"Whatabout Rubin?"
"It would still be possible to go ahead with that. It would be useful as a control. And a cover under the cover, so to speak. I don't want the Rubin project in Reseune. I don't want it impacting what we plan to do. You understandthe name of the game is re-tracing. Intensive monitoringAri was used to that, but her successor ought not to have direct contact with someone else undergoing the same thing. We'd have to run both halves of the Rubin project at Fargone."
"You imply you intend to do thiswhether or not you have official support."
"I'm seeking that support. I want to save Warrick. I want to cooperate fully with the military. We need the kind of security and cover you can provide usat least until the new Ari can surface. Then it appears as a Reseune projecta thoroughly civilian project. That's useful, isn't it?"
"God." Gorodin drank down the other half of his coffee. And held out his cup to the azi.
"Abban," Nye said. The azi came and filled the cupwhile Gorodin used the delay to do some fast adding.
"What," he said then, carefully, "does this have to do with Warrick?"
"We need him. We need him to go on with his work."
"Him? To reconstruct her? Working on her tapes?"
"No. That wouldn't be wise. I'm talking about Reseune. Rememberwe have to think in twenty-, fifty-year terms. He's still young. He's only now showing what he can do. His own research interlocks with Ari's. Let me be honest with you: Ari's notes are extremely fragmentary. She was a genius. There are gaps of logic in her notessort of an of course that Ari could bridge and didn't need to write down. We can't guarantee success: no program of this son can. We only know that we have a better chance with Ari, that we knew intimately, than with a stranger that we don't. She coded a great deal. Her leaps from point to point, the connections ... in a field she damned near built. . . make her notes a real maze. If we lose the principals of Ari's lifeif we can't recover something like the life Ari livedif certain people aren't available to consult, then I think our chances of seeing this project work go down and down. Ultimately Ari's notes could become meaningless. The matrix becomes lost, you see, the social referent irrecoverable. But we have it now. I think we can do it. I know we can do it."
"But what damn use is all of this, thenbeyond recovering Emory herself? How many people are we going to have that land of record on? What can it apply to? It can't get us Bok."
"Emory herself is not negligible. Emory able to take up her work where she left offbut at about age twenty. Maybe younger. We don't know. We'll find out. Understand: what we learn doing this will tell us how much data we have to have with other projects. Like Bok. We just have to be damned careful this round. Because if the worst-case holds, every precaution is necessary: every influence is irreplaceable. Getting Ari back is step one. If there's going to be an amplification of her work on personality formation Ari is the key to it. We have a chance with her. We know her. We can fill in the gaps in the information and make corrections if it looks necessary. We don't know Rubin to that extent. We don't have the headstart even with him we do with her, do you see? Rubin has become a luxury. Retrieving Ari Emory is a necessity. We can try it on our own, but it would be a hell of a lot easierwith Defense Bureau support."
"Meaning money."
Nye shook his head. "Cover. The ability to hold on to Warrick. The ability to shield what we're doing. The authority to protect our researchand our subjectfrom Internal Affairs."
"Ah." Gorodin drew a deep breath. "But moneyit always comes to money."
"We can bear our end of it if
Gorodin leaned back in his chair and chewed his lip. And thought again about recorders. "Have you talked to Lu?"
"Not yet."
"You haven't mentioned this to anyone outside Reseune."
"No. I don't intend to. We had one security breachwith the azi. We've covered it. There won't be another."
Gorodin thought about itcivilians running their own affairs under military cover. One breach and God knew what else. Too many amateurs.
Reseune wanted to start a close cooperation, on a project Gorodin, dammit, saw shifting the balance of power irrevocably toward Union
Ariane Emory experimenting with a kid on Fargone had seemed a hell of a lot safer. Reseune trying to raise the dead seemed
hell, go for the big gain. Go for everything.
It was a pittance, to the Defense budget.
"I don't think there's much problem," Gorodin said. "We just appropriate the Fargone facility. We invoke the Military Secrets Act. We can cover any damn thing you need."
"No problem," Nye said. "No problem in that. As long as it stays classified."
"No problem with that," Gorodin said.
"So we stamp everything Rubin project," Nye said. "We build the Fargone facility; we work the Rubin project under deep secrecy out there; we get deeper cover for our work on Cyteen."
"Two for the price of one?" It struck Gorodin after he had said it that the expression was a little coarse, on the day of Emory's funeral. But, hell, it was her resurrection they were talking about. Not identity, Warrick had said. Ability. That was close enough.
He was damned sure Giraud Nye had the inclination to keep Reseune's control over the project. The Project, meaning an embryo in a womb-tank and a kid growing up in Reseune. Twenty years.
He suddenly added that to his own age. He was a hundred twenty-six, ground time. A hundred forty-six by then. And Nyewas not young.
It was the first time it had ever really hit himwhat Warrick had meant about the time factor in Reseune. He was used to time-dilationin a spacer's sense: that hundred forty-six ground-time would lie far lighter on him, who lost months of ground-time in days of jump. But Reseune's kind of time meant lifetimes.
"We'd like that second project full-scale," Nye said. "Having a comparative study could save us in a crisis, and we're beyond any tentative test of theories. Comparison is going to give us our answers. It's not a luxury."
Part of the Rubin project at Fargone meant part of the data within easy reach. And meant a fail-safe. Gorodin always believed in fail-safesin equipment; or in planning. Spacer's economy. Two was never too many of anything.
"Do it," he said. "Makes cover a hell of a lot easier." There was the matter of clearing it with Lu, and the chiefs of staff. But Lu and the chiefs of staff would go with anything that promised this kind of return and put Emory's work at the disposal of Defense.
Defense took a lot of projects under its wing. Some were conspicuous failures. Those that workedpaid for all the rest.
ix
Steps passed the door continually. More than usual. There were voices. Some of them Justin thought he knew; someone had stopped outside the door, a group of people talking.
Please, he thought. Please. Somebody stop here. He hoped for a moment; and feared. He listened, sitting on the sleeping mat that was all the furniture in the room. He clenched his hands together in the hollow of his crossed legs.
"Call Ari," he kept saying to anyone who dealt with him. "Tell her I want to talk with her."
But they were azi. They had no authority to go above their Supervisor. And as many times as he asked, the Supervisor never came.
It was a suicide cell he was in, padded walls and door, just a sink and the toilet and the sleeping mat. The light was always on. Food came in water-soluble wrappers little more substantial than toilet paper, without utensils. They had taken his clothes and given him only hospital pajamas, made of white paper. They had not questioned him any more. They had not spoken to him again. He did not know how much time had passed, and his sleeping was erratic with depression and lack of cues from lights or activity outside. And the tape-flashes, seductive and destructive. He refused to let the flashes take hold in the isolation. He refused it even when it would have been consolation.