Regenesis (66 page)

“I remember.”

“Impossible for his replicate, however.”

“I’d try to calm him down, to get you out of it.”

“So it wasn’t just Ari had a go at remodeling the Warrick psyche. He’d already blinked at creating his own double. He couldn’t take the arguments. You were seven. And he just had to win, didn’t he, or burst a blood vessel?”

It was certainly a point. He gazed at Grant, who had a momentarily earnest look, saw at least what made a certain grim sense.

“He ties you in knots,” Grant said. “And you remain the one that can return the favor…if you ever would, but you never let that shoe drop. In the meanwhile, he ran afoul of another man who didn’t like to lose.”

“Giraud.”

“Who hated him. And what the Nyes did to him was make him afraid for Paul.”

He stared off across the room, seeing—seeing Giraud, and one of those small nasty rooms. Terror, when he didn’t know where Grant was.

“You think he’s lying about starting work again?”

“He may try. He may be trying. Or he may be trying something else. You’re the great unanswered question to him. More than she is. He thinks he knows what
she
is; and he’s likely wrong; and the fact he might actually see that is going to frustrate him more, because he can’t prove what he thinks is true, is actually true. You completely frustrate him. You’re supposed to
be
him, never mind he took the one step, reining in your very nicely adrenalized temper, that assured you
never
would be him. It’s always amazed me how intelligent born-men, designers, can flux that far, that they can do something they know absolutely flies in the face of the result they want to get, and never expect it not to work out the way they want. If I designed an azi set like that, what would you tell me?”

“That it’s a conflict.”

“Beyond a simple conflict, born-man. It’s a roaring great deep set/ psychset mismatch.”

He heaved a breath, found himself mentally shying away from the concept of going after Jordan with the same energy Jordan used on him—because, dammit, he knew that would be a blowup to end all blowups. “It’s beyond a simple conflict. It’s that two Jordans can’t occupy the same space. Neither could two Aris. Psychogenesis works if one of the participants is dead.”

“Please don’t go that far.”

“You’re saying it’s irresolvable.”

“That the temper is there. That you either defuse it so it doesn’t bother you at all, or you and he will continue to go at each other over the most minor of differences.”

“That’s grim.”

“I, however, have faith in you,” Grant said. “You’re
better
than he is and you have no need to prove it to him. Just don’t let him suspect it, is all. He’s competitive, if you’ve missed that.”

“But how can I
live
with him?”

“That,” Grant said, “is going to be a lasting problem.”

He didn’t sleep well. He lay staring at the water-rippled ceiling, trying to find some null point in the fractal patterns, but his mind was awake and racing.

He laid out mental patterns for a living. He cured azi problems, when something had gone wrong. He’d never cured his own, which was that gut-deep knot that happened when he got into an argument. He’d always assumed, assumed, because that was the watershed point of his life, that the first Ari had set that into him, a flinch away from anger.

But Grant had handed him a key, a memory that hadn’t been that significant, until he recalled—past the towering dark of that night in Ari’s apartment—that Jordan
had
told him that, the day he gave him Grant for his own responsibility.

Responsibility.

Hostage. With the very proper advice that he couldn’t let his temper go again, not with Grant.

Possibly Jordan had given him that responsibility completely cold-bloodedly, seeing it as a way to win the argument with a matching temper, which had been, admittedly, out of control. Jordan reined it in for Paul. He had to for Grant. It was symmetrical, wasn’t it?

God, he thought. There was a saying in Reseune, that a designer with himself for a patient was a damned fool. There was a reason there was a psych overseeing psych operators. There was another saying among designers, to the effect that CITs were a guaranteed bitch-up. He’d had Jordan’s temper. He’d traded it for a gut-deep knot; and Jordan didn’t get mad at Paul—Jordan just made Paul suffer the effects of Jordan’s getting mad at everybody else—of Jordan’s getting mad at himself, very possibly, but mostly just battering himself against anything that opposed him. No compromise with the universe. Jordan was a Special, a certified genius at what he did, but Jordan had reached a point with a seven-year-old where he’d couldn’t win the fight. So he’d just shut it down.

And Ari, with her own very active temper, had gotten hold of that situation and jerked it sideways…with much more cold calculation, and more accuracy, maybe, than Jordan had been capable of using. He’d had a brain. His ideas had been fairly well out-there. Jordan had a habit of getting impatient with his what-ifs and shutting them down, hard. Damned nonsense, was what Jordan called his ideas. Ari had called them interesting.

He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to control the immediate visuals. Trying to shut Ari down and get Jordan in some kind of perspective, as not a bad man—just a hard-headed one who’d tried to steer him into a Jordan-esque path.

And God knew what Jordan’s own upbringing had been—a father brusque, emotionally shut down, very much on facts as he interpreted them to be, he had gotten that impression, at least, of the man who was, in a sense, his real father, since he was Jordan’s, mother—there had been, obviously, since Jordan himself wasn’t a clone, but nobody that had stayed; maybe nobody who’d even been there, people who died in the early days—sometimes left legacies in lab. Ended up being the gene donors for the foundational azi lines Jordan’s mother could have been cells in a dish, for all the record he’d ever laid hands on.

Didn’t make him unhappy, in the sense that he’d always been just as content to be like Grant, who was fairly perfect, in his eyes, both motherless and fatherless. He’d always been content to be Jordan’s Parental Replicate. But it was a question, whether if there’d been another influence in Jordan’s growing up, if Jordan would have grown up with a little doubt that one truth covered everything in the universe.

Jordan got the flaw from his father; Jordan tried to replicate
himself
, that was the damned key. Jordan hadn’t started with the concept of a kid who’d have his own notions—Jordan had tried to trim off any bits that didn’t match him…had fixed him on Grant, the way he’d fixed on Paul, only in that household there’d been room for only one personality, and nobody could argue with it.

CIT. Designer. And thorough bitch-up. No question. Ari could stand him off temper for temper. But she hadn’t been able to work with him.

She’d conned him, was what. She’d conned Jordan into the whole concept of a psychological replicate, then snatched the result and did a job on it.

He lay there, totally null for a moment, asking if it really hurt as much as it once had. Thinking that—if not for Ari—he’d have made Grant into Paul.

Which couldn’t happen, because Grant wasn’t Paul. And she’d gotten Jordan to accept Grant, because it was so damned hard to
get
an alpha companion, and the labs had had only one—that she’d created, knowing right then and there what should have been so, so clear to Jordan—that Grant wasn’t Paul. Grant wasn’t compliant. Grant was a fine, fine piece of work, who had taken his own path and already begun to drag a young born-man sideways. Jordan might have laid down Grant’s early programs, but not his absolute earliest, preverbal ones; and beyond that—Grant had just—self-directed. Psychologically, endocrine level and all, stable as they came, and an intellect that might well get beyond him.

Ari’s best. Ari’s near-last project, right along with the design that would replicate herself. Thank God for Grant. Thank Ari.

He just had to think what to do about Jordan.

And maybe he had to be a damned fool, and do a bit of work on himself, try to unwire that clenched-up anger, and figure out where to send the adrenaline rush Jordan provoked in him. Just thinking about it set him off. And set him to work.

Calm down, first. Take the energy out of it. Find a place to put it. Don’t shut it down. That makes the knot. Find a place to use it.

Create. Think. There’s energy in flux. There’s creative potential in things that don’t match.

Grant turned over. “Are you still awake?”

“Thinking,” he said.

“Thinking good things or bad things?”

“I’m working on that,” he said. “I’m not going to let Jordan bring himself down. How long has it been since Paul took tape, I wonder?”

“Probably not in a long while.” Grant set a hand on his shoulder. “Justin. Mess with Paul and you’re taking a very large chance. He’s not stable. And you’re not his Supervisor.”

He shook his head. “I’m not. And he won’t trust me. But Paul’s storing tension the way a battery stores power. Paul’s not right. So Jordan’s not right. Jordan’s Worked Paul. But the conditions Jordan imagines to exist, don’t, so the world he’s made Paul live in—doesn’t exist. And Paul sees it. I think Paul sees it, and doesn’t know how to fix it.”

Grant considered that a moment. “That could be.”

“You have a sense of him.”

“I have an azi’s sense of him, which I think is accurate. Storing tension, very much so. But the wrong Intervention could do damage. Might lead to shutdown.”

Grant had been there. Grant had been through that. It was Grant’s own watershed experience, more so even than the sojourn with the Abolitionists.

“It’s a plan, at least. Jordan’s wound tight, protecting Paul. But he’s only adding to the tension. There’s a hell of a lot wrong in that relationship. They’re wound up together. I don’t know where to take hold of it. I don’t know I should, until the chance happens, until I know what Paul’s mental state is.”

“I can’t read him well enough,” Grant said. “The other night, the first night they were in the black and white apartment, Paul was dipping in and out of shutdown, just skimming it. Creating his own calm-down.”

He remembered it. He’d taken it for overload—max stress, even on an alpha. Listening. But Grant intimated Paul hadn’t been listening, hadn’t been processing, hadn’t been recording, at certain intervals.

“That’s information,” he said. “Watch him. Watch him. See what you can figure.”

“I will,” Grant said. “Just—be careful with him.”

“I will,” he said.

He didn’t know if he could do anything, that was the thing. Real-time work froze him up. It was a problem that Jordan might have given him, right along with the genes. The stress of it might even be Jordan’s problem, which Paul had absorbed. It was a damn interlock.

But he had to try. And, God, if Jordan caught him at it—

Hell didn’t half describe it. He
wasn’t
as important to Jordan as Paul was. He’d accepted that fairly unemotionally, since, in point of fact, Jordan wasn’t as vital to him as Grant was, and he knew which he’d choose.

Maybe he ought to—choose, that was. Go to Ari, tell her it wasn’t working, couldn’t work. Put Jordan back in Planys, give him something to do there, let him and Paul live their lives.

But he couldn’t do it. That was the hell of it. He was like Jordan, stubborn on an issue, and he had to try.

J
ULY
20, 2424
1722
H

The item alert was blinking on the screen, and Ari clicked it.

Mail alert,
it said…some sender she’d specifically tagged to trigger the alert flasher, and that was a very, very short list.

She clicked again.

And her breath quickened. Cyteen Station in the sender line, Fargone Station as home address, via the merchanter
Candide
, docking in the last two minutes—a ship’s black box had just dumped its contents to Cyteen Station in orbit over their heads, and a longed-for letter, at least one letter, had flown down the datastream to Reseune. Via protocols established in Alpha Wing, a reply to
her
letter opened the gateway, straight to Base One.

Click.
Three
letters. One from Oliver AOX Strassen. Ollie was still alive.

One from Valery Schwartz. Her heart danced.

One from Gloria Strassen. That wasn’t so welcome. But she’d had to write to Gloria and to Julia just to be fair.

Discipline. Ollie outranked everybody. She read his letter first.

Dearest Ari,
it said. Nobody called her dearest, but Ollie could.
I received your invitation and very sympathetically understand the frame of mind in which you sent it, I do think. I remember you as Jane’s daughter, and with the utmost affection. But I must decline your kindness on several accounts.

First and most of all, Fargone is home, now. It was Jane’s home and mine, my best memories are here, and I have responsibilities that fill my time very usefully—ultimately useful to you, I hope.

Second, if things are going well for you, your direction is no longer Jane Strassen’s, but Director Finery’s, and you will be more comfortable in that role if I am not close by to prompt you to be that little girl again. I know you will be as intelligent as the great Dr. Emory, I hope you will be at least as wise, and I hope you will be good, but the meeting cannot satisfy me, or you. If I were still azi, that statement of logic would cause me no pain; but since I have become CIT, it has to pain us both. Let us remember those days as happy as they were, and keep that happiness in our mutual past, unchanged.

I must add one other matter: I know you have invited the Schwartzes and the Strassens to Reseune. I hesitate to be so blunt, but use caution. Jane’s relatives have been outspokenly bitter about their forced residency on Fargone: Valery Schwartz has grown up in close association with the Strassens. His mother is deceased, eleven years ago: a drug overdose which is inexplicable as an accident. Young Schwartz may or may not elect to accept your invitation: he is known here in the art community and has a reputation in deeptape experientials—an art which I have only lightly sampled, given my own character and origins. I am advised there are psychological considerations to prolonged exposure to these arts. Please use caution. I enclose files, in hopes you are surrounded by competent security—you surely must be, and I hope I know by whom.