So Geoffrey Nye had had two sons that were as different as different came, seven years apart and yet as joined as anybody could be who wasn’t cloned. They were natural‑born, those two– thatwas unusual, in Reseune’s administration. They’d had a mother who’d actually lived married to their father, so normal by Novgorod standards you could expect Giraud and Denys to turn out as normal as anybody could ever be. But their mother had been a psych operator, and Denys’ Rezner scores had been off the high end of genius. God knew what she’d tried on her own sons, promoting that intellect–she’d wanted Giraud to come up to Denys’ level–but she never could turn one into the other. And then she’d died, along with her husband, in a boating accident, and not a common one. The boat had caught fire, out on the Novaya Volga, where you just didn’t open the cabin to the outside atmosphere. It had been pretty nasty.
And maybe it was because she was so tired tonight, maybe it was because Yanni was meeting with Corain and Spurlin and Justin was meeting with Jordan, and because she’d found Maman hadn’t been in any loving mood when she’d agreed to bring her up, and because Denys, who knew one when he saw one, had called her a monster–all these truths had landed on her in one evening, with dinner being way late and Florian coming into her office and saying, for the third or fourth time, regarding the late dinner, “Sera, you really need more staff.”
“Then you pick them!” she said peevishly. “ Doit. You set the number. You know what’s needed better than I do. Just pickthem, for God’s sake.”
“Yes, sera,” Florian said and went away ever so quietly. That didn’t make her feel better at all, but she was still raw‑nerved and she didn’t want to talk to anybody.
They weren’t that badly off with the staff they had, if they’d just had a better cook. There’d been a time this winter when Florian had been making dinner and they’d lived on sandwiches, but they had their little staff, people they’d gotten from random picks, mainly from old Dr. Watts, who’d died, and whose sad little staff needed reassigning; and one good pick out of Amy’s dispersed office for a supplies clerk: Callie. Callie had gone into her service as acting majordomo, and she was going to shift back to household supplies when they got somebody trained for the post; Callie didn’t like dealing with CITs if she could avoid it. But Callie managed so far. Meanwhile a pastry chef who’d been released by general staff as too emotional for the huge cafeteria kitchens was serving as their general cook, which was why dinner had been late tonight.
It wasn’t a staff: it was a collection, and yes, it needed seeing to, and yes, the cook had burned supper two nights in a row the first week they’d had him and last night delayed an entire hour putting together pork sandwiches–provoking Catlin to suggest armed force might hasten dinner–but Ari didn’t really care about that at the moment. Florian had looked upset when he left, which only made her feel worse, but she was one jump from breaking something, throwing something, or bursting into tears. The first Ari had hurt her Florian. She never, ever wanted to do that, and right now she was so fluxed she couldn’t even go track him down and talk to him.
Yanni, dammit, Yanni. What are you doing to me?
Flux‑thinking. The mind skipped, one topic to the next, all of it connected only because one brain held it all in one confused packet before it lay down to sleep and sleep purged the chemicals that had held everything in a forced relationship. Flux‑thinking. Skipping between categories. Skipping between emotional states. Linking things that weren’t linked and then getting way fluxed because there was an emotional charge left over from something else that wasn’t even related.
It was how CITs routinely did things. Azi, which were started on logical, orderly input from the hour of their birth, didn’t flux–well, the high ones did, but generally had rather not.
She, being CIT, being more than bright, and having a lot of circuits, was fluxed as hell, and knew it: mixing categories and jumping from one thought to the next in high flux–that was how ideas were born out of nothing. But she so wanted to sleep, and didn’t want to take a sleeping pill–there’d been too many pills.
Get some rest, Justin had scolded her. He knew she was taking cataphoric and deepstudying too many hours. He knew she was strung out, but she was trying to watch all of Reseune while Yanni was gone, because she didn’t really feel safe with him gone and only ReseuneSec in charge. Hicks, who ran ReseuneSec, hadn’t stopped her taking down Denys, but then she’d come in by surprise and gotten control of System. She didn’t feel quite comfortable with ReseuneSec now that she’d resigned her takeover, and let Hicks, as Giraud’s second‑in‑command, assume his authority and his office. She didn’t know him. She never had known him, except that Giraud had trusted him.
So in this interval while Yanni was gone, just so as not to give anybody any ideas, she’d sealed herself into her apartment with a staff she fairly well could trust, while she ran her own security checks, because she wasn’t clear who to trust and who not in any given department. They were names to her, was all, and she didn’t know histories, or how they connected to things that had happened.
She was watching things for Yanni, that was what he’d said. Keep an eye on things while I’m gone. And like a silly azi she’d taken it as something she ought to do as a point of responsibility, along with her studies and everything else. She wasn’t trusting of Hicks, even if he had stood back and let her deal with Denys. But once she’d gotten into what was going on in Novgorod, all the same, it turned out she’d have done better to keep a closer eye on Yanni himself for the last several months.
A meeting with Spurlin. Dinner with Mikhail Corain, in Yanni’s hotel room. And no record kept that she had yet reached via Base One, which meant he hadn’t recorded it in Base Two. She wanted Yanni back here. She wanted him back so she could look him in the eyes and see him answer and hear a really good explanation of what business he had having an off‑record supper with Ari Senior’s old enemy–after an off‑record meeting with Defense, which was a bureau that hadn’t been that nice to herat all.
That didn’t make for a good night’s sleep, no matter how badly she needed it.
BOOK ONE Section 1 Chapter vii
APRIL 26, 2424
1506H
Keyboarding flowed and went on flowing, a spate of pure creation. The hindbrain could do one thing, recording what the brain had already decided had to happen, while the conscious and unconscious raced ahead, doing what they most liked to do. Occasionally Ari muttered a voice command, like a third hand, to locate a piece of programming and get it in queue, hardly noticing.
She tagged certain things to her just‑finished voice recording, then issued another command to autocheck and report on bugs and mandatory halts, a caution, before locking that little bit–and everything ever to be chained to it–firmly into Base One’s files.
That was how she wrote program for her successor…cautiously. She had put her half‑finished creation under a brand new heading, whimsically, as ariagain. It was almost ready to go permanent. Electrons ported themselves where they needed to go and changed what needed changing, creating a new, self‑defending thread…but only in that folder.
It ran and reported clean.
Final button‑push. She handed it to Base One for System trial. More electrons checked it through and did whatever Base One did to protect its own programming. She didn’t know. She just knew how to make it work. Someday she’d learn what the first Ari had known about System–but someday wasn’t this day. She just wanted momentary distraction from Yanni and Giraud and lessons and all of it.
And the little file was only one of a set of files, all linked, all for some day when she would be dead–cheerful thought, but she had to plan for it.
She planned more sessions to follow this particular tape. She was planning, while the fingers, in hindbrain lagtime, handled what she’d thought nanoseconds ago.
On the vid screen at her elbow, a thunderstorm built and broke above the sprawling establishment that was Reseune, thunder that vibrated through the building around her. The tall precip towers that rimmed the cliffs above the river had talked to the weathermakers in orbit, and between them they’d loosed a lair‑sized storm, taking the potential that was up there and making the spate of rain happen now rather than later, when the scheduled flight was due.