In very, very few cases, there is no fix, no remedial psychset to install even with mindwipe, and a panel of qualified staff members can find no humane solution, except to terminate. The azi's quality of life is the main consideration, and Reseune, which has made the rules which forbid a Supervisor to speak sharply to one of its azi in the workplace, likewise must take the decision any next of kin must face when a body functions after reasoning, meaningful life has ceased. ...
CHAPTER 4
i
The womb-tank tilted, spilled its contents into the fluid-filled receiving tank, and Ariane Emory struggled and twisted, small swimmer in an unfamiliar dim light and wider sea.
Until Jane Strassen reached down into the water and took her up, and the attendants tied off the cord and took her to a table for a quick examination while Jane Strassen hovered.
"She's perfect, isn't she?" There was worry in that question. An hour ago it would have been clinical worry, professional worry, anxiety about a project which could go very wrong if there was something wrong with the baby. But there was a certain personal anguish involved of a sudden, which she would not have expected to feel.
You're the closest match to Olga Emory's tests, her cousin Giraud had said; and Jane had thrown a tantrum, refused, protested that her management of Wing One labs did not include time to take on motherhood at a slightly fragile, overworked one hundred and thirty-two years of age.
Olga took it on at eighty-three, Giraud had said. You're a strong-minded woman, you're busy as hellso was Olgayou have Olga's interest in art, you were born in space, and you've got the professional skill and the brains. You're the best match we've got. And you're old enough to remember Olga.
I hate kids, she had retorted, I had Julia by immaculate conception, and I resent any comparison to that obnoxious nit-picking bitch!
Giraud, damn him, had smiled. And said: You're on the project.
Which brought her to this, this room, this hour, agonizing while the medical experts looked over a squirming newborn, and the thoughts of personal responsibility took hold.
She had never involved herself much with her genetic daughter, who was her personal concession to immortality, conceived with the unknowing help of a Pan-paris mathematician who had made his donation to Reseune, because she had thought a random chance and new blood might be preferable. Too much planning, she had maintained, made bad gene pools; and Julia was the result of her personal selection, not bad, not good either. She had entrusted Julia mostly to nurses, and dealt with her less and less as Julia proved a sweet, sentimental space-brainno, bright, in any less demanding environment, but overwhelmed right now by the discovery of her own biology and as feckless in her personal life as one of the azi.
But this, Ari's replicate, this end-of-life adopted daughter, was what she had hoped for. The ideal student. This was a mind that could take anything she could throw at it and throw it back again. And she was forbidden to do it. She had done tape of Olga with the child. Hand on Ari's shoulder. Sharp tug at Ari's sweater, straightening it. Ari's angry, desperate wince. That was the pair she damned well remembered. It brought back everything.
For eighteen years of her life she had listened to that voice. Olga had carped at everyone on staff. Olga had carped at the kid, what time Olga had had time, till it was a wonder the kid was sane, in between which the kid had been totally on her own with the azi. Olga had taken all those damned blood-samples and psych-tests and more psych-tests, because Olga had theories that led to theories Ari had worked on. Olga had gotten Ari's earliest Rezner tests, which damned near hit the top of the scale, and from that time on it had been a case of blood in the water: Olga Emory, with her pet theories of scientific child-rearing, had believed that she had an Estelle Bok on her hands, destined for centuries of immortality via Reseune labs. And every other kid in Reseune's halls had heard that Ari was brilliant and Ari was special because mothers and fathers on staff knew their professional heads would roll if their kid blacked the deserving eye of Olga's precious Ari.
In those pioneering days on Cyteen, when intellectuals running from the Earth Company visa laws had gathered at what had then been the far end of space and founded Cyteen Station, renegade political theorists, famous physicists, chemists and legendary explorers had been thicker in the station mess hall than people who could fix the toilets; rejuv was a new development, Reseune was being founded to work with it, Bok's physics was rewriting the textbooks, and speculations and out-there theories had possessed people who should have known better. And Olga Emory had been a brilliant intellect with an instinct for cross-disciplinary innovation, but she had entertained some real eetees in her mental basement.
Never mind James Carnath, who had more of them, and determined he and Olga were going to make a baby to outdo Bok the day he found out he was terminal.
Which had led them all to this room and this project.
So she had to do everything Olga's way. Straighten up, Ari. Stand still, Ari. Do your homework, Ari Twitch and bitch.
Between that and throwing Ari at azi nurses, the same way she had done with Julia. She had considerable remorse for that, in retrospect.
Changing that parental disinterest would change Ari. Benign neglect. It was a terrible thing to recognize her own personal mistakes retroactively. Studying up on Olga had been like looking in a too-revealing mirror. Giraud had been right. A hell of a thing to find out, at a hundred and thirty-two.
To this day she had no more maternal feeling for Julia than for any other product of the labs ... or for the two azi the attendants were busy birthing over on the other side of the room. In the case of Ari, never mind the experience with one daughter and fifty-two years' experience with students, it had to be a question of following program. For the kid's own good. She had respected Ari Emory, and dammit, if she failed with her, that was all the reputation she was going to leave in Reseune. At a hundred and thirty-two. She hated fuck-ups. She hated personal indulgence and fuzzy thinking.
It was still damned hard to look at Julia and see what a meek thing she had come to beconstantly fouling up at work, spoiling her new baby beyond bearing, dependent on an endless succession of loversand know that it was partly genes and partly her fault. The same neglect, the same carping she had now to admit she had done with Julia, was part and parcel of what made Ari run. Psychsets and genetics at work.
Wrong kid, right parent, maybe. And vice versa.
Hell of a hand nature dealt out.
ii
"They're all in good shape," Petros Ivanov said.
"That's wonderful. Really wonderful." Denys took a bite of fish and another one. Private lunch, in the executive dining room, with the curtains back on the seal-windows of the observation deck. The weather-makers were giving them a rain, as requested, a major blow, water sheeting down the windows. The atmosphere was going to be compromised for a day or so. "Damn Giraud. Of course it'll go all right, he says, and runs off to the capital. And damn if he's called!"
"Everything's right on the profile so far. The azi are absolutely norm. They're already on program."
"So's Ari."
"Strassen's bitching about the head nurse."
"What else is new?"
"Says she's opinionated and she upsets her staff."