“So that’s why you say the perpetrator is likely beyond justice.”
“It’s one theory.”
“But why in all reason did Jordan Warrick agree to take the hit? Yes, it was a transfer–but he could have appealed.”
Oh, that was disingenuous. Mikhail Corain hadn’t spoken up for Jordan, back then, hadn’t spoken up loudly at all, and had politically hoped for Jordan’s silence, since the immediate precursor to Ari’s death had been Jordan’s meeting with Corain and with Defense. Jordan had been cutting a deal to trade Reseune secrets and go public with charges–if Jordan could get himself and his son out of Reseune and under Defense Bureau and Citizens Bureau protection.
“Who knows?” Yanni said, equally disingenuous.
“So is his return a controversial matter in Reseune?”
Interesting question. Clever way of putting it.
“Not very. He’s settling in; he doesn’t yet have a practice. His son, you may know, runs an important office in Reseune. Young Emory’s studying, mostly, not directly concerned with external affairs. You could say I want to deliver her a more peaceful universe. I want a universe in which she doesn’t have to start out opposing you…a cooperative universe, with less and less motive to destabilize what works–you know, that antiquated notion of progress by compromise? I think we’ve had enough of fringe groups and extremists. I know you don’t like them any better than I do. I’ve tried to initiate compromise in my tenure. Personal legacy, ser. Personal legacy. That’s my ambition.”
Corain nodded quietly over his coffee.
Whether Corain bought it all was a good question. Nobody trusted a psychmaster. Urban legend invented the word, and amplified it into crazy notions of mind control and telepathy, all sorts of nonsense. The answer was, like most things, complicated. Yanni’s reasons were complicated, and the manipulations were complicated: a little truth, aptly distributed, with very few outright lies.
Divert and divide. Redirect the perception of profit involved. Create a little wedge, Defense interests and Citizen interests–those were easy to split. Defense was naturally Expansionist. Citizens was naturally Centrist. The Paxers’ interests, however, weren’t remotely divisible down that great divide of War years politics. Their name meant peace–but their war being over, nowadays they just wanted the power a large movement offered. Paxer rhetoric and Paxer violence could influence events. Violent acts could recruit the young and disaffected, while the old, canny, and astute Paxer leadership, some of whom were openly interviewed on the news these days, drew satisfaction from the fear that surrounded them.
A clever old warhorse like Corain, head both of the Centrist party, and of the Citizens Bureau–the very constituency that happened to contain most of the Paxer movement–did know what grief his party would come to if the Paxers ever got their wish. This might be the time, Corain might well be persuaded, to move the Centrists closer and closer to the same interests as the Expansionists–at least for this generation. Together, Defense, Information, Science, and Trade, the Expansionists had a strong bloc in the Council of Nine: add Citizens to that, and they had an unbreakable majority–on issues that Citizens could remotely favor.
And when the Nine swung that definitive a weight, the Council of Worlds historically fell into line.
That wrapped it up neatly enough. Yanni sipped his coffee, reminisced a little with the first Ari’s old adversary, and listened as much as he spoke.
They didn’t get into the second bottle of the Sauvignon.
They weren’t thatfriendly.
BOOK ONE Section 1 Chapter v
APRIL 22, 2424
1545H
Ari wasn’tin a good mood. The smile was bright enough, a broad grin, a second or two in duration, and then it was gone. She went over paper printout with a forced concentration that just wasn’t up to its usual enthusiasm.
Justin Warrick didn’t ask why. It wasn’t profitable to ask, but her mood was bothersome. Ari wasn’t sulking, nothing to do with him, he sensed. She was just trying hard not to be elsewhere this afternoon, and didn’t volunteer the information that anything was wrong, but there was, somewhere in her universe.
Which, if it wasn’t his doing, he had to take as not his business. Her universe in one sense had widened when Denys had died; in another, in the weeks after, it had gotten a lot more focused, more down to the task at hand, and he was fairly sure she was dropping weight. He saw it in the hand that gripped the stylus, in the angle of the back–backbones showed under the silk jersey. She had a few people on her domestic staff, people who were supposed to be seeing to her welfare and making sure she got meals. She certainly had Florian and Catlin to look out for her and serve as confidants. But something wasn’t right, and he’d begun to suspect it was a troublingly unusual complaint in an eighteen‑year‑old genius‑level CIT: far too muchstudy, obsessive study. Too little real sleep. Taking the cataphoric drug too often, trying to let deepstudy hours sub for sleep, and giving herself no time for dream‑function. That could lead to some real eetee behavior. Ari didn’t say so, but the signs of that were increasingly there, in the weight loss, the slight rawness of nerves.
“I don’t see it,” she said, after scanning page after page, “Justin, I don’t see it.”
“Maybe a little sleep would be a good thing.”
“I sleep just fine.”
“Sure you do,” he said. “Ari, do me a personal favor. Have a little more of it.”
Now he got the frown, full‑force and directed at him. “There’s nothing wrongwith my sleep pattern. I’m just not seeing this problem, is all.”
“Well, possibly I’m wrong.” Not likely. He knew the psychset represented in that printout very well, and he knew the particular case in question, and the right answer was obvious to a much lesser operator. On the other hand, he was dealing with a mind that was capable of taking a new approach to a classic problem, and capable of not pinning the solution where every other operator thought it was. It was an interesting point, whether the obviousness of the answer would make her miss the question…or whether she had rejected the classic answer and was after something else which no other examiner had ever caught.
They weren’t going to find it out in five minutes.
“I want you to take this home,” he said. It was near the end of their regular session. “Don’t look at it again until tomorrow morning. And, young sera–”
“Don’t call me that!”
“Ari. Get some sleep. No study tonight. That’syour assignment.”
A quick flash of dark, sullen eyes. “I’m fine.”
“Sure you are. Take the evening off. Take the night off. Think about it.”
“Too damned much thinking,” she said. “I can getthis, dammit.”
She had a real bent for macrosets, the big picture, a very, very rare skill; he was an expert at microsets, and he taught her what he knew. It was what he did, these days, regular one‑on‑one sessions, five days a week. He gave her cases, she figured them, they discussed the answers and sometimes argued them. They were working on actual integration work, putting psychsets together in a community, letting them run in the original generation and two or three more, and seeing how the interface worked.
But the one he’d given her, and also slipped into the latest mix, was an azi named Young AY‑4, who wasn’t theoretical. AY‑4 had blown up and attacked his teammates…lethally…during the War. Justin hadn’t told her that. He just pointed out something had gone wrong in the integration, and she’d correctly picked up on AY‑4 as the problem. The real‑life AY‑4 had gotten the self‑defense part down, all right, but it had gone bad, very bad, and he had taken himself out along with his teammates, for reasons still debated. The Defense Bureau had trained their own so‑called Supervisors for a certain period during the War, over Reseune’s protests. They’d messed with azi psychsets, thinking they’d turn out a better, more obedient soldier, who could work with anyofficer, not just a Reseune trained Supervisor. Thathadn’t worked outstandingly well–witness the AY‑4 case. It was a famous case in his generation–an azi designation most anyone of his age would recognize.