Текст книги "Regenesis"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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BOOK ONE Section 2 Chapter vi

APRIL 26, 2424

1659H

“…it’s him. Maybe he hates Patil. Or maybe there’s something actually going on, and he doesn’t give a damn about it, because they’re trying to use him–the old radicals–hell, I don’t know how they could have gotten to him, but he won’t play anybody else’s game. Just his own, always his own, the hell with anybody else.”

Interesting observation, Ari thought, sitting beside Catlin at the eon‑sole. The audio clip ran to its conclusion:

“Will you go to Yanni?”Grant had asked.

And Justin: “I’m going to give Catlin another phone call. I’m not taking this. I’m not taking this from him. He wants us back under suspicion, he wants us arrested, he wants me upset, he’ll make himself the martyr, so we both get sent to Planys, back to his private kingdom, and he has years to work on us… Damn it. Grant, you’re right.”

“ Didhe call you?” Ari asked, when the clip ended.

“Yes,” Catlin said, with a nod. “He did. He said–” She keyed another clip, listened, then made it audible.

“…he doesn’t give a damn about this Dr. Patil. He’s after me. He wants to get me at odds with admin and better yet, get us all sent back to Planys, where he has a base.”

“ Why would he pick Dr. Patil?” recorded‑Catlin asked.

“ I’ve no idea. An outside and problematic contact he once had. Somebody he didn’t really know and doesn’t care about. Maybe somebody he hates. I just don’t know.”

Catlin stopped the clip.

“Jordan Warrick is a very interesting person,” Ari said. “And now Justin’s quite angry at him. Jordan’s supposed to be good at Working. Very good. I wonder if he intended all he got from Justin.”

“Warrick Senior’s behavior seems self‑destructive,” Catlin said.

“Not only self‑destructive,” Ari said. “He’d gladly take us with him. He seems to want things back the way they were before I was born, and he’s bound to be frustrated with me.”

“There is a solution to this,” Catlin said.

Kill him, Catlin meant. It wasn’t legal to do, but that certainly wouldn’t stop Catlin and Florian, if she ordered it. And very likely Yanni wouldn’t let her or them take the consequences for it. There was far too much invested in her. So she could even get away with it, under the law.

But not in Justin’s eyes, and the likelihood that Justin would find out sooner or later–oddly enough that was the first Stop the thought ran into. Not the Law. Justin.

Jordan was just very, very interesting–someone from the first Ari’s time, a piece of the puzzle of the first Ari’s life and death that had been missing all these. Everyone had said Jordan was a problem.

He certainly was. A very high‑powered problem. He was attempting to Work his son, whatever else this was about, and Justin possibly had it figured out entirely accurately.

It was also clear Jordan Warrick still had secrets. The first Ari had wanted him for a partner: they’d worked together productively for a while, before their personalities clashed. Politics had been part of it–the Centrist Party with their program of stopping further explorations, concentrating Union into a tight, strong knot, so that their longtime rivals over at Pell’s Star–the Alliance–had to concentrate there, too. So no one would be expanding. If mankind went on exploring and expanding and trying to out‑race each other to likely stars, expanding so fast they had to use birthlabs to multiply fast enough to keep economies going, the Centrists feared that so much use of birthlabs was going to change mankind–

And that was quite true. It was changing the balance in the genome. It had, already, in much more than just the genome. There were differences between them and Alliance and Earth far other than genetic balance.

But psychosociology wasn’t the reason why Jordan had aligned with the Centrists. Oh, no. His reason for taking their side was that the first Ari and most of Reseune was Expansionist. The first Ari’s whole life’s work was Expansionist.

And, not too strange to say, Jordan had taken up corresponding with the Centrists and their more radical branch at about the time the partnership between himself and Ari had broken up…so figure that Jordan didn’t really believe in the Centrist Party or give a damn about their fears for the future. He’d just used them.

Interesting.

Interesting, interesting.

“We’re going to watch him,” Ari said. “Yanni’s managing this so far. I’m sure you’ll tell him there was some sort of a leak, when you think it’s right to do.”

“Hicks has given us agents to be totally at our disposal,” Catlin said. “Thirty, with clericals.”

This was news. “Because of Jordan Warrick?”

“Perhaps. Ser Warrick, Dr. Patil, Dr. Thieu, and events unforeseen. We laid down conditions to our working with this staff. Florian is over at the barracks going through their records, analyzing the abilities of what we’ve been given.”

“A permanent gift? From Hicks?”

“Permanent, yes, sera. Much like the protection the first Ari had, high‑level ReseuneSec, with accesses, only Florian said we wouldn’t take them except if you hold the Contracts, sera.”

“The first Ari’s guard. They were Contracted to Reseune itself?”

“Not our predecessors. But yes, the others were. Your predecessor never internalized the staff ReseuneSec lent her–she rather used all of ReseuneSec; but we think that may have been a problem, that her security staff wasn’twholly hers. We’re taking care of that. You need to hold those Contracts.”

“To be inside the apartment?” She was a little appalled. “We need domestic staff.”

“Those are coming, sera. But we were offered the others. They can have a barracks here, in the wing, an adjunct office with computer ties to ReseuneSec. We’re moving out the rest of the records storage and taking over the guest apartment on the first floor. We can cancel everything if it’s not a good idea. But there’s room for them on the first floor, down by the old lab, and they won’t be in the apartment–we wouldn’t let them in, until we’re very comfortable with them; though I’m sure, when they are Contracted, that they’d like you to be there, sera. If it’s all right.”

That was a natural thing, an emotional thing. And it would cement the Contract, in that sense. She’d be their Supervisor, the CIT they’d come to in distress or in need–to be remote from them was unacceptable. And she’d told Florian to see to staff. He certainly had. She’d turned them loose to see to things, and they’d done it without making a ripple in her own schedule…maybe a bit widely, but–all the same–they had the chance to gain loyal personnel. That wasn’t a bad idea.

“Of course,” she said. “Of course I will. When are they coming in?”

“Soon. A few days. The domestic staff should get here first. Florian’s checking on their progress while he’s down the hill.”

“You’ve been very quiet to be so busy.”

“These are things we can do. I hope we’ve done them well enough.”

She’d been completely lost in her work, her deepstudy and her own tracking of problems down in Novgorod, out of touch with domestic issues, so long as her clothes appeared clean and her breakfast and supper arrived mostly on time. She walked about with her head stuffed with population equations and spent her days in the first Ari’s population dynamics designs–she’d reached a point, a strange point in such study, when whole disciplines had begun to come into focus, as if the brain had started assembling all the scattered bits of what had been her predecessor’s operations two decades ago, and put it all together. She was at that critical point, dammit, on the verge of overload, and she just went there on any stray thought, far, far from the needs of domestic staff. Her head ached–literally ached–from the effort it was to jump between the real world and Ari’s world, and back again–to try to grasp the underlying reasons for the ethics her predecessor had installed to patch what had already been done at Novgorod–laying down the commandment to work, and the necessity for recreation, and above all the mantra “We are different as our world is different, and our different world is a valuable resource…”

Hell, that was dangerous. It was sweeping, it had no exceptions, it was potentially troublesome, and the first Ari had dared embed that in the tape, high and wide, which was the way she worked. Half a million Novgoroders kept voting against terraforming, and, azi‑originated as they were, and doggedly devoted to work for validation–they had deep suspicions about CIT‑descended Centrists and about proposals for terraforming, and were increasingly inclined in the last ten years to favor red‑brown architecture, one might note–the color of Cyteen’s outback.

Was that significant?

Was that going to produce a problem integrating into Union ethic as a whole–where her predecessor had done other interesting tweaks in local mindsets?

“Sera?” Catlin asked, and she blinked. That was how she was lately. That was the territory where her own thoughts wandered, and the choice of protective and service staff–essential to her safety–became just part of the overload.

“I think it’s likely very fine what you’ve done.” She brought herself to short‑focus on it, and try to integrate it into her concept of her household, and how it was all going to work, and Catlin was right to persist in getting an answer out of her. You couldn’t make mistakes with azi. You couldn’t just Contract them and throw them away.

And it was scary, thinking of all the changes racketing around her.

She had two people in all the world–Florian and Catlin–that she trusted to be competent and devoted to her–an array of people like Sam and Yanni, that she trusted for other fields, but when it came down to it, it was Florian and Catlin who would keep her alive and give her time to pursue those abstracts she chased through the maze of records.

They reported to her. They made choices–in this case, they’d made one that affected the household around her.

And more security. Her life, certainly–maybe Union’s survival–depended on her bodyguards’ judgement.

“I have no doubt of you,” she said briskly to Catlin, totally focused for the moment on the here and now, and Catlin’s fair demand for her to back them or not. “Do what you see fit to do. Did Justin stay in the Wing today?”

“Working in his office, since a late breakfast, sera. So is Grant. Perfectly cooperative. Jordan called him; Justin left the office and went to breakfast. There was, however, no contact between them beyond that. Justin and his companion spoke only to the waiters at the restaurant and to each other. And he of course communicated with me. Jordan staved in his new office with Paul and rearranged things. He found two bugs. It wasn’t all.”

Ari gave a perfunctory laugh, not whole‑hearted, more wistful. “It would be so much nicer if Jordan weren’t an enemy. Does Justin like his life, I wonder? Is he mad at me, do you think?”

“Grant is content,” Catlin said. The azi, she could judge quite well. The born‑man, she didn’t attempt.

And that was, of course, a correct answer.

“I wish I could turn things around with Jordan,” she said. “I wish I could figure how to Work him. But he’s stubborn. And he knows all the tricks.” She gave a sigh and got up from the console. Paused, then, looking directly at Catlin, a second time sharply focused on the present, and on Catlin’s and Florian’s problems. “Sending Jordan back to Planys wouldn’t be good, would it, if he has a network there? I’d planned on Strassenburg. But he’ll Work the azi there and try to change them, and they’re all foundational to that city, and thatwould be a big problem. I could build an ethic around him in that population, but once he’s dead, what will that do? He’d be a rock in the stream. Everything would bend around him. Forever.”

Catlin shook her head. “I’m sure I don’t know any answer, sera.”

“Unfortunately I don’t, either,” she said, and went to her bedroom, and her private bath, and took a headache remedy before she took another deepstudy pill and went back to her bed, leaving everything to them, going back to what she had to do.

There’d been a garden once in legend, a perfect garden. But there’d been a snake in it. The woman hadn’t known what to do about him. And every problem of humankind had started from that. The snake had done a Working, about knowledge, and pride, and the woman had gone off her path and taken all her descendants with her.

She had her own snake under close watch. And she couldn’t let concern about Jordan disrupt her concentration, not when things were starting to gel, not when her essential job for the next few months was absorbing the sum of several sciences, dosing down with kat so often she could almost go deep‑state the way Catlin or Florian could learn, just by thinking hard, and become only the thing she was absorbing, without objection, without question, just wide open to unquestioned knowledge.

You had to trust the tapes, you had to really trust them to dose down that far, or to go that open. You had no resistence when you did that. You had no way to say no. You had no extraneous thoughts. You just recorded, embedded the knowledge as fast as possible, burning it into the brain’s pathways, strong, strong, strongpathways.

There was only one source of tapes she’d trust like that: the first Ari’s tapes, stored in Base One, tapes recording Ari I’s thoughts, her opinions on technical questions, her data, her projects, her working life.

If there was any personal prejudice embedded in those records, any Working her predecessor had designed for her beyond the obvious, it was going into her head, too.

If she’d had the choice, if she’d had the leisure, if the world hadn’t been as high‑pressure as it was, and if the legislature wasn’t boiling with important decisions Yanni was trying to handle–if all those things were so, and the world were safer, she’d have taken less of the deepteach drug, she’d have taken longer in her learning, she’d have stayed near enough to the surface to let a little of her conscious mind work on the problems, and see more critically what she personally thought.

But in Denys Nye’s fall, Union had gone quietly into crisis, and civilization could make some serious missteps while she lazed her way through, learning at an ordinary pace.

So she took the dose she did, on her off days, and gave up critiquing her predecessor. She wasn’t giving up her conscious mind in the long run–she banked on that. She was strong‑willed, she was psychologically knowledgeable, she knew the tricks a person used in Working another, and she had a good memory for where and when she’d learned something, right down to the session. If she ran up against an ethical problem, she’d do her own thinking–eventually. She had tags on all of it.

Was it her own thinking, for instance, that had let her matter‑of‑factly consider Catlin’s matter‑of‑fact offer simply to kill Jordan Warrick? She might have been shocked a few months ago. But maybe not. Denys had been trying to kill her. Ultimately they’d killed him. That was a lesson life had given her.

Was it her own thinking, still, that said doing away with Jordan might still be the better, safer answer, that said there might be a way to do the deed quietly, and that Justin might not stay too long in mourning if she did it very cleverly?

She said no. Shesaid no. That was the one mentality in the transaction she could entirely identify. That was her, saying no, and not clearly knowing whether it was the first Ari’s pragmatic sense or her own soft‑hearted inexperience behind that answer.

It was scary. Two days ago she’d taken Poo‑thing out of his drawer and set him on the dresser, so she could see him from this bed. She’d been too old for him. Now she was old enough to want contact with childhood years he represented. Poor’ battered bear. He’d been through a lot. Denys, in the main. But never discount her predecessor’s intentions, battering her mind into a pattern she was supposed to follow for all her life.

Was rebellion stupidity? Or was it just her genetics snuggling around the first Ari’s precepts, hardheadedness and arrogance trying to find a convenient shape to settle into?

She wanted Florian tonight. She really wanted Florian. But she, and he, had so much work to do…so very much work to do…things about the household, which kept them all fed, and safe…in a Reseune that didn’t all want them to stay alive.

The dose began to take hold. Critical thinking ebbed. The machine started up, a gentle repetitive tone, warning the tape was about to start. She had to press a button to get it to go on. She had that much volition left.

Beginning. The Novgorod designs, the overall structure.

Maybe nobody should examine their own world that closely. She’d been out in the world, however briefly She’d seen the world from the air, seen it from the ground, gone through its corridors and met its violence.

Now she was working directly with the ethics that drove it, examining the ethics set into the azi who had been the foundational citizens. Did she intend to tweak that mix? She could. She could subtly, by sending in other azi into key positions, shift the whole Cyteen electorate.

She could set others at work at Fargone, where Ollie ruled. She knew Ollie’s ethical structure. She had a copy of Ollie’s personal manual, down to the day he left. She could skim it at high speed, and recognize ordinary structures from special ones. She could design azi to fit around Ollie, no question, the foundations of something special, around one that she’d loved, when she was little. She could make all Fargone Station into Ollie’s image.

Ethics were the stop‑marks, and the directional choices, in a psych‑map. And she knew set after set of the classic ones, the ones from before the first Ari’s time, the ones designed by committee.

She knew the ones that had the first Ari’s peculiar stamp on them. Like those key sets in Novgorod, and at Gehenna–the people that would rise to the top and become important, the leaders, the movers.

She could replicate that at Strassenburg. She could do something else. Yes, she could.

And something else was her choice in building that place.

Surveillance of past projects like Gehenna was her job, the key thing that the first Ari had created her to do. Be the watchdog. Steer the directed populations in a good direction. Understand. Change at need. Know the program, and know how to change it.

Strassenburg would always be closely tied to Reseune, and it would be hers. Herchosen genesets, her chosen CITs, her designed psychsets, never part of Novgorod or any of the rest of Cyteen: something new under the sun. The thetas she was about to manage for sheer practice would be the foundation of a site where herprograms ran, not her predecessor’s. Every problem case in Reseune was currently worried that the new facility might serve as a gulag for her opposition–and in fact she hadthought of creating a little secure lab there, for the likes of Jordan Warrick.

But there was a problem with secure labs, and the Patil incident had demonstrated that, hadn’t it, abundantly? Secure labs were full of very bright people, who could be very devious if they wanted to be.

And getting a Special like Jordan involved there would jeopardize the far more important reason for Strassenberg, that the whole town was itself a lab, a control for herself, and for her successor. She wanted to see what herdesigns grew into, isolated from those at Novgorod.

She intended nothing antithetical to Novgorod, unless intolerance for other ideas was a timebomb developing in the first Ari’s design.

Within decades, Novgorod would meet something on its beloved planet that wasn’t Novgorod, when it had been the only true city in the world for all the world’s existence. Novgorod had had some experience in tolerance, tolerating Reseune itself, Reseune’s autocracy–even needingan Ariane Emory, and voting for her programs.

But would they tolerate diversity when it wasn’t theirbrand of diversity?

For the good of the planet, they would have to. Or their idiosyncrasy became a problem that she would have to handle with subsequent population surges.

And what she did carried through generations. That was the point of everything: ultimately it was peopleyou were dealing with, people whose psychsets might have been planned like a jigsaw puzzle, groups of the one psychset clicking into place with other groups of another, and tending to bond and procreate with individuals of like psychset, so there was a certain persistence of type– thatwas setted‑in, too. All part of integrations.

No apparent problems in Novgorod. So far. Even the Abolitionists might be healthy. At least people disagreed with the majority.

So let Novgorod meet something Else. In her time, in her successor’s time, let two separate psycharcologies learn each other. That would deliver a poke to the urban organism downriver, to see how it wiggled.

It might also guarantee that her successor would need to exist.

Azi felt a certain pride in the continuance of their type. It was part of their sets. But was it wired into what was basically human?

Curious, curious. She was able to compare herself only against the first Ari. Her successor would at least have a broader field of inquiry in that department.

And perhaps her successor would found yet another colony, just to check things out. She thought if she were that Ari, that thought would certainly occur to her.

But that would complicate the situation long‑term, when populations merged and met, as they would when the world grew. Too many variables spoiled the soup, to mix a metaphor.

Forgetting that they were dealing with living, self‑willed people spoiled it, too. Too much deepstudy, too much immersion in the theoretical, the give and take only of electrons, not the behavior of whole organisms. The world was more complicated than theory ever yet predicted: that was why she was important. It was her job to see things coming, and figure how to shift the demographics without conflicts. A machine didn’t work, mixing in yet one more metaphor, if it was all one homogenous piece. Neither did a city, or a species.

Finding the glitches was her job. Her problem. Man started out analyzing his environment, graduated into understanding his own psyche, graduated, again, into analyzing the behavior of the human species en masse.

That guaranteed employment for several of her kind, didn’t it?

BOOK ONE Section 2 Chapter vii

APRIL 27, 2424

0117H

Florian was back from down the hill–late. Exhausted. He fell into bed in the dark, and Catlin rolled over and asked, face to face, brow to brow with him: “So. What’s the story? Do we accept these people?”

“I didn’t find anyone to object to. I’ve interviewed them. I’ve ordered them into a single barracks, two days of special tape. They’ll be firmly under our orders and initially operational by, I’d think, the fifteenth of next month.”

“Good.” She eased an arm around him. She was tired, herself, from hour after hour at the screens, and running up and downstairs seeing to the move. He was tired from a day with Hicks and trekking from one end of Reseune to the other, down to the labs and the barracks, back to the offices, meeting upon meeting with prospective help.

“Has sera asked after me?”

“She knows where you’ve been all day. She’s very busy in her studies, but she approves of what we’ve done.”

“Good.” He pulled her close, bestowed a weary kiss on the forehead. She wasn’t thattired, that that didn’t get a reaction. But she stayed tracked, business first. “There was an interesting development on my side today.”

“Oh?”

“Justin called me. Called us. He wanted to know what was on the card. He wanted to distance himself from that inquiry. But he also wanted to know.”

The penalty of interesting information. Florian pushed her back enough to look at her eye to eye. “Curious about the card, is he?”

“Curious and worried. He’s conflicted. He wants to know and he doesn’t want to know. On my own judgment, I told him about the Novgorod doctor to see what his reaction would be, and also to warn him about the nature of the danger. He didn’t know her, not even by name. I ran the clip of his call for sera to hear it.”

“Interesting,” Florian murmured. “And what did she say?”

“Much the same. She found it interesting.”

Hands moved. And stopped. “Do you think sera’s going to call me tonight?”

“Definitely she won’t,” Catlin said. “She skipped supper again and went straight into deepstudy.”

“She shouldn’t do that.”

“I said so, too. She said she’d have a big breakfast in the morning.”

“She’s pushing herself again. It’s not good.”

“It’s not good,” Catlin agreed. “I think she feels we’re in danger. I think she suspects something she can’t identify, the same as us.”

“What’s Unusual?” Florian said. It was the old game, the childhood game. Find the change. Find the anomaly. Find the problem.

“Jordan,” she answered. “Jordan being in Justin’s old office.”

“The card.” He tossed the list of Unusuals back. “Yanni. This Dr. Patil. The new colony. The new wing. The new township. Am I missing anything?”

“I think,” Catlin said, “that the card fits Jordan. Jordan wanting Justin to get caught. Justin giving us the card and being angry at Jordan. Justin calling me this afternoon.”

“Sera studying late,” Florian said, “night after night. She doesn’t feel she’s ready. Or she’s looking for something.”

“Yanni coming to dinner, right after his trip to Novgorod. Talking about Eversnow. Which Patil is going to run. Connection.”

“Hicks suddenly giving us all this staff. Which he was prepared to do before I walked in. Which meant he could have prepared to do it before the card ever came up–or only afterhe knew about the card he didn’t have–yet–until I gave it to him. Does the card show him some specific danger? Or is he trying to plant a spy on us, by giving us this staff?”

“Sera pulling Justin into the Wing,” Catlin said. “She didn’t even exit the Wing to talk to Yanni. Yanni came here to talk to her–so she’s still regarding our warnings–but she pulled Justin inside our perimeters.”

“She may be going out of the Wing more often than the last couple of months, if we have this new security staff,” Florian said. “That exposes her to danger. Would Hicks want that?”

“We’re about to have domestic staff down in prep,” Catlin said. “That’s an exposure.”

“Hicks seemed to relax once he had the card. He seemed more friendly. That’s an emotional assessment. He’s a born‑man. He has authority, despite what we hear about the office. And he is cooperating.”

“So what do we conclude?” Catlin asked. “That something’s moving, one. Jordan’s stirred up, Justin is, ReseuneSec is, that’s two. And we still don’t know what Eversnow and Patil have to do with anybody.”

“Something’s moving,” Florian agreed, “and once we have more staff, sooner or later sera’s going to be going outside the perimeter we’ve established.”

“We’ve just got to watch out for her. It’s all we can do.”

“And follow up on Justin and this card.”

“Sera won’t like it,” Catlin said. “But we have to.”

“Justin Warrick is the one piece we canmove. We have to. Or we have to ask Yanni about Patil and the card, and I don’t think he’ll tell us the truth.”

“Do you think Hicks will tell us the truth, once he has an answer about the card?”

“Emotional assessment. No. Not for free. So I don’t want to ask, officially, not while we don’t know who talked to Jordan, and why he gave Justin that card.”

Catlin heaved a sigh and put her arms around him. He put his around her. They had sex, purely a tension‑reliever, mutual release, mutual pleasure. Afterward Catlin said, side by side on the same pillow:

“At least we’ll have help on staff.”

“We’ll have more to do for a while, watching the watchers. Being sure Hicks isn’t our problem.”

“Good news, if he is being honest. And if his staff is. And we know there’s danger outside. But we’ve been shut in the Wing so long there’s risk of sera losing touch with outside. Isolating herself from Reseune–from Novgorod–she can’t afford that. She has to go outside sooner or later. That’s coming. We just have to be sure of our own staff. That’s basic.”

“True.” He shut his eyes and relaxed with his partner, a long sigh flowing out of him. They could rest, the few hours of someone else’s watch–Marco and Wes took the night shift in the Wing One office. Those two, they could trust.

They did know at least Justin Warrick was safer than he had been, thanks to them getting him into a new office.

The question was whether they might have opened another window for an attack on sera, by letting Justin in–and yet another by accepting Hicks’s offer. There were very many, very skilled people they were letting into the wing.

Catlin objected to things. Catlin was always suspicious, and Catlin had agreed with him in this. He wished she’d seen a major problem up front…because the transition to outside made him very, very uneasy.

BOOK ONE Section 3 Chapter i

MAY 1, 2424

2000H

Eleven weeks, and Giraud, and Abban AB, and Seely AS would each one easily fit in the circle of an adult’s thumb and forefinger, and that was after the latest growth spurt. They didn’t weigh as much as a lab mouse. But their bones were forming, and their teeth were starting. They had the beginnings of a breathing apparatus, that floor of the rib cage, the diaphragm, which prepared them to draw breath. They were transparent, full of blood vessels, paths for the blood which had definite structure. Their fingers and toes were starting to grow in length. Legs grew longer. And they moved their whole bodies. They stretched, widely, and often, asserting their presence in the world.

BOOK ONE Section 3 Chapter ii

MAY 1, 2424

2123H

I’m different than the first Ari, young Ari, so far as I can figure, in one very major way: it was her Maman who drove her so hard, not Denys Nye, and she never loved her mother. I had Jane Strassen to take care of me, and I loved her very much. I expected to love people. The first Ari didn’t. The first Ari was very much solo throughout her life, but I have my friends, and I even liked Giraud Nye at the last–and he protected me, though I don’t think I’ll ever forgive Denys–my Denys, remember. Don’t let my feelings prejudice yours. Maybe your Denys will turn out nicer. Until I meet him, I won’t know.