"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."
"An azi is opinionated.That means the azi is going exactly down the instructions and Jane's mad because she's got new staffers in her apartment. She'll survive." He poured more coffee. "Olga's azi is still a damn worry. Ollie's younger, he's a hell of a lot tougher-minded than that poor sod Olga had, by all accounts, and Jane's got a good point: run tape on Ollie to soften him up and Jane's temper will crack him. Her style with the kid she can manage; changing Ollie and changing the way she deals with him is further than Jane's going to go without exploding. If that kid's got even an ordinary baby's instincts she'll pick up on adult tensions right from the cradle. Figuring she's got Ari's sensitivity, God knows whatshe can pick up on. So what do you do?"
Petros grinned. "Run tape on Jane?"
Denys snorted into his coffee and sipped. "I sure as hell wish. No. Jane's a professional. She knows what this is worth. We've got a bargain. We keep hands off Ollie and she cues Ollie how to play this. We just trust an azi that can make our Janie happy can cope with anything." Laughter.
He was mad as hell at Giraud. There was a good deal of this Giraud could have taken off his shoulders, but Giraud had a tendency to kite off to the capital whenever things got tense on the Project.
It's all yours,Giraud had said. You're the administrator. And welcome to it.It had taken most of a year sifting through Ari's notes, that small initial part of the computer record the technicians could get at easily. Reseune's records computers had run for three weeks just compiling the initial mass of data on Ari. Thank God Olga had archived everything with cross-referencing and set it up in chronological order. The tapes had to be located, all this not only on Ari, but on two azi who had been protosets and unique. There was a tunnel under the hills out there and there were three more under construction, because that enormous vault was full, absolutely full to capacity, with workers beginning to divide tape into active, more active and most active, so more of it could be put in the House itself.
And when the data-flood from the Project came rolling out in full operation it would be a tidal wave in the House Archives. One of those tunnels was specifically to house the physical records of the Project; and that included software design for some of the things Ari had halfway worked out and someone else was going to have to finish before that baby was talking.
Reseune was notgoing to farm out anything to do with the Project. It was farming out some of the azi production runs, to clear personnel time. It would have been an economic crisis, except the military had thrown money at Reseune's extension at Fargone and Reseune's extension in Planys, money which funded more tanks, more computers, more production andthose tunnels. Meanwhile Jordan Warrick was doing everyone a favor by actually handling the physical set-up over in Planys, which had Warrick happier than he had been since Ari's demise, turning out real work again—no small gain in itself, since it made Defense happy. They had lost Robert Carnath from House Operations and promoted him over the Planys lab: Robert was no friend of Warrick's and a sharp enough administrator to keep all the reins in his hands. They had lost other staff out to the Fargone lab construction and they were going to lose more, when that lab went active and the Rubin project kicked in. Reseune had been overstaffed when the thing began and now it was actually buying azi contracts from hackers like Bucherlabs and Lifefarms, rejuving every azi over forty and driving staff berserk with retraining tapes. Fifteen barracks were empty down in the Town, and they had just signed a buy-back deal with Defense for certain Reseune azi approaching retirement: it saved Defense expensive retraining and pensioning, it made certain azi damned happy when they learned they were going on working and getting staff positions at RESEUNEAIR and in freight and production and wherever else an azi whose outlook otherwise was transfer to some dull government work center could fill a slot and look forward instead of back. It gave Reseune a large pool of discipline-conscious, security-conscious personnel—instantly. Mistakes and glitches were bound to proliferate in Reseune's smooth operations, but noton the Project, where there were no new faces, and where the top talent could consequently pay full attention to their jobs.
The military buy-back had saved them. Denys was proud of that stroke. It tooksomething to multiply a Project designed for one subject into four—counting Rubin and the two azi. And to coordinate the project-profile andthe finance andthe covert aspects of it. Giraud handled the latter. Denys had had the rest in his lap for long enough he felt hehad just given birth.
"It's not easier from here," he told Petros. "From here on, it's going to be a race between that kid and profile-management. If anyone fouls up, Iwant to know about it. If she gets an unscheduled sniffle, I want to know about it. Nothing's minor until we've got results to check against profile."
"Hell of a way to go, developing the profile while it's running."
"We'd have to anyway. There are goingto be differences. We'd always be altering it. And we'd never know where we're going anyway. If that kid is Ari in any measurable degree, we'll never damn well know, will we?"
No laughter at all.
iii
Justin poured, wine swirling into Grant's many times emptied glass. Poured another for himself and set the dead bottle down. Grant looked at his glass with a slightly worried look.
Duty. Grant was getting drunk and thinking about the fact. He knew. He knew the way he could tell that Grant was not going to say a thing, Grant had just decided that duty was not the operative word tonight.
They talked about the office. They talked about a design sequence they had been working on. A bottle of wine apiece did not do much for the design—the connections were getting fuzzy.
But Justin felt better for it.
He felt a strange dissatisfaction with himself. A baby arrived and he went through the day in a state of unreasoning depression. Reseune was aflutter with: "Is she cute?" and "How is she doing?" and he felt as if someone had a fist closed around his heart.
Over a baby being born, for God's sake. And while a kind of a party was going on in the techs' residencies, and another one over in Wing One residency, he and Grant held their own morose commemoration.
They sat in the pit in the apartment that had been home when they were both small, the apartment that had been Jordan's, crackers and drying sausage slices on the plate, two dead wine bottles standing in cracker crumbs and moisture-rings on the stone table, and a third bottle a third gone. And that was finally enough to put him at distance from things.
Wish a little baby would die? God, what kind of thinking is that?
He lifted his next glass when he had filled it, and touched it to Grant's with labored cheerfulness. "Here's to the baby."
Grant frowned and did not drink when he did.
"Come on," Justin said. "We can be charitable."