Cyteen: The Betrayal (29 page)

Never mind James Carnath, who had more of them, and determined he and Olga were going to make a baby to outdo Bok the day he found out he was terminal.

Which had led them all to this room and this project.

So she had to do everything Olga’s way. Straighten up, Ari. Stand still, Ari. Do your homework, Ari-Twitch and bitch.

Between that and throwing Ari at azi nurses, the same way she had done with Julia. She had considerable remorse for that, in retrospect.

Changing that parental disinterest would change Ari. Benign neglect. It was a terrible thing to recognize her own personal mistakes retroactively. Studying up on Olga had been like looking in a too-revealing mirror. Giraud had been right. A hell of a thing to find out, at a hundred and thirty-two.

To this day she had no more maternal feeling for Julia than for any other product of the labs … or for the two azi the attendants were busy birthing over on the other side of the room. In the case of Ari, never mind the experience with one daughter and fifty-two years’ experience with students, it had

to be a question of following program. For the kid’s own good. She had respected Ari Emory, and dammit, if she failed with her, that was all the reputation she was going to leave in Reseune. At a hundred and thirty-two. She hated fuck-ups. She hated personal indulgence and fuzzy thinking.

It was still damned hard to look at Julia and see what a meek thing she had come to be-constantly fouling up at work, spoiling her new baby beyond bearing, dependent on an endless succession of lovers-and know that it was partly genes and partly her fault. The same neglect, the same carping had now to admit she had done with Julia, was part and parcel of what made Ari run. Psychsets and genetics at work.

Wrong kid, right parent, maybe. And vice versa.

Hell of a hand nature dealt out.

“They’re all in good shape,” Petros Ivanov said.

“That’s wonderful. Really wonderful.” Denys took a bite of fish and another one. Private lunch, in the executive dining room, with the curtains back on the seal-windows of the observation deck. The weathermakers were giving them a rain, requested, a major blow, water sheeting down the windows. The atmosphere was going to be compromised for a day or so. “Damn Giraud. Of course it’ll go all right, he says, and run off to the capital. And damn if he’s called!”

“Everything’s right on the profile so far. The azi are absolutely norm. They’re already on program.”

“So’s Ari.”

“Strassen’s bitching about the head nurse.”

“What else is new?”

“Says she’s opinionated and she upsets her staff.”

“An azi is opinionated. That means the azi is going exactly down the instructions and Jane’s mad because she’s got new staffers in her apartment. She’ll survive.” He poured more coffee. “Olga’s azi is still a damn worry. Ollie’s younger, he’s a hell of a lot tougher-minded than that poor sod Olga had, by all accounts, and Jane’s got a good point: run tape on Ollie to soften him up and Jane’s temper will crack him. Her style with the kid she can manage; changing Ollie and changing the way she deals with him is further than Jane’s going to go without exploding. If that kid’s got even an ordinary baby’s instincts she’ll pick up on adult tensions right from the cradle. Figuring she’s got Ari’s sensitivity, God knows what she can pick up on. So what do you do?”

Petros grinned. “Run tape on Jane?”

Denys snorted into his coffee and sipped. “I sure as hell wish. No. Jane’s a professional. She knows what this is worth. We’ve got a bargain. We keep hands off Ollie and she cues Ollie how to play this. We just trust an azi that can make our Janie happy can cope with anything.”

Laughter.

He was mad as hell at Giraud. There was a good deal of this Giraud could have taken off his shoulders, but Giraud had a tendency to kite off to the capital whenever things got tense on the Project.

It’s all yours, Giraud had said. You’re the administrator. And welcome to it.

It had taken most of a year sifting through Ari’s notes, that small initial part of the computer record the technicians could get at easily. Reseune’s records computers had run for three weeks just compiling the initial mass of data on Ari. Thank God Olga had archived everything with cross-referencing and set it up in chronological order. The tapes had to be located, all this not only on Ari, but on two azi who had been protosets and unique. There was a tunnel under the hills out there and there were three more under construction, because that enormous vault was full, absolutely full to capacity, with workers beginning to divide tape into active, more active and most active, so more of it could be put in the House itself.

And when the data-flood from the Project came rolling out in full operation it would be a tidal wave in the House Archives. One of those tunnels was specifically to house the physical records of the Project; and that included software design for some of the things Ari had halfway worked out and someone else was going to have to finish before that baby was talking.

Reseune was not going to farm out anything to do with the Project. It was farming out some of the azi production runs, to clear personnel time. It would have been an economic crisis except the military had thrown money at Reseune’s extension at Fargone and Reseune’s extension in Planys, money which funded more tanks, more computers, more production those tunnels. Meanwhile Jordan Warrick was doing everyone a favor by actually handling the physical set-up over in Planys, which had Warrick happier than he had been since Ari’s demise, turning out real work again-no small gain in itself, since it made Defense happy. They had lost Robert Carnath-from House Operations and promoted him over the Planys lab: Robert was no friend of Warrick’s and a sharp enough administrator to keep all the reins in his hands. They had lost other staff out to the Fargone lab construction and they were going to lose more, when that lab went active and the Rubin project kicked in. Reseune had been overstaffed when the thing began and now it was actually buying azi contracts from hackers like Bucherlabs and Lifefarms, rejuving every azi over forty and driving staff berserk with retraining tapes. Fifteen barracks were empty down in the Town, and they had just signed a buy-back deal with Defense for certain Reseune azi approaching retirement: it saved Defense expensive retraining and pensioning, it made certain azi damned happy when they learned they were going on working and getting staff positions at RESEUNEAIR and in freight and production and wherever else an azi whose outlook otherwise was transfer to some dull government work center could fill a slot and look forward instead of back. It gave Reseune a large pool of discipline-conscious, security-conscious personnel-instantly. Mistakes and glitches were bound to proliferate in Reseune’s smooth operations, but not on the Project, where there were no new faces, and where the top talent could consequently pay full attention to their jobs.

The military buy-back had saved them. Denys was proud of that stroke. It took something to multiply a Project designed for one subject into four-counting Rubin and the two azi. And to coordinate the project-profile and the finance and the covert aspects of it. Giraud handled the latter. Denys had had the rest in his lap for long enough he felt he had just given birth.

“It’s not easier from here,” he told Petros. “From here on, it’s going to be a race between that kid and profile-management. If anyone fouls up, I want to know about it. If she gets an unscheduled sniffle, I want to know about it. Nothing’s minor until we’ve got results to check against profile.”

“Hell of a way to go, developing the profile while it’s run-

“We’d have to anyway. There are going to be differences. We’d always be altering it. And we’d never know where we’re going anyway. If that kid is Ari in any measurable degree, we’ll never damn well know, will we?”

No laughter at all.

iii.

Justin poured, wine swirling into Grant’s many times emptied glass. Poured another for himself and set the dead bottle down. Grant looked at his glass with a slightly worried look.

Duty. Grant was getting drunk and thinking about the fact. He knew. He knew the way he could tell that Grant was not going to say a thing, Grant had just decided that duty was not the operative word tonight.

They talked about the office. They talked about a design sequence they had been working on. A bottle of wine apiece did not do much for the design-the connections were getting fuzzy.

But Justin felt better for it.

He felt a strange dissatisfaction with himself. A baby arrived and he went through the day in a state of unreasoning depression. Reseune was aflutter with: “Is she cute?” and “How is she doing?” and he felt as if someone had a fist closed around his heart.

Over a baby being born, for God’s sake. And while a kind of a party was going on in the techs’ residencies, and another one over in Wing One residency, he and Grant held their own morose commemoration.

They sat in the pit in the apartment that had been home when they were both small, the apartment that had been Jordan’s, crackers and drying sausage slices on the plate, two dead wine bottles standing in cracker crumbs and moisture-rings on the stone table, and a third bottle a third gone. And that was finally enough to put him at distance from things.

Wish a little baby would die? God, what kind of thinking is hat?

He lifted his next glass when he had filled it, and touched it tp Grant’s with labored cheerfulness. “Here’s to the baby.”

Grant frowned and did not drink when he did.

“Come on,” Justin said. “We can be charitable.”

Grant lifted his eyes and made a small motion of his fingers. Remember they could have us monitored.

That was always true. They played games with the House monitors, but they had to go outside to have a word or two they id not have to worry about.

“Hell, let them listen. I don’t care. I feel sorry for the kid. he didn’t ask for this.”

“No azi does,” Grant said sharply. Then a frown made a crease between his brows. “I guess no one does.”

“No one does.” The depression settled back over the room, le did not know what was going to happen to them, that was what. Reseune was changing, full of strange faces, assignment shifts, the azi were-unsettled by the rejuv order. Elated by that, elated by the fact that they must have pleased someone, and distressed at the reassignments and the transfers and the arrival of strangers. Not harmfully distressed, just-having lore change fall on them than they had ever had to cope with: supervisors’ interview schedules were overcrowded and Supervisors themselves were asking for relief that did not exist.

While over in Wing One residency there was an apartment shut up like a mausoleum. Not dusted, not touched, not opened.

Waiting.

“I don’t think they’ll have any better luck than they did with ok,” Justin said finally. “I really don’t. Jane Strassen, for rod’s sake. The endo-” Endocrinology was not a thing one could say after a bottle and a half of wine. “Damn chemistry, works fine on the machines. Just nature’s way of getting at the thresholds. Nice theory. But they’ll end up driving her crazier than Bok. They’d have better luck if they outright ran deep-tape on her. The creativity factor’s a piece of garbage. Bring her up to like Ari’s work, deep-tape a little empathy, for God’s sake, and turn her loose. The whole project’s a damn lunatic obsession. It’s not Ari’s talent they want, not a nice bright kid, it’s Ari! It’s the power they want back, it’s personality! It’s a clutch of rejuved relics staring at the great The End and having Reseune’s budget to squander. That’s what’s going on. It’s a damn disaster. It’s too many people’s lives and too damn little caring upstairs, that’s what they’re doing. I feel sorry for the kid. I really feel sorry for her.”

Grant only stared at him a long while. Then: “I think there is something about creativity and tape-that we don’t have it to the same degree-“

“Oh, hell.” Sometimes he trod on Grant without knowing he had done it. Sometimes he opened his mouth and forgot with Grant the sensitivity he made his living using with azi down in the Town. And hated himself. “That’s a lot of garbage. I damn sure don’t believe it when you fix a design a dozen senior designers have been sweating on for a month.”

“I’m not talking about that. I am azi. Sometimes I can see a problem from a vantage they don’t have. Frank is azi too, but he’s not what I am. I can get a little arrogant. I’m entitled. But every time I have to argue with Yanni I feel it right in the gut.”

‘Everybody feels it in the gut. Yanni’s a-“

“Listen to me. I don’t think you feel this. I can do it. But I know every bit of what makes me tighten up fits right in that book in the bedroom, and what makes you do it wouldn’t fit in this apartment. Look at what they’re doing with Ari. They had to build a damn tunnel in the mountain to hold what she was.”

“So what’s it mean that at lunch the day the war started she had fish and she was two days into her cycle? That’s crap, Grant, that’s plain crap, and that’s the kind of thing they built that tunnel to hold.” Along with those damn tapes, that’s there. Till the sun freezes over. That’s what people will remember I was. “You choke up with Yanni because he’s got a three-second fuse, that’s all. It’s his sweet nature, and losing the Fargone post didn’t improve it.”

“No. You’re not listening to me. There is a difference. The world is too complicated for me, Justin. That’s the only way I can explain it. I can see the microstructures much better than you. My concentration is all on the fine things. But there’s something about azi psychsets-that can’t cope with macrostructures. That whole tunnel, Justin. Just to hold her psychset.”

“Psychset, hell, it’s full of what she did, and who she hurt, and she was a hundred twenty years old! You want to go to Novgorod and buy councillors, you’d fill that tunnel up too, damn fast.”

“I couldn’t. I couldn’t see behind me. That’s what it feels like.”

“You’ve lived in these walls all your life. You could learn.”

“No. Not the same things. That’s what I’m saying. I could learn everything Ari knew. And I’d still focus too tight.”