently. She had not slept much. "No. I did it for you."

"I wasn't very gracious about it. Forgive me. I've been that route myself, with Yanni. I didn't mean to do that to you."

"I understand why you're upset," she said. "I do." Grant was likely to come in at any time and she wanted to get this out beforehand. "Justin, Grant took into me. He was right. But I am too. If Reseune is safe again you can travel. If it isn't, nothing will help, and this won't hurt—in fact it makes you safer, because there's no way they can come at you
or
your father without coming at me, because your father's worked on your stuff, and that means he's working with you and you're working with me, and all he has to do, Justin, all he has to do, if he wants my help—is not do anything against me. I don't even care if he likes me. I just want to work things out so they're better. I
thought
about the danger in working with you, I did think, over and over again—but you're the one I need, because you work long-term and you work with the value-sets and that's what I'm interested in. I'm not a stupid little girl, Justin. I know what I want to work on and Yanni can't help me anymore. Nobody can. So I have to come to you. Uncle Denys knows it. He says—he says—be careful. But he also says you're honest. So am I—no!" —As he opened his mouth. "Let me say this. I
will not
steal from you. You think about this. What if we put out a paper with your name and mine
and
your father's? Don't you think that would shake them up in the Bureau?"

He sat down. "That would have to get by Denys, Ari, and I don't think he'd approve it. I'm sure Giraud wouldn't."

"You know what I'd say to my uncles? I'd say—someday I'll have to run Reseune. I'm trying to fix things. I don't want things to go the way they did. Let me try while I have your advice. Or let me try after I don't."

He scared her for a moment. His face got very still and very pale. Then Grant showed up, coming through the door, so he drew a large breath and paid attention to Grant instead. "Good morning. Coffee's not on. Yet."

"Hint," Grant said, and made a face and took the pot out for water. "Ari," Justin said then, "I wish you luck with your uncles. More than I've had. That's all I'll say. Someday you'll find me missing if you're not careful. I'll be down in Detention. Just so you know where. I'm rather well expecting it today. And I'm not sure you can prevent that, no matter how much power you think you have in the House. I hope I'm wrong. But I'll work with you. I'll do everything I can. I've got a few questions for you to start off with. Why did you install two variables?"

She opened her mouth. She wanted to talk about the other thing. But he didn't. He closed that off like a door going shut and threw her an important question. And Grant came back with the water. They were Working her, timing every thing. And he had said what he wanted to say.

"It's because one is an action and one is a substantive.
Defend
will drift and so will
base.
And there's going to be no enemy from offworld, just the possibility of one, if that gets passed down. And they're not going to have tape after the first few years: Gehenna didn't."

Justin nodded slowly. "You know that my father specializes in educational sets. That Gehenna has political consequences. You talk about my working with him. You know what you're doing, throwing this my way. You know what it could cost me. And him. If anything goes wrong, if anything blows up—it comes down on us. Do you understand that?"

"It won't."

"It won't.
Young sera, do you know how thin that sounds to me? For God's sake be wiser than that. Not smarter.
Wiser.
Hear me?"

God. Complications. Complications with Defense. With politics. With him. With everything.

"So," he said. "Now you do know. I just want you to be aware. —Your idea about semantic drift and flux is quite good—but a little simple, because there's going to be occupational diversity, which affects semantics, and so on—"

Another shift of direction. Finn and definitive. "They stay agricultural."

He nodded. "Let's work through this, step by step. I'll give you my objections and you note them and give me your answers. ..."

She focused down tight, the way Florian and Catlin had taught her, mind on business, and tried to hold it, but it was not easy, she was not azi, and there was so much
to
him, there was so much complication with him, he was always so soft-spoken, Yanni's complete opposite. He could come off the flank and surprise her, and so few people could do that.

He could go from being mad to being kind—so fast; and both things felt solid, both of them felt real.

She felt Grant's disapproval from across the room. There was nothing she could gain there: win Justin and eventually she won Grant, it was that simple. And she had made headway with Justin: she added it up in its various columns and thought that, overall, complicated as he was, he had given her a great deal.

"He was nice about it," she said to Florian and Catlin at dinner. "He truly was. I think it was real."