Regenesis (v1.2)

by C. J. Cherryh

  Put him and Hicks on ice for the duration and concentrate only on Novgorod? She thought about that, about her whole list of priorities. She thought about going down to the capital in person—which would draw media attention, maybe draw other things, but it would get attention— planetwide and up in orbit.

  She thought about how the first Ari had let Reseune matters slide, and trusted Giraud to handle what he was certified to handle, when she went up to Novgorod—her mistake, her very big mistake, a long time ago. And that was the bottom line. Ari had trusted Giraud to handle what Giraud said he could handle, a simple matter for somebody with that level of certification—if Giraud hadn’t been dealing with the best Reseune could turn out, with the bollixed-up pyschtech Defense could manage, exactly the kind of thing that could fool somebody who, being a by-the-book operator himself, only expected what was in the books.

  So, faced with a choice of going to Novgorod before she had the requisite years behind her, she trusted Yanni not to make a mistake—with something not simple, either. Sometimes you just had to let things go in the hands of people who were expert at what they did. Yanni had been talking to Council for years. He knew them. He knew his contacts.

  Meanwhile she had to figure out what a spy inside Reseune could have told Defense, and what kind of an organization their enemies had been building, from the War years when Reseune and Defense had had a tight, tight relationship.

  Jordan, she thought… when Ari yanked back the azi from the combat zones, they’d been dealing with the old Contracts, and undoing what had been done and undone around the time of the War. Jordan, a junior in the labs in those days, must have heard the first Ari fight her battles with Defense… and when Ari was old, and he was in his prime, he’d gone to Defense with an offer to betray Reseune. Defense, who already had a man inside, had double-crossed him—why?

  Because they weren’t interested in what Jordan had offered them. They’d heard what he said and drew some other conclusion. Hadn’t they? Jordan hadn’t proposed murdering Ari. Had he?

  One thing seemed evident, Jordan had written that paper. He’d at least met the problem of the military sets, post-War, and analyzed the security measures Defense had set into its azi soldiers, a self-destruct if captured, in some instances—Defense work cobbled into Reseune’s clean psychsets. Involving Jordan was a risk—to Kyle AK, mentally; to Justin, emotionally; in all respects, to himself-—and to Reseune, if he was still bent on revenge.

  But if you wanted to dig up the things that lay buried in Reseune, Jordan Warrick was one who knew, and who’d been in a position to know. Yanni, who also knew, was in Novgorod, out of reach. There was Ivanov. There was Wendy Peterson. Neither of them had been involved in the labs the way Jordan had.

  It might be a big mistake. If he said yes instantly, it was time to worry.

  But he might also be their best asset.

  Chapter xv

  Aug 9, 2424

  0808 H

  Prang was her first visit. Chi Prang, Alpha Supervisor, another of the old hands, met her with a notion of what the case was about. Ari had told her that in a letter sent along with the file; and Prang didn’t have much encouragement. Prang said if she had ever been notified the code had had any questionable outcome she would have taken AK-36 in immediately. She said that she had, yesterday evening, checked records that Giraud had sent and the notation was simply that AK-36 had had the code administered, that he was “doing well,” and that he was under Giraud’s Supervision.

  Giraud had, Prang added, maintained an ironclad and prickly secrecy about his department, his operations, and his personnel; she recalled he had had arguments with the first Ari on that topic.

  The first Ari, Ari thought to herself, hearing that, had isolated herself, had set everybody at distance, didn’t read the people she was living with as well or as impartially as she read everybody else she dealt with.

  Read a stranger? Absolutely. Instantly.

  Read a group of people? Easily.

  Read the Nyes? Not well enough. The first Ari had grown up with them; been a child with them. Of course she knew them. If you stared at a thing a long time, after a while you weren’t really seeing it. Your mind started being busy, and you knew what you were staring at hadn’t moved, but maybe you didn’t see every detail. You didn’t notice when it blinked or its eyes dilated. You didn’t know when it changed its mind. You didn’t notice when loyalty to something else had gotten to the surface and started to move its thoughts in another direction. You didn’t notice that, the older Giraud got, maybe, the more Giraud was being run by his younger brother—who was the real Special, as Ari knew, and brilliant in azi psych, but who wasn’t a damned good Supervisor. Do this for me. Do that. Don’t let them know. Don’t let them inquire. Giraud, fix it for me. Giraud, keep them out. Giraud, she’s dangerous. She’ll be rid of us…

  Major blind spot. Giraud loved her, not many had, but Giraud had, and of course she could trust Giraud’s motives.

  Put that in the notes to her successor: mind her own relationships.

  Like Justin. Like Amy. Like Yanni. It was scary. It was one thing to say the first Ari should have done it; it was another, to think of doing it with Florian, with Catlin, Justin, and Amy…

  “He won’t come through it,” Prang said bluntly, regarding their chances of dealing with Kyle at this point. “He won’t likely survive it.”

  “Is the block likely in the deep sets?” she asked. “Did Defense have anybody that could do it that way?”

  “The fact that they didn’t have anybody who could,” Prang said solemnly, “doesn’t mean they didn’t try. They had a high failure rate. There were azi we never saw again. Killed in combat. Always killed in combat. Alphas, no less.”

  “How many were lost?”

  “Twelve. None that belonged in combat. None psychologically fit for it. they didn’t want us enabling combat in an alpha. They wanted their career officers to run them, not have an azi taking combat command. They were clear on that score. Ari—your predecessor—worked to get them all back, and it took the turning point in the War and a slowdown in our production to bend them.”

  “Betas lost?”

  “I don’t recall the numbers. High hundreds. Gammas. God. Near four thousand.”

  That made her mad… mad, and she thought she’d lie awake tonight thinking about it. That attitude in Defense, and then Prang’s little shrug, as if—what could we do? What could anyone do?

  She’d spent a very little time with Prang, which put her on the edge of furious.

  Then she wanted to go ask Jordan about what he remembered, but that wasn’t going to work, if she went in on a frontal assault.

  So she went to Justin’s office instead—went just with Florian, and asked him and Grant if they’d reached any results in the case she’d given them.

  Justin said, “I can’t tell you where any block is. I can tell you, if I were good, where I’d put it, if I were working on the psychset in the original manual. Grant agrees.”

  She sat down by them and let them show her, just where; and it was where she thought.

  But then she asked, “What if you were a total fool? If you weren’t that good, and you just wanted to go ahead anyway, and you weren’t that smart?”

  They both frowned, even Grant, who rarely did. And then Grant said, “If you were a fool, maybe,” and searched the file and showed where you could put it in the secondary sets, and it made sense to her—secondaries was where ethics went, and they played off the deep sets, but they were shifty things, and interrelated, and they mutated considerably over a lifetime. It was why azi went back time and again for refresher tape.

  Ethics… and emotional needs.

  “Could be,” Justin said, and added: “Kyle was a cold bastard, whenever I had to deal with him. I can’t say my opinion’s entirely clinical. I’ve tried to get past that. I’ve asked myself if it was partially null-state, on his part. And it could have been. I could have misinterpreted it.”

>   “You mean when you were arrested.”

  “He was there, during some unpleasant sessions. I knew him. I can’t say I know him lately—I can’t say I can do an impartial assessment on him, at all. Except—the azi this original manual should have produced— would have had some emotional reaction. He didn’t. That’s why I say, subjectively, it could have been a partial shutdown.”

  “He could have done that,” Grant said. “Justin and I have talked about it. We think it’s not just that the axe code didn’t take. He’s self-adjusted, possibly even to the point of being his own reason the axe code didn’t take. He’s been running internal adjustments, whatever situation he’s in. If he takes tape, which I’m sure a provisional Supervisor would want him to do, he takes it surface-level, absorbs it as a behavioral guide. It steadies him down, re-teaches him what his responses ought to be in order to fool everybody. He has an emotional capability: that’s currently completely engaged with his Supervisor. He gets pleasure out of doing the best he can, but he probably knows how messed up he really is. He knows, constantly, that he’s lying to the one he’s attached to, except when he’s dealing with his Supervisor in Defense, whoever that is—and whether it’s been the same person all along, or whether that’s changed, he’ll be loyal, and emotionally engaged, and if what they ask him to do throws his deep sets into confusion, his actions will still be clear, even through the conflict. I’ve studied the military sets. Actions are the real loyalty. That’s the mantra way deep in what they used to set. Do what you’re told.”

  She could see it, in what Grant pointed out, the ethic to follow instructions and do no harm until one could get to a Supervisor, the sort of thing you’d set in for somebody who had to survive where Supervisors weren’t going to be as close as the nearest office. It was a beta kind of setting. Grant was more complex on that issue. Florian—

  Florian, right beside her, was capable of intense argument: you had to know how to get him to do what he didn’t want to, and you had to make it clear to him it really was an order.

  And then he’d do anything. Absolutely anything. Catlin would do it even faster, and not need advice and sympathy after; Florian did.

  So what sort was AK-36?

  By all she’d read, he’d have been a Catlin sort. Point him at an enemy. He was setted for headquarters security, and that was what he’d been intended to be, in the purest form of his psychset.

  But somebody had done something with the secondaries, and he had become, to all intents and purposes, self-steering ever since, and they’d flung him into Supering combat betas and other alphas. Surviving. Trying to comply with his deep sets. Everybody did. Even born-men did that, in their own chaotic way.

  Ask Florian? There was a level at which she didn’t mess with her security’s working mindsets. Theory was a designer question, and she wasn’t as good yet as she would be. It was, more specifically, a Grant kind of question, if you were going to ask an alpha.

  It was a Justin or a Jordan kind of question, if you were going to ask a designer.

  She left, thinking about it, and she went into the security office and, in a small conference room with Florian, she called Jordan.

  “It’s Ari,” she said. “Do you have a moment, ser?”

  No answer, for a long time. Florian had been standing, and in the quiet and the privacy; sat down opposite her, signing, He’s there.

  “Jordan? I really need to talk to you. Please answer.”

  “Please? There’s a foreign word. Do I recognize that?”

  “I need your help. Would you mind if I dropped by?”

  “Oh, now this is familiar. ‘Would you mind?’ Try telling the truth and see if I mind!”

  “Are we talking about the manual I sent you?”

  “I haven’t got time for games.”

  “I want your opinion, ser. I need your opinion. You’re one of the few who might know, and I urgently want to talk to you about that manual.”

  “Go to hell and take my son with you.”

  “That’s not very nice.”

  Laughter from the other end. “Fuck you!”

  Florian’s face went dangerous. She held up a hand. “Do I take it, ser, that you recognize the case?”

  “What is this, a fucking test? I told you, I’m too old for games.”

  “Old enough to remember what everybody else has forgotten. I thought you were. I wasn’t sure. Now I know for certain I want you in on this.”

  “On what? This isn’t a modern design. This is old history. This is old history; from before I was born, let alone working.”

  “You’re good. You just proved that. And I still want you on this case.”

  “The hell! It’s a damned trick, and I’m not going with it!”

  He broke the contact.

  Florian looked at her, questioning, perhaps, whether they were about to do something.

  “I can’t force his opinion out of him,” she said. “Not in any useful way. But he knew what he was looking at. It made him mad that I didn’t tell him who it was.”

  “Many things make Jordan mad,” Florian said. “He’s not that much like Justin, is he?”

  It was a good question. She knew things that could make Justin mad. She’d done some of them. But the one that would Get him, above all else, was something happening to Grant; and the one that would Get him, just him, personally—

  —if he were in Jordan’s place—

  He’d know he’d put his companion in a hell of a place with his actions opposing Ari, that was one; and he’d be damned upset in his career if he was on the outs with Ari.

  It was an interesting thought, too, what Jordan would have been, if he’d been lovers with the first Ari long-term. But that had gone very, very wrong—not because Jordan hadn’t ever loved Ari, she was fairly sure of that, and not because Ari hadn’t likely loved him. What Jordan wanted was being partners with her, learning things, doing things, having that. It wouldn’t have mattered, if he were Justin, whose name was on a published paper; or whether he got official credit; but it had mattered very, very much to Jordan, because—

  Switch personae dramatis again—because Jordan was driven, all his life, to be number one, the best, the one who ran things—

  And he wasn’t the best. In his view, Ari had turned on him. But she’d seen a danger in him. Seen how thoroughly one hell of a sex drive overlying a god-complex had blinded what otherwise really was a great mind…

  She’d fixed it in the next generation, hadn’t she?

  This is it. This is all there is. This is all there’ll ever be.

  All there is.

  He’d been seventeen, Justin had, and that had to have hurt, because Jordan had always taught him not to trust Ari; but Justin’s own ambition to be the best had driven him to Ari; and afterward—

  Afterward he’d had that mantra echoing in his skull, and Grant was the one he could trust, forever after, the way Jordan trusted Paul. Justin had come, finally, to a point he could like her. Just—like her; and that was a long, long way for that mindset to come.

  She’d met Justin on the same territory, hadn’t she? She’d been half afraid of him. And then targeted him for her first adult conquest. And shied off again, bluff called. He’d been scared of her. Grant had been willing to fling himself between. But that had been a dose of ice water, and she’d thought about it later and thought—thank God they hadn’t. Wouldn’t that have made a mess of things?

  Liking was good enough.

  Jordan hadn’t been that lucky. Neither had the first Ari.

  I’ve found two of your mistakes, she thought, addressing Ari. One was ever sleeping with Jordan; the other was letting Giraud run and never just having the fight it would have taken and looking into his competency to do what he was certified to do.

  You knew about Denys, didn’t you? Knew damned well he was a genius, and knew Giraud was almost bright enough to handle things. Giraud really was an Alpha Supervisor. He just wasn’t the best one on the planet. When an alpha get
s messed up, it’s a question of who can unwind the tangle he can make of his sets, and that’s probably just very, very few, even among those with the license, isn’t it? It’s hard for me to judge—because I’m good; it was probably hard for you to judge. I wonder how often you ever ran into Kyle, or if you ever looked twice at him.

  She looked at Florian, pocketed the com, reached across the table, and laid her hand on his, a little calm-down.

  “I’m not worried about Jordan,” she said. “I’ll Get him. I’ll Get him and not lose Justin in the process. They’ve had a fight about something. But we’ll fix it.”

  “We’re worried about Defense,” Florian said somberly. “Sera, we don’t have resources there.”

  “We don’t,” she said, “but we’re smarter.”

  “They have weapons and numbers.”

  Here and now, Florian meant. Here and now didn’t always figure when she set her thoughts ranging; but trust Florian to pull her back to the real world. Defense, she thought, was her enemy and consequently all Reseune was in danger. Defense was, in the terms of their childhood game, the Enemy, and Vladislaw Khalid… was its modern face.

  What have they got? was one thing to ask.

  And it was always, always smart to ask—How does what we did play out in their eyes? What do they think we did?

  Overthrowing Denys… who had agreements with them. Bringing Jordan back.

  Bringing Jordan back, where Jordan, if he weren’t Jordan, might have been moved to tell her things. A lot of things. Jordan had been dealing with Defense before Kyle turned Abban into a weapon aimed at the first Ari.

  She’d assumed Jordan was innocent. But if there was one person inside Reseune besides Ari in those days who could have run a timebomb like Kyle, it was Jordan. Giraud damned sure couldn’t, and Prang didn’t think she could crack what Defense had done and an alpha had worked over for decades…