Regenesis

by C. J. Cherryh

  “And you’re picking the sets that go there?”

  “Can’t discuss that one. Sorry” He wasn’t sure he should have said as much as he had. But it was common knowledge, and the answer he’d given did answer Jordan’s question.

  “And how soon does this new enterprise arise from the wasteland?”

  “Awhile yet. They’ve only built the bunker as is, for the first workers. Precips are mostly built, but not online.”

  “The little darling’s precocious ambition? Or Yanni’s?”

  “Hers, as far as I know.”

  “And only eighteen. What are we calling this installation?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But with azi all picked out for it. And what CIT population? Is this where she’s sending all the dissidents?”

  It wasn’t far off the mark, and Jordan Warrick could easily turn up on that list, but he didn’t want it to happen and he didn’t let his expression change, knowing that was exactly what Jordan was implying.

  “I haven’t a clue about that.”

  “Oh, come, you’re consulting on the psychsets of the azi component, the things they’re supposed to counter. You know damned well what CIT profile the azi will fit around, clear as a footprint.”

  “Well, if I guessed, I’d be a fool to say, and you didn’t sire a fool, Dad, so give it up.”

  “And she thought of this all on her own.”

  “You’re assuming things I’ve never said.”

  The waiter came, offering dessert. “No, thanks,” Justin said. “Just the bill.”

  “Yes, ser,” the waiter said, having gotten his instructions, it seemed: the waiter tapped his handheld and called up a bill.

  Thank God it was fast. Justin swept his keycard through the offered handheld and keyed a reasonable tip on a monumental charge. He gave it to the waiter, kept a pleasant smile on his own face as he pushed his chair back, and maneuvered himself between Jordan and Grant as they all got up and walked out.

  “So where is this place?” Jordan asked, as they passed between the columns on their way out. “The new construction?”

  “Not that far upriver.”

  “Light manufacture? I just wonder what they’ll be making up there that we don’t have here. Or mining there that we can’t get elsewhere.” Jordan’s face was grim. “Oh, I have the picture, believe me. It’s no more manufacture than it is a recreation spot.”

  “Assumptions are a bitch. They just don’t get you to any good outcome.”

  “Lectures from my son?”

  Dead stop. He faced Jordan. “I passed my majority some years ago, Dad. And you know it’s damned likely we’re bugged. So what in hell are you doing? Trying to piss off Yanni? I tell you, I really don’t appreciate being dragged into your quarrel with a kid you never met.”

  “Are you afraid? Have they made you afraid?”

  “The answer is no. No. I’m not afraid. I’m comfortable. I support Yanni. I support Ari, for that matter. I hope she has a long and happy career. And if you’ll take my advice and just live here, I’m sure you’ll get along. If you want a fight for a fight’s sake, I’m sure you’ll get it from someone. I just don’t see the point in it.” He walked on, with Grant.

  Jordan stayed beside him, Paul just behind. “Too beaten-down. Too little fire. I missed your growing-up.”

  “Oh, plenty you missed, I assure you. You didn’t miss anything good. But that’s what we dealt with while you had your own troubles. It’s finished. Done is done. If you didn’t kill Ari—”

  “I didn’t. You know it was a frame.”

  He stopped, beyond the columns, in the public corridor, and faced Jordan. “I reserve judgement. You might have killed her—to protect your investment in me. Or Denys Nye thought she was going to die anyway, and a clone would be manageable, especially in his hands; and you weren’t connected to the right people to protect you. Whatever happened, it didn’t work for you. For good or for ill, you missed my growing-up. You missed my times in detention. You missed my being Worked over by security, and you missed Grant’s troubles, too, but, you know, we just can’t recover those happy days, can we? So let’s not try. I’ll take your word you were innocent. You’ll take mine that I believe you. We’ll both get along.”

  “We’ll talk about this tomorrow. In the office.”

  “Damn it, Dad, you can’t come in there. It’s a security clearance area and you haven’t got one. So keep out!”

  Jordan reached into his pocket and held out a card. Justin started to take it, automatically, and when he stalled in sudden apprehension that it had nothing to do with the office or the security clearance issue, Jordan reached out and dropped it into his coat pocket.

  He wasn’t a kid, to skip out of the way. It was ludicrous. It was also an attack.

  “Damn it, Jordan.”

  “Damn what?”

  He’d had earnest hopes when he’d heard Jordan was released and when Jordan made it home to a changed Reseune, that he’d have the father he’d been deprived of during all the Nye years. Everything would be healed and clean and new.

  Neither Paul nor Grant said a word to what had just happened. He wanted to take the card out of his pocket, fling it away to be trampled by passers-by, swept up by the cleaning-bots—pounced on by security. He didn’t even reach into his pocket to look at it. “I really don’t appreciate this. Dad.”

  “Tomorrow,” Jordan said. “See you tomorrow. That’s still one of your non-teaching days, isn’t it?”

  “No,” he said. “You’re not moving in with us.”

  “Tomorrow,” Jordan said again—the way he’d just held his ground in arguments two decades ago. No argument. Just a position from which he wouldn’t budge. “That was my office.”

  “Damn it, Jordan.”

  “My office, I say. Sure you won’t come over for an after-dinner drink?”

  “Good night,” Justin said, and started off in his own direction, toward the doors. Grant walked beside him, not saying a word until they’d exited the corridor for the outside, and started across the darkened quadrangle.

  “You told him no,” Grant said. “But he will come ahead tomorrow anyway, won’t he?”

  “My bet is on it,” he said. “And we’ve got to advise the staff Lock up the office if we have to. Damn him, Grant, damn him. All he has to do to fit in is just do nothing. That’s the only requirement, just settle in, don’t push any buttons, and let things be.” Grant said nothing in reply, and Justin remembered that face, set and angry: Jordan, his elder twin—biologically speaking. Twin psychologically speaking, so far as being raised by his father went. Next best thing to psychogenesis.

  Ari’s face, too. Elder Ari’s face. A glass in his hand. The feeling of being drugged. Sex. And a voice saying—

  He couldn’t remember what she’d said. To this day, it blacked out at that point. He’d tried not to let his father know what had happened. He’d tried so hard.

  But too many had known.

  And he’d spent his next years being arrested for the suspicion of thinking. He’d given up his father’s head-on attack on life and adopted a stubbornness that laid low, laid modest plans, and just survived into the next Ari’s growing up, to become a general annoyance to Denys Nye.

  Mirror into mirror, physically, himself with Jordan. But the psychology Jordan knew in his son had been Worked on and Worked over every time they’d arrested him and hauled him in…

  He suspected they’d tried to bend him, at least.

  But cracking any Working the first Ari had done—that wasn’t easy. He’d been set on a course. He’d even begun to cling to it, mentally, telling himself from the start that the Nyes could have done the murder themselves, and that they might someday kill him, but they weren’t going to crack him, because he was Ari’s piece of work. What kept him alive, he greatly suspected, was the fact they couldn’t tell whether he was somehow essential in the plans Ari had laid down—essential in the construction of her own psychological and p
hysiological clone. The genius that had made Reseune what it was had to be reborn to keep the power Reseune had, which was currently in their hands: and if Justin Warrick was somehow part of it—the Nyes had to keep him alive.

  They’d gone into convulsions of policy when their precious clone had found her way to him.

  They hadn’t known what to do with him after that, except try to make sure he didn’t come up with any Working of his own, where it regarded the little girl, who’d become a bigger girl, who’d become a young woman and developed notions her guardians finally couldn’t control.

  Sex, prominent among them. He’d gotten away from her. He’d known that was worth his life, but the Nyes weren’t what scared hell out of him in that regard. What scared him was young Ari herself, the fact that there was no predicting what psychological trigger could go off in that interface, as if whatever the first Ari had done had set a mark on him that wouldn’t stay quiet if he ever got involved with child-Ari. It wasn’t where he wanted to go. It wasn’t who he was supposed to be. His whole being shrieked no and he backed away.

  And Jordan came back into his life, now that the Nyes were done, and now that Yanni Schwartz was in charge.

  Yanni sat sphinxlike behind his desk, watching all the pieces shift on the board, doubtless wondering whether the piece that was Justin Warrick would gravitate to the troublesome piece that was Jordan, and whether Jordan would gravitate back to his old intention of getting out of Reseune and attacking its policies from the outside. Jordan had had contacts—contacts that had had contacts with the Paxers, the Abolitionists; and he’d had friends at the opposite end of the spectrum, the Defense Bureau, who’d been the first Ari’s allies, but who simultaneously wanted to get the upper hand over Reseune. And Jordan had dealt with them…back then, dealt with every contact on the planet he could use to break Reseune’s power and overthrow the system

  They were all watched, constantly, had been for years, and Yanni reported regularly to an eighteen-year-old girl who would own absolute power over ReseuneLabs whenever she wanted to take it up. Within a decade, the corporation that was creating population and civilization in the farthest reaches of human exploration would come back under the control of a second Ariane Emory.

  And a third Ariane, someday. That event was already in the planning stages. Every detail of young Ari’s life was being stored up, the way the first Ari’s life had been stored.

  And come the day, the inevitable day—the question would be…which of the two Aris ought to be born again.

  And how many of the people who’d been part and parcel of the second Ari’s life had to be recreated, and which Ari were those replicates going to have to deal with?

  He had a horrid suspicion a storage somewhere now had his data, and Grant’s programming, and maybe Yanni’s. Giraud Nye, who had probably never looked to face such an event, was already less than a year from rebirth. Denys Nye, the shadowy eminence who’d run the labs in the interim years, was still a question mark…but he’d bet a year’s pay which way that decision was going to go. Ari’s teenaged emotions were still in the ascendant; but the cold, keen intellect was rising fast.

  He didn’t know how much of that situation Jordan knew. How did you tell your father you—and therefore he, through you—were destined for immortality, right along with the original Ari, Jordan’s onetime partner and lifelong rival, all to help her exist again and go on shaping humankind for all eternity?

  It wasn’t going to make for family tranquility once Jordan got that picture, that was for very damned certain.

  And that city young Ari was founding, upriver from ReseuneLabs? Who was going to live there, but people that Ari didn’t want living under Reseune’s roof, or downriver in Novgorod, either, where the government and other troubles resided?

  “It should have been a pleasant evening,” he remarked, in the chill, deep silence of the deserted quadrangle, the absence, usually, of electronic bugs…unless somebody was aiming ears specifically at them. And he wouldn’t say absolutely that that wasn’t the case, given the red flag of Jordan’s invitation. “I’d tried to look forward to it.” He felt the card in his pocket, a little paper card.

  “Tried?” Grant asked.

  “He’s bitter,” Justin said. “I can’t blame him for that part of his attitude. Twenty years in exile…”

  “Against whom should he be bitter?” Grant asked. Judging CIT emotions was not what he was born to do. “You? Does he blame you because you work with young Ari? Is it Yanni he dislikes? Or did I miss the entire point of that discussion?”

  “No. You didn’t miss it. He blames me for coming out of it on her side. That’s one thing.”

  “They’re all dead, all the ones actually responsible for his situation. Yanni’s alive. But Yanni didn’t send your father away, did he?”

  “He didn’t, exactly. Or he actually may have, but the deal probably saved Jordan’s life. But the fact those responsible are dead now is only one more frustration for him. A slice of his life is gone in those two decades. He could live a hundred years more, on rejuv. But all he sees is the twenty years he lost. And the fact he’s been robbed of a fight about it. And what he really wants—what he really wants, between you and me, is no Reseune.”

  Several more paces in silence. “What would take its place?” Grant asked. “Does he know that?”

  “I didn’t say it was a reasonable attitude.”

  “He’s as intelligent as either of us.”

  “That’s no guarantee of rationality.”

  “I’ve observed that occasionally,” Grant said dryly. It was worth a dry laugh, even under the circumstances.

  “What I’ve said still holds,” Justin said. “You’re not to go anywhere near him without me, and you’re not to occupy a room with him or Paul without me, and you’re not to take seriously anything he tells you privately, not even if he tells you I’m dying. Just—no matter how finely you dice it—stay away from him.”

  “He Created me. Reseune forever holds my Contract and you’re my Supervisor. I know what’s right.”

  “Contract, hell. Protect yourself.”

  “Protecting myself, I protect you. That’s logical, isn’t it?”

  “Very. I’m glad you see it that way.”

  “Someone is by the pond,” Grant remarked. And it was true. A shadow stood near the small fishpond ahead of them, where quadrangle walks crossed. Four benches offered seating there, to anybody who wanted to contemplate the water—a pleasant place to sit and think, on a sunny summer day. It was still April, it was long after dark, and the wind was up. Their ordinary coats were barely enough to make a walk to the other wing bearable. And somebody was standing there in the dark, somebody in dark, close-fitting clothing.

  The shadow watched the water. It might be a despondent lover, someone wanting solitude. It might have nothing to do with them.

  But fear had been a constant, in the Nye years. Fear of arrest. Fear of being tampered with, of having Grant tampered with—Ari was their only protection. And Ari wasn’t going out of her Wing lately.

  The figure had been intent on the water. Now the head turned. The whole body turned to stand confronting them.

  “Ser,” the shadow said politely as they met, and recognition revised the shadowed vision into familiar detail, the black elite Security uniform, dark curly hair, light build.

  Florian. Ari’s personal bodyguard. A youth no older than Ari herself, with absolute power—to arrest. To kill, without a second’s warning. And he had that damned card in his pocket.

  “Jordan proposes to share your office,” Florian said.

  “I told him no.” Surely Ari’s security knew he had. He’d bet his life they’d heard every word of it. And it was better than other alternatives.

  “Let him have it. Your materials will go to another office.” Florian held out a keycard, offering it.

  He took it. He had no choice but take it, in a hand growing chill through. “But our personnel—”

  �
��Sorry, ser, they’ll have to find other employment. They aren’t cleared for Wing One.”

  “They’re our people.”

  “No longer.”

  “And the computers, our files…we have notes, handwritten notes—the order they’re in—in delicate position. Stacks that can’t be disrupted without losing information—we’re not that neat. Things we can’t have just anybody rifling through, for God’s sake. It’s a mess, but we know where things are. Things in the safe. Look, if we have to do this, we can go over there tonight. We need to do this ourselves…we’re willing to do it ourselves.”

  “We’re aware of the state of your office,” Florian said—dark humor at his expense, he had no idea. “And qualified personnel will perform the transfer.”

  “We need to go over there.”

  “Best you don’t, ser, so the persons moving it can do so with the greatest attention to detail. All the items will be there in the morning, in their original order, and new equipment will be in place in your former office by 0500.”

  “For him. Bugged equipment.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “He’ll think I arranged this. No matter how you explain it, he’ll think I had something to do with this.”

  “Unfortunate if so, ser, but your notes will be safe, and your staff will be safe, in other employ, at a priority. They’ll be given employment, no problem. Just not Wing One.”

  At least they wouldn’t miss a paycheck, Em, and the others. They’d be all right. But they were the ones that knew his work. They’d been his people.

  “No wipe.”

  “No wipe, ser. Nothing of the sort.” This with a slight shift of the shadowed gaze toward Grant, and back. “We ask you to accept this arrangement and not attempt to circumvent it in any fashion. Grant, you’re not to go there, either.”

  “My father won’t take this well at all,” Justin said. “I’m afraid he’ll be in Yanni’s office in the morning.”

  “We’ll advise the Director. It’s not your problem, ser.”

  “I appreciate your concern.” The cold of the night had penetrated his dinner jacket. He felt a shiver coming on. “I’m freezing, at the moment. Can you tell me—I take it, it was Ari ordered this?”