Cyteen: The Betrayal (44 page)

She shook her head; and tried not to cry. She tried to get a good mad. Like maman.

“We won’t talk about it now. Nelly’s going to be here tonight. She’ll be a little upset. You know she can’t take much upset. Promise me you’ll be good to her, Ari. She’s your azi and you have to be kind to her, because she really ought to stay in the hospital, but she’s so worried about you, and I know you need her. Nelly’s going to come home every night between her sessions-they’re going to give her tape, you know, they have to, because she’s terribly upset; but she loves you and she wants to come take care of you. I’m afraid it’s you who’ll have to take care of her. You understand me? You can hurt her very, very badly.”

“I know,” Ari said, because she did.

“There you are. You’re a brave little girl. You aren’t a baby at all. It’s very hard, very hard. -Thank you, Seely.”

Seely had brought her a glass of water and a pill, and expected her to take it. Seely was a nobody. He wasn’t like Ollie. He wasn’t nice, he wasn’t mean, he wasn’t anything but azi all the time. And he took her glass and put it on his tray and offered her the water.

“I don’t want any tape!” she said.

“It’s not that kind of pill,” uncle Denys said. “It’ll make your head stop hurting. It’ll make you feel better.”

She didn’t remember telling him her head hurt. Maman al-ways said don’t take other people’s pills. Never, never take azi-pills. But maman was not here to tell her what this one

Like Valery. Like sera Schwartz. Like all the Disappeareds. Maman and Ollie had gotten caught too.

Maybe I can Disappear next. And find them.

“Sera,” Seely said. “Please.”

She took the pill off the tray. She put it in her mouth and drank it down with the water.

“Thank you,” Seely said. He was so smooth he wasn’t there. He took the glass away. You would never notice Seely.

Uncle Denys sat there so fat he made the whole chair go down, with his arms on his knees and his round face upset and worried. “You won’t have to go to playschool for a few days. Until you want to. You don’t think you can feel better. I know, but you will. You’ll feel better even tomorrow. You’ll miss your maman. Of course you will. But you won’t hurt as much. Every day will be a little better.”

She didn’t want it to be better. She didn’t know who made people Disappear. But it wasn’t maman. They could offer her whatever they wanted. It wouldn’t make her believe what they said.

Maman and Ollie had known there was trouble. They had been terribly upset and kept hiding it from her. Maybe they thought they could take care of it and they couldn’t. She had felt it coming and hadn’t understood.

Perhaps there was a place people went to. Perhaps it was like being dead. You got in trouble and you got Disappeared somewhere in some way even maman couldn’t stop it happening.

So she knew she couldn’t either. She had to push and push, that was what, and get in trouble until there wasn’t anybody. Maybe it was her fault. She had always thought so. But when they ran out of people to Disappear she had to find out what was going on.

Then maybe she could go.

She was Wrong, of a sudden. She couldn’t feel her hands or her feet, and she felt a burning in her stomach.

She was having trouble. But Seely picked her up in his arms and the whole room swung and became the hall and became the bedroom. Seely laid her gently on the bed and took her shoes off, and put a blanket over her.

Poo-thing was beside her on the bedspread. She put out her hand and touched him. She could not remember where she had gotten Poo-thing. He had always been there. Now he was here. That was all. Now Poo-thing was all there was.

v

“Poor kid,” Justin said, and poured more wine into the glass. “Poor little kid, dammit to hell, couldn’t they let her come down to the airport?”

Grant just shook his head. And drank his own wine. He made a tiny handsign that warned of eavesdroppers.

Justin wiped his eyes. He never forgot that. Sometimes he found it hard to care.

“Not our problem,” Grant said. “Not yours.”

“I know it.”

That for the listeners. That they never knew, one way or the other, whether they were there. They thought of ways to confound Security, even thought of devising a language without cognates, with erratic grammar, and using tape to memorize it. But they were afraid of the suspicion their using it might raise. So they went the simplest route: the tablet. He reached for it and scrawled: Sometimes I’d like to run off to Novgorod and get a job in a factory. We design tape to make normal people. We build in trust and confidence and make them love each other. But the designers are all crazy.

Grant wrote: I have profound faith in my creators and my Supervisor. I find comfort in that.

“You’re sick,” Justin said aloud.

Grant laughed. And Grant went serious again, and leaned over and took hold of Justin’s knee, the two of them sitting cross-legged on the couch. “I don’t understand good and evil. I’ve decided that. An azi has no business tossing words like that around, in the cosmic sense. But to me you’re everything good.”

He was touched by that. And the damned tape-flashes still bothered him. Even after this many years, like an old, old pain. With Grant it never mattered. That, as much as anything, gave him a sense of comfort. He laid his hand on Grant’s, pressed it slightly, because he could not say anything.

“I mean it,” Grant said. “You hold a difficult place. You do as much good as you can. Sometimes too much. Even I can rest. You should.”

“What can I do when Yanni loads me down with-“

“No.” Grant shook at his knee. “You can say no. You can quit working these hours. You can work on the things you want to work on. You’ve said yourself-you know what he’s doing. Don’t let them give you this other thing. Refuse it. You don’t need it.”

There was a baby in process on Fargone, replicate of one Benjamin Rubin, who lived in the enclave on the other side of an uncrossable wall, and worked in a lab Reseune had provided.

It provided something visible for Defense to hover over. And Jane Strassen, when she arrived, would find herself mother to another of the project’s children.

He knew. They gave him Rubin’s interviews. They let him do the tape-structures. He had no illusions they would run them without checks.

Not, at least, these. And that was a relief, after running without them for a year.

“It’s a degree of trust, isn’t it?” His voice came out hoarse, showing the strain he had not wanted to show.

“It puts another kind of load on you, a load you don’t need.”

“Maybe it’s my chance to do something worthwhile. It’s a major project. Isn’t it? It’s the best thing that’s happened in a long time. Maybe I can make Rubin’s life-better or something.” He leaned forward to pour more wine. Grant moved and did it for him. “At least Rubin had some compassion in his life. His mother lives onstation, he sees her, he’s got something to hold on to.”

Give or take the guards that attended a Special. Justin knew all these things. A confused, remote intellectual whose early health problems had been extreme, whose attachment to his mother was excessive and desperate; whose frail body had made health a preoccupation for him; whose various preoccupations had excluded adolescent passions, except for his work. But nothing-nothing of what had shaped Ari Emory.

Thank God.

“I can do something with it,” he said. “I’m going to take some work in citizen psych. Do me some good. It’s a different methodology.”

Grant frowned at him. They could talk work at home, with out worrying about monitors. But their line of conversation had gotten dangerous, maybe already gone over the line. He was not sure anymore. He was exhausted. Study, he thought, would take him off real-time work. Study was all he wanted. Grant was right, he was never cut out for trouble-shooting real-time situations. He cared too damn much.

Yanni had yelled at him: “Empathy is fine in an interview. I It’s got no place in the solution! Get it straight in your head who you’re treating!”

Which made sense to him. He was not cut out for clinical psych. Because he never could get it straight, when he felt the pain himself.

By Yanni’s lights, even, he thought, by Denys’-because there was no way this could have come to him without Denys working at Giraud-it was the most generous thing they could have done for him, putting him back in work that took a security clearance, re-establish his career in a slightly different field, in work very like Jordan’s, let him work on a project where he could gain some reputation-CIT work was something the military would notice without actually giving the military an excuse to move on him, and it might clear him and do some good for Jordan. That was at least a possibility.

It was a kind of ultimatum, he thought, a kindness that could go entirely the other way if he tried to avoid the honor. That I was always what he had to think about. Even when they were doing him favors.

vi

Ari woke with someone close to her, and remembered waking halfway through the night when someone got into bed with her, and took her in her arms and said in Nelly’s voice, “I’m here, young sera. Nelly’s here.”

Nelly was by her in the morning, and maman was not, the bedroom was strange, it was uncle Denys’ place, and Ari wanted to scream or to cry or to run again, run and run, until no one could find her.

But she lay still, because she knew maman was truly gone. And uncle Denys was right, she was better than she was, she was thinking about breakfast in between thinking how much she hurt and how she wished Nelly was somewhere else and maman was there instead.

It was still something, to have Nelly. She patted Nelly’s face hard, until Nelly woke up, and Nelly hugged her and stroked her hair and said:

“Nelly’s here. Nelly’s here.” And burst into tears.

Ari held her. And felt cheated because she wanted to cry, but Nelly was azi and crying upset her. So she was sensible like maman said, and told Nelly to behave.

Nelly did. Nelly stopped snuffling and sniveling and got up and got dressed; and gave Ari her bath and washed her hair and dressed her in her clean blue pants and a sweater. And combed and combed her hair till it crackled.

“We’re supposed to go to breakfast with ser Nye,” Nelly said.

That was all right. And it was a good breakfast, at uncle Denys’ table, with everything in the world to eat. Ari did eat. Uncle Denys had seconds of everything and told her she and Nelly could spend the day in the apartment, until Nelly had to go to hospital, and then Seely would come and take care of her.

“Yes, ser,” Ari said. Anything was all right. Nothing was. After yesterday she didn’t care who was here. She wanted to ask Denys where maman was, and where maman was going. But she didn’t, because everything was all right for a while and she was so tired.

And if Denys told her she wouldn’t know the name of that place. She only knew Reseune.

So she sat and let Nelly read her stories. Sometimes she cried for no reason. Sometimes she slept. When she woke up it was Nelly telling her it would be Seely with her.

Seely would get her as many soft drinks as she wanted. And put on the vid for her. And do anything she asked.

She asked Seely could they go for a walk and feed the fish. They did that. They came back and Seely got her more soft drinks, and she wished she could hear maman telling her they weren’t good for her. So she stopped on her own, and asked Seely for paper and sat and drew things.

Till uncle Denys came back and it was time for supper, and uncle Denys talked to her about what she would do tomorrow and how he would buy her anything she wanted.

She thought of several things. She wanted a spaceship with lights. She wanted a new coat. If uncle Denys was going to offer, she could think of things. She could think of really expensive things that maman never would get her.

But none of them could make her happy. Not even Nelly. Just when they were going to give you things, you took them, that was all, and you asked them for lots and lots to make it hard for them, and make them think that was important to you and you were happier with them, -but you didn’t forget your mad. Ever.

vii

Grant sweated, waiting in Yanni Schwartz’s outer office, with no appointment and only Marge’s good offices to get him through the door. He heard Yanni shouting at Marge. He could not hear what he said. He imagined it had to do with interruptions and Justin Warrick.

And for a very little he would have gotten up and left, then, fast, because from moment to moment he knew he could bring trouble down on Justin by coming here. He was not sure that Yanni would not shake him badly enough to make him say something he ought not. Yanni was the kind of born-man he did not like to deal with, emotional and loud and radiating threat in every move he made. The men who had taken him to the shack in the hills had been like that. Giraud had been like that when he had questioned him. Grant sat there waiting and not panicking only by blanking himself and not thinking it through again until Marge came back and said:

“He’ll see you.”

He got up and made a little bow. “Thank you, Marge.”

And walked into the inner office and up to the big desk and said: “Ser, I want to talk to you about my CIT.”

Azi-like. Justin said Yanni could be decent enough to his patients. So he took the manner and stood very quietly.

“I’m not in consultation,” Yanni said.

Yanni gave him no favors, then. Grant dropped the dumb-annie pose, pulled up the available chair and sat down. “I still want to talk to you, ser. Justin’s taking the favor you’re doing him and I think it’s a bad mistake.”

“A mistake.”

“You’re not going to let him have anything but the first-draft work, are you? And where does that leave him after twenty years? Nowhere. With no more than he had before.”

“Training. Which he badly needs. Which you should know. Do we have to discuss your partner? You know his problems. I don’t have to haul them out for you.”

“Tell me what you think they are.” Yanni had been relaxed, mostly. The jaw clamped, the chin jutted, the whole pose shifted to aggression as he leaned on his desk. “Maybe you’d better have your CIT come talk to me. Did he send you? Or is this your own idea?”