Regenesis (v1.2)

by C. J. Cherryh

  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.

  Giraud had been. It had been Giraud’s office.

  Oh, lay bets on Giraud. There was the mind that might have done it. Hicks had only been number two to Giraud. Hicks might not even have known. But he’d very likely known the special use of the BR-28 series. And he’d seen to it that one got into her unit.

  If that was true, then the Nyes still had tentacles threaded through ReseuneSec, and, through ReseuneSec, into all sorts of places. The dead man’s hand was still on the controls. His programs persisted into the next regime, still on Giraud’s orders.

  Thank you, Uncle Giraud. Dear Uncle Giraud. You could so easily have done it to Rafael and all his kind, and the labs are still producing them. You’d do that for Denys, to be sure he got information he wouldn’t know how to chase. You’d do anything for Denys. You set it up so Denys would get his information even if you weren’t there. And the BR-28s are just the set I know about.

  I know one thing, at least. You laid traps you neglected to tell me about. Denys was still alive, and you wouldn’t betray him. I understand that. And I understand Denys was protecting me. But you ended up putting me in danger to give Denys that little advantage in keeping power, because you didn’t tell me there was anything like this buried in ReseuneSec.

  And that makes me just a little mad, Uncle Giraud.

  So now I know what you did, and what your mindset is capable of in your next incarnation, toward my successor… all sorts of betrayal, for the one you’re protecting. And I see very well how your own mindset arrived at the notion of this compulsion to report. You made it your own mirror. You so liked information. You never trusted any of your own subordinates. I’ll bet you even planted one on Hicks. On your own second-in-command. I’ll bet if I went over his beta assistants, I’d find one with a block very much like that. I bet you did some very special work on that one other azi. And ten of the BR-28’s?

  Oh, that was wicked, Uncle.

  But now I do know.

  And solving Rafael’s problem, I know what to do about you. Denys doesn’t need, to be born. Just you do. Just you, to be fixed, on me, Uncle, the way you fixed on Denys.

  Denys has just become irrelevant.

  Good. That makes me happier. I’m sorry about it, simultaneously, and I wish I didn’t have to. but I think we’re both going to be happier in the long run.

  She prepared a letter to Yanni—just in case Yanni had gotten wind of her activity with her new, Hicks-provided staff. Yanni might be guilty as sin in the first Ari’s death—at least in the cover-up and blaming Jordan part of it. Yanni might know exactly what Giraud had been up to, infiltrating ReseuneSec, ReseuneSpace at Fargone and Beta—and if he did know, and he’d b
een letting that happen, and not telling her, he was on the verge of becoming irrelevant, too.

  Dear Uncle Yanni, she wrote, with a little pain in her heart.

  I turned up something. And fixed it, so you know. I think you should be aware. I leave it to you whether to tell Director Hicks his own staff may have a problem. Be discreet. You know what your lines of honest communication are.

  Then the stinger:

  Please include me in them from now on.

  Section 2

  Chapter i

  June 11, 2424

  2158 H

  Giraud’s eyes had been changing position slowly. By this seventeenth week they had moved all the way onto the front of his face, so he was much more Giraud than he’d ever been.

  He’d gained weight—hadn’t kept up with Abban in size, but was about the same as Seely. He not only twitched to stimuli this week, his bones had begun to harden out of the tough cartilage that earlier comprised his skeleton, and his joints, responding to muscle twitches, had begun to flex and move in a way they would do for the rest of his life.

  He’d also gained a new sense: he had actually heard the maternal heartbeat that had timed his life… he heard it when a tech dropped a pan: he couldn’t tell it was different than taste or smell—every stimulus was the same to him, but he reacted, the way a plant might react. His newly functioning joints moved.

  His sense of hearing would grow more acute as time passed, but Seely’s would be extraordinary, an asset, in Seely’s future profession.

  And something else had changed, radically so, for Giraud. He was solo now. His brother Denys’ sequence number had been active in the birthlab computer until just last week, a soft scheduling that would have let it go to implementation on any given day. That data and that material had gone back to deep storage, the CIT number dumped from lab files, officially disconnected from Giraud’s, so even if he looked, someday, he might find it hard to find his brother until his Base was significantly higher than the lab’s.

  Denys might yet be born. There was seven years yet to change that back without deviating from program… seven years had been the gap between the brothers. But for now that data had quietly slipped deep into storage, with no extant string to pull it out. That would have to be rebuilt.

  A subsequent generation might change its mind about connecting Denys to Giraud, having both of that set.

  This one wasn’t likely to.

  Chapter ii

  June 11, 2424

  2158 H

  Living next door to Ari had its moments—one of them being about suppertime, when the hall suddenly flooded with ReseuneSec in uniform, and Justin’s plans for dinner out had taken second place to ingrained apprehension. Their door had stayed shut. The mass of black uniforms had, instead, been admitted to young Ari’s apartment, all of them at once.

  Well, Justin said to himself, that was unnerving. Thirty was the number of Ari’s own detail, if the records he’d passed on had been all-inclusive. Had that been thirty? It could be.

  And were they safe, for God’s sake? Ari had yanked the initiative back from him, unfinished, said it was all right, he and Grant had been right—

  Right? There’d been some sort of problem. He knew there was. Grant agreed. And she went ahead anyway.

  “She must have done something,” Justin commented to Grant, who stood at his shoulder to see the minder’s vid image. “She wouldn’t have them all in there, if she hadn’t. Damn, I still can’t find the glitch, and hell if I want to ask her—she’s confident enough, as is.”

  The message she’d sent, taking the project back, still rankled. He’d lost sleep on that work. Lost a major amount of sleep. And he still didn’t have an answer, or a real thank you. There had been times, in the last few weeks, when he actually understood his father’s feud with the original.

  Grant’s hand landed on his shoulder. “Doesn’t look like a good evening for us to go out,” Grant said.

  He ran a capture on the security monitor’s immediate record. “Entertainment,” he said. And dinner out became dinner in.

  They popped pizza into the luxury apartment’s very fast oven, and opened a respectable wine while they reviewed the tape… Yes, there were thirty. Thirty who presumably were about to be received and probably instructed inside Ari’s fairly capacious living area… after which they would presumably pour back out into the hall, ready to go on duty.

  It was damned certain the thirty, plus the recently acquired domestic staff, weren’t by any means going to fit in that apartment’s staff quarters. So they had to be living somewhere else in the wing, likely downstairs.

  “That’s the BR-283,” Justin said, regarding the tall one with the officer’s silver on his collar. “Classic officer set. Dates from the 2370s. Spooky, how much like Regis he looks.”

  “Not spooky,” Grant said with a little laugh. “It would be spooky if he didn’t.”

  “I wonder whatever happened to Regis.”

  “No knowing,” Grant said. The laugh had immediately vanished.

  Dark thoughts. A dark time, a time worth forgetting. The crowd in the hall represented a new age. A new beginning. Regis had vanished, along with the rest of the first Ari’s staff. No one ever saw them again. Rumor had it her Florian and her Catlin had been terminated. No one knew how many others.

  Cheerfulness, for God’s sake. The little minx had probably fixed whatever glitch there was in the BR set. Figure how she’d fixed it inside several weeks of working the problem… that was a question.

  “Probably she did exactly what Jordan complained about,” he said to Grant, “and went after the deep set on the BR. Fast fix.”

  “That’s one way to get his attention,” Grant said. “It would be logical.”

  “Rough on him.”

  Grant gave a slow, thoughtful nod. “But it would work. And they’re ReseuneSec. Those are odd sets from the beginning.”

  “Cold as hell’s hinges,” Justin muttered, with other unpleasant memories, and tried to shake the mood of that black flood in the hall—his hallway as well as hers. He poured a white wine, poured another for Grant, and reran the tape. “That’s the BB-19.” Justin said, regarding the thin, long-faced azi. “I’ve worked with another of that set. A bundle of nerves. Good on details. He’ll likely be scared to death of Florian and Catlin.”

  “With probable cause,” Grant said, and, with a pizza wedge for a pointer: “That’s his counterpoint, I’m betting. BY-10. A lot like the BB-19. A good combination, those two. One’s detail, the other tends to macrofocus.”

  “Males generally get top posts in that house, have you noticed that? Since Florian and Catlin, that’s her predilection. It was her predecessor’s, too. Not a female in the whole lot.” Flash on that apartment, that time. He’d been, then, around Ari’s age now.

  And that night, in the first Ari’s apartment… had there been staff present, besides Florian and Catlin? He couldn’t remember it… didn’t want to remember. He was sorry for Florian and Catlin. He really was. It depressed him to think about it.

  “And Theo ended up in authority over Jory on the domestic staff,” Grant said. “I wouldn’t have advised that. Jory’s brighter. But they’ll manage. He’ll take advice.”

  “You know, Ari is far more social than her predecessor,” Justin said, envisioning that crowd in Ari’s living room—probably being served refreshments and urged to relax—which would make the lot almost comically uncomfortable. No, she actually wouldn’t do it. She knew better. She’d do what would make them comfortable—like brief them, give them information. Those mindsets would like that far better than teacakes, all things considered. But sociality… she’d encourage that, far more than those mindsets had ever seen. “She has a strong inclination to go for company. Not with that lot, but in general.”

  “I’ve observed,” Grant said.

  “Right from the start. She visited our office. Whenever she got bored, she went looking for people. Cultivated a set of friends. Still does. Deny
s really didn’t like that habit in her. Of course, Denys didn’t like people in the first place.”

  “Neither did the first Ari,” Grant said. “Deviation from the model. Maybe an improvement. Maybe not. I can’t imagine that the first Ari ever had that bent in early years.”

  “Our Ari lost Jane Strassen, but she never grew bitter, just took to chasing us. Maybe she’s more people-oriented because she didn’t spend her early years wondering if her dear mother would kill her if she disappointed. That’s what they say about Olga Emory.”

  “A relationship I can’t imagine,” Grant murmured. “But then, I can’t imagine a mother.” A tilt of Grant’s head. “Just you.”

  “I don’t qualify.”

  “You absolutely don’t. Which suits me fine.”

  They were lovers. They made no particular fuss over it. It was just who they were. There was nobody they trusted more than each other, nobody they loved more than each other. That had been true for years. For a time, in his growing up, if there hadn’t been Grant, he wouldn’t have been sane. If there hadn’t been him—it was equally sure Grant wouldn’t have been what he was.

  And if not for the first Ari’s intervention, Grant would have been Jordan’s work, entirely.

  And if not for the first Ari’s intervention, so, almost undoubtedly, would he.

  “I wonder what she’s building out there behind the wing,” Justin said hours later, when he and Grant were in bed, after a long evening and an entertainment vid. The only light was the clock face on the minder. The security force had, as predicted, departed after a precise hour and forty-five minutes. Headed for the lift. Assigned, signed, and delivered—

  And that gave Ari as much protection as any other agency in Reseune.

  “Building behind the wing?” Grant asked, half asleep. “What brought that up?”

  “She’s accumulating an army—counting service people, that’s a large staff.”

  “You think?” Grant rolled over and managed a half-awake interest. “What are you thinking?”