Текст книги "Cyteen "

The small jet touched down at Planys airfield and rolled to the front of the little terminal, and Justin unbuckled his safety belt, moving in the same sense of unreality that had been with him since the plane left the ground at Reseune.

He had thought until that very moment that some agency would stop him, that the game was giving him permission to travel and then maneuvering him or Jordan into some situation that would cancel it.

He was still scared. There were other possibilities he could think of, more than a psych of either one of them—like the chance of Reseune creating a situation they could use to harm Jordan or worsen his conditions. He tried to put thoughts like that in the back of his mind, where they only warned him to be careful; like the thoughts that armored him against the sudden recall, the sudden reversal of the travel permit, even this far into the matter.

One had to live like that. Or go crazy.

He picked up his briefcase and his bag from the locker while his Security escort were coming forward—it was the plane that shuttled back and forth between Reseune and Planys at need, a corporate plane with the Infinite Man symbol on its tail, not the red and white emblem of RESEUNEAIR, which carried passengers and freight over most of the continent and a few points overseas. Reseune Labs owned this one, even if it was a RESEUNEAIR crew that flew it; and the fact that this plane was, like RESEUNE ONE,private—kept its cargoes and its passenger lists from the scrutiny of the Bureau of Transportation.

A long, long flight from Reseune, over a lonely ocean. A plane with an airlock and a suction filter in the lock, and the need for D-suits and masks before they could go out there. He took his out of the locker, white, thin plastic, hotter than hell to wear, because the generic fits-everyone sort had no circulating system, just a couple of bands you put around your chest and shoulders to keep the thing from inflating like a balloon and robbing you of the air the helmet gave you.

The co-pilot took him in hand and checked his seals, collar, wrists, ankles and front, then patted him on the shoulder, pointing to the airlock. The generic suits had no com either, and you shouted or you signed.

So he picked up his baggage, likewise sealed in a plastic carry-bag, and looked to see if Security was going to let him out there.

No. One was going to lock through with him. That was how closely they were watching him.

So he went into the airlock and waited through the cycle, and went out down the ladder with the Security guard at his back, down where the ground crews, in custom-fitted D-suits, were attending the plane.

There was very little green in Planys. Precip towers did their best to keep the plants alive, but it was still raw and new here, still mostly red rock and blue scrub and woolwood. Ankyloderms were the predominant phylum of wildlife on this continent, as platytheres were in the other, in the unbridged isolation that had given Cyteen two virtually independent ecologies—except, always, woolwood and a few other windborne pests that propagated from virtually any fiber that got anywhere there was dirt and moisture.

Flora reinforced with absorbed silicates and poisonous with metals and alkaloids, generating an airborne profusion of fibers carcinogenic in Terran respiratory systems even in minute doses: the plants would kill you either in minutes or in years, depending on whether you were fool enough to eat a leaf or just unlucky enough to get an unguarded breath of air. The carbon monoxide in the air was enough to do the job on its own. But the only way to get killed by the fauna was to stand in its path, and the only way it ever died, the old joke ran, was when two of equal size met head to head and starved to death.

It was easy to forget what Cyteen was until you touched the outback.

And there was so profound a sense of desolation about this place. You looked away from the airport and the buildings, and it was Cyteen, that was all, raw and deadly.

Jordan lived in this place.

There was no taking the suits off until they got to Planys Annex, and the garage, and another airlock, where you had to brush each other off with some violence while powerful suction fans made the cheap suits rattle and flutter. You had to lift and stretch the elastic straps to get any fiber out of them, then endure a hosing down in special detergent, lock through, strip the suits and step up onto a grating without touching the outside surfaces—while the decontamination crew saw to your baggage.

Damn, he thought, anxious until the second door was shut and he and his escort were in a hall that looked more like a storm-tunnel at home—gray concrete, completely gray.

It was better on the upper floor: green-painted concrete, decent lighting. No windows . . . there was probably no window in all of Planys. A small concession to decor in a few green plastic hanging plants, cheap framed prints on the walls.

Building A, it said occasionally, brown stencil letters a meter high, obscured here and there by the hanging pictures. Doors were brown-painted metal. There was, anomaly, an office with curtained hallward windows. That was the one that said, in a small engraved-plastic sign: Dr. Jordan Warrick, Administrator, Educational Division.

A guard opened that door for him. He walked in, saw Paul at the desk, Paul, who looked—like Paul, that was all: he was dyeing his hair—who got up and took his hand and hugged him.

Then he knew it was real. "Go on in," Paul said into his ear, patting him on the shoulder. "He knows you're here."

He went to the door, opened it and went in. Jordan met him there with open arms. For a long, long while they just held on to each other without saying a word. He wept. Jordan did.

"Good to see you," Jordan said finally. "Damn, you've grown."

"You're looking good," Justin said, at arms' length, trying not to see the lines around the eyes and the mouth. Jordan felt thinner, but he was still fit and hard—perhaps, Justin thought, Jordan had done what he had done, from the day Denys had called him into his office and told him he had gotten a travel permit—run lap upon lap in the gym, determined not to have his father see him out of shape.

"I wish Grant could have come."

"So did he." It was hard to keep his composure. He got it back. And did not add that there was reason to worry, that Grant was more scared than Grant wanted to let on, being left alone at Reseune—azi, and legally under Reseune's authority. "Maybe some other trip."

This trip hadto work. They hadto make it as smooth and easy as possible, to get others in future. He had an idea every paper in his briefcase was going to be gone over again by every means Security had here; and that when he got back to Reseune they were going to do it all again, and strip-search him the way they had before he boarded the plane, very, very thoroughly. But he was here. He had the rest of the day and till noon tomorrow. Every minute he spent with Jordan, two high-clearance Security agents would be sitting in the same room; but that was all right, right as the cameras and the bugs that invaded every moment of his life and left nothing private.

So he walked over to the conference table with Jordan, he sat down as Paul came in and joined them, he said: "I brought my work. They'll get my briefcase up here in a bit. I'm really anxious for you to have a look at some of it."

It's a waste of time, Yanni had said, in Yanni's inimitable way, when he had begged Yanni to give him a clearance to bring bis latest design with him.

And then cleared it by that afternoon. This'll cost you, the note Yanni sent him had said. You'll pay me in overtime.

"How have things been going?" Jordan asked him, asking him more than that with the anxiousness in his eyes, the way a son and a psych student could read and Security and voice-stress analyzers might possibly miss.

Is there some condition to this I don't know about?

"Hell," he said, and laughed, letting the tension go, "too damn well. Toodamn well, all year. Last year was hell. I imagine you picked that up. I couldn't do anything right, everything I touched fell apart—"

A lot of problems I can't mention.

"—but it's like all of a sudden something sorted itself out. For one thing, they took me off real-time work. I felt guilty about that—which is probably a good indicator how bad it was; I was taking too long, I was too tired to think straight, just no good at it, that's all, and too tied up in it to turn it loose. Yanni thought I could break through, you know, some of my problems that way, I know damn well what he was trying to do; then he R&R'd me into production again. Until for some reason he had a change of heart and shoved me back into R&D, on a long, long lead-time. Where I do just fine, thanks."

They had talked so long in time-lag he found himself doing it again, condensing everything into packets, with a little worry about Security objecting in every sentence. But here he had more freedom. They promised him that. There was no outside eavesdropping to worry about and they could talk about anything—that offered no hint of escape plans or hidden messages to be smuggled outside Reseune.

Jordan knew about the Project. Both Projects, Ari and Rubin.

"I'm glad," Jordan said. "I'm glad. How's Grant's work?"

"He never was in trouble. You know Grant." And then he realized how far back that question had to go.

All those years. Grant in hospital. Himself in Security's hands. Jordan being whisked away to testify in Novgorod before they shipped him out to Planys.

His hand shook, on the table in front of him, shook as he carried it to his mouth and tried to steady himself.

"Grant—came out of it all right. Stable as ever. He's fine. He really is. I don't know what I'd have done without him. Have you been all right?"

"Hell at first. But it's a small staff, a close staff. They can come and go, of course, and they know my condition here, but it's a real difference—a real difference."

O God, be careful. Anything you say, anything you admit to needing, they can use. Watch what you say.

". . . We take care of each other here. We carry each other's loads, sometimes. I think it's all that desert out there. You either go crazy and they ship you out, or you get seduced by the tranquillity here. Even Security's kind of reasonable. —Aren't you, Jim?"

One guard had settled in, taken a chair in the corner. The man laughed and leaned back, ankles crossed.

Not azi. CIT.

"Most times," Jim the guard said.

"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. Militarypriority. 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 knowis 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 wantto 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.

ii