Cherryh, C J - Alliance-Union 08 (68 page)

"I want to know where Sam Whitely is."

"He's down at the mechanics school! Let me go, let me
go—"

"Florian has a knife," sera said. "Do you want to see it? Shut up and answer me. What do you know about my maman?"

"I don't know anything about your maman! I swear I don't!"

"Stop sniveling. You tell me what I ask or I'll have Florian cut you up. Hear me?"

"I don't know anything, I don't know."

"Why am I poison?"

"I don't know!"

"You know, Amy Carnath, you know, and if you don't start talking we're going to go down deep in the tunnels and Catlin and Florian are going to ask you, you hear me? And you can scream and nobody's going to hear you."

"I don't know. Ari, I don't know, I swear I don't."

Sera Carnath was crying and hiccuping, and Ari said:

"Florian, —"

"I can't tell you!" sera Carnath screamed. "I can't, I can't, I can't!"

"Can't tell me what?"

Sera Carnath gulped for air, and sera pulled sera Carnath's blouse loose and started unbuttoning it, one-handed.

"They'll send us away!" sera Carnath cried, flinching away; but Catlin grabbed her from behind. "They'll send us away!"

Sera stopped and said: "Are you going to tell me everything?"

Sera Carnath nodded and gulped and hiccuped.

"All right. Let her go, Catlin. Amy's going to tell us."

Catlin let sera Carnath go, and sera Carnath backed up to a bundle of pipes and stood with her back against that. Florian kept the light on her.

"Well?" sera asked.

"They send you away," sera Carnath said. Her teeth were chattering. "If anybody gets in trouble with you, they can send them to Fargone."

"Who
does?"

"Your uncles."

"Giraud," sera said.

Sera Carnath nodded. There was sweat on her face, even if it was cold in the tunnels. She was crying, tears pouring down her cheeks, and her nose was running.

"All the kids?" sera asked.

Sera Carnath nodded again.

Sera came closer and took sera Carnath by the shoulder, not rough. Sera Carnath thought sera was going to hit her, but sera patted her shoulder then and had her sit down on the steps. Sera got down on one knee and put her hand on sera Carnath's knee.

"Amy, I'm not going to hit you now. I'm not going to tell you told. I want to know if you know anything about why my maman got sent away."

Sera Carnath shook her head.

"Who
sent her?"

"Ser Nye. I guess it was ser Nye."

"Giraud?"

Sera Carnath nodded, and bit her lips.

"Amy, I'm not mad at you. I'm not going to be mad. Tell me what the other kids say about me."

"They just say—" Sera Carnath gulped. "—They just say let you have your way, because everybody knows what happens if you fight back and we don't want to get sent to Fargone and never come back—"

Sera just sat there a moment. Then: "Like Valery Schwartz?"

"Sometimes you just get moved to another wing. Sometimes they take you and put you on a plane and you just have to go, that's all, like Valery and his mama." Sera Carnath's teeth started chattering again, and she hugged her arms around her. "I don't want to get sent away. Don't tell I told."

"I won't. Dammit, Amy! Who said that?"

"My mama said. My mama said—no matter what, don't hit you, don't talk back to you." Sera Carnath started sobbing again, and covered her face with her hand. "I don't want to get my mama shipped to Fargone—"

Sera stood up, out of the light.
Maman
and
Fargone
were touchy words with her. Florian felt them too, but he kept the light steady.

"Amy," sera said after a little while, "I won't tell on you. I'll keep it secret if you will. I'll be your friend."

Sera Carnath wiped her face and looked up at her.

"I will," sera said. "So will Florian and Catlin. And they're good friends to have. All you have to do is be friends with us."

Sera Carnath wiped her nose and buttoned her blouse.

"It's the truth, isn't it, Catlin?"

"Whatever sera says," Catlin said, "that's the Rule."

Sera got down beside sera Carnath on the steps, her casted arm in her lap. "If I was your friend," sera said, "I'd stand up for you. We'd be real smart and not
tell
people we were friends. We'd just be zero. Not good, not bad. So you'd be safe. Same with the other kids. I didn't know what they were doing. I don't
want
them to do that. I can get a lot out of my uncle Denys, and Denys can get things out of uncle Giraud. So I'm a pretty good friend to have."

"I don't want to be enemies," sera Carnath said.

"Can you be my friend?"

Sera Carnath bit her lip and nodded, and took sera's left hand when sera reached it over.

They shook, like CITs when they agreed.

Florian stood easier then, and was terribly glad they didn't have to hurt sera Carnath. She didn't seem like an Enemy.

When sera Carnath got herself back together and stopped hiccuping, she talked to sera very calm, very quiet, and didn't sound at all stupid. Catlin stopped being disgusted with her and hunkered down when sera said, and rested her arms on her knees. So did Florian.

"We shouldn't be friends right off," sera Carnath said. "The other kids wouldn't trust me. They're scared."

As if sera Carnath hadn't been.

"We get them one at a time," sera said.

"Shut the door," Yanni said; Justin shut it, and came and took the chair in front of Yanni's desk.

Not
his
problem this time. Yanni's. The Project's. It was in those papers on Yanni's desk, the reports and tests that he had
not
scanned and run on the office computer, but on a portable with retent-storage.

He had not signed his write-up. Yanni knew whose it was. That was enough.

"I've read it," Yanni said. "What does Grant say, by the by?"

Justin bit his lip and considered a shrug and no comment: Yanni still made his nerves twitch; but it was foolish, he told himself. Old business, raw nerves. "We talked about it. Grant protests it's a CIT question—but he says the man doesn't sound like he's handling it well at all."

"We're six months down on this data," Yanni said. "We don't have a ship-call from that direction for another month and a half, we don't have anything going out their way till the 29th. Jane was worried about Rubin. If our CIT staff kept off Ollie he'll have tried to work on it, I'm sure of that, but he's azi, and he's going through hell,
damn
my daughter's meddling—she's a damn expert,
she
has to know CIT psych better than Ollie does, right?"

"No comment."

"No comment. Dammit, I can
tell
you what they've been doing these last few months. My daughter and Julia Strassen. I
never
wanted those two on staff. So they get a harmless job ... on the Residency side, of course. With Rubin. Jane gets out there and gets a look at the Residency data and Jane and my daughter go fusion in the first staff meeting. I think it contributed to Jane's heart attack, if you want my guess."

Justin felt his stomach unsettled—Yanni's pig-stubborn daughter, thrown out to Fargone on an appointment she never wanted. . . and probably thought she would get promotion from, setting up RESEUNESPACE labs and administration along with Johanna Morley; then Yanni's old adversary-sometime-lover Strassen the Immovable suddenly put in as Administrator over her head the same as over her father's;
his
stomach was upset, and he figured what was going on in Yanni.

Dammit, Administration is crazy.

Crazy.

"I'd trust Strassen," he said quietly, since Yanni left it for him to say something.

"Oh, yes, damn right I'd trust Strassen. Jenna might be a good Wing supervisor, but hell if she's got her own life sorted out, and she's Alpha-bitch when she's challenged. So Jane dies. That means someone has to run things. Jenna listens to her staff, all right. But Rubin's mother is a complicated problem. A real power-high when Rubin got his Special status, a real resentment when Rubin got the lab facilities and a little power of his own. Rubin's psychological problems—well, you've got the list: depressions over his health, his relationship with his mother—all of that. Rubin acts like he's doing fine. Happy as a fish in water. While his mother wants to give network interviews till Jenna hauls her in. Stella Rubin didn't like that. Not a bit. That woman and the Defense Bureau go fusion from the start ... and Rubin's situation has been an ongoing case of
can't live with her or without her.
Rubin plays the psych tests we give him, Rubin's happy so he can keep peace,
that's
what Jane estimated—not an honest reaction out of him since the Defense Bureau put the lid on mama. Six months ago, spacetime. That's why I wanted you to look at the series. And the bloodwork—"

"Considering what's going to arrive out there in another six months or so."

"Ari's interviews, you mean."

"He's a biochemist. He's aware they're running some genetic experiments on him. What if someone picks up on it?"

"Especially—" Yanni tapped the report on his desk. "This shows a man a hell of a lot more politically sophisticated than he started. Same with his mother."

"Reseune can do that, can't it?"

"Let me give you the profile I've got: Rubin isn't the young kid they made a Special out of.
Rubin's
grown up. Rubin's realized there's something going on outside the walls of his lab, Rubin's realized he's got a sexual dimension, he's frustrated as hell with his health problems, RESEUNESPACE goes into a power crisis at the top and Rubin's hitherto quiet, hypochondriac mother, who used to focus his health anxieties
and
his dependencies on herself, is carrying on a feud with Administration and the Defense Bureau
and
reaching for the old control mechanisms with her son, who's reacting to those button-pushes with lies on his psych tests and stress in the bloodwork, while
Jenna,
damn her, has torn up Jane's reassignments list and declared herself autonomous in that Wing on the grounds Ollie Strassen can't make CIT-psych judgments."

"Damn," Justin murmured, gut reaction, and wished he hadn't. But Yanni was being very quiet. Deadly quiet.

"I'm firing her, needless to say," Yanni said. "I'm firing her right out of Reseune projects and recalling her under Security Silence. Six months from now. When the order gets there. I'm telling you, son, so you'll understand I'm a little . . . personally bothered . . . about this."

What in hell am I in here for? He knew this. It didn't take me to see it. What's he doing?

"You have some insights," Yanni said, "that are a little different. That come out of your own peculiar slant on designs, crazed that it is. I talked your suggestions over with committee, and things being what they were—I
told
Denys what my source was."

"Dammit, Yanni, —"

"You happened to agree with
him,
son, and Denys has the say where it concerns Ari's programs. Giraud was his usual argumentative self, but I had a long quiet talk with Denys, about you, about your projects, about the whole ongoing situation. I'll tell you what you're seeing here at Reseune. You're seeing a system that's stressed to its limits and putting second-tier administrative personnel like my daughter in positions of considerable responsibility, because they don't have anyone more qualified, because, God help us, the next choice down is worse. Reseune is stretched too thin, and Defense has their project blowing up in their faces. If Jane had lived six months longer, even two
weeks
longer, if Ollie could have leaned on Jenna and told her go to hell—but he can't, because the damn regulations don't let him have unquestioned power over a CIT program and he can't fire Jenna. He's got a Final tape, he can get CIT status, but Jenna's reinstated herself over his head with the help of other staff, and Julia Strassen declaring she's Jane's executor—so Jenna and Julia are the ones who have to sign Ollie's CIT papers, isn't that brilliant on our part? Jenna's going to pay for it. Now Ollie's got his status, from
this
end. But
that
won't get there for some few months either, and
he
doesn't know it." Yanni waved his hand, shook his head. "Hell. It's a mess. It's a mess out there. And I'm going to ask you something, son."

"What?"

"I want you to keep running checks on the Rubin data as it comes in, in whatever timeframe. Our surrogate with the Rubin clone is Ally Morley. But I want you to work some of your reward loops into CIT psych."

"You mean you're thinking of intervention? On which one of them?"

"It's the structures we want to look at. It's the feedback between job and reward. Gustav Morley's working on the problem. You don't know CIT psych that well, that's always been one of your problems. No. If we have to make course changes, you won't design it. We just want to compare his notes against yours. And we want to compare the situation against Ari's, frankly."

He was very calm on the surface. "I really want to think you're telling the truth, Yanni. Is this a real-time problem?"

"It's no longer real-time. I'll tell you the truth, Justin. I'll tell you the absolute truth. A military courier came in hard after the freighter that got us this data, cutting—a classified amount of time—off the freighter run. Benjamin Rubin committed suicide."

"Oh, God."

Yanni just stared at him. A Yanni looking older, tired, emotionally wrung out. "If we didn't have the public success with Ari right now," Yanni said, "we'd lose Reseune. We'd
lose
it. We're income-negative right now. We're using Defense Bureau funds and we're understaffed as hell. You understand now, I think—we were getting those stress indicators on Rubin before the Discovery bill came up, before Ari's little prank in the Town. We knew then that there was trouble on the Project. We'd sent out instructions which turned out to be—too late. We had pressure on the Discovery bill; we knew that was coming before it was brought out in public. We knew Ari was going to have to go public—and we had all of that going on. You may not forgive Giraud's reaction, but you might find it useful to know what was happening off in the shadows. Right now, Administration is looking at you—in a whole new light."