Strings (16 page)

“Yes.”

“Oh, really!” Hubbard shook her head in disbelief. “Tell me!”

“He has a big following in the camps,” Alya said glumly. “And in the country. If he can arrange for a large contingent from both—and all others will be fragmented, is this not so? Many groups from many places?”

Hubbard nodded, still amused. “So he will have a working plurality? He thinks that that, plus a royal wife…”

Alya nodded, and found herself returning a smile. “Exactly.”

“I do not think he quite appreciates the problems he will face.”

“Probably not,” Alya said. “He’s smart, but very limited—a child of the slums. He cannot imagine a world that is not confined and bounded. I mean, people don’t live under demagogues from choice, do they?”

In frontier worlds there could be no kings, no tyrants; barely even civic mayors. Anyone trying to seize power would find himself a leader with no followers.

Then Alya realized that she was next item on the agenda. Hubbard was evaluating her, not Jathro. She dropped her eyes and vowed to guard her tongue more carefully.

The carpet under the table showed patches worn by years of feet. The office was unusually austere and frugal for a person as prominent as the director of 4-I.

“Your presence at the news conference today was a surprise to me, Your Highness.”

Not since she was a tiny child being handled by gigantic adults had Alya felt so helpless, so conscious of unlimited power. That dangerous old woman could do whatever she chose—and would. Alya kept her head down and said nothing.

“What provoked your attendance? Intuition?”

Alya nodded.

“And what exactly has my grandson got to do with you?”

“You treated him abominably.” Alya forced herself to meet the basilisk scrutiny.

“Yes, I did. What has that to do with you?”

“I don’t know. But it has.”

Hubbard’s eyes narrowed and she tightened her lips.

“What were you doing?” Alya demanded. “Testing him?”

The old woman breathed a ghost of a laugh. “He hardly ranks a test on the scale of what happened today. Did you understand his remark about seventeen stories?”

Alya shook her head.

“Last night he blundered into danger. Early this morning Dr. Bagshaw rescued him, but in the process he was forced to drop Cedric fifty-five meters out a window. He was strapped inside an armored box at the time, yet that sort of experience could easily turn a man into a gibbering moron. Cedric, I am informed, merely complained that he had not been warned what to expect.”

“Is that what you’re trying to do—turn him into a gibbering moron? Because you made another try at it this afternoon, didn’t you?”

Hubbard’s thin smile mocked Alya’s anger. “In Cedric’s case it would seem to be impossible.”

Time was running out—Alya could feel it. The lev would go without her. But she had to ask. “What do you mean?”

“It is a complex story. May I offer you some refreshment? Coffee? Wine?” The old witch was picking at Alya’s impatience like a hangnail.

“No, thank you.”

“Very well. What I told Cedric was the truth. He was sired by my son on Dickson Rita Vossler. As a zygote, he was removed from his mother’s uterus and frozen. Common enough procedure nowadays, of course. In Cedric’s case, his parents went to Oak, where they almost certainly died. Most of our clients simply vanish, but in John’s case I had already arranged a cover story about a broken string and a lost expedition. We do that for anyone whose absence may be noticed.”

The Banzaraki royal family did the same. Omar had “drowned while fishing.” In a few days or weeks, Kas would find a convenient air crash or hotel fire, and the country would officially mourn Alya.

“So, ironically, John did die—and in what may have been the only sentimental action of my life, I had the embryo thawed out and brought to term in vitro.” Hubbard smiled that razor-thin smile of hers again. “A foolish impulse? You think I felt a debt to my son?”

“I doubt that my opinion is relevant, Director.”

“Or welcome. Anyway, I had Cedric salvaged and reared.”

“Reared in an organage!”

“Don’t jump to conclusions!” Hubbard’s voice cracked like a rifle. “There are a thousand worse places for a child than Meadowdale. It is one of the best foster homes in the country. Some of the children are exactly what they seem—the offspring of prominent persons who cannot otherwise guarantee their safety. They are given a very healthy upbringing, with as much outdoor activity as modern climate permits.”

Alya’s temper sprang up and trampled caution underfoot. “Some are? But most of the inmates are clones, aren’t they? Being raised as meat, as spare parts! And the healthy exercise is designed to produce strong organs for autografts!”

Hubbard dismissed that irrelevancy with a shrug. “Buying organs on the open market is expensive. Rejection is always a danger. So is disease. The children are well looked after.”

“Physically!” Alya shouted. “Looked after physically—fed and exercised like horses! But their minds are deliberately retarded. You almost won a Nobel Prize, and your grandson probably can’t even read!”

For the first time she had penetrated the ice—Hubbard had felt that thrust, but her voice went quieter, not louder. “His father wrestled livestock. I told you that Cedric was a foolish impulse on my part. I threw out my son’s old underwear; I should have had his genital excretions flushed down the sewer.”

Alya was beyond speech.

Hubbard leaned back in her chair and studied Alya thoughtfully. “This intuition of yours—have you ever heard of GFPP?”

“No.”

“It is a relatively new technique, Genetic Factor Personality Prediction. It seeks to estimate a person’s character by analysis of his genotype.”

“Does it work?”

“Within limits. About three years ago I thought to run it on Cedric’s DNA.”

“And?”

“He scored high on intelligence, and sociability, and several minor factors. He was low on ambition. Very low on aggression.”

Even when Cedric had been angry, he had barely raised his voice. Alya could not imagine him wanting to hurt anyone. “A gentle giant!”

“Sentiment! I am talking science. The truly remarkable feature of his profile was tenacity. There he registered as high as the test results would go.”

“Tenacity?”

“A complex of perseverence, single-mindedness, and stubborness.”

“Courage? Why not say it—‘courage’?”

“Portmanteau term. Can’t be scientifically defined.”

Alya was being provoked to lose her temper. Trouble was, she was going to. “I know what it is, even if you don’t. What about Cedric’s tenacity?”

“I admit I wondered then if I might have wasted a valuable resource.”

God in Heaven! Why can’t she think of him as a person?

Hubbard chuckled soundlessly, as though she had heard that thought. “I said that GFPP has limitations—that is because inheritance is not everything. We are molded by our environment, also. Indeed, the usual estimate is that nature and nurture play a roughly equal role in making us what we are.”

“You can quantify environment?” Alya did not try to hide her skepticism.

The old woman nodded. “We think so—in this case. Cedric’s background has been very impoverished in stimuli. Dr. Wheatland has been encouraging this research, you understand. It is useful in evaluating potential employees. She set up parameters to model a deprived institutional upbringing, and we ran an HCP—that’s a Holistic Character Prognosis.”

“And what were the results of the experiment this time?”

“Very interesting!” Hubbard spoke as though she were discussing something pinned to a specimen board. “Apparently organages develop self-reliance. His tenacity estimate went right off-scale.”

“So?”

“So I can use Hubbard Cedric Dickson without fear of reducing him to gibbering moronship. Drop him out windows? No problem. Set an angry crowd on him—why not? He has tenacity, he hangs on. He continues to function. You saw him today—he’s virtually indestructible.”

Alya felt ill. She pushed herself to her feet, determined to leave before she blurted something dangerous. “I shall go to Cainsville now.”

Hubbard stayed sitting, staring across at her with what seemed to be quiet contempt. “You have missed the point, child.”

“What point?”

“That I have plans for Cedric. He is a pawn, but an important one.”

Alya leaned heavily on the back of the chair she had just left and stared into the hateful, mocking eyes of the evil old woman.

Mad as a moray eel.

“A pawn you plan to sacrifice?”

“Possibly.”

“Literally? Literally sacrifice? Kill him?”

“If necessary,” Hubbard said flatly. “I play for high stakes. This is the high table, Princess. No nickel bets here. And sentiment is a small-denomination chip. That is the point you missed. Don’t throw your heart at my grandson. You’ll only get hurt.”

“I shall go to Cainsville now.”

“I’m not finished. I have a question for you. This family intuition of yours—I understood that it only detected personal danger?”

Alya could guess what was coming. She waited, pretending that the question had been only a statement.

Hubbard frowned. “Well? Is it also self-referent?”

“Self what, Director?”

“Oh, don’t play dumb bunny with me, girl! Does your inherited intuition also pick out breeding partners to enhance itself?”

Kas thought it did. Alya shivered. “If it does, then I am nothing but a pawn also, a puppet of the
buddhi
talent, and anything I say on the subject might be a falsehood.”

“I see.” Hubbard considered that, showing her lower teeth in the nastiest smile Alya had seen yet. “Well, enjoy my grandson while you can, Princess. I saw how you kept trying to paw him. But remember that he won’t be available for very long. You can’t have him to keep. He is not going to Tiber with you, or whatever world you choose. He is mine to do with as I please.”

She rose, tall and straight in her gray suit, and deadly like a sword. “I shall give you a world, Princess Alya, and you may play Ms. Moses and lead your people to your promised land. But Cedric stays here. I caused him to be. He is mine.”

“You’re crazy!”

“Many have told me so. Most of them are dead now.”

The Institute had its own lev station, on a spur from the main tube. It ran private cars nonstop between HQ and Cainsville every two hours, thereby creating massive inconvenience for every other user of the artery.

Alya reached the platform with minutes to spare, flushed and puffing from an entirely unnecessary sprint. Flanked by his guard, Cedric stood among the crowd, as inconspicuous as a palm tree in a rice paddy. He was wearing a pale blue poncho, and his hair was neatly set in tawny ripples. The doors had just opened, and he was watching the passengers emerging, so he did not see her until she reached him. He looked down then, and joy blazed in his smile.

Alya’s heart rolled over and submerged in a swamp of guilt and dismay. She should have guessed what would happen! His grandmother had lied to him and betrayed him, his foster parents had been revealed as murderous ghouls, his childhood friends were all foully murdered—but a pretty girl had smiled and spoken kindly. If he was really nineteen, then he could not be more than eight months younger than she, at the most—or even slightly older. He must be forty centimeters taller. Yet compared to her, he was only an overgrown child.

He smiled sheepishly. “Hope you don’t mind the work clothes. The store had nothing in—”

“Anything but that green! Blue suits you.”

He blushed, as she had known he would.

And she felt better already, as she had known she would, just being near him.

She felt mean, using him as an antidote.

Then he shyly pulled a single red rose from under his poncho and offered it to her without a word.

Mean? She was as bad as his bitch of a grandmother.

The Institute’s private lev cars were considerably cleaner and more comfortable than Nauc’s usual. Furthermore, a deputy director had status. The little VIP compartment at the front was snappily appropriated by a group of venerable scientists who thought they deserved it more than Cedric did. His burly bodyguard explained their error. When words failed to convince, he led the eldest out by the ear, and the others followed meekly. Then Jathro tried to accompany Alya, and the bull threatened to burn off his beard with a torchgun. She suspected that was the bull’s own idea, not Cedric’s, but Cedric was grinning gleefully and obviously not averse to having her all to himself.

Even first-class seating would not normally have been adequate for his legs, but when acceleration was over and the seat backs reversed, he stretched out and laid his astonishingly large feet on the opposite bench. Alya raised the armrest between them, expecting him to accept that as an invitation, but he was apparently too shy to believe the signal. At first he made no move. Still, just being close to him relieved her pain.

Supported on magnets and flashing through vacuum at a thousand miles an hour, a lev was normally a smoother ride than even a super. The Cainsville express was an exception because it ran nonstop in a tube designed for stops. The curves were all gentle, but not all had been designed to be taken at full speed, and some produced a crushing gee force. On the first bend Cedric tried to keep his weight off Alya, but on the return she just relaxed and leaned. He caught the message and encircled her with a long arm. She fitted neatly into the crook of his elbow, his shoulder a good headrest, if bony; giants did have their uses. Thereafter they rocked in unison.

And that was the cure she had needed. The long arm banished the ghosts. The gnawing of her intuition died away at last—she was traveling to Cainsville and cuddling as close to Hubbard Cedric as decency permitted, and for the first time in days she felt peace. A
satori
never explained, so she could not guess why he should matter, but she was very relieved to know that mere proximity was enough. Whatever the
buddhi
wanted, apparently it was not going to drive her to coitus with him. She was relieved to make that discovery—bedding Cedric would be child molesting.