Regenesis (v1.2)

by C. J. Cherryh

  “Not very profitable ones, except Mariner. I’m afraid I’m not an optimist about the peace with the Alliance lasting through your tenure.”

  “I am. I think we can keep the peace if we’re sensible and get control of our own people bombing subways and talk to Alliance with some kind of notion how our own politics are going to run for ten years consecutive. You talk about integrations out there. I’m worried about integrations here. We have a disease in our own heart, Yanni. We have a serious problem in the Novgorod population, and I’m pretty sure it’s not an azi problem, it’s probably come down from the station, and I think it’s serious. I think it’s serious enough that before we start any future population burst of the size you describe, we need to know why we have Paxers, and what drives them. Is it the azi-CIT mix, or is there something about us?”

  Yanni was silent a moment, thinking about that, and at that moment Haze and Hiro carried dinner in, briskly served. It was chicken with herbs, in a delicate pastry crust, and it smelled good.

  “Eat,” she said. “It’s Cook’s first formal dinner. They probably went crazy back there keeping it ready to serve. Don’t let it go to waste.”

  He had a bite. “It’s good. This is really good.”

  Ari looked at Haze and Hiro. “Tell Wyndham so. It really is.”

  “Thank you, ser, sera,” Haze said, pleased, and quietly departed, and the door shut.

  Two bites later: “I can take over Admin,” she said, “when I want to. Don’t think Base Two can ever overpower Base One. It just won’t happen. That’s not a threat, Yanni. It’s a warning. Please don’t try me. Convince me. I’m willing to listen to your plans. I am listening.”

  “You find out things already, don’t you?” Yanni asked. “You get what you want. You didn’t need my clearance. You’re as deep into the information as you want to be.”

  She lifted a shoulder, and had a bite. To get information, sometimes you had to give away a real piece on your side. “Generally,” she said, and swallowed, and laid down her knife and fork and looked at him. “Yanni, please don’t be against me. I don’t want to be against you.”

  “I won’t cede you Eversnow. I’ll fight you for that. On everything else, I’m with you. But for that, because I believe in it, and I believe I’m right, I’ll fight yon.”

  She considered that a moment, on two bites of dinner, then nodded. “All right, Yanni,” she said, finally. “I think you’re making me a lot of trouble, long term, but I’ll think hard about what you’re saying. I did promise, and you’ll get your onworld base and I’ll work your integrations—I’m not up to what you want now, and you’re right, I don’t know enough to argue. But I’ll be there; and I’ll back your project until I have a clear reason not to. I promise you. If I have to set my successor on the case, it will run, and we’ll take care of those people. But I want you to know I’m worried. my predecessor was murdered. We have people in Reseune we can’t trust. We have a lot of people in Novgorod who aren’t behaving rationally—you can argue it’s rational from their point of view, but not in the macrosetted view. Macrosets in that population aren’t working the way they’re supposed to. People aren’t as happy as they’re supposed to be, for no damned reason I can figure.”

  “I’m not sure those people will ever be happy; the planet isn’t what their parents were promised it was going to be. They were all going to be rich. It wasn’t going to take them a great deal of education to succeed. Now it is. That’s just pure human nature, Ari, nothing too arcane.”

  That was a point. She thought about it. “So it is more work than some people want. But that’s not all that’s going on. Those people, who are persuading other people to build bombs—you can always find somebody out of sorts and desperate: people get themselves into mental messes. But the Paxers are out creating more unhappy people as a matter of policy, because they want power, and they’re getting recruits because they’re either tapping into some flaw in the macrosets—which is possible. But I have a theory that upsets me more than that.”

  “What?”

  “Maybe they’re using Reseune techniques to get the recruits they want. Maybe they’re doing things we don’t know about.”

  “The Paxers?”

  “Look. We created the science: the military went off on their own tangent thinking they could use it, and we ended up with some spacecases and some real dangerous people. The first Ari’s book got published, and all of a sudden we had people trying to run interventions on each other in their living rooms. —It’s serious, Yanni, don’t laugh. What we do is power. And power is what people want. The people operating in their living rooms, they’re fools, especially if they do it under therapeutic kat; but remember what the first Ari said about ordinary people understanding Einstein, in this age, and someday they’d understand Bok?”

  A bite stayed poised on Yanni’s fork. “Meaning we’ve got a society that thinks they understand what we do.”

  “I think Ari’s book wasn’t exactly a trigger. It just warned us that we needed to look at how much people believe they really do understand what we do. Power comes from doing what we do, and maybe there have been a few people who are smart enough, but not smart enough, if you get what I mean. Ari One and her mother both designed azi sets that worked around that CIT footprint, but what if a handful of CITs have been freelancing for the last few decades, and bringing up bent kids? Look at Giraud and Denys’s mother. Look at Olga Emory herself, the things she did to my predecessor. There wasn’t a method, back then, there was just this viral idea floating around society that if there was a hyper-efficient way to educate azi, there could also be some process to make a bright CIT kid a genius. And if some people ran the wrong intervention on the wrong kid, they could create what Denys called me.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A monster,” she said. “A real monster.”

  “You have a hell of an imagination,” Yanni said.

  “I’m serious, Yanni. Novgorod’s lag-timed by rejuv and birthlabs: if they store the genesets. people can have kids into their eighties and hundreds, with birthlabs: and the time the Paxers start blowing things up is during my predecessor’s lifetime—that’s third-gen. That’s where the problems usually come out in a bad set.”

  “That also happened to coincide with the War they were protesting.”

  “True. But there’s no War now, and they’re still protesting. They’re not real clear what they’re protesting, except the planet isn’t what they want it to be, and they clearly think they can dispense with us.”

  “Nothing psychotic about that. Humanity did without us for thousands of years. Alliance and Earth, somehow, still do.”

  “That’s not it, though. It’s not that they can do without us, it’s that somebody wants to be us. What if that’s the viral idea, Yanni? That somebody’s always going to be us, and that’s where the power is situated, and maybe somebody’s little kid, or several people’s little kids, were turned into something that’s angrier about us than the parents were. Maybe that’s why they’re still protesting a war that’s been over for decades, and why it’s only gotten worse and crazier. I mean, the first Paxers blew up buildings at odd hours when people weren’t likely to be there, and now they’re just trying to cause the worst casualties they can. It’s accelerated. They’re sucking in mental cases their violence created, and giving them bombs and sending them out—but you don’t think the leaders of this movement are ever going to carry the bombs. They’ll sit back pretending to be us, congratulating themselves that they’ve become us.”

  “So do you see a fix, short of a mass mindwipe of every CIT in Novgorod?”

  “I see Paxers proliferating like crazy, once Eversnow goes public. That worries me, Yanni.”

  “Why would they proliferate?”

  “Because it’s change. Because it scares the followers. Because change changes the balance of power and that’s going to agitate their leaders. Some people won’t want the whole terraforming question shunted out to th
e edge of space: they want it here. Some people won’t want it anywhere. Some people will agree with me that it’s too much too soon. It’s going to be like yeast in a bowl, it’s just going to froth up and make a hell of a mess.”

  “In your theory you could change the national polling hours and they’d bomb subways over it.”

  “They probably would,” Ari said. “It would all become some Reseune plot.”

  “So there’s a monster in the walls. What’s his name, Anton Clavery?”

  “You’re making fun of me.”

  “Not exactly. Your theory would say the Paxers took out Patil and Thieu. The one’s easy, the other’s hard. You need sane people to get into Planys and then go insane.”

  She shook her head. “You need a killer. Money’s a motive, too. When you need something delicate done, you hire an expert.”

  Yanni sat and thought about that a moment. “Nasty theory, young lady.”

  “It’s scary. So’s your Eversnow, but I said I’d support it. You know what else worries me in the whole issue? Jordan worries me.”

  “Regarding the Paxers?”

  “He’s an issue with them. If he’s as self-interested as you say, he’ll do whatever benefits him. He’s the embodiment of the disaffected, the third-gen problem. You can’t make him care. And he doesn’t.”

  “Interesting analysis.”

  “Am I right?”

  “Jordan’s an old issue with the Paxers: they think they’d like to see him out in public—they think he’d blast Reseune in the media if he gets his chance, and they’d really love that. He doesn’t personally give a rat’s ass whether we terraform or don’t. And if you want somebody who’s got the skill to be a real operator, your bogeyman in the CIT sector, that’s Jordan. But—” Yanni said, “there’s one thing against it. Jordan is entirely for himself. He’d fry the Paxers quicker than he’d fry Reseune. Stupid people bother him. He’d turn on them in a heartbeat, the moment they cross him.”

  “And he designs azi sets.”

  “Damned good ones,” he said.

  “So have you ever worried what he put into them?” she asked. “Back when he was working, and mad at Ari? I say it’s probably CITs that are the cause. But we had the War. we had the military running interventions on their own azi, who later decommissioned and went civilian, a lot of them in Novgorod. And we had Jordan designing azi sets for decades and decades. I don’t think he could have gotten anything past my predecessor, but that may just be my own ego. We never had the handle on military sets I wish we had.”

  “We had people blowing up subways forty years ago,” Yanni said. “Well before Jordan became the ass he is.”

  “Was there ever a point he wasn’t one?”

  “You want the truth? He said he was in love with your predecessor,” Yanni said. “I don’t think he really was. But he may have thought he was, for a complex of reasons involving power, and he was certainly less of an ass before that major blowup.”

  That was interesting. “So he lied to her. He was interested in romance and power, and she was interested in her projects?”

  “I don’t think she cared about the sex. It was his mind she wanted. I think he lied to himself, for one of the rare times in his life. Major self-delusion, wrapped up in his self-concept. He was sleeping with Paul while that affair was going on. I told him it wouldn’t work. He told me go to hell. A year later he had Justin conceived, born the year after. The Ari affair was on again, off again. They were trying to work together. He suddenly got the notion she was taking his ideas. Sharing didn’t work with either of them. That’s where it blew up. What happened in the bedroom, I don’t know; but the ideas were the issue he complained about.”

  “I can imagine that,” she said. “He’s very self-protective in that regard.”

  “So,” Yanni said somewhat cheerfully, “it all blew up. I don’t think Jordan’s the godfather of the Paxers, not even the model of them—he may have done a few designs that could be problematic in Ari’s integrations, you could be right about that. She tossed certain of them out and wouldn’t let them go to implementation. There was a hell of a fight about it—he called her a goddess-bitch and she said he was a damned lunatic. They traded those words back and forth and had one shouting light right in Admin offices in front of the secretaries and the visitors. I don’t think they slept together after that.”

  She had to laugh ruefully for a microsecond, and grew sad after, thinking about herself and Justin, and swearing to herself it never would happen to them that way. “What did Paul think about it?”

  Yanni looked at the door, as if measuring the distance to the conference room, and said, quietly, “Poor Paul. Always, poor Paul. Paul puts up with him. That’s got to be a ferociously strong mindset, Paul’s. God knows Jordan’s tinkered with it over the years. But Paul loves him.”

  “That’s what Paul gets out of it, at least. Did the first Ari ever try to do anything with him?”

  Yanni shook his head emphatically. “No. That would have really torn it worse than what she did with Justin. Paul’s where Jordan lives, that’s all. Justin just happened one year—a project that ran for a couple of decades, and blew up when Ari intervened. Became a permanent reminder of a quarrel he’d had with Ari. That’s one way to look at it, on Jordan’s scale of things.”

  “That’s sad, too. Justin loves him.”

  “A lot of people have tried,” Yanni said with a second shake of his head. “God knows. If you have an altruistic bent, young lady, take it from me on this one. Don’t try kindness, not with him. He’s just what he is. Let him be.”

  “I wish I could Get him, all the same,” she said, and set to work at the dish again. “Yanni, Uncle Yanni, you keep being Director for a while. I’ll wait. Just don’t you be my Jordan, and let’s be friends. I’ll respect your opinion, you respect mine, and don’t hold out on me anymore.”

  “I’ll take a good deep look at your theory on Novgorod,” he said.

  “Good,” she said. “I’ll be interested.”

  “Eversnow,” he said, “stays.”

  “Through anything I can foresee at the moment,” she said, wishing otherwise—but it was necessary, right now.

  So was keeping her word, if she didn’t want to make honest people mad at her. And she had always thought Yanni was honest. “I’ll really try to make it work, Yanni.”

  She signaled for the next course. Gianni had made a really beautiful dessert, showing off, she was sure. It was layered, and oh, so good. Yanni ate his and ended up being persuaded to another half slice, and a little glass of liqueur to top the evening off. She couldn’t eat another bite. Her stomach was a little upset by the time she saw Yanni to the door.

  But it hadn’t gone that badly.

  Yanni said he still trusted Hicks. That was a problem.

  She didn’t anymore, not until Hicks really proved himself.

  She could take Hicks out, put someone she really trusted into that post—like Amy Carnath. Amy had the brains and she’d be fair. But she’d absolutely hate running ReseuneSec. Besides, she was only eighteen, same as the rest of them, and that was the problem—in a post like Hicks’, history mattered. Yanni knew all sorts of things, just a long, long memory, and so did Hicks, and you didn’t just replace a memory like that with a new appointment and hope to have anything like the prior performance in a job involving information.

  She could take Admin herself, and put Yanni into Hicks’ job, but he’d really hate that, and that wouldn’t improve matters.

  So they were stuck, temporarily, with Hicks.

  The good part was, so far, she still had Yanni. They could work with each other, until things had to be different.

  Chapter ix

  June 17, 2424

  1008 H

  “Hello,” Ari said, opening the door to Justin’s office, and he spun his chair around.

  Grant turned more slowly.

  She came in solo. They had gotten the extra chair, which they used in her lessons
, since they’d folded their other Wing One office into this one, and she turned it around and sat down, primly proper.

  “Coffee, sera?” Grant asked.

  “Please. Thank you. I need to talk to both of you.”

  “Is there a problem?” Justin asked.

  “Yes and no.” She waited until Grant had handed her a cup of coffee in a pretty gilt mug, and just held it in her lap, not to delay or draw this out. “The sets you did that I snatched back. Thank you for that. I came to tell you you were right, there was a problem.”

  “Which set?”

  “The one you delayed on.”

  Justin gave out a long, long breath.

  “That set was tampered with,” she said. “I think I’ve fixed it. I’m sure I’ve fixed it. Sure enough to have him in charge of my own guard.”

  “That’s very sure,” Justin said.

  “His name is Rafael,” she said, “and now he’s under my orders. I think he was under Hicks’, and I think Giraud’s before that.”

  “He’s too young,” Grant said.

  “He is, but he’s not the first of his number. I think there was some off-record done with his whole type… no, I don’t just think. I know. There was. I’m quitting being the kid as of this week.”

  Zap.

  “I didn’t get that out of it,” Justin said, frowning, so her bow-shot had gone right past him. “I should have. I assumed. Never assume. You certainly beat me on this one.”

  She shrugged lightly. “I had a head start. I know green barracks programming.” With a shift of her glance toward the hall where Catlin waited. “And you wouldn’t have that experience. Still, you had something spotted. That’s what warned me to look twice. You had your finger pretty well on it.”

  “What did it do?”

  “He conflicted like hell when I took the Contract. He had a nice little reservation built in and I blitzed it. Not as good as an axe code, what I did, but close.”

  Grant made a face. Grant knew.