Regenesis (47 page)

“I’ll meet you there,” sera said, “and give you your orders.”

“Yes,” he answered her, and nodded. “Yes, sera.” The waking mind was in fragments. It needed time and quiet to reassemble its boundaries.

“You can go with Wes,” sera said gently. “Go on, now. The others will follow when they wake.”

The door was open. Wes took him by the arm, and steered him out, past John Elway, past the other staff. Sweat stood on Elway’s face…fear
for
sera, or fear
of
his situation, Catlin was unsure which, and didn’t like that lack of information.

“It’s perfectly all right,” sera said, pausing for a moment to address the man. “I can take care of him. Catlin will stay here and escort the others up the hill. Are we agreed about that?”

Elway nodded slightly, looking pale. Elway might, Catlin thought, be just a little less conflicted than the azi, but sera was going to run Reseune one day, and born-men in Reseune all knew that. If Elway was supposed to report this, he might decide to be careful what he reported and to whom. He was a very worried born-man.

And maybe it wasn’t just Rafael sera had Worked, omitting to give Elway any clear indication what he ought to do and what was safe.

Instead sera simply walked off with Florian, behind Wes and Rafael. Rafael was theirs now, very, very little chance he wasn’t.

It was a scary thing to watch. It had been a far scarier moment when sera had walked into that room. But given sera’s work, it was very likely it wouldn’t be the last time sera personally did a thing like that, no matter how they objected.

And her security just had to be in position, and fast. Very, very fast, Catlin thought. And armed with non-lethals, next time. Sera had surprised her security. It felt wrong to complain about it, but it certainly shouldn’t happen twice, and it was their job to take precautions.

There was another matter. Rafael had come from Hicks, at least by previous Contract.

That was worth talking over with Florian and with sera, on an absolutely urgent basis. For right now, Hicks and all his immediate staff were on her Unreliable list.

J
UNE
7, 2424
1712
H

Catlin was back, Ari noted, from the minder link in her office. Florian had escorted
her
back. Wes was still downstairs, helping Rafael and his three settle into their temporary quarters—Marco had been manning the security station solo the while, and Ari let pass a little sigh, now that everybody was back safely.

Four Contracts down, twenty-six more to set, and there was a message on the minder this evening from Justin, informing her that he didn’t think Library had given him everything it said it had given them.

No, she noted, at her console, Justin
hadn’t
quite caught the problem. But she hadn’t either, from a scan of the set—it was there, and you could spend hours and hours looking through the set and the specific individual’s list of tapes given, searching and searching for something to make sense of a set of lines in that program…all the earmarks of reference to deep set, but nothing in the deep set record that would quite satisfy it. It was like an if-then link, but when you got there, there was nothing listed. Every instruction ever given to that azi was supposed to be recorded in his specific manual—but if it wasn’t?

That if-then was just a shape without anything to attach to—a point at which hooks could be set to turn an azi into a spy…or assassin, if that was the game; and Justin
had
found something wrong: he just hadn’t assumed it wasn’t him, so he was still looking for the link.

She sent him a memo that said:

All done. You should have trusted yourself. You were right to keep looking, your delay warned me to keep looking, and Library wasn’t lying to us. ‘Night, both of you.

Nasty. It
wouldn’t
let Justin get a peaceful sleep. He’d worry about it. He’d reach a right conclusion. And now after one long, hard stretch of work, he knew what ReseuneSec tape looked like, and he’d found a problem and put a finger close to it. Not too shabby an accomplishment on his part, considering she’d been working with security sets for years.

And what someone had done with Rafael…the deep level at which that compulsion had gone in said
Alpha Supervisor
in blazing letters. A Beta Supervisor could marginally have done it, and it was true it hadn’t been totally neat, but it had been damned deep and resistant, all of which argued only that the perpetrator wasn’t the
best
Alpha Supervisor in Reseune. The best? That was, in her private assessment, beginning to be
her
.

But it left Yanni, Hicks, Jordan Warrick, Justin Warrick. And, postscript, there was also grim old Chi Prang, the head of Alpha section in the azi labs. Prang
could
have done it, at someone’s orders, or in collusion with someone, and she didn’t know the woman.

Fast computer search said Prang was one hundred thirty-seven years old and had, yes, worked in that capacity during the first Ari’s regime and Denys’ and now Yanni’s. That was a wide range of potential allegiances. Prang had five assistants, any one of which was provisionally alpha-licensed, which meant they had the skills, but had to have Prang’s oversight.
That
spread the search wider afield, and led, very probably, further and further from the culprit, because subordinates wouldn’t have as immediate a motive. So she was wrong about there being just five people. But the list of original suspects was still the primary list. Yanni, she was relatively sure, could have done a better job, Justin wouldn’t have done it in the first place, Jordan hadn’t had access, and that…

That left the fingerprints of the Director of ReseuneSec, Hicks, who had the rating to handle his own assistant, but who didn’t practice on a wider scale—
his
command was beta, in the main. Very, very few alphas, and those
not
socialized into the general society—specialists, technicals—they’d report their own personal problems to Hicks, but being purely technicals, they weren’t in a position, in their ivory tower, to encounter much angst. That meant Hicks wouldn’t be often in practice. A provisionally licensed, only-occasional kind of operator wasn’t really up to finesse, unless he’d been shown how to do it, and was following a sort of recipe.

There were two styles of dealing with azi difficulties. One was the meticulous route that figured a Supervisor
could
make a mistake. You searched and researched the files until there was a theory, and a treatment. It was a very soft, very gentle method of going after the problem and fixing it—which didn’t always work at optimum, unless you were as good as Justin; but at least it didn’t generally go badly. If you
were
good, you could eventually lay a finger on the specific line in the set that was causing the conflict and change it, with proper annotations on the record. That was very much Justin.

The other was the brute force method—when you wanted something and knew the basic architecture of the set, you could ignore most of the subsequent manual and go right after the primal sets, gut level. You could do that if you didn’t, ultimately, care about the result long-term, or you could also do it if you were that good, that you
could
work at primary level in a subject, and if you had a clear vision how it could make everything subsequent settle into place.

I’m that good, she thought. She’d taken a chance with it. Was still taking a chance with it, in the sense that she now believed Rafael was clear—because she’d set his Contract very tightly, very exclusively on her, as the resolver of all conflicts, the source of all orders. She’d been brought up on the first Ari’s tapes. She’d been working with two alpha sets for years; and, being the born-man equivalent of an alpha, what she read in the manuals resonated at gut level; and the differences between an alpha and a theta resonated that way, and, once she got into the manuals, beta level made sense—the same with gamma, zeta, and eta—each with their own constellation of needs and satisfactions. Even for a born-man…it made sense.

Why
was the key.
Why
individuals did things, even when they had consistently negative outcomes…
why
people had to do things…she’d been asking
that
question of the universe for years. And born-men got the worst of it, all their lives.

Why did they have to take Maman away?

Why was Denys nice to me sometimes?

Why is Jordan what he is?

Why does Yanni bring me presents?

Who is Hicks working for?

Those were all, all important questions, and she’d fairly well gotten the answer to all but the last one—which might lie somewhere tangled with the cruel thing someone had done to Rafael.

She was very, very thankful Catlin hadn’t had to shoot Rafael, or that she herself hadn’t broken him down and not been able to fix it.

Typical of the really big problems in the azi world, the fix was actually simple, because the layers were so clean. Born-men—born-men were a muddled mess, as if someone had stirred a layered pudding with a knife. But when an azi was in primary conflict, his earliest, most basic self-protective rule was, “Appeal to a Supervisor.” Second was, “The Contract is the ultimate right.” And when Rafael had been drugged-down and wide open, she’d laid hands right on the conflict. She’d given him the Contract at the beginning, and that was all right: he’d taken it in, and immediately his reservations had attached, and he’d arranged his safe loophole. And then she’d hit him with the deep set changes, and a reiteration of the Contract, which had torn it all wide open, and set it up for healing.

He’d sleep once he’d carried out her orders to arrange the barracks. He’d work until he dropped, sleep like the dead, and wake up clear and sure of himself and with all his layers in good order.

The compulsion for a dual loyalty had to have been planted way back, from when he was a child; or it had to have been planted fairly near term by someone with the ability to plant it. Which again said Alpha Supervisor.

But say that the compulsion
had
been there for his whole life.

Fingers flew. Base One slithered quietly across departmental lines and nabbed another azi record, this one from a very young trainee designated for ReseuneSec—another B-28, BA-289, to be precise, which meant there were as many as seven more B-28’s already out there, somewhere.

It took a computer comparison to wade through that training record, proving it was identical to BR-283’s, and a little research to determine that that particular azi, BA-289, had been born and started on that path in 2412, before BR-283 had proved out, so there were three others old enough to be in place somewhere, and, after 283, four more theoretically in the system, younger than 289. You didn’t start proliferating a new routine through a geneset like that until you’d proved it out…not if you were operating by the book.

Was BR-283 the first of his kind?

Joyesse came in to ask if sera would want supper delayed.

“Ten minutes,” she said, because she was close, and she had an idea exactly what she was looking for.

And there they were. One B-28 in ReseuneSpace, up on Beta Station. One in Novgorod, in the ReseuneSec Special Operations office. One, oh, delightful! was in ReseuneSpace on Fargone, in Ollie’s service. BR-280, named Regis, an operations agent, had been born in 2373, and had been in service—in her predecessor’s service, no less—when she died. The first Ari’s security staff had been reassigned—scattered to the edge of space, evidently, when Giraud took over.

Oh, damned right they had scattered them. That staff, if questioned, knew things. And there was no damned reason her predecessor would have created an off-the-books routine in this Regis—who was in
her
security group—unless she hadn’t trusted the security group itself. And that was too many layers to be sane, especially when the first Ari could have peeled any of that group like an onion it she had any suspicion.

No. Someone had actually infiltrated Ari’s staff. And Denys, putatively, had been the agency of her death—which Giraud had pinned on Jordan—and Yanni had shipped Jordan to Planys to avoid a trial. While the original Florian and Catlin had died, and the security detail had been shipped out, scattered to all points of Union space, not one of them left on Cyteen.

Chin on hand, she contemplated that scenario.

ReseuneSec. An azi that had served the first Ari, now with Ollie. Other azi, who had never served Ari, at Beta, in Novgorod. And now she got one, in Hicks’ goodwill gift to her.

If it were the first Ari’s programming, she’d surely have had the finesse to vet the geneset and the psychset of her spies—piece of cake for Ari One. Someone of lesser ability, on the either hand, might have stuck with the first success and built spies like production items…then managed to get his favorite number assigned hither and yon.

Maybe the same person had moved BR-280 out, fast, with all the others, after the first Ari’s death. To have killed 280
with
Florian and Catlin might have drawn attention to him and his history, and all the others.

She drew in a slow breath.

Hicks could, if he worked at it, reprogram a beta. But Hicks hadn’t been in office, them.

God, this was archaeology. Everything was buried.

First logical query was to be sure the Regis base’ program was identical to Rafael’s, and that all the others were. Base One filched that manual from deep, deep storage—Reseune never erased a manual. Any version of it.

Beyond ten minutes. Joyesse came back, a little diffident.

“I apologize,” Ari said. “This isn’t finished yet. Tell cook I am so sorry. Another twenty minutes. Staff should have their supper.”

Joyesse left. And she let the computer sift through that mountain of material, which took only one of those minutes. It flagged no difference at all.

So BR-280 was the same as 281. That meant the window for that special routine had always been there in that mindset. And possibly that same routine, which
wasn’t
in the manual—illegal as hell—had indeed existed in 280. She couldn’t lay hands on 280 to find out, not easily. But she’d bet 280 reported to Hicks…who hadn’t been in charge of ReseuneSec long enough to have set it up that way.