Part 6 (1/2)

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 s.h.i.+p-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 partners.h.i.+p, 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 relations.h.i.+p . . . 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.