Regenesis (v1.2)

by C. J. Cherryh

  Was rebellion stupidity? Or was it just her genetics snuggling around the first Ari’s precepts, hardheadedness and arrogance trying to find a convenient shape to settle into?

  She wanted Florian tonight. She really wanted Florian. But she, and he, had so much work to do… so very much work to do… things about the household, which kept them all fed, and safe… in a Reseune that didn’t all want them to stay alive.

  The dose began to take hold. Critical thinking ebbed. The machine started up, a gentle repetitive tone, warning the tape was about to start. She had to press a button to get it to go on. She had that much volition left.

  Beginning. The Novgorod designs, the overall structure.

  Maybe nobody should examine their own world that closely. She’d been out in the world, however briefly She’d seen the world from the air, seen it from the ground, gone through its corridors and met its violence.

  Now she was working directly with the ethics that drove it, examining the ethics set into the azi who had been the foundational citizens. Did she intend to tweak that mix? She could. She could subtly, by sending in other azi into key positions, shift the whole Cyteen electorate.

  She could set others at work at Fargone, where Ollie ruled. She knew Ollie’s ethical structure. She had a copy of Ollie’s personal manual, down to the day he left. She could skim it at high speed, and recognize ordinary structures from special ones. She could design azi to fit around Ollie, no question, the foundations of something special, around one that she’d loved, when she was little. She could make all Fargone Station into Ollie’s image.

  Ethics were the stop-marks, and the directional choices, in a psych-map. And she knew set after set of the classic ones, the ones from before the first Ari’s time, the ones designed by committee.

  She knew the ones that had the first Ari’s peculiar stamp on them. Like those key sets in Novgorod, and at Gehenna—the people that would rise to the top and become important, the leaders, the movers.

  She could replicate that at Strassenburg. She could do something else. Yes, she could.

  And something else was her choice in building that place.

  Surveillance of past projects like Gehenna was her job, the key thing that the first Ari had created her to do. Be the watchdog. Steer the directed populations in a good direction. Understand. Change at need. Know the program, and know how to change it.

  Strassenburg would always be closely tied to Reseune, and it would be hers. Her chosen genesets, her chosen CITs, her designed psychsets, never part of Novgorod or any of the rest of Cyteen: something new under the sun. The thetas she was about to manage for sheer practice would be the foundation of a site where her programs ran, not her predecessor’s. Every problem case in Reseune was currently worried that the new facility might serve as a gulag for her opposition—and in fact she had thought of creating a little secure lab there, for the likes of Jordan Warrick.

  But there was a problem with secure labs, and the Patil incident had demonstrated that, hadn’t it, abundantly? Secure labs were full of very bright people, who could be very devious if they wanted to be.

  And getting a Special like Jordan involved there would jeopardize the far more important reason for Strassenberg, that the whole town was itself a lab, a control for herself, and for her successor. She wanted to see what her designs grew into, isolated from those at Novgorod.

  She intended nothing antithetical to Novgorod, unless intolerance for other ideas was a timebomb developing in the first Ari’s design.

  Within decades, Novgorod would meet something on its beloved planet that wasn’t Novgorod, when it had been the only true city in the world for all the world’s existence. Novgorod had had some experience in tolerance, tolerating Reseune itself, Reseune’s autocracy—even needing an Ariane Emory, and voting for her programs.

  But would they tolerate diversity when it wasn’t their brand of diversity?

  For the good of the planet, they would have to. Or their idiosyncrasy became a problem that she would have to handle with subsequent population surges.

  And what she did carried through generations. That was the point of everything: ultimately it was people you were dealing with, people whose psychsets might have been planned like a jigsaw puzzle, groups of the one psychset clicking into place with other groups of another, and tending to bond and procreate with individuals of like psychset, so there was a certain persistence of type—that was setted-in, too. All part of integrations.

  No apparent problems in Novgorod. So far. Even the Abolitionists might be healthy. At least people disagreed with the majority.

  So let Novgorod meet something Else. In her time, in her successor’s time, let two separate psycharcologies learn each other. That would deliver a poke to the urban organism downriver, to see how it wiggled.

  It might also guarantee that her successor would need to exist.

  Azi felt a certain pride in the continuance of their type. It was part of their sets. But was it wired into what was basically human?

  Curious, curious. She was able to compare herself only against the first Ari. Her successor would at least have a broader field of inquiry in that department.

  And perhaps her successor would found yet another colony, just to check things out. She thought if she were that Ari, that thought would certainly occur to her.

  But that would complicate the situation long-term, when populations merged and met, as they would when the world grew. Too many variables spoiled the soup, to mix a metaphor.

  Forgetting that they were dealing with living, self-willed people spoiled it, too. Too much deepstudy, too much immersion in the theoretical, the give and take only of electrons, not the behavior of whole organisms. The world was more complicated than theory ever yet predicted: that was why she was important. It was her job to see things coming, and figure how to shift the demographics without conflicts. A machine didn’t work, mixing in yet one more metaphor, if it was all one homogenous piece. Neither did a city, or a species.

  Finding the glitches was her job. Her problem. Man started out analyzing his environment, graduated into understanding his own psyche, graduated, again, into analyzing the behavior of the human species en masse.

  That guaranteed employment for several of her kind, didn’t it?

  Chapter vii

  April 27, 2424

  0117 H

  Florian was back from down the hill—late. Exhausted. He fell into bed in the dark, and Catlin rolled over and asked, face to face, brow to brow with him: “So. What’s the story? Do we accept these people?”

  “I didn’t find anyone to object to. I’ve interviewed them. I’ve ordered them into a single barracks, two days of special tape. They’ll be firmly under our orders and initially operational by, I’d think, the fifteenth of next month.”

  “Good.” She eased an arm around him. She was tired, herself, from hour after hour at the screens, and running up and downstairs seeing to the move. He was tired from a day with Hicks and trekking from one end of Reseune to the other, down to the labs and the barracks, back to the offices, meeting upon meeting with prospective help.

  “Has sera asked after me?”

  “She knows where you’ve been all day. She’s very busy in her studies, but she approves of what we’ve done.”

  “Good.” He pulled her close, bestowed a weary kiss on the forehead. She wasn’t that tired, that that didn’t get a reaction. But she stayed tracked, business first. “There was an interesting development on my side today.”

  “Oh?”

  “Justin called me. Called us. He wanted to know what was on the card. He wanted to distance himself from that inquiry. But he also wanted to know.”

  The penalty of interesting information. Florian pushed her back enough to look at her eye to eye. “Curious about the card, is he?”

  “Curious and worried. He’s conflicted. He wants to know and he doesn’t want to know. On my own judgment, I told him about the Novgorod doctor to see what his reaction would be
, and also to warn him about the nature of the danger. He didn’t know her, not even by name. I ran the clip of his call for sera to hear it.”

  “Interesting,” Florian murmured. “And what did she say?”

  “Much the same. She found it interesting.”

  Hands moved. And stopped. “Do you think sera’s going to call me tonight?”

  “Definitely she won’t,” Catlin said. “She skipped supper again and went straight into deep-study.”

  “She shouldn’t do that.”

  “I said so, too. She said she’d have a big breakfast in the morning.”

  “She’s pushing herself again. It’s not good.”

  “It’s not good,” Catlin agreed. “I think she feels we’re in danger. I think she suspects something she can’t identify, the same as us.”

  “What’s Unusual?” Florian said. It was the old game, the childhood game. Find the change. Find the anomaly. Find the problem.

  “Jordan,” she answered. “Jordan being in Justin’s old office.”

  “The card.” He tossed the list of Unusuals back. “Yanni. This Dr. Patil. The new colony. The new wing. The new township. Am I missing anything?”

  “I think,” Catlin said, “that the card fits Jordan. Jordan wanting Justin to get caught. Justin giving us the card and being angry at Jordan. Justin calling me this afternoon.”

  “Sera studying late,” Florian said, “night after night. She doesn’t feel she’s ready. Or she’s looking for something.”

  “Yanni coming to dinner, right after his trip to Novgorod. Talking about Eversnow. Which Patil is going to run. Connection.”

  “Hicks suddenly giving us all this staff. Which he was prepared to do before I walked in. Which meant he could have prepared to do it before the card ever came up—or only after he knew about the card he didn’t have—yet—until I gave it to him. Does the card show him some specific danger? Or is he trying to plant a spy on us, by giving us this staff?”

  “Sera pulling Justin into the Wing,” Catlin said. “She didn’t even exit the Wing to talk to Yanni. Yanni came here to talk to her—so she’s still regarding our warnings—but she pulled Justin inside our perimeters.”

  “She may be going out of the Wing more often than the last couple of months, if we have this new security staff,” Florian said. “That exposes her to danger. Would Hicks want that?”

  “We’re about to have domestic staff down in prep,” Catlin said. “That’s an exposure.”

  “Hicks seemed to relax once he had the card. He seemed more friendly. That’s an emotional assessment. He’s a born-man. He has authority, despite what we hear about the office. And he is cooperating.”

  “So what do we conclude?” Catlin asked. “That something’s moving, one. Jordan’s stirred up, Justin is, ReseuneSec is, that’s two. And we still don’t know what Eversnow and Patil have to do with anybody.”

  “Something’s moving,” Florian agreed, “and once we have more staff, sooner or later sera’s going to be going outside the perimeter we’ve established.”

  “We’ve just got to watch out for her. It’s all we can do.”

  “And follow up on Justin and this card.”

  “Sera won’t like it,” Catlin said. “But we have to.”

  “Justin Warrick is the one piece we can move. We have to. Or we have to ask Yanni about Patil and the card, and I don’t think he’ll tell us the truth.”

  “Do you think Hicks will tell us the truth, once he has an answer about the card?”

  “Emotional assessment. No. Not for free. So I don’t want to ask, officially, not while we don’t know who talked to Jordan, and why he gave Justin that card.”

  Catlin heaved a sigh and put her arms around him. He put his around her. They had sex, purely a tension-reliever, mutual release, mutual pleasure. Afterward Catlin said, side by side on the same pillow: “At least we’ll have help on staff.”

  “We’ll have more to do for a while, watching the watchers. Being sure Hicks isn’t our problem.”

  “Good news, if he is being honest. And if his staff is. And we know there’s danger outside. But we’ve been shut in the Wing so long there’s risk of sera losing touch with outside. Isolating herself from Reseune—from Novgorod—she can’t afford that. She has to go outside sooner or later. That’s coming. We just have to be sure of our own staff. That’s basic.”

  “True.” He shut his eyes and relaxed with his partner, a long sigh flowing out of him. They could rest, the few hours of someone else’s watch—Marco and Wes took the night shift in the Wing One office. Those two, they could trust.

  They did know at least Justin Warrick was safer than he had been, thanks to them getting him into a new office.

  The question was whether they might have opened another window for an attack on sera, by letting Justin in—and yet another by accepting Hicks’s offer. There were very many, very skilled people they were letting into the wing.

  Catlin objected to things. Catlin was always suspicious, and Catlin had agreed with him in this. He wished she’d seen a major problem up front… because the transition to outside made him very, very uneasy.

  Section 3

  Chapter i

  May 1, 2424

  2000 H

  Eleven weeks, and Giraud, and Abban AB, and Seely AS would each one easily fit in the circle of an adult’s thumb and forefinger, and that was after the latest growth spurt. they didn’t weigh as much as a lab mouse. But their bones were forming, and their teeth were starting. They had the beginnings of a breathing apparatus, that floor of the rib cage, the diaphragm, which prepared them to draw breath. They were transparent, full of blood vessels, paths for the blood which had definite structure. Their fingers and toes were starting to grow in length. Legs grew longer. And they moved their whole bodies. They stretched, widely, and often, asserting their presence in the world.

  Chapter ii

  May 1, 2424

  2123 H

  I’m different than the first Ari, young Ari, so far as I can figure, in one very major way: it was her Maman who drove her so hard, not Denys Nye, and she never loved her mother. I had Jane Strassen to take care of me, and I loved her very much. I expected to love people. The first Ari didn’t. The first Ari was very much solo throughout her life, but I have my friends, and I even liked Giraud Nye at the last—and he protected me, though I don’t think I’ll ever forgive Denys—my Denys, remember.

  Don’t let my feelings prejudice yours. Maybe your Denys will turn out nicer. Until I meet him, I won’t know.

  So there are differences. Sometimes I worry about that. I don’t know if I’ve turned out as bright as the first Ari. She was really good with computers and her Florian was, and I’m still not, though I suppose I’ll learn, and I know Florian’s studying, and he’s getting into programming as fast as he has time for. So I’m working very hard to absorb what she knew on a whole lot of fronts at once. I’m studying how Admin works and who’s responsible to whom. The thing the first Ari was incredibly good with, psychsets, I study really hard—I’ve dropped five kilos just from the study this last month, and I can’t eat enough to keep up with the weight loss. But the harder I study, the more I just keep seeing a maze of possibilities, when it comes to fixing a psychset onto a geneset—and I’m starting to do that job for real. I’m confident operating at the gamma level, but I know I’m not ready to mess with an alpha’s sets. And she was capable of that, at my age, which just amazes me.

  Understand, I’ve mostly met the alphas she setted later in her career— the early ones, the older ones, are either dead or assigned out, admin jobs, that sort of thing—except Ollie, who was with Maman. There was Ollie, and he was pretty remarkable—still is: he’s running Fargone Station. Maybe she was just that good, that early. Who knows? Maybe I would- be, if Yanni let me have a try at alphas. But I just don’t want to mess one up, so I’m not arguing with Yanni on that point. I’m starting my work with simpler sets.

  I do worry that being overall
happier might have taken something vital off my potential. That’s yet to prove. If you never hear this, well, I’m not the model someone wants you to follow. But I think I’m intellectually close to the first Ari, despite some detours, and despite the fact I play off a bit. I’m very close to being up with my studies, at the benchmarks she set for me, so I guess it’s all right; and if I think about it I’m exceeding some of them. I did start study early. I tend to forget I’m younger than I’m supposed to be by a few years. And I’m close to being able to make my own decisions in the labs, and I know I’m going to be capable of Admin, though I just haven’t got the time even to consider actually taking that on, and I really don’t want to. I’m so glad Yanni is running things and I don’t have to. And anything that suggests there’s any problem with Yanni scares me. There’s something right now, just a question about the way he’s handling Jordan Warrick, and I want to trust him, but I’d be a fool to say I’m not thinking about it, thinking hard. If I had to step in and control Reseune, it would be a major setback for my studies. And I don’t want that, and most of all I don’t want to lose Yanni, because, so much he does is good. And he could even be right.

  It’s natural he should keep secrets from me. I haven’t let him see all I can do. And maybe I should just call him here and ask him outright what he’s done or what he thinks he’s doing, but I’m just reluctant to do it while Florian and Catlin are investigating things. I could make everything blow up. And that’s no good.

  For now, Yanni limits what I do, and that’s good. He gets the results of my tests, and he’s my outside checkup. He says he wants me to keep focused on study precisely so I don’t appear in public and disturb people—especially people down in Novgorod—but I think, too, so I don’t scattershot my studies. I can do so many things and I’m interested in so many things I sometimes think I could just fly apart. Strassenburg’s a toy, in one sense. In another, it’s important for me to set that up early, and you’ll see why, if you think about it two seconds. And now I have to think about Reseune itself, and find out who’s doing what, and how the lines of power run.