Dammit, someone pull a prank on me, someone make me laugh, someone for God's sake answer me.
I can see all the star-stations, all the azi-sets, the whole thing in slow flux, so damned slow, and so dangerous
Where's the advice, Poo-thing?
Amy, and Maddy and Tommy and Sam. Florian and Catlin. Justin and Grant. Yanni. And Andy down in AG.
It's talking, fool. The whole universe is talking. Listen and be amazed.
Nelly. Maman and Ollie. Denys. Giraud-present and Giraud-soon-to-be.
The static of the suns.
"... Sera?"
She drew a long breath.
Short-focused again, black-clad figure in the doorway, tall and blond. Worried.
"I'm fine," she said; and discovered her legs asleep. Foolish predicament, gratefully foolish. She rubbed her aching thighs and levered herself up with absolute gracelessness, leaning on the headboard.
When she could stand she went over to the dresser, picked up Poo-thing and put him in the drawer.
Catlin looked at her strangely for that too. But she doubted Catlin had ever understood Poo-thing in the first place.
viii
Punch and sugary cookies. Ari nipped one off the table herself, ignoring the kitchen's more elaborate confections, savored the plain flavor, and took a drink of the green punch which she preferred, thank you, from the nonalcoholic bowl.
A little girl slipped up through the crowd of Olders and snatched a handful; and a second. Fast escape. That was Ingrid Kennart, aged six. Ari chuckled to herself, on a fleeting memory. And frankly could not recall for a second whether it was a flash off some Archive tape or out of her own past.
New Year's, God, of course it had been a New Year's. The music changed, live this yeara handful of the techs had a band, not bad, either. But the glitter was the same. And maman and Ollie
She caught a flash of silver jewelry out of the corner of her eye and for a second saw a ghostbut it was only Connie Morley, who was tall and thin and wore her dark hair upswept and elegant
She had a second of triste, no reason, just looked away across the floor where Olders were sittingDenys: Giraud was in Novgorod this season. Petros Ivanov. Dr. Edwards. He could, she swore, never be John to her, no matter how old she got. And old Windy Peterson and his daughter, out dancing, Peterson trying to learn the new step.
Maddy Strassen was beautiful, really beautiful in silver-blue satinno shortage of partners for her or 'Stasi, her faithful shadow. And Amy CarnathAmy was out on the floor with a very correct, very confused-looking young azi who was, however, doing quite well with the stepblond, crewcut, and terribly handsome: Security, stiff as they came when Amy had gotten her hands on him, but loosening up a bit, to the amusement of all of them and the evident disquiet of Amy's mother. The lad was Alpha, and social as far as Green Barracks wentyes, sera! with a real snap in the voice. Quentin, his name was: Quentin AQ-8, who just might have ended up being Contracted to House Security or RESEUNESPACE, or outside, if any of a small handful of qualified agencies had wanted to pay the million and a quarter for his Contract, for an azi who had to be Supered directly from Reseune, and whose reflexes were dangerously fast. Quentin AQ would have found himself in someone's employment in another year.
Quentin was, Florian and Catlin reported, a very happy, if very overanxious young man. And Amy was
in love, probably described it. At least it was a very healthy dose of infatuation, which made Amy Carnath insist Quentin was her partner, Quentin was going out onto the floor, fashions and customs changed, and people were forgetting why the old rules existed with the earliest azi: it had gotten to have completely different reasons, and it was going to stop. The youngers did it at their parties; the Olders could just accept it, so there: thus Amy Carnath.
Florian, Ari had said then, so Amy and Quentin were not out there alone.
And after a while there were a few others.
But mostly Florian and Catlin shadowed her very closely, and Florian refused 'Stasi with an earnest: I'm terribly sorry. I'm on duty.
That was the way the world changed. In the House, Florian and Catlin were shadowing her with the attention they had used in Novgorod.
No relaxing. No let-down.
The Novgorod authorities were scared out of their minds about the New Year's crowds and the chance of an incident.
Hell of a thing. The Paxers were not Ari's design, she was more and more convinced. A cultural inheritance, an ugly little side-trip in the independence-prioritied mindsets that had founded Union. The grandsons and granddaughters of rebel scientists and engineersblew up kids in subway stations, and wanted to run the government.
They talked about potential Worms in Justin's designs twenty, thirty generations down. Union had a few after three generations, real serious ones, and she was scared going into a controlled situation like New Year's with Family and staff, with Florian and Catlin to watch with a trained eye for anything Unusual. To have a Novgorod citizen's choicekilometers of walking in ped-tunnels or twice daily percentaging the headlines and the mood of politics to decide whether to risk a ten-minute subway ridenot mentioning the chance of some ordinary z-case putting the push on you for your keycard hell of a way to live. But Novgorod citizens hated the idea of a master-system for keycards: a danger to their freedom, they argued.
They had, she thought, a higher anxiety threshold than she did; but they were holding their own, that was the good part, hell with the Paxers, people held on; and she, Ari Emory, she followed the situation and wondered if there was perhaps merit in the idea of a major program to buy-off thousands of military azi still rejuvable, bring them back to Reseune for re-training, exactly the way they had done before she was born
No question then of the bad precedent of having armed troops keeping order in Novgorod, but a loan of a civilian agency from Reseune Administrative Territory to the municipality of Novgorod. If these were the times they lived in, as well have a response for it, if it meant enforcement standing line-of-sight in every ped-tunnel and subway in Novgorod.
Manpower was the original reason Reseune existed; and she was working out the proposal to land on Denys' desk. And expected Denys to say no. Reseune was making profit again and Denys was determined to hold the line against what he called her out-there ideas.
She sighed, watching uncle Denys from across the room, and seeing a tired lump of a man who had some very strange turns: who had, she had discovered it in Denys' Base in the House systema huge volume of unpublished work that she ached to talk with him about, work on inter-station economics that was bound to cause a ripple when it did come to light. . . she did not understand it, but it was very massive and very full of statistics; a huge work on the interaction of economics with the Expansionist theory of government that was absolutely fascinating; a massive study of the development of consumer society in azi-descended population segments, including specific tracing of psychsetted values in several generations of testing; a study of replicate psychology; a history of Reseune from its inception; and work on military systems, of a kind that looked very much like Giraud's workuntil she put her finger on the telltale phrases and turns of speech and realized to her shock that Giraud did not write the things published under Giraud's name. They were Denys' writings. And this secret store of them, this absolute treasure-house of ideas, kept in Archive? Never brought forward, just meddled with from time to time, adjustedan enormous work-in-progress, from a man so obsessively retiring that he maneuvered his brother into a Special's status so that Giraud could have the reputation and do the public things, while Denys stayed in the background, appearing to devote himself exclusively to administrative work and the day-to-day decisions and approvals for R&D and implementations.