Yanni was up to stuff in Novgorod. Yanni's office wasn't going to tell her that, but Base One did. Base One found it real easy to wander where it liked, into communications between Yanni's office and Novgorod, and between Yanni's office and ReseuneSec; and what Ari heard made her madnot a real Mad, so far, but a good one all the same. Yanni was talking to unusual people, people who'd been enemies, and probably not making records about it. That was a watch-it, but she hadn't told Catlin and Florian about the problem yet, just in case Yanni had a reasonable explanation.

Yanni might guess Base One was into his stuff. Probably he didn't. Denys hadn't known to what extent Base One had invaded Base Two, or if he'd known, he'd hoped he'd worked around it, and he'd hoped he was being careful. Or at least he'd hoped to psych her, which would have been the answer to his problem, if she'd been that stupid. She'd grown up. He'd been one jump too late to stop her.

She ran through all sorts of records on things Yanni had done, from way back. She did find that her predecessor had trusted Yanni ahead of the Nyes. That wasn't a great surprise. Yanni generally told the truth.

She incidentally found that it was the first Ari who had given Yanni instructions that if anything happened to her, she wanted Jane Stra.s.sen to be the surrogate.

And then she looked just a little too deep: Yanni had had a long conversation with Maman about that, and Maman had said, h.e.l.l, no, what do I want with a baby? I had one, thanks. See how that turned out. No. Absolutely not.

Then Yanni had promised Maman if she did it for them she could go back to s.p.a.ce when the job was done. That she'd have a major directorate somewhere in s.p.a.ce, and Maman had said, well, she'd think about it because Maman really loved being in s.p.a.ce. The War was what had made it necessary for Maman to be down on the planet, because it was safer, she found that fact out between the lines, but after the War, Maman had been so important to Reseune. she'd been stuck in an administrative post and hadn't been able to get transferred back up to the station. So for that promise, Maman said maybe she could put up with a few years of inconvenience.

That hurt. That really hurt, and it really bothered hershe didn't cry about it, but the information just bored a sore spot in her heart, until finally she psyched herself and said Maman had changed her mind eventually, that it didn't matter how it had started, she'd finally Gotten her Maman, all unexpected, because Maman had turned out to love her. She wouldn't believe that wasn't so.

Well, it was what you got for getting into people's records and eavesdropping: you caught people saying things you never wanted to hear, and this one, hurtful as it was, taught her that in a major way.

But what she found went on teaching her. She couldn't leave it where she'd left it. She couldn't stop looking at it.

She got into Maman's records, too. She'd never gotten a letter from Maman after Maman had gone away to s.p.a.ce, and there were no letters from Maman hidden in the record, but she did find her Maman's report on her when she was five. She's a handful. But site's bright. G.o.d, she's bright, She scares me.

Ari Senior had also saidthis turned up in Maman's lettersLet Stra.s.sen choose the second surrogate. And Maman was going to pick Yanni to take over her upbringing after Maman went back to s.p.a.ce, but Giraud hadn't allowed that.

That was worth a Mad, too: Giraud had just overridden Maman, being head of Security. He'd sent Maman to s.p.a.ce, then ignored her choice, and ended up choosing Denys, as being a relative closer to her as well as actually being a Special himself, without the Senate declaration that said so. Which Yanni wasn't.

No question where Giraud's reasoning lay, however. Giraud hadn't wanted any power edging over into Yanni's hands, and Yanni was the man that would take it and do what he pleased.

And of possible candidates to take her on, Giraud wasn't of the disposition. But Denys had agreed to it. Denys had probably just hated it; but Denys would have done it to get power.

Possibly, too, it was because Denys couldn't stand not knowing how she was developing. Denys had liked puzzles. And she'd been a puzzle to himat close range. And by the time he was in it, he'd realized that an azi nurse wasn't going to keep her from disrupting his life, nor was domestic staff, nor even his own bodyguard.

The Child has subverted the minder, she read on a certain date, in a frustrated communication to Giraud. she read on a certain date, in a frustrated communication to Giraud. She eluded Seely. She's a monster. She eluded Seely. She's a monster.

She liked that one. It echoed Maman, in a Denys tone. She forgot for two seconds that she'd lost one and killed the other. For a fluxed second she was just there again, a little girl in Denys's household, pursuing a Mad about losing Maman, a Mad that had never let her be friendly with Denys and never would.

Or maybe it was just good taste, she thought. She'd picked her enemies, and she'd been pretty accurate so far.

And then, with the thought of Denys, she riffled through the rest of that electronic file, the one that slowly built a case against Denys, finding justification for killing him And, still in flux-state, back to Yanni's file, as large as Denys', in Base One.

Was there a connection? Did one temporary authority equal the other? Was Yanni on the level with her?

Denys might have killed her predecessor, and then made it look as if Jordan had done it, so Jordan was exiled for it. Or at leastGiraud had dug up the evidence. Giraud had hated the Warricks with a pa.s.sion.

But it had been Yanni who had actually brokered the Family deal that got Jordan into Planys, close and protected. There was a lot more security at Planys for several reasonsthe military base, the isolation of oceans you couldn't even fly across without decon; the fact that Planys worked on a lot of military projects and every communication that went out of there went through security. If they'd sent Jordan to s.p.a.ce for exile, there'd have been ship-calls, people coming and going. Not at Planys.

So it was both a closer arrest, and a safer onen.o.body was going to a.s.sa.s.sinate Jordan inside PlanysLabs, where visitors were so closely tracked. Giraud had been perfectly capable of arranging an accident, wherever else Jordan might have ended up, inside some Reseune facility. Yanni had saved Jordan from that.

Giraud had had power, a great deal of power just after the first Ari had died. And he had used it. A lot. So you could say he'd benefitted from Ari dying, and that was a motive. You could almost suspect him of killing the first Ari.

But in all his communications and even messages to Denys, he'd really been upset by Ari's death. He'd seemed to view it as a tremendous loss to Reseuneworse, a premature one, before they'd gotten the psychogenesis project really organized. They'd taken a whole year getting her started. So for one reason or another, they really hadn't been ready.

And once she'd started looking and sounding like her predecessor, Giraud had warmed up to her, and started doing her favors in a very fond way. She hadn't wanted to like him. But she'd ended up liking him, and still did, even knowing what he'd done to the Warricks.

The hour the first Ari had died, she'd arranged for the first Florian and the first Catlin not to be with hershe'd sent Florian and Catlin each off on an errand. She'd been alone, then. Jordan had come in. The sniffer at least proved that. Jordan admitted they'd had an argument, which no monitor had picked upagain, some device had broken, and n.o.body knew how. She'd died. But the crime scene had been muddled up because Denys argued they should call in the Moreyville police, not to have it investigated only by ReseuneSec, so as not to have any political accusations of a coverup. And in that process there'd been a lot of people going in and out, which they never should have been allowed to do: that was Yanni's note on the case. The sniffers' evidence was muddled for the same reason there were fingerprints all overa lot of people used that lab, and a lot of people had been in and out in the immediate furor over Ari's death before the Moreyville investigators ever got there.

Should she take that at face value, as just the confusion of a bad, bad moment in Reseune's history? Maybe. The authority that ran everything had died, and for an hour or so n.o.body had been running things. Departments were all running at their own admin levels, no coordination, n.o.body to call or appeal to, until Giraud and Yanni had stepped in.

And Ari sending Florian and Catlin away. . . had she known she'd never see them again? Had she known she was killing them? Had she kept that cold a face and not given anything away to them, who'd have read her the way her Florian and her Catlin could read her? Some people thought the first Ari had killed herself. But she didn't know how the first Ari could have ever gotten that intention past her Florian and Catlin, if they were anything like hers.

She scanned Ari's notes from immediately before she died. She had, a hundred times. She searched administrative comments on Jordan, and b.a.s.t.a.r.d was about the sum of comments from Giraud and no few others, plus a note that Jordan had found out about Ari having run an intervention on Justin, and that Jordan was madder than h.e.l.l.

But Ari's records stopped with the lab notes, right at the end of a sentence. Period. Was it significant that Ari had finished her last sentence?

She would finish a sentence, herself, even if somebody came in while she was writing. It was just the way she was.

Base One had apparently shut down the instant Ari's death was logged. Base One had gone into an entirely different mode, truncated its wide information-gathering to a single, computer-driven thread, all but shut downfor so many years some people must haw thought Denys's base in the house system had actually become Base One, even if it called itself Base Two. But Denys had known better. Denys had gotten her to log onto Base One when she was old enough. And maybe he'd hoped he could get his own access on it. But it hadn't done a lot when Denys was there.

And then Base One had said, h.e.l.lo, Ari. In her predecessor's voice. In her room. She'd gained her secret friend. Her childhood advisor. Denys had been aware she used Base One to a certain extent, after that, but his Base continued as the dominantly active one in System. Maybe he knew Base One would be pegged to her age, and that she wouldn't be able to use it until she was the right age. But Base One had always treated her as two years older than she really was.

Denys had been safe until she'd gotten the keys to open Base One wide and set it back to work at full stretch, as it had been in the first Ari's day, a.s.sembling and collating all the log notes from the years it had been asleepand it suddenly took priority.

She sped through the mundane records. Being prime in System, nearly identical with System, Base One left no footprints where it went. She'd asked it to bring up remarks in which she or her predecessor or Maman had figured. It found those. And later, it found Justin's.

She felt abraded, rubbed raw, when she read Denys's message to Giraud, saying, "Stra.s.sen spoiled the little b.i.t.c.h. Systematically."

Her eyes stung. She backed off, mentally, and just scanned itshe could read very, very lastand picked out keywords that were highlighted in colors. She got vocal records and listened to tone of voice, reserving judgement. It didn't come out better for Denys or Giraud. She heard Abban's remarks, that cold, distinct voice that sent chills through her. Abban had been near the labs when Ari died.

But Abban had been Giraud's bodyguard in those years, before Giraud died and Abban joined Seely in Denys' household.

Curious. Companion azi went in ones. Bodyguards went in twos. And neither Abban nor Seely had been companion azi, not if you really knew them. They'd been like Florian and Catlin, products of the training down in Green Barracks, and deadly dangerous. Giraud had been born, and seven years later, Denys had been born, and Abban and Seely had been in the household with Giraud. When Giraud was sixteen and making his first trip to Novgorod with his mother, leaving nine-year-old Denys at Reseune. Abban had gone with Giraud, and Seely had stayed with Denys. Which was the way it had been, forever after, when they set up separate domiciles. That was the way it had been until Giraud died.

Had it started out a partnership, Abban with Seely? It wasn't in the manuals, which had been maintained by Giraud's mother, for starters. It would have been Giraud's mother who had failed to record that small detail: she was the expert that had run them, at the start.

A weird arrangement between the brothersseven years separated in birth, but so. so close lifelong that they were part of each other and neither ever married or had a relationship . . . and a mother who didn't keep complete records of azi under her management, who had, possibly, a secret few pages to those manuals that she didn't enter into the record. For what logical reason?

Some furtive sense of protection of her boys, a layer of security' that would always tie them together?

To judge by the rest of the world, Reseune had some real odd family connections, things that weren't ordinary. For one thing, people who ran birthlabs could do pretty much as they pleasedJordan wanted a Parental Replicate, and the first Ari had encouraged it, and so there was Justin. Ari wanted a tag on Justin, so she created Grantespecially for Justin, and one of a kind.

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 twothat was 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. G.o.d knew what she'd tried on her own sons, promoting that intellectshe'd wanted Giraud to come up to Denys' levelbut 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 monsterall 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. "Do it. You set the number. You know what's needed better than I do. Just pick them, for G.o.d'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 rea.s.signing; and one good pick out of Amy's dispersed office for a supplies clerk: Gallic. Gallic 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 sandwichesprovoking Catlin to suggest armed force might hasten dinnerbut 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 fluxwell, 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 h.e.l.l, and knew it: mixing categories and jumping from one thought to the next in high fluxthat was how ideas were born out of nothing. But she so wanted to sleep, and didn't want to take a sleeping pillthere'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, a.s.sume 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 enemyafter an off-record meeting with Defense, which was a bureau that hadn't been that nice to her her at all. at all.

That didn't make for a good night's sleep, no matter how badly she needed it.

Chapter vii.

April 26, 2424 1506 H.

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 bitand everything ever to be chained to itfirmly 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 b.u.t.ton-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 Systembut 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 deadcheerful 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.

Just a small convenience. The weathermakers did nothing in this instance but hurry things a few hours and make sure that Yanni Schwartz, inbound from Novgorod, would land meticulously on time.

Reseune was tiny on the surface of the world that was Cyteena white dot from the perspective of Cyteen Station, seat of the Union Senate, which dealt with the wide universe. She'd seen her worldwell, half of itwell, at least the mid-continental Novaya Volga valley, which was the highway down to Novgorod, to Swigert Bay, and the wide ocean.

Mostly the world outside the human zones was desert. The native life saw to that.

Excepting woolwood forests, which loosed deadly strands human lungs never wanted to meet.

Excepting the mud flats and ocean beaches near human habitation, which frothed with an unwholesome stew of dieoffyou really didn't want to smell it.

Terran stuff had early on gotten into the oceans, a bright idea that the modern generation was working to remediate. Purer Reseune water flowed down to the oceans on this continent these daysgone were the days when raw sewage had run down the river, deliberately loosed into Swigert Bay and outward, killing native life, breeding wildly, and creating that lovely yellow dieoff froth on the beaches.

In the early days, the driving colonial notion of how to manage Cyteen had been changing air and land, ridding the world of native species, creating a new Earth for humankind. Then they'd found that the native lifeor part of itcould prolong a human life for decades. Now, the plan was carefully managed enclaves, and in a small programtoo small a program, in Ari's viewPlanysLabs and ReseuneLabs alike tried to save what they'd begun too hastily to destroy.

The first Ari had had a lot to do with that change of purpose . . . and the growth of the rejuv industry. Through that, and control of the azi system, she'd built the economic power of Reseune, and, using its dominance in the Bureau of Science, gained immense political power.

Yanni Schwartz wielded that power now, being Proxy Councillor for Science. And down in Novgorod, where the planetary legislature sat, the Bureaus of Science, Defense, Information, and Trade, habitual allies, had all joined with Mikhail Corain's Citizens Bureau to authorize an azi-production lab at Fargone. She'd heard the news. She'd gotten it before the official broadcast. Budget items she'd seen as headed for easy pa.s.sage, which was what Yanni was supposed to be promoting down in the capital, had been quietly dropped from the legislative agenda, none objecting.

She objected. And she was p.i.s.sed as h.e.l.l.

Yanni was supposed to persuade the opposition party to pa.s.s an expansion of the upriver remediation project. But instead . . . the Council voted on a budget for a new azi lab, on the fringes of s.p.a.cealpha-capable, no less, clear out at Fargone. Reseune didn't let that technology off the planet, and all of a sudden they were moving it out of Cyteen System?

The remediation budget was dead until the next session, and meanwhile how were they going to keep the team of scientists on that project doing something creative? Reseune was going to have to fund their salaries solo, or have them break apart and go onto other projects, momentum lost, knowledge scattered.

Session was over. Yanni was coming home. And she had questions. A lot of them.

Nothing argumentative, she decided. A nice, quiet welcome home. Nothing to let on how much she knew about the secret meetings. If Yanni didn't know how far she was in command of Base One, she didn't want to make it too evident; and if he knew, she didn't want to let ReseuneSec know it.

"Staff memo," she shot out, via house minder. "Yanni. Dinner."

That order flew to staff, and, give or take the emotional fragility of the staff cook, she dismissed dinner preparations from her current list of concerns. Florian and Catlin would see to the invitation and make sure Yanni and dinner arrived in due time . . . if they had to send down to catering.

Chapter viii.

April 25, 2424 1652 H.

Yanni Schwartz was on his flight back to Reseune, and sera, who had been definitely On and angry for the last several days, wanted to see Proxy Councillor Schwartz, socially, with due courtesies, of courseand immediatelyfor dinner.

Florian got the message in the apartment's security station at the same moment Catlin did, at the console next to him, and they exchanged hardly more than a flicker of the eyes before Florian turned to make the supper arrangements. He keyed. A message flew to Yanni's Reseune office, and a small routineanother few keystrokessearched Yanni's existing appointments for conflict.

None. Unless Yanni had set something up that wasn't on his schedule here at Reseune, he hadn't any dinner appointment.

He had one now, and Yanni's domestic staff had become aware of it in time not to prepare dinner for his homecoming.

Florian fired off a done done, advised their own skittish kitchen of formal dinner for two, and resumed work on his own problem, which had, for the last several days, involved searching azi profiles of availables for sera's household.

The two of them, Ari's personal bodyguard, were sera's absolute top-level staff. Second in rank were Marco and Wes, who ran night shift, and protected the household any time he and Catlin were both off premises they were older, much older, and canny in the extreme. That would leave Marco and Wes exactly where they were, their backup, no matter what others came inand besides that, Wes had a special authority, being their on-staff medic. Corey and Mato ran errands, helped in kitchen and served as backup security personnel as well as domesticsthey had come in from another staff, and their qualifications were excellent. A solitary and harried beta, Callie-BC-3218, majordomo pro tem, ran their domestic staff with tolerable efficiency.

Then there was Gianni, their pro tem cook. Gianni would have entered meltdown had the guests tonight been more than two, but he would likely manage one more serving, given adequate notice, instead of sera's usual changeable schedule.