“Working in his office, since a late breakfast, sera. So is Grant. Perfectly cooperative. Jordan called him; Justin left the office and went to breakfast. There was, however, no contact between them beyond that. Justin and his companion spoke only to the waiters at the restaurant and to each other. And he of course communicated with me. Jordan staved in his new office with Paul and rearranged things. He found two bugs. It wasn’t all.”
Ari gave a perfunctory laugh, not whole‑hearted, more wistful. “It would be so much nicer if Jordan weren’t an enemy. Does Justin like his life, I wonder? Is he mad at me, do you think?”
“Grant is content,” Catlin said. The azi, she could judge quite well. The born‑man, she didn’t attempt.
And that was, of course, a correct answer.
“I wish I could turn things around with Jordan,” she said. “I wish I could figure how to Work him. But he’s stubborn. And he knows all the tricks.” She gave a sigh and got up from the console. Paused, then, looking directly at Catlin, a second time sharply focused on the present, and on Catlin’s and Florian’s problems. “Sending Jordan back to Planys wouldn’t be good, would it, if he has a network there? I’d planned on Strassenburg. But he’ll Work the azi there and try to change them, and they’re all foundational to that city, and thatwould be a big problem. I could build an ethic around him in that population, but once he’s dead, what will that do? He’d be a rock in the stream. Everything would bend around him. Forever.”
Catlin shook her head. “I’m sure I don’t know any answer, sera.”
“Unfortunately I don’t, either,” she said, and went to her bedroom, and her private bath, and took a headache remedy before she took another deepstudy pill and went back to her bed, leaving everything to them, going back to what she had to do.
There’d been a garden once in legend, a perfect garden. But there’d been a snake in it. The woman hadn’t known what to do about him. And every problem of humankind had started from that. The snake had done a Working, about knowledge, and pride, and the woman had gone off her path and taken all her descendants with her.
She had her own snake under close watch. And she couldn’t let concern about Jordan disrupt her concentration, not when things were starting to gel, not when her essential job for the next few months was absorbing the sum of several sciences, dosing down with kat so often she could almost go deep‑state the way Catlin or Florian could learn, just by thinking hard, and become only the thing she was absorbing, without objection, without question, just wide open to unquestioned knowledge.
You had to trust the tapes, you had to really trust them to dose down that far, or to go that open. You had no resistence when you did that. You had no way to say no. You had no extraneous thoughts. You just recorded, embedded the knowledge as fast as possible, burning it into the brain’s pathways, strong, strong, strongpathways.
There was only one source of tapes she’d trust like that: the first Ari’s tapes, stored in Base One, tapes recording Ari I’s thoughts, her opinions on technical questions, her data, her projects, her working life.
If there was any personal prejudice embedded in those records, any Working her predecessor had designed for her beyond the obvious, it was going into her head, too.
If she’d had the choice, if she’d had the leisure, if the world hadn’t been as high‑pressure as it was, and if the legislature wasn’t boiling with important decisions Yanni was trying to handle–if all those things were so, and the world were safer, she’d have taken less of the deepteach drug, she’d have taken longer in her learning, she’d have stayed near enough to the surface to let a little of her conscious mind work on the problems, and see more critically what she personally thought.
But in Denys Nye’s fall, Union had gone quietly into crisis, and civilization could make some serious missteps while she lazed her way through, learning at an ordinary pace.
So she took the dose she did, on her off days, and gave up critiquing her predecessor. She wasn’t giving up her conscious mind in the long run–she banked on that. She was strong‑willed, she was psychologically knowledgeable, she knew the tricks a person used in Working another, and she had a good memory for where and when she’d learned something, right down to the session. If she ran up against an ethical problem, she’d do her own thinking–eventually. She had tags on all of it.
Was it her own thinking, for instance, that had let her matter‑of‑factly consider Catlin’s matter‑of‑fact offer simply to kill Jordan Warrick? She might have been shocked a few months ago. But maybe not. Denys had been trying to kill her. Ultimately they’d killed him. That was a lesson life had given her.
Was it her own thinking, still, that said doing away with Jordan might still be the better, safer answer, that said there might be a way to do the deed quietly, and that Justin might not stay too long in mourning if she did it very cleverly?
She said no. Shesaid no. That was the one mentality in the transaction she could entirely identify. That was her, saying no, and not clearly knowing whether it was the first Ari’s pragmatic sense or her own soft‑hearted inexperience behind that answer.
It was scary. Two days ago she’d taken Poo‑thing out of his drawer and set him on the dresser, so she could see him from this bed. She’d been too old for him. Now she was old enough to want contact with childhood years he represented. Poor’ battered bear. He’d been through a lot. Denys, in the main. But never discount her predecessor’s intentions, battering her mind into a pattern she was supposed to follow for all her life.
Was rebellion stupidity? Or was it just her genetics snuggling around the first Ari’s precepts, hardheadedness and arrogance trying to find a convenient shape to settle into?
She wanted Florian tonight. She really wanted Florian. But she, and he, had so much work to do…so very much work to do…things about the household, which kept them all fed, and safe…in a Reseune that didn’t all want them to stay alive.
The dose began to take hold. Critical thinking ebbed. The machine started up, a gentle repetitive tone, warning the tape was about to start. She had to press a button to get it to go on. She had that much volition left.
Beginning. The Novgorod designs, the overall structure.
Maybe nobody should examine their own world that closely. She’d been out in the world, however briefly She’d seen the world from the air, seen it from the ground, gone through its corridors and met its violence.
Now she was working directly with the ethics that drove it, examining the ethics set into the azi who had been the foundational citizens. Did she intend to tweak that mix? She could. She could subtly, by sending in other azi into key positions, shift the whole Cyteen electorate.
She could set others at work at Fargone, where Ollie ruled. She knew Ollie’s ethical structure. She had a copy of Ollie’s personal manual, down to the day he left. She could skim it at high speed, and recognize ordinary structures from special ones. She could design azi to fit around Ollie, no question, the foundations of something special, around one that she’d loved, when she was little. She could make all Fargone Station into Ollie’s image.
Ethics were the stop‑marks, and the directional choices, in a psych‑map. And she knew set after set of the classic ones, the ones from before the first Ari’s time, the ones designed by committee.
She knew the ones that had the first Ari’s peculiar stamp on them. Like those key sets in Novgorod, and at Gehenna–the people that would rise to the top and become important, the leaders, the movers.
She could replicate that at Strassenburg. She could do something else. Yes, she could.
And something else was her choice in building that place.
Surveillance of past projects like Gehenna was her job, the key thing that the first Ari had created her to do. Be the watchdog. Steer the directed populations in a good direction. Understand. Change at need. Know the program, and know how to change it.
Strassenburg would always be closely tied to Reseune, and it would be hers. Herchosen genesets, her chosen CITs, her designed psychsets, never part of Novgorod or any of the rest of Cyteen: something new under the sun. The thetas she was about to manage for sheer practice would be the foundation of a site where herprograms ran, not her predecessor’s. Every problem case in Reseune was currently worried that the new facility might serve as a gulag for her opposition–and in fact she hadthought of creating a little secure lab there, for the likes of Jordan Warrick.