viii

Justin hugged his coat about him as he and Grant took the outside walk between Residency and the office, and jammed his hands into his pockets. Not a fast walk, despite the morning chill, on a New Year's morning where everyone was slow getting started.

He stopped at the fishpond, bent and fed the fish. The koi knew him. They expected him and came swimming up under the brown-edged lotus. They ruled their little pool between the buildings, they entertained the children of the House and begat their generations completely oblivious to the fact that they were not on the world of their origin.

Here was here. The white old fellow with the orange patches had been taking food from his hand since he was a young boy, and daily, now, since Jordan had gone and he and Grant had sought the outside whenever they could. Every morning.

Spy-dishes could pick up their voices from the House, could pick them up anywhere. But surely, surely, Security just did the easy thing, and caught the temperature of things from time to time by flipping a monitor switch on the apartment, not wasting overmuch time on a quiet pair of tape-designers who had not made the House trouble in years. Security could bring them in for psychprobe anytime it wanted. That they had not—meant Security was not interested. Yet.

Still, they were careful.

"He's hungry," Justin said of the white koi. "Winter; and children don't remember."

"One of the differences," Grant said, sitting on the rock near him. "Azi children would."

Justin laughed in spite of the distress that hovered over them. "You're so damn superior."

Grant shrugged cheerfully. "Born-men are so blind to other norms. We aren't." Another piece of wafer hit the water, and a koi took it, sending out ripples that disturbed the lotus. "I tell you, all the trouble with alien contacts is preconceptions. They should send us."

"This is the man who says Novgorod would be too foreign."

"Us. You and me. I wouldn't worry then."

A long pause. Justin held the napkin of wafers still in his hands. "I wish to hell there was a place."

"Don't worry about it." It was not Novgorod Grant meant. Of a sudden the shadow was back. The cold was back in the wind. "Don't. It's all right."

Justin nodded, mute. They were so close. He had had letters from Jordan. They looked like lace, with sentences physically cut from the paper. But they said, in one salutation: Hello, son. I hear you and Grant are well. I read and re-read all your letters. The old ones are wearing out. Please send more.

His sense of humor is intact, he had commented to Grant. And he and Grant had read and re-read that letter too, for all the little cues it had given him about Jordan's state of mind. Read and re-read the others that got through. Page after page of how the weather was. Talk about Paul—constantly, Paul and I.That had reassured him too.

Things are moving, Denys had said, when he brought up the subject of sending voice tapes. Or making phone calls, carefully monitored.

And they had been so close to getting that permission.

"I can't help but worry," Justin said. "Grant, we've got to be so damn clean for the next little while. And it won't finish it. It won't be the last time. You or I don't have to have done anything."

"They brought the girl there. They didn't stop us from coming. Maybe they didn't expect what happened, but it wasn't our doing. A roomful of psychologists—and they froze. They cued the girl. She was reading them,not us. It's that flux-thinking again. Born-men. They didn't want what happened; and they didwant it, they set up the whole thing to show Ari off, and she was doingit—she was proving what they've worked to prove. And proving nothing. Maybe we cued her. We were watching her. I got caught at it. Maybe that made her curious. She's four years old, Justin. And the whole room jumped. What's any four-year-old going to do?"

"Run to her mother, dammit. She started to. Then everybody relaxed and she picked that up too. And got this look—" He twitched his shoulders as a sudden chill got down his neck. Then shoved his imagination back down again and tried to think. The way no one had, last night.

"Does it occur to you," Grant said, "the fallibility of CIT memory? Flux-thinking. You have prophetic dreams, remember? Youcan dream about a man drinking a glass of milk. A week later you can see Yanni drinking tea at lunch and if seeing him do that has a high shock-value, you'll super the dream-state right over him, you'll swear you dreamed about him doing that, exactly at that table, and even psychprobe can't sort it out after that. It's happened to me twice in my life. And when it does, I take my tape out of the vault and betake myself to the couch for a session until I feel better. Listen to me: I'll concede the child's behavior may have been significant. I'll wait to see how it integrates with other behavior. But if you want my analysis of the situation, every CIT in that room went dream-state. Including you. Mass hallucination. The only sane people in that room for thirty seconds were the azi and that kid, and most of us were keyed on our CITs and bewildered as hell."

"Except you?"

"I was watching you andher."

Justin gave a heavy sigh and some of the tension went out of him. It was nothing, God knew, he did not know.It was what Grant said, a roomful of psychologists forgot their science. Flux-thinking. Shades of values. "Hell with Hauptmann," he muttered. "I'm becoming an Emoryite." Two more quiet breaths. He could remember it with less emotional charge now and see the child—instead of the woman. I'm going to a party at Valery's.

Not a touch of maliciousness in that. She had not been playing her game then. She had looked up with a face as innocent as any child's and offered a let's-be-friends opening. Them and Us. Peace-making, maybe. He was not in touch with his own four-year-old memories. Jacobs, who worked that level in citizen psych, could tell him what a four-year-old CIT was like. But he could haul up a few things out of that dark water: Jordan's face when he was in his thirties.

Himself and Grant feeding the pond-fish. Four or five or six. He was not sure. It was one of his oldest memories and he could not pin it down.

And he sweated, suddenly, shying off.

Why? Why do I do that?

What's wrong with me?

Walls.

Children—had not been an interest of his. Emphatically—not an interest of his. He had mentally shied off every chance to learn, fled his own childhood like a territory he was not going back to; and the preoccupation of Reseune with the Project had disgusted him.

Twenty-three years old and a fool, doing routine work, wasting himself, not thinking to left and right. Just straight down a track. Not checking out much tape because tape meant helplessness; because tape opened up areas he did not want opened.

Throwing down those walls to then,to Jordan, to anything that had been—brought the anger up, made his palms sweat. Getting involved—

But they had becomeinvolved.

"It's a trap, isn't it?" he said to Grant. "Your psychset won't let you see what I saw. But is it valid for her,Grant? She has that flux-dimension, and so do all us CITs."

Grant gave a humorless laugh. "You're conceding I'm right."

"It was a roomful of CITs being fools. But maybe we saw something you didn't."

"Flux. Flux. Klein bottles. True and not-true. I'm gladI know what planet I'm standing on, all the time. And I saw what I saw without supering the past orthe future."