Regenesis (23 page)

“But he still has his security clearances.”

“He still has some clearance—though he carried on correspondence with a few people in the University in Novgorod, not all of whom we were quite comfortable with: people who’d gotten burned in the program cancellation; people who leaned just a little to the Centrist fringes—ReseuneSec found it useful to let it continue, to see where the lines of communication led, granted nothing classified got out. Meanwhile he met Jordan Warrick…when
Jordan
moved out there, not, of course, voluntarily. They weren’t close for the first ten years, didn’t even speak; but in the last few, as Thieu tended toward retirement, they started up a friendship. We can’t prove a damned thing, except our quiet in-house inquiry about resurrecting a nanistics project—the Eversnow project, which we didn’t say at the time, nor mentioned Patil’s name—got Thieu very exercised.
He
breached security, at least within that close community of academics, and contacted a student of his currently teaching in Novgorod, qualified in the field, security clearance, to be sure, but not a contact he was authorized to make.”

“Patil.”

“Patil. He’d corresponded with her for years, but all those letters were innocuous, two scientists talking about programs, and definitely subject to censors who actually can read in that field. Recall there’s a strong Centrist bent in Novgorod University, through the social studies department and into some very shady nooks of the rebel chic. Patil’s work has a cult following. She doesn’t encourage the radicals. But they get excited when she publishes. When she lectures, they show up at her lecture series. If we revive the old studies for use at Eversnow, I want to be sure it
doesn’t
get used here on Cyteen by some lunatic with a lab vial. Let me tell you, with Thieu retired and Patil’s whole operation off at Eversnow we’re actually safer—barring something coming back by ship. All of which I mention to you just in the case I
should
fall down the stairs and break my neck—”

“Please don’t!”

“—in case, I say, I’m telling you verbally. There is that one very untidy and roundabout link to Jordan Warrick that we don’t like, the elderly and sometimes erratic Dr. Thieu, who connects with Patil, who’s the person we want to use at Eversnow, partly for very political reasons. But while we’re going ahead with the Patil nomination, we’re also going through the establishment on Planys with a microscope right now on the excuse of investigating Jordan, and it’s why we shouldn’t roundtrip Jordan right back to Planys at first excuse. If fire and fuel
can
meet, we just want to be very sure the bottles are secure. Once we ship Patil out to Fargone, we’ll feel a lot safer.”

“But you’re saying it’s possibly all innocent.”

“Patil’s a natural candidate for the Eversnow post. But hauling her from the Centrist party to the Expansionist side of the slate is going to mightily annoy some people. It’s possible certain factions will be more interested in the politics of it than in the actual science, which is years off. Short-term, it’s very likely to be political.”

“ ‘Rethinking the Theory of Long-Period Nanistic Self-direction.’ ”

“God, where did you run across that?”

“It was going to run in
Scientia
last year. It was pretty thick going, but I read it.”

“I should think it was. You and the censors. How did you get it?”

“The Centrists had made a fuss about it, pre-publication, said it proved they could do what they wanted to do on Cyteen without killing the rejuv ecology. Uncle Denys was mad about it. He was threatening to have the editor fired if it ran, so they pulled it. I figured I should give it a look. So she was writing up what she shouldn’t have written about?”

“It was an agitation on her part. But a quiet one, the presentation of a theory, not a how-to. The War’s over. We could enlist any nanistics expert we want out of Beta, and will—but for various reasons—including the fact she’s the darling of the Paxers, the Centrists, and the military, and could get us the votes—she’s our pick for the lab going out to Eversnow. It’s a dream assignment for her. She may be the Centrist intellectuals’ darling, not that they understand half of what she’s about, but she does want to see her theories put into the field, and
she’s
how we got the two Councillors to shift their vote to support mine, notable Defense and Citizens. And just to draw a line under the fact of who’s in bed with whom, our Jordan’s spent the last eight years having lunch with the professor who taught Patil.”

“He doesn’t
have
a Base in System any more. So how did he know about it? How did he get the card? Maybe he wanted us to have it. Maybe he’s trying to ask a question…in his unique way.”

“That would be an interesting position,” Yanni said. “Or maybe he just wanted Justin to take exception to the ensuing investigation.”

“To drag Justin into it on his side,” Ari said, “but I don’t think he did what Jordan would want him to do.”

“Oh, it probably was within his guesswork,” Yanni said. “I assume Jordan expected the card to be confiscated, and Justin to be involved, and upset, and maybe more amenable to Jordan’s arguments. He’s psych, not nanistics, educational psych, at that. I
don’t
like the notion he could have gotten this card from Thieu, and gotten it through our screening. Security’s got to take a look at that. But it’s not much more comfortable a thought that someone here gave it to him…probably with information.”

“It has a reader-strip, ser,” Florian said. “We didn’t put it into a System-connected reader.”

“Probably a very good notion,” Yanni said. “Damn it! Damn Jordan to bloody hell.”

“I’d rather not if I can avoid it,” Ari said. “But Justin is staying in Wing One.”

“Granted,” Yanni said. “No question. Good call.”

“
You
didn’t bring Patil’s name up with Jordan, did you?”

“Hell, no.”

“Just asking,” she said easily. It remained a possibility, all the same. But less likely, perhaps.

So Justin was safe. But Jordan definitely wasn’t.

A
PRIL
26, 2424
0855
H

Late to bed, late to rise, and not that early to the office.

The morning was definitely off routine, when you had to rack your memory to recall what your own office address was, and it was entirely surreal to walk in and find the set-up pretty much what you remembered—and you hadn’t put it there.

Justin had expected boxes. The office was—just moved. Things were on shelves in exactly the same order…apparently so, at least. Florian hadn’t exaggerated.

“Well,” Grant said, at his shoulder, “they were neat.”

“Certainly better than some invasions we’ve had,” Justin muttered, and let go a long, long breath. He hadn’t known he was that wound up about the move, but he had been. He didn’t see a safe. Opening several desk drawers didn’t turn up Ari’s material. It had gone somewhere, and that bothered him.

“Her stuff isn’t here,” he said.

“Security will have it,” Grant said. “Five against ten, Florian will have gotten it, personally.”

“Well, it’s not a bad office,” Justin said, looking around. It wasn’t bad. It was even good, given there was room for the two of them—ample room, but nothing for staff. God knew what Em thought, this morning, arriving to find he had no office and no job.

There was a window. The view from the purported window was fake, but it was a very expensive fake: a screen showed the Novaya Volga from, one supposed, the top of the cliffs, more likely the top of one of the precip towers—he’d never been up there: nobody went there, except the repair and maintenance crews working on the weather system, and most of those were robots.

It was a dizzying image, if one thought about it. It gave an illusion the whole building was forty stories tall, when the brain knew for a fact they were on the ground floor.

“Nice view,” Grant said.

“You’re such an optimist.” Justin ran his hand over the spines of the physical books on the shelf, finding no flaw in the order of them—printout of this and that psychset. He
liked
printout, when it came to review. He marked-up with abandon, and liked things in order,
his
order. The stacks on the desk looked like his stacks. He thumbed through them. They were in a reasonable order. Likely the stacks on Grant’s desk were the same.

But he wanted to find something they’d messed up. He checked the drawers. Exact order, exact contents. “I hate it when I don’t know what they’ve done wrong. I’m sure there’s something.”

“The movers were ReseuneSec, weren’t they?” Grant asked. “They’re used to not having things look disturbed.”

That was worth half a laugh at least.

There was an in-office coffee dispenser sitting on a sideboard. That was new, and good. The machine was loaded and it turned on and functioned at the touch of a button. That was even better.

And the movers had improved on one other thing: the move had organized the supply cabinet contents in a logical, eye-pleasing way, with little colored bins for the various styli and clips and pointer-tags. He surveyed it top to bottom, looking for flaws.

“Color-coded.” Justin remarked, giving up his search. “I suppose our mess was too much for them to get here intact. We have all shiny new paper clips.”

“Have a cup of coffee.” Grant handed him one, an implicit calm-down.

“You know Jordan’s going to be beside himself this morning.”

“Likely he is,” Grant said. “Just about now.”

He took a sip. It was better coffee than what they’d had available down the hall in the old office. Much better. It was probably real. “Pricey.”

“Free,” Grant said.

“Meaning we’re entirely on her tab.” That didn’t improve the taste.

“Do we ever actually run through our wages?” Grant asked.

“We never get a chance to find out, do we? And what about our regular work?” He turned full circle, looked at the walls, the river view, and something beyond vertigo bothered him, something indefinably bothered him and made his shoulders twitch. He walked across the office and back before it dawned on him. “It’s backward. It’s damned
backward
! The back wall is south. The old office wall faced north.”

“Is that going to bother you?”

“It’s already bothering me.” He was still frustrated. The office had always had its carefully designed clutter—even his every-other-layer stacking was preserved, in the pile on the corner of his desk. The room was white-walled, had a view that cost a month’s pay. The desks were new black lacquer, not brown lake wood, scarred from years of use. Their use. It was like that damned black and white bedroom they lived in, that was what. “I want some flowers in here. Some pictures that
don’t
move.”

“I can order the flowers,” Grant said, and added wickedly. “Red?”

“No. Blue. Green. Purple. Anything but red.” There was one red pillow, one red flower, in their professionally decorated black, gray, and white quarters.

“Maybe you’d like to pick out the pictures yourself.”

That nettled him, too. “Ordering flowers is not your job to do. You’re not my—”

“I’m not as afflicted by the decor as you are,” Grant said. “It’s a born-man problem. You’re fluxed. I’m sure I could order flowers in a sane, logical way. Possibly I’d be calm enough to pick out complementary pictures. Clearly—”

“The hell.” He found his mood improving, unwanted improvement, even toward laughter. “Oh, hell, blue. Blue would be good. Blues and purples, that sort of thing.” The single screen pretending to be a window drew the eye and suggested blue-greens and grays. “Cancel the purple. Blues and quiet greens. That might do it. I’d like that. If you wouldn’t mind doing it. I’m not that logical, at the moment.”

“I’m sure there’s something that’ll work,” Grant said nicely. “I’ll look.”

By computer. You could do anything by computer. It would be there in an hour, if they opted for messenger service, and flowers and paintings could get through security, oh, by tomorrow, if security was in a good mood.

It certainly wasn’t the way he’d done things in the days when he’d been free, on his own salary and Grant’s.

Before the first Ari had gotten her hands on him. Before Jordan had gotten himself in trouble and gotten shipped to the far side of the world.

So Jordan came back, and Ari protected him from his own father…meaning she’d finally gotten her way and gotten him all the way into her wing—to do
nothing
in his career, but teach her.

Standing, he flipped on the computer. The screen blinked up.

Three
messages from Ari, in the upper righthand corner.

Calamity?

He dropped into the chair, keyed the messages up.

And had to laugh, however ruefully.

“What is it?”

“Ari’s postscripts. The first Ari didn’t do postscripts. Wouldn’t have done a postscript when she was six. Our girl’s done two in the same letter. She’s worried I’ll hit the ceiling. I think she’s really worried.”

“What does she say?”

“That they’re giving the other office to Jordan. That were better off here. That the old office was bugged, anyway.”

That got a laugh from Grant.

Justin keyed off and got up. “Let’s go out for lunch.”

“Out for lunch? We haven’t gotten any work done yet. I’m just into the flowers.”

“Lunch. Relaxation. Out of the Wing. Prove we can. But somewhere
less
likely to run into Jordan.”

“Jordan is going to be heading for Yanni’s office about now. If we stay off that track, we’ll miss him.”

This time
he
laughed. It made fair sense. Jordan was going to take about five minutes to realize he’d been given the office solo, and bet on it, Jordan wasn’t going to be working today, either.

Straight line course for Yanni’s office, no question.

Not that Yanni would do anything to make Jordan happier.
Yanni didn’t do it
, Ari’s final note had said. And she claimed she hadn’t done it.

So who had? What other authority was there, ruling his life?