She passed the printout over; they read it, one after the other.

"Sounds reasonable," Catlin said. "I haven't any trouble about it."

"I don't see any problem," Florian said. "It won't take half a minute. If there's no tape to do."

It still scared her. It scared her more than anything else.

But she did what it said. They took their pills and she followed what the paper said; and left them to sleep, then.

And went into her office, shut the door, and used the keyboard with Base One, because she wanted no noise in the apartment at all while they were that far down.

She told Base One the routine was run.

And Base One said: This Base now recognizes their cards.

She read, mostly, late, because she wanted them to wake up before she could rest. She scanned Ari senior's data, on the words Geoffrey Carnath.And she hadunderstood uncle Denys in what he had said happened. She scanned it all the way to the end, when Ari moved out. She read the worst things and sat there feeling strange, just strange, like it was bad, but nobody had died, that was the worst, if somebody had died.

Then they might Disappear someone else.

And she was mad. Mad about things another Ari's guardian had done a long, long time ago, which weren't there, but the Security reports were, right up to when Ari had turned herself and Florian and Catlin over to Security, saying her uncle was abusing Florian.

That was the way Security wrote it. But she knew what had happened. Sort of. She couldn't make a picture in her mind, but she knew, all the same. And Ari talked about getting along with her guardian. I'd have killed him. Like I'd have killed uncle Denys if he'd gone after me. Because you don't play games with Security. Not with Seely, not with Denys. But then where would I be? In a lot of trouble. In alot of trouble.

Her stomach went upset. She had known she was in a corner, deep down. Geoffrey Carnath's security had gotten the better of the first Ari's. They must have had a fight. Something must have happened.

Florian and Catlin had gone to detention. Ari had gone to hospital. Ari, hospital,she typed, for that date. Sedation,it said. Geoffrey Carnath's order. Florian, security.

A medic had seen him. He was hurt. So was Catlin. And they had run tapes on him and Catlin. She got the number on them.

She chased the case through files for an hour and chased the move-in order, and the Family council meeting—where senior staff, knowing what had happened, had given Ari senior a place of her own, with her own key and no one to watch over her, because that was what she demanded to have, because she was threatening to go to the news-services and Geoffrey Carnath was too much trouble for even the whole Family to fight him over the guardianship. True. Everything true, as far as Base One went. Things like that had happened to the first Ari.

They had taken maman. But uncle Denys and uncle Giraud had never done what Geoffrey Carnath had done to the first Ari.

She sat there a long time staring at the screen, and then started looking up some of the words the report had used.

And sat there a long time after, feeling her stomach upset.

She was terribly, terribly relieved when Florian called to her on the Minder and said that he was awake, and all right, just a little sleepy yet.

"I'm here," Catlin said then, a little vaguely; but Catlin made it into the hall before Ari did. Leaning on the wall. "Is there a problem?"

"Nothing," Ari said, "nothing right now. Go sleep, Catlin. Everything's fine. I'm going to fix dinner myself. I'll call you."

Catlin nodded and went back into her room.

There were a lot of things in the apartment, once they started going through it—a lot of Ari senior's clothes that were very nice but too large yet.

Ari senior had been—a bit more on top. And taller. That was spooky too, figuring out in the mirror what size she was going to be. Someday.

There was jewelry. Terribly expensive things. Not near as much as maman's, mostly gold, a lot of what could be rubies, just lying in the chest on the bureau—all these years—but who in the House would steal?

There was a wine cabinet taller than she could reach, which wouldn't have spoiled, she knew that, it was probably real good by now; and there was whiskey and other things under the counter that wouldn't have been hurt by all these years of sitting there.

There was a big tape library. A lot were about Earth and about Pell. A lot were on technical things. A lot were Entertainment. And a lotof those ... had a 20 Years and Over sticker. And titles that made her embarrassed, and uneasy.

Sex stuff. A lot of it.

It was like looking through Ari senior's drawers in her bedroom, like it was private, and she would hate if she were grown-up and dead, to have some twelve-year-old kid going through herdrawers and finding out shehad stuff like that in her library, but it was interesting too, and scary. The first Ari had said there was nothing wrong with the thoughts she had had, just that she was too young and shouldn't be stupid.

But it was all right when you were Older.

She remembered how the first tape felt. And she closed up the cabinet door and wondered what was in them, and whether they would be like the other one. They were just E-tapes. They weren't deep or anything like it. They couldn't hurt you.

If they were hers like everything else in the apartment, then she could do whatever she wanted with them—when she was settled in, when she was sure everything was safe.

It wasn't like being stupid with people,where sex could hurt you.

Kids were supposed to be curious. And there was no way anybody could find out she was using them. Just Catlin and Florian, and they wouldn't mess with her stuff. She could do private things now, real private, and uncle Denys couldn't know.

When she got settled in. You didn't do Entertainment tapes just anytime you wanted, no more than you had all the food you wanted. You got your regular work done.

Even if you thought about how interesting it would be, and what there was to find out, and how the teaching-tape had felt.

Meanwhile the cabinet stayed closed.

"It's all right, come on," she said, and brought Amy and Maddy past the Security guards and up the lift.

She used her keycard on the door and let them in. The Minder told her that Florian and Catlin were not there, they were off in classes doing make-up work, the way she had told them they should.

She saw Amy and Maddy look at each other and look around at the huge front room, real impressed.

Something said to her she ought not let anyone see allof where she lived, or know how things were laid out: she knew Catlin would worry about that. But she showed them the middle of it, which was the big room in front and the kitchen and the breakfast room with the glassed-in garden where nothing was growing yet—and back to the main front room and into the other wing, where there was the big sunken den and the bar and then her office, and her bedroom and the bedrooms that had been Florian's and Catlin's (and were again).

They had oh'ed over this and that at the start, when she said that there were rooms down past the kitchen, mostly offices and stuff. And over the garden. But when they got this far, into still another living room with more rooms yet to go, they just stared around them and looked strange.

That bothered her. She was used to figuring people out, and she couldn't quite figure what they were thinking, except maybe they were worried about there being something dangerous about this, or her, or uncle Denys.

"We don't have to meet down in the tunnels anymore," she said. "We can be up here and there's no way they can find out what we're doing, because Florian and Catlin have this place checked over so nobody can bug us. Not even uncle Denys."