The first Ari died. Her Florian and Catlin died. Maman died. Giraud died. Denys died. Abban died. Seely died.

Thieu died. Patil died. Now Spurlin. Seven were killed by violence. Three had been old. And now there was Spurlin. The odds were definitely not with natural causes, when power passed from hand to hand.

“A lot of people have died,” she said to Florian. “A lot of people. You can’t count Denys and Abban and Seely. That was us pushing back when they pushed us. But your predecessors and mine… whywould Abban be taking Denys’ orders, if it was Abban that did it?”

“If Denys ran tape on him,” Florian said. “If somebody good set it up. Denys had a lot of opportunity.”

“Was he the only one who could?” she asked. Her hands had fallen to his shoulders. He was a safe haven, Florian was. “Who could get to him, else? Track that.”

Fabric of history, all decayed, all the evidence, evaporating with every stray gust from a vent. The rime ice melted. The body went to the sun. People went on dying around the hinge‑points of power. It had gone on a long, long time. Before any time she remembered, certainly.

“What priority?” Florian asked her. His hands were at her waist. He’d become a young man. He’d become what he was designed to be and he asked an important question: in the crisis of the moment, with Spurlin dead and Jacques’ decisions in doubt and Lynch possibly next on somebody’s list–what priority, the investigation of three twenty‑year‑old murders?

Absolute priority. It was the environment of her life. It was the reason she existed. Because she existed, all the others had died: her doing, or others’ doing, because of her.

Some few were still alive, still in power, in various places. Some of them she trusted. And that could be deadly.

“High,” she said. “See if it was investigated, that first. Then see how wellit was investigated.”

“We’ll do that,” Florian said.

She kissed him, not for any good reason, except it fuzzed the brain for a moment, and it felt good, and she wanted to feel good for a moment. She wanted to lie to her senses for a moment and say they were all safe.

But it wasn’t true. The kiss was over and she sent him off to Catlin and Wes and Marco, and knew he’d do both–keep up with what was going on and investigate old history, both, if he and Catlin had to give up sleep.

They weren’t safe. And the next few days were going to be hard ones. Dangerous. She wasn’t ready to take over. Yanni’d told her that. But events weren’t going to wait for her. People were pushing, already, to get places and do things before she could possibly interfere and change the rules. People might die, in that push.

She couldn’t prevent it. That was the point.

So far, she couldn’t prevent it.

BOOK THREE Section 5 Chapter i

JULY 24, 2424

0821H

Giraud and Seely and Abban all reached their twenty‑third week. They swallowed…their lungs developed more passageways, and blood vessels, which would one day soon be useful: the proximity of these structures to each other would ultimately make it possible to breathe. Right now they drew their oxygen through the bioplasm of the artificial womb itself. And it rocked, and moved, and occasionally received sounds, internally generated, which made muscles twitch. By now, the brains sent faint light stimuli to a particular center, and sound to another. Nothing was overload. Everything was even keel.

They each weighed about half a kilo, and looked human. Seely weighed a few grams more than Giraud, and was a few centimeters taller. Abban was larger, and weighed six grams more than Giraud. Proportionately, he always would be larger. But Giraud would overtake both in girth, and Seely in weight, before he was fifty.

They moved, they turned. They had their own agendas, based somewhat on what the womb was doing. But something different had happened. The two wombs that contained azi were active at scheduled times. The one that contained a CIT was completely random. Chaos was a part of Giraud’s life now. Order had begun to assert itself in the other two. And that would always be true.

BOOK THREE Section 5 Chapter ii

JULY 25, 2424

1931H

Probably every vid in Reseune that wasn’t in a child’s room was tuned to the Novgorod news channel. That was probably true up on Cyteen Station.

This election mattered–immensely. The balance of power between parties was at stake. And nobody knew the results yet. The computers were counting and recounting and running complex check routines.

Justin and Grant occupied themselves with a manual, at home, over pizza–the downstairs restaurant, named Seasons, had done mostly deliveries tonight, very likely. Ari was closeted with her staff across the hall. Justin had seen the deliveryman with a trolley full of other orders, mostly pizza, with one address designation on it, and that was Amy’s apartment…so he had the notion a lot of people were there.

Yanni–Yanni wasn’t home, or if he was, he was quiet about it. More likely he was in his office; and if Ari wasn’t with her young friends for something this important, it was because Ari was busy and planned to be busy, whatever happened.

Himself, he just read through a great deal of Jordan’s notes, exactly replicated: he’d already read the basic program. So had Grant. And he couldn’t concentrate worth a damn, with the clock now thirty‑three minutes past the anticipated hour of the announcement of results. So he skimmed ahead, looking for the last and next to last note Jordan had made on that manual. Sequence of note was determined by the outline of programming itself. But Jordan’s handwriting had changed over twenty years, and he knew the way it had changed. It wasn’t that hard to find the latest ones.

“Page 183.23,” he said to Grant, a little troubled by what he saw.

Grant flipped pages, settled.

A little line appeared between Grant’s brows.

The station had been playing old tape of Spurlin, discussing Gorodin’s term as Proxy, Gorodin’s death–natural causes, that; then commentators discussing Spurlin’s suspicious death and the fact the special team at the University Hospital hadn’t published a cause of death–discussing Khalid’s last administration, familiar stuff to anybody who hadn’t been living in the outback for the last ten years–including the famous argument with young Ari–over and over and over. They’d turned the audio way down.

But the breaking news flasher went on, and Justin said, “Minder, sound.”

Audio came up. “ The five minute alert has been given. We are five minutes away from hearing the results of…”

BOOK THREE Section 5 Chapter iii

JULY 25, 2424

1940H

“…the Bureau of Defense election,”the vid said, and the web didn’t get the results or relay them any faster–just the timelag between Cyteen Station, where the counting was done, and Novgorod, where the news station resided. Base One, directly receiving the satellite, was a fraction faster than the news station.

Microdifference, in the scheme of things. Ari forced herself to have a sip of water and waited as the minute counter ran. Florian and Catlin, Marco and Wes, and Theo and Jory all watched the big screen. Nobody said anything.

She had contingencies in mind. She hadn’t said what they were, because she didn’t want even her most intimate staff knowing what she’d do in certain instances, in case that what‑she’d‑do changed someday, putting staff at disadvantage.

Second sip of water.

The seconds ticked down. Two minutes and fewer.

She put a call through to Amy’s apartment, where all the gang was. “Amy? Ari here.”

Amy answered, nearly instantly. “ Ari?”

“Listening, I take it. If it’s Spurlin I’ll send champagne down there. If it’s Khalid–you’re on your own. In either case–I’m going to be busy for a bit. Hang on.”