Cherryh, C J - Alliance-Union 08 (107 page)

Maybe Jordan picked up his nervousness, because Jordan looked at him, laughed and said: "Relax. They monitor us from time to time. It's all right. Hello, Jean!" —to the ceiling.

"We know each other," Jordan said then. "Planys is a very small establishment. Sit down. We'll make coffee. God, there's so much to talk about."

It was very lonely, the apartment without Grant. There was ample justification for worry, and Justin swore he was not going to spend four uninterrupted days at it.

So he read awhile, did tape awhile, an E-dose only, a piece of fluff from library. And read again. Ari had given him an advance copy of Emory's
IN PRINCIPIO,
the first of the three-volume annotated edition of Emory's archived notes, which the Bureau of Science was publishing in cooperation with the Bureau of Information, and which was now selling as fast as presses could turn them out in the Cyteen edition and already on its way on ships which had bid fabulously for it, a packet of information destined for various stations which would in turn pay for the license, sell printout and electronic repros to their own populations and sell more rights to ships bound further on.

Even, possibly, more than possibly, to Earth.

While Reseune accounts piled up an astonishing amount of credit.

Every library wanted copies. Scientists in the field did. But it was selling in the general market with a demand that could only be called hysteria: a volume of extremely heavy going, illustrated, with annotations so extensive there were about three lines of Emory's notes to every page, and the rest was commentary, provided by himself and by Grant, among others: he was the JW and Grant was the GALX; YS was Yanni Schwartz; and WP, Wendell Peterson; and AE2 was Ari, who had gotten the original text out of Archive and provided reference notes on some of the most obscure parts. DN was Denys Nye; GN was Giraud; JE was John Edwards; and PI was Petros Ivanoy, besides dozens of techs and assistants who served in editing and collation—each department head and administrator to read and vet the material from his own staff.

Dr. Justin Warrick, it said in the fine print in the table of contributors. Which, secretly, like a little child, he read over and over just to see it confirmed. Grant, they listed as Grant ALX Warrick, E.P.,
emeritus psychologiae,
which meant an azi who should have a doctorate in psych, and would have, automatically, if he became CIT. It pleased Grant more than Grant would let on.

CIT silliness, Grant had said. My patients certainly don't care.

But it was there, in print. And meanwhile the general public was buying copies, long waiting lists at booksellers—the Bureau had figured on strong library interest, but
never
anticipated average citizens would buy them, and certainly was bewildered that they were selling at that rate at a pre-publication price of 250 cred per volume—until an embarrassed Bureau of Information cut the price to 120 and then to 75, based on advance orders; and that brought in an absolute flood of orders. There were precious few sales in fiche or tape, except to the libraries: the actual books, printed on permasheet, thank you, were status objects: one could hardly display a microfilm to one-up one's neighbors.

Young Ari avowed herself completely bewildered by the phenomenon.

People know, Justin had said to her, that your predecessor did tremendously important things. They don't know
what
she did. They certainly can't understand the notes. But they feel like they ought to understand. What you ought to do, you know—is write a volume of your own notes: your own perspective on doing the volume. The things you've learned from your predecessor. You
ask
the BI if they'd be interested in the rights to
that.

Not surprisingly, Information jumped at the chance.

Now Ari was struggling to put her own notes in shape. And coming to him with: Do you think . . . and sometimes just chatter—about the hidden notes, about things as full of revelations as the books he had spent a year helping annotate with the barest explanations of the principles involved.

She had sent a copy of
IN PRINCIPIO
to Jordan.

"Because it has your name in it," Ari had said to him, "and Grant's."

"If it gets through," he had said. "Planys Security may not like it. Not to mention Customs."

"All right," she had said. "So I'll send it with Security. Let them argue with that."

She did thoughtful things like that. In a year and a half in her wing she had come through with every promise she had made, gotten him and Grant a secretary, taken the pressure off—

If something went wrong or something glitched, Florian was on the phone very quickly; and if Florian could not resolve it, it was—Wait, ser, sera will handle it—after which Ari would be on the line, with a technique that ranged rapidly between
This has to be mistaken—
to a flare that department heads learned to avoid. Maybe it was a realization Ari might remember these things in future. Maybe—Justin suspected so—it was because that voice could start so soft, go to a controlled low resonance uncommon at her age—then pick up volume in a punch that made nerves jump: that made his jump, for certain, and evoked memories. But she never raised that voice with him, never pushed him, always said please and thank you—until he found himself actually on the inside of a very safe circle and
liking
where he worked—with a small, niggling fear that he was losing his edge, becoming less worried, less defensive, relying too much on Ari's promises—

Fool, he told himself.

But he grew so tired of fighting, and the thought that he might have reached a situation where he could draw breath awhile, that he might actually have found a land of safety, even if it meant difficulties to come. . .
later
was all right.

Ari was well aware of what came in and out of her wing, was aggressively defensive of her staffs time—her attention to pennies and minutes was, God, the living echo of Jane Strassen; so that, beyond the annotations which totaled about a hundred twenty pages between himself and Grant, and three months' intensive work, she accepted only design work for her wing, only troubleshooting after others had done the brute work, and it went, thank God, immediately
back
to junior levels in some other wing when he or Grant had provided the fix, no returns, no would-you-mind's? and no 'but we thought you could do that, we're running behind.'

So he critiqued Ari's work, answered Ari's questions, did the few fixes her wing ran, and had the actual majority of his time to use on his own projects—as Grant did, doing study of his own on the applications of endocrine matrix theory
in
azi tape, which Grant was going to get a chance to talk over with Jordan—Grant was very much looking forward to it.

They were, overall, happier than he remembered since—a long time; and it was the damnedest thing, waking up in the middle of the night as he did, with nightmares he could not remember.

Or stopping sometimes in the middle of work or walking home or wherever, overwhelmed by a second's panic, of nothing he could name except fear of the ground under his feet, fear that he was being a fool, and fear because he had no choice but be where he was.

Fear, perhaps, that he had not won: that he had in fact lost by the decisions he had made, and it would only take some few years yet to come clear to him.

All of which, he told himself severely, was a neurotic, compulsive state, and he resisted it—tried to weed it out when he found it operative. But take tape for it, he would not; not even have Grant run a little tranquilizing posthyp on him—being afraid of that too.

Fool, he told himself, exasperated at the track his thoughts tended to run, and marked his place and laid the book aside.

Emory for bedtime reading.

Maybe it was the fact he could still hear that voice, the exact inflection she would use on those lines he read.

And the nerves still twitched.

He rattled around an empty apartment in the morning, toasted a biscuit for breakfast, and went to the office—not the cramped, single office he and Grant had used for years, but the triple suite that Ari had leased—physically in the Ed Wing, which was back, in a sense, to where they had begun—simply because that wing had space and no one else did: an office apiece for himself and Grant, and one for Em, the secretary the pool had sent, a plump, earnest lad quite glad to get into a permanent situation where he could, conceivably, come up in rating.

He read the general advisories, the monthly plea from catering to book major orders a week in advance; a tirade from Yanni about through-traffic in Wing One, people cutting through the lower hall. Em arrived at 0900, anxious at finding the office already open, and got to work on the filing while he started on the current design.

That went on till lunch and during—a pocket-roll and a cup of coffee in the office; and a concentration that left him stiff-shouldered and blinking when the insistent blip of an Urgent Message started flashing in the upper left corner of the screen.

He keyed to it. It flashed up:

I
need to talk to you. I'm working at home today. —AE.

He picked up the phone. "Ari, Base One," he told it.

Florian answered. "Yes, ser, just a second." And immediately, Ari: "Justin. Something's come up. I need to talk to you."

"Sure, I'll meet you at your office."
Is it Grant? God, has something happened?

"Meet me here. Your card's cleared. Endit."

"Ari, I don't—"

The Base had gone off. Dammit.

He did not meet Ari except with Grant; except in the offices; except sometimes with Catlin and Florian, out to lunch or an early dinner. He kept it that way.

But if something had happened, Ari would not want to argue details over the phone; if something had happened with Grant—

He keyed off the machine, and got up and went, gathering up his jacket, telling Em to shut down and go home, everything was fine.

He headed over to the wing where Ari's apartment was, showed his card to Security at the doors and got a pass-through without question.

Dammit, he thought, his heart pounding, it had better be a good reason, it had better be business—

It had better
not
be because Grant was momentarily not in the picture.

"Come in," Florian said, at the door. "Sera is waiting for you."

"What does she want?" he asked, not committing himself. "Florian, —is this a good idea?"

"Yes, ser," Florian said without hesitation.

He walked in then, sweating, not only from the trip over. The room, the travertine floors, the couch—was a vivid flash of then and now. "Is it Grant?"

"Your jacket, ser? Sera urgently needs to talk with you."

"About what? —What's happened?"

"Your jacket, ser?"

He pulled the jacket off, jerked a resistant sleeve free, handed it to Florian as Ari arrived in the living room from the right-hand hall.

"What in hell's going on?" he asked.

She gestured toward the sunken living room, the couch; and came down the steps to take a seat there.

He came and sat down at the opposing corner. Not the private living room: thank God. He did not think he could have held together.

"Justin," she said, "thank you for coming. I know—I know how you feel about this place. But it's the only place—the only one I'm absolutely sure there's no monitoring but mine. I want you to tell me the truth, now, the absolute truth: Grant's safety depends on this. Is your father working with the Paxers?"

"My— God. No. No. —How in hell could he?"

"Let me tell you: I've got a report on my desk that says there are leaks out of Planys. That your father—has been talking with a suspect. Security is watching Grant very carefully. They fully expect Jordan to attempt an intervention with him—"

"He wouldn't! Not—not on something like that. He wouldn't do that to Grant."

"Your father could manage something like that without tape, without anything but a keyword, with someone of Grant's ability. I know what Grant's memory is like."

"He
won't
do it. It's a damned set-up."

"It may be," she said quietly. "That's why I wanted to talk to you, fast, before Security has a chance, because I'll do this: I'll look for all the truth. I'm the one it's against. And I've been aware of this—for a while; from long before Grant got that pass. Grant's gone into the middle of a Security operation that I don't want to agree with. I don't want to think that Grant could work against me, or that you could, but I have to protect myself—which is why I took this chance."

"I don't understand." He felt the old panic—too experienced to give way to it. Keep the opposition calm, keep the voices down, go along with things. He did not think Ari was at the head of whatever was going on, not with what he knew of where authority was in the House. "Ari, tell me what's going on."

"People who protect me ... don't want me near you. That's why I waited and let Grant go—because I knew—I know very well that it's a set-up against you, which is why I called you to come here."

"Why is that? What do you want?"

"Because I have to know. That's first. And I know how you hate this place, but it's the only place, the only place I can trust." She reached into her left-hand pocket, and pulled out a little vial. Amber glass. "This is kat. It's a deep dose. You can help me or you can leave now. But this is the chance I have. You go in the tape lab and take this, and let me get you on tape—I promise, I
promise,
Justin, no lousy tricks. Just the truth on tape, for me to use. This is what I need. This is the kind of documentation I can use with the Bureau, if I have to go that far. This is the chance I have to believe you."

He flashed badly, totally disoriented, unable to think for a few breaths. Then he reached out for the vial and she gave it to him.

Because there was no choice. Not a thing he could do. He only thought—
God, I don't know if I can do this. I don't know if I can stay sane.

"Where?" he said.

"Florian," she said; and he got up shakily and went after Florian as Florian indicated the hallway to the right.