Regenesis

by C. J. Cherryh

  “They’re all that’s keeping me sane.” A drink of the vodka. “A damned thin thread, these days. Damn Yanni.”

  “I hoped you’d give me a reasonable critique on the other set I sent you,” Justin said. “I’m waiting for it, in fact.” Jordan had had too much vodka to make sense on that topic, Justin was well sure—Jordan had likely forgotten all about it, in the heat of the argument at dinner, but he had questions of his own that Jordan hadn’t satisfied. The reward structure in that theta set emanated directly from work he and Jordan shared for years, it was related to the problem he’d handed Jordan in the bar this evening, and he hadn’t expected that kind of reaction. Yanni used to heap scorn on his reward concept in the low-level sets, claiming it would produce problems down the generations in an azi-derived population. Yanni had called him a damned fool—until Jordan started working with him, and then Yanni had started listening.

  “Piece of crap,” Jordan said.

  Well, that wasn’t what he’d hoped to hear.

  “In what regard?”

  “In what regard…don’t give me that calm-down routine. Your damn design is out in the ether. Piece of crap, just like that crap you handed me at dinner. Same fucking reason.”

  “Sorry, then. I won’t press you for specifies tonight.”

  “I’ll give them to you with a broad brush, same issue. Same reason. Same damn problem I fought out with Ari. She didn’t listen. She implemented. Now I see it in my son. Grant, do you agree with this crap?”

  “Ser,” Grant said, “insofar as I follow the thread of this argument, I am in agreement with the design, yes.”

  “But then, you’re Ari’s design, aren’t you?”

  “Ser.”

  “Jordan,” Justin said sharply, “don’t pull that. You don’t believe it, you don’t mean it, so just don’t touch it. That’s your fourth glass.”

  “You don’t see a problem. You think you’re fucking brilliant, skipping over any substructure, just go straight for the deepsets: it’s the shortcut, everything for the shortcut. And the poor azi you program, pity them—they’re not alphas, they’re not going to figure that’s a leap of flux-thinking logic, no, you’re going to have theta minds making a leap from a to zed with no supportive structure, no crosslinks, no work-up in their skill-set level to encourage any critical thought about their actual performance…”

  “Thetas aren’t good at that.”

  “Don’t read me basic lessons! You know damned well you’re taking a shortcut.”

  “I am. Yes. Admittedly. That’s the whole purpose.”

  “And you’re going to have a pack of thetas gone eetee with no recourse but Reseune operators to pull them back to sanity…if they can. A batch of smug, happy, wrongheaded workers.”

  “That’s why I come to you.” A little bald flattery never hurt. But it was also the truth. “I see you don’t think it’s a good idea. I respect that. I just expect more specific reasons for your opinion than I’m getting here.”

  “I don’t know why I’d bother. You’re getting all your theories from the little darling.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t think so.”

  “I damned well know so. You think that’s new, that leap of procedures you threw into that last paper? That’s Ariane Emory. That’s Emory, cut and dried. She’d just wave her hand and say, with the appropriate gesture, ‘It will work. It will work.’ Hell! That kind of thinking created Gehenna. There’s her kind of thinking run amok. She was doing it that far back!”

  “But the azi there lived. They weren’t expected to. But she expected it of them. She just didn’t tell Defense. And what she did worked. The fact there’s been other input into the system—that wasn’t in program…”

  “Well, that’s the universe for you! Don’t you get it? You can’t anticipate your little program to run forever in a bubble. Something’s going to impact it. Something damned sure did, on Gehenna.”

  “There’s got to be a dividing line, between trusting the subject will adapt, and going only by micromanaging little situations, constantly referring back to a Supervisor. We’re so damned conservative with the deepsets…”

  “With reason! Have you ever seen a real eetee case? Has your real-life practice ever gotten the results of one of your damned thought experiments?”

  “No. I’m teaching. It’s all theory.”

  “At this point.”

  “We argue. In point of fact, I know the present Ari would love to hear your objections. She’d be very interested. We could have some good conversations…if you were so inclined.”

  “While she’s hot after my son? The hell.” The rest of the vodka went down. “Get me another, Paul.”

  “Jordan,” Justin said, as Paul looked dismayed.

  “I said get me another. There are things I need to say. I didn’t know my geneset could produce a fool.”

  Paul got up and shot more vodka into the glass. Twice that, Justin thought, if that’s what it takes…bundle him off to bed and let’s end this evening somewhere short of disaster.

  “I hate to point out,” Justin said as Jordan took the glass, “that’s five.”

  “Have you been alone with her?”

  “Are you asking if I’ve had sex with her?” Justin asked.

  “I’m asking if you’ve been alone with her. Grant, has he ever been alone with her?”

  “Ser, I’d rather not enter this conversation.”

  Grant, damn the situation, wasn’t able to lie, not to a man who’d been his Supervisor as well as his CIT father. In some situations he was thorough azi, and too vulnerable for this fight.

  “I’m taking Grant home,” Justin said, and set the glass on the side table. “ ’Til you’re sober. Grant, don’t answer him. You don’t have to answer him.”

  “Oh, I’ll imagine the answer, then. Stay put, Grant! I’m not through.”

  “I am.”

  “You sit where you are and you listen to me. I’m seeing things in your work—I’ve been seeing them. I’ve corrected you. You’ve changed things right back—”

  “Where it matters.”

  “You’ve changed things right back in the same vein as that little item you sent me this afternoon. The same thing you shoved in my face at dinner.”

  “I was uneasy about the concept, I didn’t get an answer on the others, just a correction with no note. I wasn’t sure why. I was asking your help with a problem, Dad… I’m sorry if it gives you some eetee flashback to your own time…”

  “Oh, back to my time, is it? What is my time, can you tell me that, son of mine?”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  “Pretty clear what people here think. Twenty years out of the current here, twenty years of a real style change in operations here, Yanni Schwartz losing his mind and putting you with the little bitch to let her pick your bones clean. I don’t appreciate that move. I don’t care if the spoiled darling did threaten to stop breathing if he didn’t.”

  “Actually, Jordan, I agreed to it. Clear the family name and all.”

  “Oh. Oh, that’s good. I didn’t do it, dammit! Do you need to hear that?”

  “I hear you. I just think it’s as well the public—when this goes public—hears it, too. I’d like to see the day—”

  “What, the day everything’s sweet again? It won’t come. You want me to work with you? Quit working with her.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Can’t!”

  “Let’s put it this way, Dad. I won’t. I respect you, I respect you tremendously, but you don’t have the right to tell me who I work with. I’m getting something out of this…”

  “Oh, it’s clear you’re getting something out of it! And you don’t have the right to take my theories and hand them on a platter to that little walking memory bank. I had to put up with the last Ari taking my work and putting her name on it and I’m sure as hell not going to see it happen in the second generation.”

  “I haven’t given her your work, except as you’ve taught
me. After that. Dad, in the way things work in the universe, it becomes mine.”

  “The hell it does.”

  “It becomes mine. Dad, not because I’m regurgitating it verbatim, but because I’m using my brain and everybody else’s a input along with yours to come up with my own ideas.”

  “And her input, it’s very damned clear.”

  “Because you didn’t like a two-line routine I wrote on a cocktail napkin? I gave you a second instance of a similar routine, because my own leap of logic bothered me and I wanted your reaction on it, but do I get a sensible discussion, on this one or the last two weeks? No. First you ignore it—”

  “I didn’t ignore it. I corrected it!”

  “Twice, without any explanation!”

  “I’d think you damned well knew my objection!”

  “I’m not reading your mind!”

  “So I said something, tonight!”

  “In the bar? You didn’t say something in any rational way. You went orbital without a launch, just up there, bang! No preface, no sensible discussion, nothing but a fucking emotional reaction, alcohol-fueled, and fluxed to the max. You aren’t thinking clearly on this. Dad. If you saw something in my work that triggered a flash of your own—”

  “Don’t you go patronizing with me!”

  “All right, all right. This is it. We’re going home.”

  “Home. Is that what you call it?”

  “I live in Wing One! I live there because there was a time, thanks to my trying to find out about your situation, that I was apt to be arrested, which was damn near a monthly event in my life, and it was getting serious, about then. I’d have been in lockup. That was my choice.”

  “And then things all changed. All right. Level with me. There was a time they wouldn’t trust you. I’m not talking about the little darling. I’m not even talking about Denys. I’m talking about Yanni. They wouldn’t trust you. Now they do. Why?”

  “Because she told them to. Because Denys Nye is dead, and his apparatus isn’t functioning any more. Because Yanni likes me better than Denys did!”

  “Because she told them to. Because she’d had a chance to work you over, that last time, when Grant was in Planys, and you were here solo, in her reach.”

  It was too close to the truth. He didn’t want to lie about it. “She’s a kid. Dad.”

  “She’s a monstrosity. And she got her hands on you when Grant wasn’t around. She finished what her predecessor started. Didn’t she?”

  “Dad…”

  “I’m not hearing you deny it. Is it true. Grant? Did she do that?”

  Silence from that quarter. Grant had prior orders, an instruction from his current Supervisor that outranked anything his first Supervisor could order on that topic.

  “I draw my conclusion,” Jordan said. “She did. Just you? Or both of you?”

  “I have the session tapes,” Justin said, braced for the storm. “And nothing happened. She asked me where I stood on certain matters. I satisfied the questions—that I wasn’t an assassin. That you weren’t. And Grant wasn’t.”

  “Let me see the tapes.”

  Reasonable request, on one level. But not a good idea. That second thought flashed up, fast and hard: Jordan wasn’t any father—Jordan and he twitched off exactly the same impulses: Jordan took a deep breath and he felt as if he had just breathed. Jordan flared off and his own adrenaline surged, mirror-image. He couldn’t help it. He was a PR, Jordan’s exact replicate, and the resonances were there, every muscle twitch. It was his face, as he’d never be, because he’d started rejuv at thirty-five and Jordan hadn’t until forty-five—but it was close enough. Every lift of a brow, every frown, psychologically connected as they were, to hoot, by Jordan’s having brought him up as a son—resonated, in a way a natural son wouldn’t feel it. They were twins. Identicals. And his father, besides all that, besides the fact that his father’s own gut would react to that tape of him lying there, deep-tranked, undergoing questions from Ari’s twin—besides all that, his father was a psych operator, and the first time seeing that tape, Jordan might be in shock, but the second and third time through he’d be gathering bits and pieces, tabs, things he could use in a constant, battering attempt to undo everything he’d seen done, to grab hold of parts of his son’s soul and jerk—hard. Every damned time anything came up that Jordan didn’t like, he’d have? a key to his psyche that nobody else would.

  “No,” he said. “No. Those tapes are private.”

  “I’ll bet they are.”

  “This was a mistake,” Justin said, and this time, in his own moment of temper, reached for the double vodka on the side table and downed it in three gulps, half ice melt, because he was going to need anesthesia to get any sleep tonight. After which he propelled himself to his feet, and Grant got up. “ ’Night, Dad.”

  “Oh, now we run for it. Touched a sore spot, have I?”

  “Maybe,” Justin said. “But I’m not staying here to have you twist the knife.” He got a breath, and one clear thought. “I want to go on working with you. If you want it otherwise, you can have that, but don’t answer me tonight.”

  “Tell me this,” Jordan said. “How are the flashbacks?”

  He’d been plagued by them for years. Flashes of a couch, elder Ari, the taste of orange and vodka. The smell of it. Not of late. And he flashed on the answer, the thing Jordan was really asking. “Not germane here, Dad.”

  “They’re better, aren’t they? Not as many as before you had a session with the younger version. Was there sex?”

  “Nothing nearly so entertaining as the first time,” he shot back, referencing the fact Jordan had seen the first tape, and he knew he shouldn’t have said that. It was the vodka. Which hadn’t been a good idea. He felt an oncoming wave of heat. “Grant, come on. It’s not friendly in here. I’m sorry, Dad. I’m sorry for the whole damned thing.”

  “They’re spying on us, you know. This whole conversation will go to her.”

  “More likely it’ll go to Yanni. She doesn’t meddle in my business.”

  “She says.”

  “She doesn’t have to lie. And you’ve spread enough of my business out for the monitors to see, at whatever level. I’ve had enough of this argument, Dad. I was glad to see you home. I knew there’d be problems…”

  “Meaning I wouldn’t fall in line with the compacts you’ve made.”

  “Meaning everything, Dad, meaning just about everything.” He had the impulse to say. Meaning you’re frustrated about that license, meaning you’re mad about lost time, mad about the current administration, mad that you’re still under house arrest. Mad about your whole life. But the vodka hadn’t that thorough a grip on him that he should let that fly. He just said. “I love you. Go to bed and sleep it off. Maybe they’ll arrest me in the morning because I was stupid enough to let this carry on this far. Maybe not. Things are generally better now.”

  “Oh, the martyr, my suffering son.”

  “Have it any way you like. Security is what security is and they’ll do any damn thing they like. I’m used to it and they know I’ll tell them the plain truth. Hear that, Yanni? So just go to bed, Dad. At least we didn’t have this conversation in the bar. But I’m not sure we should have had it at all.”

  “High time we had it.”

  “Sure,” he said, “if you think so. I didn’t have an inkling you were getting that mad about my repeated question. So think about it. And calm down. Come on, Grant.”

  This time they did make it out the door. He’d bet there was one more glass of vodka poured tonight, if not drunk, before Paul got Jordan into bed. He deeply regretted the one he’d had.

  “I’m going to be hung over,” he said to Grant.

  “Glass of orange, another of water, water every hour, and two aspirin,” Grant said. “Sovereign. You were making perfect sense, by the way.”

  “Sorry. Very sorry.”

  “You couldn’t stop him.”

  No security had shown up. They took the open air ro
ute across the quadrangle to Wing One, and through the doors, and security checked them through and never said a word.

  That much had changed since Yanni had taken over. People could be fools these days and not be arrested or interviewed. They might hear from Yanni once he got back, but tonight they made it home all right.

  BOOK ONE Section 1 Chapter vi

  APRIL 22, 2424

  2351H

  Yanni was up to stuff in Novgorod. Yanni’s office wasn’t going to tell her that, but Base One did. Base One found it real easy to wander where it liked, into communications between Yanni’s office and Novgorod, and between Yanni’s office and ReseuneSec; and what Ari heard made her mad—not a real Mad, so far, but a good one all the same. Yanni was talking to unusual people, people who’d been enemies, and probably not making records about it. That was a watch-it, but she hadn’t told Catlin and Florian about the problem yet, just in case Yanni had a reasonable explanation.

  Yanni might guess Base One was into his stuff. Probably he didn’t. Denys hadn’t known to what extent Base One had invaded Base Two, or if he’d known, he’d hoped he’d worked around it, and he’d hoped he was being careful. Or at least he’d hoped to psych her, which would have been the answer to his problem, if she’d been that stupid. She’d grown up. He’d been one jump too late to stop her.

  She ran through all sorts of records on things Yanni had done, from way back. She did find that her predecessor had trusted Yanni ahead of the Nyes. That wasn’t a great surprise. Yanni generally told the truth.

  She incidentally found that it was the first Ari who had given Yanni instructions that if anything happened to her, she wanted Jane Strassen to be the surrogate.

  And then she looked just a little too deep: Yanni had had a long conversation with Maman about that, and Maman had said, Hell, no, what do I want with a baby? I had one, thanks. See how that turned out. No. Absolutely not.

  Then Yanni had promised Maman if she did it for them she could go back to space when the job was done. That she’d have a major directorate somewhere in space, and Maman had said, well, she’d think about it—because Maman really loved being in space. The War was what had made it necessary for Maman to be down on the planet, because it was safer, she found that fact out between the lines, but after the War, Maman had been so important to Reseune, she’d been stuck in an administrative post and hadn’t been able to get transferred back up to the station. So for that promise, Maman said maybe she could put up with a few years of inconvenience.