They might, more likely, be Ari's enemies, in which case they might do almost anything, and in that case they might not want him to survive to testify.
Whatever had happened, Kruger was involved in it, beyond a doubt, and it could even be monetary . . . perhaps everything rumor had said about Kruger's humanitarian concerns was a lie. Reseune was full of lies. Perhaps it was something Ari herself maintained. Perhaps Kruger had just fooled everyone, perhaps he was engaged in a little side business, in forged Contracts whenever he got a likely prospect. Maybe he was being sold off to some mining site in the hinterlands, or, God, some place where they could try to retrain him. Try. Anyone who started meddling with his tape-structures on a certain level, he could handle. On others . . .
He was not so sure.
There were four of them, counting the driver, and such men might well have guns. The bus seals were life itself.
He clasped his hands together and tried desperately to think the thing through. A phone was the best hope. Maybe stealing the bus once they trusted him, once he knew where civilization was and whether the bus had the fuel to get there. It could take days to get a chance. Weeks.
"I think you know by now," Winfield said finally, "this isn't where you're supposed to be."
"Yes, ser."
"We're friends. You should believe that."
"Whose friends?"
Winfield put his hand on his arm. "Your friends."
"Yes, ser." Agree to anything. Be perfectly compliant. Yes, ser. Whatever you want, ser.
"Are you upset?"
Like a damned field supervisor, talking to some Mu-class worker. The man thought he knew what he was doing. That was good news and bad . . . depending what this fool thought he was qualified to do with tape and drugs. Winfield had mismanaged him thus far. He did not give way to instincts simply because he reckoned that they did not profit him in this situation, and because there was far more profit in keeping his head down . . . reckoning that his handlers were not stupid, but simply too ignorant to realize that the Alpha-rating on his card meant he could not have the kind of inhibitions born-men were used to in azi. They should have drugged him and transported him under restraint.
He was certainly not about to tell them so.
"Yes, ser," he said, with the breathless anxiousness of a Theta.
Winfield patted his arm. "It's all right. You're a free man. You will be."
He blinked. That took no acting. 'Free man' added a few more dimensions to the equation; and he did not like any of them.
"We're going up in the hills a ways. A safe place. You'll be perfectly all right. We'll give you a new card. We'll teach you how to get along in the city."
Teach you. Retraining. God, what am I into?
Is there any way this could be what Justin intended?
He was afraid, suddenly, in ways that none of the rest of this had touched . . . that he did not have it figured, that defying these people might foul up something Justin had arranged
or Jordan, finding out about it, intervening
They might be what the only friends he had in the world had intended for him, they might be heading him for real freedom. But retraining, if that was what they had in mind, would reach into all his psychsets and disturb them. He did not have much in the world. He did not own anything, even his own person and the thoughts that ran in his brain. His loyalties were azi-loyalties, he knew that, and accepted that, and did not mind that he had had no choice in them: they were real, and they were all he was.
These people talked about freedom. And teaching. And maybe the Warricks wanted that to happen to him and he had to accept it, even if it took everything away from him and left him some cold freedom where home had been. Because the Warricks could not afford to have him near them anymore, because loving him was too dangerous for all of them. Life seemed overwhelmed with paradoxes.
God, now he did not know, he did not know who had him or what he was supposed to do.
Ask them to use the phone, get a message to Merild to ask whether this was all right?
But if they were not with Merild that would tip them off that he was not the compliant type they took him for. And if they were the other thing, if this was not the Warricks' doing, then they would see he had no chance at all.
So he watched the landscape pass the windows and endured Winfield's hand on his arm, with his heart beating so hard it hurt.
x
It was surreal, the way the day fell into its accustomed order, an inertia in the affairs of Reseune that refused to be shaken, no matter what had happened, no matter that his body was sore and the damnedest innocent things brought on tape-flashes that hour by hour assumed a more and more mundane and placid level of existenceof course that was what it felt like, of course people from the dawn of time had done sex with mixed partners, paid sex for safety, it was the world, that was all, and he was no kid to be devastated by itit was more the hangover that had him fogged, and now he was on the other side of an experience he had rather not have had, he was still alive, Grant was downriver safe, Jordan was all right; and he had damned well better figure Ari Emory had more than that in mind
Shake the kid up, play games with his mind, go on till he cracked. You wanted Grant free, boy, you can substitute, can't you? leave the apartment, report to the office, smile at familiar people and hear the business go on about him that had gone on yesterday, that went on every day in Wing OneJane Strassen cursing her aides and creating a furor because of some glitch-up in equipment repair; Yanni Schwartz trying to mollify her, a dull murmur of argument down the hall. Justin kept to his keyboard and immersed himself in a routine, in a problem in tape-structure Ari had set him a week ago, complex enough to keep the mind busy hunting linkages.
He was careful. There were things the AI checker might not catch. There were higher-level designers between his efforts and an azi test-subject, and there were trap-programs designed to catch accidental linkages in a particular psychset but it was no generic teaching-tape: it was deep-tape, specifically one that a psychsurgeon might use to fit certain of the KU-89 subsets for limited managerial functions.
A mistake that got by the master-designers could be expensivecould cause grief for the KU-89s and the azi they might manage; could cause terminations, if it went truly awryit was every designer's nightmare, installing a glitch that would run quietly amok in a living intellect for weeks and years, till it synthesized a crazier and crazier logic-set and surfaced on some completely illogical trigger.
There was a book making the rounds, a science fiction thriller called Error Message, that had Giraud Nye upset: a not too well disguised Reseune marketed an entertainment tape with a worm in it, and civilization came apart. There was a copy in library, on CIT-only check-out, with a long waiting list; and he and Grant had both read itof course. Like most every House azi except Nye's, it was a good bet.
And he and Grant had tried designing a worm, just to see where it would go. "Hey," Grant had said, sitting on the floor at his feet, starting to draw logic-flows, "we've got an Alpha-set we can use, hell with the Rho-sets."