I'm sure I don't."
"You know,Justin, you know damn well, you just haven't had uncle Giraud's briefings; and it stillcaught us. Giraud knew there was a leak. He knew what your father would say; he warned me what your father would say if he got a chance. The question isn't even whether it's true. Let's assume it is."
He was going to slip her, she saw it coming, and she maintained his attention with an uplifted finger, exactly, exactlyAri senior's mannerism: she knew it. "Whatdoes it do for your father?"
"It gets him the hell out of Planys. It gets him clean, dammit, it gets him his standing with the Bureau—"
"All of which I'm not averse to—in my own time. My own time isn't now. It can't be now. Thinkabout it, Justin; you can handle Sociology equations. Try this one, try this one near-term, like the next few years—tell me what's going to happen and what's going to result from it. That'sfirst. That's the thing that matters. What does it do to him, what's going to happen? Second question: where does he stand, where does he think he stands, what side has he just taken—and don't tell me your father's naive, noone in Reseune is naive, just under-briefed."
He said nothing. But he was thinking, deep and seriously, onwhat she had said, and around the peripheries: who am I dealing with, what is she up to, has Denys choreographed this business? He was much too smart to take anything at one level.
"Did you leak it to Corain?" he asked.
Oh. That wasa good one. It jolted a thought loose. " Ididn't. But, God, Denys might have, mightn't he?"
"Or Giraud," Justin said.
She drew a long breath and leaned back. "Interesting thought. Very interesting thought."
"Maybe it's the truth. Maybe whoever leaked it is in a position to know it's the truth."
Florian was interested: Florian was watching Justin with utmost attention. She reckoned that Catlin was. God, Ari thought, and found herself smiling. He's not down, is he? I seehow he's survived.
"Easier to answer that," she said, "if I had an idea what happened that night, but there's no evidence. I thought there might have been a Scriber record. There was just the Translate. There's nothing there. The sniffers were useless; there'd been too many people in and out before they thought about it. Psychprobe would have been the only way. And that didn't happen. And won't. It doesn't matter. Giraud talked about 'the Warrick influence.' Giraud made an enemy. Now what do we do about that enemy?"
A slower man, an emotional man, would have blurted out: Let him go.She sat watching Justin think, relatively sure of some of the tracks—the fact that Jordan's name was in Paxer graffiti; that Jordan's ideas had opposed her predecessor; that there was one election shaping up in Science and another virtually certain in Defense, both critical, both of which, if the Centrists won—could destroy Reseune, shift the course of history, jeopardize all Reseune's projects, and all her purposes. . . .
Perhaps three, four, minutes he sat there, deep-focused and calm as kat could have sent him. Then, in with careful controclass="underline"
"Have yourun the projections of Jordan's input?"
She drew breath, as if one of a dozen knots about her chest had loosed.
Thereis an echo,she thought, imagining that dark place, that floating-in-null place. She took her own time answering. "Field too large," she said finally." Idon't aim at him. I want him safe. The problem is—he's quite intelligent, quite determined, and even if he didn't leak that message—what's he going to do if he gets in front of the news cameras? What's he going to do to every plan for solving this that I could have come up with?"
"I can solve it. Give me fifteen minutes on the phone with him."
"There's still a problem. He won't believe a word of it. Giraud said it: that tape was an intervention. Your father saw it—" He reacted to that as if it had hit in the gut. "You haven't," she said, "have you? Ever. You don't know what Ari did. You should have asked to see it. You should have gone over that damned thing as often as it took. It fluxed me too, fluxed me so I wasn't thinking straight: it took Giraud to point out the obvious. If Icould see what Ari did, so could your father. Your father didn't see it as a seventeen-year-old kid, your father saw it as a psychsurgeon who had to wonder exactly how often and how deep Ari's interventions had been. He had to wonder how far they'd gone. You and Grant worry about each other when you've been separate three days. I know. You know they can't run an intervention on Jordan—but don't you think he has to wonder—after twenty years—just whose you are?"
Justin leaned forward and picked up his drink from the table, breathing harder: she marked the flare of his nostrils, the intakes and the quick outflow. And the little body moves that said he wanted out of that round. "Florian," he said, "would you mind terribly—I thank I'd like something stronger." She could read Florian too, instant suspicion: Florian distrusted such little distracting tactics, with thoughts engendered of lifelong training. He was not about to turn his back on an Enemy. "Florian," she said, "his usual."
Florian met her eyes, nodded deferentially then and got up, not even looking at Catlin, who sat beside her: there was no question that Catlin was on, and hair-triggered.
"You can talk to your father," she said to Justin, "but I doubt he's believed you entirely for years. Not—entirely. He knowsyou were psychprobed, over and over again; and he doesn't believe in Reseune's virtue. If you try to reason with him—I'm afraid what he's going to think, do you see? And I'm not just saying that to get at you, Justin, I'm afraidwhat he's going to think, and I don't think you can do anything to stop him, not with reason."
"You forget one thing," he said, leaning back against his seat.
"What's that?"
"The same thing that keeps Grant and me alive. That past a certain point you don't care. Past a certain point—" He shook his head, and looked up as Florian brought the drink back. "Thank you."
"No problem, ser." Florian sat down.
"If he gets into public," Ari took up the thread of thought, "he can do himself harm, he can do me harm, of course—which I don't want. It's possible that your father has been psychologically—very isolate, for a very long time: insular and insulated from all the problems going on in the world. If he was protecting you against the release of that tape—which may be a real motive for him lying until now—he evidently believes you're capable of handling it or he's been told something by someone that makes him desperate enough to risk you as well as himself—if that message actually came from him, which is a question . . . but it doesn't really matter. What he'll do—that matters. And we have an image problem in all this mess, you understand me?"
Justin wasunderstanding her, she thought so by the little motions of his eyes, the tensions in his face. "What is there to do?" he said. "You've left Grant back there; I don't know what they're doing to my father at Planys—"
"Nothing. They're not going to do anything to him."
"Can you guarantee that?"
She hesitated awhile over that answer. "That depends," she said. "That very much depends. That's why you're with me. Someonehas to do something. I'd wanted to be inconspicuous for a while more, but I'm the only face the media knows and I'm the only one who has enough credit with them to patch this mess up—but I need you, I need your help. Possibly you'll double on me. I don't know. But whether it's true or false what they're saying, it's going to be terribly hard for your father to handle this or to back away from the cameras if he gets the chance. You're my hope of stopping that."