Текст книги "Cyteen "
Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh
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Sera stayed very still a moment. Mad. Terribly mad and upset.
It was not hard to figure why sera partnered with Justin Warrick: Catlin knew the reasons in that the way she had known, after she had seen Florian attack a problem, that Florian was everything she needed in the world.
And when somebody was your partner, you felt connected to them, and you had rather anything than think they could fail you.
A long time sera stood there, and finally she sat down at her desk. "I don't think they know," sera said.
"Not unless there's somebody working inside Reseune, sera. And that's not likely. But not everybody at Planys is Reseune staff. That's where the hole is. And they're not going to plug it. They're going to see what's going on first. Jordan Warrick is linked to the Abolitionists. And maybe to respectable people. Nobody knows yet. They're trying to find out if those groups are doing this."
Sera's face had gone terribly white, terribly upset.
"Sera?" Catlin said, and sat down in the interview chair and put her hand on her sera's knee. "Florian and I will go on trying to find things out, if you don't tell Denys about us knowing. That's the best thing. That's what we need to do."
Sera's eyes seemed to focus. And looked at her. "There's not a damn thing Justin knows about it."
"They're going to let him talk to his father, sera. They're going to monitor that—very closely. They're going to give his father a lot of room, actually let up the security—"
"To trap him, you mean. God, Catlin, to pushhim into it, what do they think people are made of?"
"Maybe they will," Catlin said. "I'm not worried about that. I'm worried about Justin being here.I'm worried because he's going to be upset when he can't go to his father. Sera, —" This was terribly hard to say. She had it in her hands of a sudden, the whole picture that had been worrying her and she made a violent gesture, cutting sera off, before she lost the way to say it. "The trouble is in Novgorod. With people who hate you. And Jordan Warrick was with these people a long time ago. It doesn't matter whether it's his fault or their fault—what matters is they're making him a Cause. And that's power. And when he's got that—"
"He's got to do something with it," sera said.
Catlin nodded. "And Justin's real close to you, sera. Justin's inside. And his father's a Special in psych—and he's your Enemy. That's real dangerous. That's terribly dangerous, sera."
"Yes," she said, very quiet. "Yes, it is." And after a moment more: "Dammit, why didn't Denys tellme?"
"Maybe he thought you might talk to Justin, sera."
"I could fixthis," sera said. "I could fix this– Damn, I'd—"
"What would you do, sera?" That sera might have an idea did not surprise her at all. But it disconcerted her to see sera's shoulders fall, and watch sera shake her head.
"Politics," sera said. "Pol-i-tics, Catlin. Dirty politics. Like our friends who aren't speaking to each other. Like fools,Catlin, who won't tell anyone the truth about what they want—like people want Reseune destroyed for a whole lot of reasons, and some of them are sane and some of them are crooked as hell. Like crazy people who blow up subways for peace. What does reason matter?"
Catlin shook her head, confused.
"I want to know who these people are," sera said in a hard voice. "I want to know, Catlin, whether any of them are of azi ancestry. Whether any of them are azi or whether this is a CIT craziness Reseune didn't have anything to do with." And a moment later: "I've got to think about the other. I've got to think about it, Catlin."
"Sera, pleasedon't go to Justin with this. Don't tell him."
A long silence. "No," she said. "No. That's not the thing to do."
ARCHIVES: RUBIN PROJECT: CLASSIFIED CLASS AA
DO NOT COPY
CONTENT: Computer Transcript File #78346 Seq. #7
Personal Archive
Emory I/Emory II
2423: 11/5: 2045
AE2: Base One, what data do you have on: keyword: assassination: keyword: Ariane Emory: keyword: death?
B/1: Ari senior has a message.
Stand by.
Ari, this is Ari senior.
You've asked about assassination.
This program will assess your current security problems while this message plays.
Most of all, beware the people you know. The others you would in no wise allow to approach you.
You've asked about death. First, don't mistake my limits for your own.
I don't know how much time there is as I write this. I know, at least, that rejuv is failing. So does Petros Ivanov, who is sworn to secrecy.
How do I face death? With profound anxieties. Anxieties because I know how much there is yet to do.
God, if I could have another lifetime.
But that's yours, sweet. And I'll never know, will I?
Base One has completed its assessment.
You are 17 years old. You are legally adult.
The indices this program uses in Security records indicate a troubled period. Do you think this is an accurate statement?
AE2: Yes.
B/1: Is your life in danger?
AE2: Yes.
B/1: Is the threat internal or external to Reseune?
AE2:1 don't know.
B/1: Do you think you can trust the Science Bureau?
AE2: I don't know. I need more information. I want my clearance raised, Base One.
B/1: Working.
Describe the things you want to know.
AE2: Everything. I want this program to do everything it did for Ari senior and I want it to do it without leaving any flags in the system.
B/1: Your request is being processed.
Ari senior has a message.
Stand by.
Ari, this is Ari senior.
You've asked for Base One to assume full operation. The program is assessing your psychological profile, your current test scores, the state of House offices and departments.
Have you considered that the security wall this will create in the House system may be detected by other Bases? Are you knowledgeable enough to create cover?
AE2: Yes.
B/1: I can't foresee your situation when you make this request. I can't advise you in specific. The program, however, is biased to grant this expansion on your request, on a complex weighting of: the length of time you have held your legal majority, the amount and nature of covert activity in other bases, your own test scores and psychological profiles, and a number of other factors you may explore at your leisure.
I had thought about dividing the power of Base One, making it possible for you to acquire information first—without giving you the power to take certain actions through Base One's accesses, this for your protection, and Reseune's.
I decided against that . . . simply because I could not foresee your circumstances. But the program is running as it is because you are asking for a House system rating exceeding that of the present administrators of Reseune.
This may be necessary. It may be a grievous mistake.
Before you proceed, consider that the larger your real power grows, the more it makes you a danger to others. This move of yours, if detected, may increase the number and energy of persons working against you.
Do you still wish to proceed?
AE2: Yes.
B/1: I earnestly advise you, don't use Base One's interactive functions beyond the limits you have used already, until you have a political base to back you: I mean specifically covert actions on a level shutting out Denys Nye, Giraud Nye, Petros Ivanov, Yanni Schwartz, Wendell Peterson, or John Edwards, because they are very likely to catch you at it real-time, in ways that have nothing to do with the House system. You may be brilliant as I was, young Ari, but you are inexperienced at this level. Consider whether a 17-year-old is a match for the experience and political savvy of these people.
It's perfectly safe, however, to use the information-gathering functions of the new level: use that to learn what's going on in the House, by all means, just don't do anything about it until you know damn well you can keep your actions completely covert or until your position is overwhelmingly stronger than any opposition inside Reseune—or the Bureau, or wherever. I am not at all convinced that an inexperienced person can conceal actions within this system.
I am, as you have detected, extremely uneasy about this step. In my day Reseune knew secrets that could mean war or peace.
I did not wield Base One fully until I was 62. I estimate that I had the ability to have handled it when I was 30. But I would have taken it up then with precisely the same caution and by the same degrees I advise you to use at 17. If you cannot survive on wits and knowledge alone, either the situation is worse than mine, or you are not as clever as I was.
Do you wish to proceed, against all these cautions?
AE2: Yes.
B/1: Be aware that this request will begin your assumption of authority over Reseune. Consider the situation inside and outside Reseune, and ask yourself what could result and whether you are ready and able to handle it.
Be aware that others may have anticipated this move and covered their traces. But until you order it to take actions—or until, mark me well, you let slip that you know something you could only have known through a higher Base, you will not create traces. Use that secrecy as long as you can.
Study carefully how others lie to the system, so that when you do it, you will be too good for them to catch.
I have taken only one precaution which will remain in the system until you have control of Administration. Base One will read-only information with no additional prompt, and advise you which information would have been inaccessible to you prior to this expansion.
It will advise you where lies have been planted in the system and show you both sets of information.
I have installed a fail-safe specifically for you, if you should request this power before assuming the administration of Reseune. The system will stop and ask for a special prompt before acting on any level possible as a result of this expansion . . . in plain terms, it will go on acting as it did before, but it will identify and tag certain kinds of information to make you aware what other people think is hidden from you; and it will prevent your accidentally taking actions that would overrun the parameters they believe exist. The key to release the system for action is: Havoc. You may re-set the keyword to suit you. But you should also think about that word—and the consequences of ignoring my advice, no matter how hot the fire gets under your feet.
Second thoughts can generally be amended with judicious action; injudicious actions can seldom be recovered with second thoughts. Do you understand me, Ari?
AE2: I understand, Base One.
B/1: Your access has been upgraded. This Base is now fully operational. Base One now outranks all other Bases in all Reseune systems.
AE2: Retrieve all previously hidden medical and security records on all individuals under my surveillance.
B/1: Working.
File:Justin Warrick
Emory I
2404: 11/5: 2045
Warrick, Justin.
Estim(ated) Res(ner Index of) 180 + comp(ares) favorab(ly) w(ith) pat [father] (but) lo(w) aggr(e)s(sion level) reference to) presence dominant) g(ender)-i(dentical)-p(arent) ergo [I ordered production of] G(rant)ALX [as Justin Warrick's companion]. . . .
File:Justin Warrick
Emory II
2423: 11/10: 2245
Warrick, Justin.
Ref: psychogenesis.
On every evidence I've found in files so far, Justin Warrick was a test case from his conception.
Ari I claims she psyched Jordan into having a PR done. She said things like: "I'm not temperamentally suited to bringing up my own"—I think she meant her own PR. And she said: "Jordan's a loss." Meaning something I don't understand, either that she couldn't work with him, or that she didn't think his slant on his work was what she wanted. I think it was more of the second. But there was ability there, complementary to her own. I think that's what she saw.
She used to work with Jordan. They worked real well at first. But Jordan's upbringing made him a dominant, and she was, and the two of them had a lot of problems which bounced off a sexual encounter they had had when he was 17 and she was 92. That was his only heterosexual relationship, and what went wrong with it had more to do with the fact that he was not hetero to begin with and he had, at 17, begun working with Ari as a student—the whole pattern identical to what happened with Justin.
But in Jordan's case, he had applied to work with Ari, probably because of a genuine admiration for her work. He was young, he was attractive, and Ari's proclivities and his admiration led to a disillusioning experience.
But here's the thing no one's looking at: Jordan Warrick's index increased 60 points during the next ten years. He already had a respectable score. But no one knew what he was until he was working with Ari—because of the publicity and the chance to work with her, is the general opinion these days. But the fact is he wasn't Jordan Warrick SP then. He was just damn bright and he was Ari's student.
So I looked back at Jordan's parents. Jordan's mother didn't want him after he was born. She was a researcher. She wanted the bonus you got back then to have a baby in Reseune. But she didn't want a baby. She just picked its father, got pregnant about as clinically timed as you can and still have sex, birthed Jordan and handed him to his father to bring up. His father was an Ed psych specialist who practiced every theory he had on his kid. Pushed him into early learning. And tended to give him things—lots of expenditure on things for Jordan. Doted on him.
Anyway, that was Jordan Warrick—not to leave out his companion, Paul, whom he requisitioned a year after his encounter with Ari, and while he was still working with her—but after he had moved out of his father's residence.
After that, his scores came up a lot.
I think Ari intervened with him continually. Ari helped him requisition Paul. Ari claims she talked him into having a PR done when he was about 30, the year after his father died in a seal failure—which was the only family Jordan had except an aunt. So she certainly worked with him. She certainly was dealing with a man who'd just lost someone he loved a great deal, and it's true that the same week they started Justin Warrick, she started Grant ALX. Things were pretty good between her and Jordan during that period, and she told Jordan a couple of years later that she had an Alpha test subject she wanted socialized, and would he like to do it and incidentally provide a playmate for his own son.
Jordan agreed. But Ari had picked Grant very carefully, and she had done some very slight corrective work with his set on a couple of things that are easy fixes, nothing beyond that—more than anything, any change in the original Special geneset meant she didn't have to go to Council to get permission and it also meant Grant would be classed as an Experimental, which means Reseune will always hold his contract, no private person can. Ari did Grant's early tape. Ari used Base One to pull up everything she could on Jordan's past and Jordan's father, right around the time she was doing all the search-up for Grant's geneset and all the prep for him. And if Grant was ever part of any other research project, it wasn't in the records or in her notes.
She did have one note that Jordan was a dominating male, but that if he'd been reared by one he'd have curled up and gone under, because that was what he was set to respond to. And something about plants and taller plants getting all the sun. Meaning if Justin was a PR he couldn't turn out like his father, because his teacher wasn't Jordan's father, Martin. Martin wasn't a dominant, but he brought up a strong, self-centered dominant who still had his father's tendency to give his son an abundance of affection and material things. This was what was going to bring Justin up. And Jordan was much brighter than Martin Warrick, was professionally skilled at manipulation, but with a peculiar emotional blind spot that revolved around his son as an extension of himself—meaning his son was going to be himself, and avoid the Bok clone problem that's haunted every PR of a bright parent.
Ari said about Justin, on his school paper: As long as you confuse your father with God you won't pursue this, which would be a shame. I'm requesting you into my wing. It'll do you good, give you a different perspective on things.
I don't know how much of what happened was planned but a lot of it was calculated. She encouraged him in the essay paper. When he did it she approved it, even as much as it duplicated things already tried. She encouraged him; she snagged him into her wing, into her reach, and she ran an intervention on him.
I've seen the tape (ref. tape 85899) and I know that it was an intervention. She knew she was dying. She had maybe a couple of years. Justin Warrick was the test that would tell her whether or not I would exist—as I do.
She always made such precise procedural steps for people to look at; but when she operated, she always seemed to violate her own rules. That's because she tended to cluster steps and combine operations, because she could pick up on flux-states better than anyone I've ever seen.
The tape of her with Justin bothers me in a lot of senses. But I keep coming back to it because there are a handful of tapes of her doing clinical interventions, scattered through her life, under controlled conditions. But knowing as much as I do about Justin, and about psychogenesis—that tape, terrible as it is, is Ari going without tape, without a clinical situation, without any safeguards; and, here's the eerie part, knowing exactly what the situation was, knowing her reactions from the inside, I can see exactly what she sees, how fast she picks up on flux and how fast she can change an entire program—
Because I've got her notes on what she was going to do, and I can read her body language like no one else.
Justin worked . . . not the way he would have if she'd been able to go on working with him. I know that. I also think I know why my uncles opposed him.
Leaving her work in the hands of a young researcher like Justin Warrick is so in character for Ari, exactly in character with that intervention in the tape. She took chances when she was working that would scare hell out of an ethics board. That—scare me less than they should, maybe, because I can see at least some of what she saw. And I know the reasons she wanted someone to follow her—someone with a special kind of sensitivity and a special kind of vision. It was her macro-system interventions that scared her—that scare me, that make me more and more afraid, and drive me beyond what I can stand, sometimes.
I need him. And I can no more explain to my uncles than Ari could. If I told them in plain language about the macro-system interventions: Listen to me, Denys: Ari put a Worm in the system, it's real, it's working, and I need computer time and I need Justin Warrick's work—I can hear him say: even Ari had her out-there notions, dear, and there's no way you can focus an integration over that range. It just won't happen. And Giraud would say: Whatever it does, we make our money off short-term.
—that's exactly what I'd get.
And Giraud would say to Denys after I was out of the room: We've got to do something about Justin Warrick.
CHAPTER 13
i
The landing gear extended as they made their approach at Planys and Grant looked out the window while the blue-grays and browns of native Cyteen passed under the right wing. His heart beat very fast. His hands were sweating and he clenched them as the wheels touched and theplane braked.
He was traveling with Reseune Security: Reseune Security flew with everyone who came and went from Planys, they had told him that. But he was still afraid—afraid of nameless things, because his memory of plane flights involved suspicion, Winfield and Kruger, the crazy people who had tried to re-program him, and an utter nightmare when Reseune Security had pulled him out, drugged and semiconscious, and flown him away to hospital and interrogations.
Twelve hours in the air, and chop and finally monotony over endless ocean in the dark—had calmed him somewhat. He had not wanted to tell Justin—and had not—what an irrational, badly fluxed anxiety he had worked himself into over this trip.
Transference, he told himself clinically, absolutely classic CIT-psych transference. He had gathered up all his anxieties about Justin's safety at home, about his own vulnerability traveling alone into Planys and about knowing no matter what Justin and Jordan insisted, he was not the one of them Jordan wanted most to see—and the plane flight was a convenient focus.
The plane would go down in the ocean. There would be sabotage. There were lunatics who would attempt to shoot it down– The engines would simply fail and they would crash on takeoff.
He had spent a great deal of the flight with his hands clenched on the armrests as if that levitation could hold the plane in the air.
He had been nervous in flight when he had been seventeen, but he had not had cold sweats—which showed that, over the years, he had become more and more CIT.
Now, with the wheels on the ground, he had no more excuses. The anxieties had to attach where they belonged, on meeting Jordan, and the fact that, azi that he was, he did not know what to say to the man he had once called his father; and who had been, whatever else, his Supervisor all during his childhood.
The thought of disappointing Jordan, of beingthat disappointment—was almost enough to make him wish the plane had gone down.
Except there was Justin, who loved him enough to give him the chance to go, who had fought for it and held out for it through all the contrived delays, the breaks in communication—everything, so that when permission came to travel again– hecould go first. They hoped there would be another chance directly after. But there was no guarantee, there was never a guarantee.
Please, he had said to Jordan, in that last phone call before the flight. I really feel awkward about this. Justin should come first.
Shut up, Justin had said over his shoulder. This time is yours. There'll be others.
I wantyou to come, Jordan had said. Of course I want you.
Which had affected him more than was good for him, he thought. It made a little pain in his chest. It was a CIT kind of feeling, pure flux, which meant that he ought to take tape and go deep and let Justin try to take that ambivalence away before it disturbed his value-sets. But Justin would argue with him. And that curious pain was a feeling he wanted to understand: it seemed a window into CIT mentality, and a valuable thing to understand, in his profession, in the projects he did with Justin. So he let it fester, thinking, when he could be more sensible about it: maybe this is the downside of the deep-set links. Or maybe it's just surface-set flux: but should it make such physiological reactions?
The plane rolled up to the terminal: Justin had said there was no tube-connection, but there was, and there was a good long wait while they got the plane hosed down and the tube-connect sealed down.
Theneveryone began to get up and change into D-suits, the way Justin had said they would.
He did as the Security escort asked him. He put on the flimsy protection over his clothes and walked out into the tube and through into Decontamination.
Foam and another hose-down, and a safety-barrier, where he had to strip the suit off and step out, without touching its exterior—
In places he had been, like Krugers', if one had to make a fast transfer, one held one's breath, got to shelter, held an oxy mask tight to one's face with one hand and stripped with the other under a hosing-down that was supposed to take any woolwood fiber down the drain.
Planys was terrifyingly elaborate, a long series of procedures that made him wonder what he had been exposed to, or whether all this was just to make people at this desolate place feel safer.
"This way, ser," one of the Decon agents said, and took him by the elbow and brought him aside into a small alcove.
Body-search. He expected this too, and stripped down when they told him and suffered through the procedure, a little cold, a little anxious, but even Reseune Security people got this treatment going in or out of Planys. So they said.
Not mentioning what they did to the luggage.
"Grant," Jordan said, in person, meeting him in the hall, and:
"Hello, ser," he said, suddenly shy and formal, the surface-sets knowing he should go and embrace Jordan, and the deep-sets knowing him as a Supervisor, and knowing him from his childhood, when all instruction had come from him, and he was God and teacher.
This was the man Justin would have become, if rejuv had not stopped them both a decade earlier.
He did not move. He could not, suddenly, cope with this. Jordan came and embraced him instead.
"My God, you've grown," Jordan said, patting him on the back. "Vid didn't show how tall you'd grown. Look at the shoulders on you! What are you doing, working docks?"
"No, ser." He let Jordan lead him to his office, where Paul waited– Paul, who had doctored his skinned knees and Justin's. Paul embraced him too. Then the reality of where he was began to settle through the flux and he began to believe in being here, in being welcome, in everything being all right.
But there were no guards in the office. That was not the way Justin had warned him it would be.
Jordan smiled at him and said: "They'll send the papers up as soon as they've been over them—Justin did send that report with you, didn't he?"
"Yes, ser. Absolutely."
"Damn, it's good to see you."
"I thought—security would be more than it is." Are we monitored, ser? What's going on?
"I told you it's been saner here. That's one of the things. Come on, we're closing up the office. We'll go home, fix dinner—not as fancy as Reseune, but we've got real groceries. We bought a ham for the occasion. Wine from Pell, not the synth stuff."
His spirits lifted. He was still anxious, but Jordan, he thought, was in charge of things; he relaxed a bit into dependency, azi on Supervisor, which he had not done with Justin—
–had not done since he was in hospital, recovering from Giraud's probes. Had never done, after, because he was always either Justin's caretaker or Justin's partner.
It was like years of pressure falling away from him, to follow Jordan when he said Come, to sink into azi simplicity with someone he could trust—someone, finally, besides Justin, who would not harm him, who knew the place better than he did, and whose wishes were sane and sensible.
It was finally, one brief interlude in all these years, nothis responsibility.
Only when he thought that, he thought: No, I can't stop watching things. I can't trust anything. Not even Jordan—that far.
He felt exhausted then, as if just for a few weeks he would like to go somewhere and do mindless work under someone's direction, and be fed and sleep and have responsibility for nothing.
That was notwhat he could do.
He walked with them to the apartment they had; and inside, and looked around him– Things are very grim there,Justin had said. Very primitive.
It was certainly not Reseune. The chairs were plastic and metal; the tables were plastic; the whole decor was plastic, except a corner full of real geraniums, under light, and a fish-tank, and a general inefficient pleasantness to the place that had all the stamp of CITs in residence . . . what Justin called a homey feeling, and what he thought of as the CIT compulsion to collect things charged with flux and full of fractals. A potted geranium represented the open fields. The fish were random, living motion. The water was assurance of life-requirements in abundance; and made a fractally repetitive sound which might be soothing to flux-habituated, non-analytical minds. God knew what else. He only knew Justin had let all the plants die after Jordan left, but when things started to go well, Justin began to fuss with a few plants, which always died back and thrived by turns—in time to the rise and fall of Justin's spirits.
Healthy plants, Grant reckoned, were a very good sign among CITs.
Things feltsafe here, he thought as he gave his jacket up and let Paul hang it in the closet, people were tolerably happy here.
So the improvements in the world, the changes that had made this last couple of years more livable, even happy—had gotten to Planys too, despite the frustrations of the Paxer scare. All the same he wished Jordan knew even a few of the multitudinous signals he and Justin had worked out, the little indicators whether a thing was to be believed.
Maybe Jordan picked up his nervousness, because Jordan looked at him, laughed and said: "Relax. They monitor us from time to time. It's all right. Hello, Jean!" —to the ceiling.
"We know each other," Jordan said then. "Planys is a very small establishment. Sit down. We'll make coffee. God, there's so much to talk about."
ii
It was very lonely, the apartment without Grant. There was ample justification for worry, and Justin swore he was not going to spend four uninterrupted days at it.
So he read awhile, did tape awhile, an E-dose only, a piece of fluff from library. And read again. Ari had given him an advance copy of Emory's IN PRINCIPIO,the first of the three-volume annotated edition of Emory's archived notes, which the Bureau of Science was publishing in cooperation with the Bureau of Information, and which was now selling as fast as presses could turn them out in the Cyteen edition and already on its way on ships which had bid fabulously for it, a packet of information destined for various stations which would in turn pay for the license, sell printout and electronic repros to their own populations and sell more rights to ships bound further on.
Even, possibly, more than possibly, to Earth.
While Reseune accounts piled up an astonishing amount of credit.
Every library wanted copies. Scientists in the field did. But it was selling in the general market with a demand that could only be called hysteria: a volume of extremely heavy going, illustrated, with annotations so extensive there were about three lines of Emory's notes to every page, and the rest was commentary, provided by himself and by Grant, among others: he was the JW and Grant was the GALX; YS was Yanni Schwartz; and WP, Wendell Peterson; and AE2 was Ari, who had gotten the original text out of Archive and provided reference notes on some of the most obscure parts. DN was Denys Nye; GN was Giraud; JE was John Edwards; and PI was Petros Ivanoy, besides dozens of techs and assistants who served in editing and collation—each department head and administrator to read and vet the material from his own staff.
