Regenesis (11 page)

“Oh, now we run for it. Touched a sore spot, have I?”

“Maybe,” Justin said. “But I’m not staying here to have you twist the knife.” He got a breath, and one clear thought. “I want to go on working with you. If you want it otherwise, you can have that, but don’t answer me tonight.”

“Tell me this,” Jordan said. “How are the flashbacks?”

He’d been plagued by them for years. Flashes of a couch, elder Ari, the taste of orange and vodka. The smell of it. Not of late. And he flashed on the answer, the thing Jordan was really asking. “Not germane here, Dad.”

“They’re better, aren’t they? Not as many as before you had a session with the younger version.
Was there sex?
”

“Nothing nearly so
entertaining
as the first time,” he shot back, referencing the fact Jordan had seen the first tape, and he knew he shouldn’t have said that. It was the vodka. Which hadn’t been a good idea. He felt an oncoming wave of heat. “Grant, come on. It’s not friendly in here. I’m sorry, Dad. I’m sorry for the whole damned thing.”

“They’re spying on us, you know. This whole conversation will go to her.”

“More likely it’ll go to Yanni. She doesn’t meddle in my business.”

“She says.”

“She doesn’t have to lie. And you’ve spread enough of my business out for the monitors to see, at whatever level. I’ve had enough of this argument, Dad. I was glad to see you home. I knew there’d be problems…”

“Meaning I wouldn’t fall in line with the compacts you’ve made.”

“Meaning everything, Dad, meaning just about everything.” He had the impulse to say. Meaning you’re frustrated about that license, meaning you’re mad about lost time, mad about the current administration, mad that you’re still under house arrest. Mad about your whole life. But the vodka hadn’t that thorough a grip on him that he should let that fly. He just said. “I love you. Go to bed and sleep it off. Maybe they’ll arrest me in the morning because I was stupid enough to let this carry on this far. Maybe not. Things are generally better now.”

“Oh, the martyr, my suffering son.”

“Have it any way you like. Security is what security is and they’ll do any damn thing they like. I’m used to it and they know I’ll tell them the plain truth. Hear that, Yanni? So just go to bed, Dad. At least we didn’t have this conversation in the bar. But I’m not sure we should have had it at all.”

“High time we had it.”

“Sure,” he said, “if you think so. I didn’t have an inkling you were getting that mad about my repeated question. So think about it. And calm down. Come on, Grant.”

This time they did make it out the door. He’d bet there was one more glass of vodka poured tonight, if not drunk, before Paul got Jordan into bed. He deeply regretted the one he’d had.

“I’m going to be hung over,” he said to Grant.

“Glass of orange, another of water, water every hour, and two aspirin,” Grant said. “Sovereign. You were making perfect sense, by the way.”

“Sorry. Very sorry.”

“You couldn’t stop him.”

No security had shown up. They took the open air route across the quadrangle to Wing One, and through the doors, and security checked them through and never said a word.

That much had changed since Yanni had taken over. People could be fools these days and not be arrested or interviewed. They might hear from Yanni once he got back, but tonight they made it home all right.

A
PRIL
22, 2424
2351
H

Yanni was up to stuff in Novgorod. Yanni’s office wasn’t going to tell her that, but Base One did. Base One found it real easy to wander where it liked, into communications between Yanni’s office and Novgorod, and between Yanni’s office and ReseuneSec; and what Ari heard made her mad—not a real Mad, so far, but a good one all the same. Yanni was talking to unusual people, people who’d been enemies, and probably not making records about it. That was a watch-it, but she hadn’t told Catlin and Florian about the problem yet, just in case Yanni had a reasonable explanation.

Yanni might guess Base One was into his stuff. Probably he didn’t. Denys hadn’t known to what extent Base One had invaded Base Two, or if he’d known, he’d hoped he’d worked around it, and he’d hoped he was being careful. Or at least he’d hoped to psych
her
, which would have been the answer to his problem, if she’d been that stupid. She’d grown up. He’d been one jump too late to stop her.

She ran through all sorts of records on things Yanni had done, from way back. She did find that her predecessor had trusted Yanni ahead of the Nyes. That wasn’t a great surprise. Yanni generally told the truth.

She incidentally found that it was the first Ari who had given Yanni instructions that if anything happened to her, she wanted Jane Strassen to be the surrogate.

And then she looked just a little too deep: Yanni had had a long conversation with Maman about that, and Maman had said, Hell, no, what do I want with a baby? I had one, thanks. See how that turned out. No. Absolutely not.

Then Yanni had promised Maman if she did it for them she could go back to space when the job was done. That she’d have a major directorate somewhere in space, and Maman had said, well, she’d think about it—because Maman really loved being in space. The War was what had made it necessary for Maman to be down on the planet, because it was safer, she found that fact out between the lines, but after the War, Maman had been so important to Reseune, she’d been stuck in an administrative post and hadn’t been able to get transferred back up to the station. So for that promise, Maman said maybe she could put up with a few years of inconvenience.

That hurt. That really hurt, and it really bothered her—she didn’t cry about it, but the information just bored a sore spot in her heart, until finally she psyched herself and said Maman had changed her mind eventually, that it didn’t matter how it had started, she’d finally Gotten her Maman, all unexpected, because Maman had turned out to love her. She wouldn’t believe that wasn’t so.

Well, it was what you got for getting into people’s records and eavesdropping: you caught people saying things you never wanted to hear, and this one, hurtful as it was, taught her that in a major way.

But what she found went on teaching her. She couldn’t leave it where she’d left it. She couldn’t stop looking at it.

She got into Maman’s records, too. She’d never gotten a letter from Maman after Maman had gone away to space, and there were no letters from Maman hidden in the record, but she did find her Maman’s report on her when she was five.
She’s a handful. But site’s bright. God, she’s bright, She scares me
.

Ari Senior had also said—this turned up in Maman’s letters—Let Strassen choose the second surrogate. And Maman was going to pick Yanni to take over her upbringing after Maman went back to space, but Giraud hadn’t allowed that.

That was worth a Mad, too: Giraud had just overridden Maman, being head of Security. He’d sent Maman to space, then ignored her choice, and ended up choosing Denys, as being a relative closer to her as well as actually being a Special himself, without the Senate declaration that said so. Which Yanni wasn’t.

No question where Giraud’s reasoning lay, however. Giraud hadn’t wanted any power edging over into Yanni’s hands, and Yanni was the man that would take it and do what he pleased.

And of possible candidates to take her on, Giraud wasn’t of the disposition. But Denys had agreed to it. Denys had probably just hated it; but Denys would have done it to get power.

Possibly, too, it was because Denys couldn’t stand not knowing how she was developing. Denys had liked puzzles. And she’d been a puzzle to him—at close range. And by the time he was in it, he’d realized that an azi nurse wasn’t going to keep her from disrupting his life, nor was domestic staff, nor even his own bodyguard.

The Child has subverted the minder,
she read on a certain date, in a frustrated communication to Giraud.
She eluded Seely. She’s a monster.

She liked that one. It echoed Maman, in a Denys tone. She forgot for two seconds that she’d lost one and killed the other. For a fluxed second she was just there again, a little girl in Denys’s household, pursuing a Mad about losing Maman, a Mad that had never let her be friendly with Denys and never would.

Or maybe it was just good taste, she thought. She’d picked her enemies, and she’d been pretty accurate so far.

And then, with the thought of Denys, she riffled through the rest of that electronic file, the one that slowly built a case against Denys, finding justification for killing him—

And, still in flux-state, back to Yanni’s file, as large as Denys’, in Base One.

Was there a connection? Did one temporary authority equal the other? Was Yanni on the level with her?

Denys might have killed her predecessor, and then made it look as if Jordan had done it, so Jordan was exiled for it. Or at least—Giraud had dug up the evidence. Giraud had hated the Warricks with a passion.

But it had been Yanni who had actually brokered the Family deal that got Jordan into Planys, close and protected. There was a lot more security at Planys for several reasons—the military base, the isolation of oceans you couldn’t even fly across without decon; the fact that Planys worked on a lot of military projects and every communication that went out of there went through security. If they’d sent Jordan to space for exile, there’d have been ship-calls, people coming and going. Not at Planys.

So it was both a closer arrest, and a safer one—nobody was going to assassinate Jordan inside PlanysLabs, where visitors were so closely tracked. Giraud had been perfectly capable of arranging an accident, wherever else Jordan might have ended up, inside some Reseune facility. Yanni had saved Jordan from that.

Giraud had had power, a great deal of power just after the first Ari had died. And he had used it. A lot. So you could say he’d benefitted from Ari dying, and that was a motive. You could almost suspect him of killing the first Ari.

But in all his communications and even messages to Denys, he’d really been upset by Ari’s death. He’d seemed to view it as a tremendous loss to Reseune—worse, a premature one, before they’d gotten the psychogenesis project really organized. They’d taken a whole year getting her started. So for one reason or another, they really hadn’t been ready.

And once she’d started looking and sounding like her predecessor, Giraud had warmed up to her, and started doing her favors in a very fond way. She hadn’t wanted to like him. But she’d ended up liking him, and still did, even knowing what he’d done to the Warricks.

The hour the first Ari had died, she’d arranged for the first Florian and the first Catlin not to be with her—she’d sent Florian and Catlin each off on an errand. She’d been alone, then. Jordan had come in. The sniffer at least proved that. Jordan admitted they’d had an argument, which no monitor had picked up—again, some device had broken, and nobody knew how. She’d died. But the crime scene had been muddled up because Denys argued they should call in the Moreyville police, not to have it investigated only by ReseuneSec, so as not to have any political accusations of a coverup. And in that process there’d been a lot of people going in and out, which they never should have been allowed to do, that was Yanni’s note on the case. The sniffers’ evidence was muddled for the same reason there were fingerprints all over—a lot of people used that lab, and a lot of people had been in and out in the immediate furor over Ari’s death before the Moreyville investigators ever got there.

Should she take that at face value, as just the confusion of a bad, bad moment in Reseune’s history? Maybe. The authority that ran everything had died, and for an hour or so nobody had been running things. Departments were all running at their own admin levels, no coordination, nobody to call or appeal to, until Giraud and Yanni had stepped in.

And Ari sending Florian and Catlin away…had she known she’d never see them again? Had she known she was killing them? Had she kept that cold a face and not given anything away to them, who’d have read her the way her Florian and her Catlin could read her? Some people thought the first Ari had killed herself. But she didn’t know how the first Ari could have ever gotten that intention past her Florian and Catlin, if they were anything like hers.

She scanned Ari’s notes from immediately before she died. She had, a hundred times. She searched administrative comments on Jordan, and bastard was about the sum of comments from Giraud and no few others, plus a note that Jordan had found out about Ari having run an intervention on Justin, and that Jordan was madder than hell.

But Ari’s records stopped with the lab notes, right at the end of a sentence. Period. Was it significant that Ari had finished her last sentence? She would finish a sentence, herself, even if somebody came in while she was writing. It was just the way she was.

Base One had apparently shut down the instant Ari’s death was logged. Base One had gone into an entirely different mode, truncated its wide information-gathering to a single, computer-driven thread, all but shut down—for so many years some people must haw thought Denys’s base in the house system had actually become Base One, even if it called itself Base Two. But Denys had known better. Denys had gotten her to log onto Base One when she was old enough. And maybe he’d hoped he could get his own access on it. But it hadn’t done a lot when Denys was there.

And then Base One had said,
Hello, Ari
. In her predecessor’s voice. In her room. She’d gained her secret friend. Her childhood advisor. Denys had been aware she used Base One to a certain extent, after that, but his Base continued as the dominantly active one in System. Maybe he knew Base One would be pegged to her age, and that she wouldn’t be able to use it until she was the right age. But Base One had always treated her as two years older than she really was.

Denys had been safe until she’d gotten the keys to open Base One wide and set it back to work at full stretch, as it had been in the first Ari’s day, assembling and collating all the log notes from the years it had been asleep—and it suddenly took priority.