Regenesis

by C. J. Cherryh

  “Well,” Catlin said. “So either our ReseuneSec clearance isn’t quite as high as it might be…or somebody’s blocked those files from them. Yanni could certainly do that.”

  “I wonder about Jordan’s minder notes?” Florian said. “We had those last week.”

  “Moved.” Base One easily found them—a lengthy list of Jordan’s goings and comings and the occasional note about a need for coffee or Paul’s notes for Jordan about gym schedules. But Thieu’s popped right up, along with all Thieu’s bioprints, as good as a door key. And Jordan’s were still accessible to Base One, which didn’t recognize the fake erasures.

  “Curious,” Florian observed, “gone into the same folder as the rest of Jordan’s records. Either Hicks isn’t being allowed to access it…which would warn him that somebody, notably Yanni, doesn’t want him to access those files—or Hicks lied when he said our access would be top level. Oh, this is good, inside Thieu’s minder notes, did you note this? Lunch with Jordan, the day Jordan left Planys—Jordan broke that appointment because he was in the air.”

  “And Jordan detested him?”

  Florian scanned the appointments. “Once a week or so—lunch with Jordan. Next door neighbors. Or across the hall.” Florian called up a schematic of the residency strip in question. “Actually opposite each other. Certainly looks like a close association.”

  “Jordan knew we could check,” Catlin asked, “but he lied, all the same. He gave that card to Justin. He knew we were watching. And ReseuneSec, which takes orders from Yanni, can’t get to these particular files…or our new access can’t. Another lie?”

  “ReseuneSec lying doesn’t surprise me too much,” Florian said. “And Jordan’s hard to understand on every level. Including, very clearly, doing things he knows we’ll notice.”

  “He claimed to dislike Thieu. Called him a dodderer.”

  “And yet has lunch with him regularly. He and Paul.”

  “How old is Thieu, actually?” Catlin asked.

  Florian keyed back to the medicals, convenient hop on Base One. “Hundred sixty-four.” Once rejuv began to lose its effect, it took only a matter of months for a man who looked forty to start looking his actual age, losing the attributes of youth, acquiring ailments, losing faculties—and a hundred sixty-four was definitely in that territory. “If rejuv is failing him, he’ll go fast, at that age. I’d think he hasn’t doddered long, actually.”

  “And Jordan was living there for twenty years,” Catlin said, “next door to him, unless there’s been a recent change of residence, and a very recent change in Thieu’s medical status.” Click-click-click, from Catlin’s console, Jordan’s medical records going back and back to 2404. “No. Jordan had that address from the week he arrived. Thieu was there, too, from 2398.”

  “The information Jordan gave sera is missing some interesting pieces, for sure. Now Thieu dodders. And in his latest letter Thieu jogs Patil’s memory about who Jordan is.”

  “Rejuv failure,” Catlin said. “Maybe Thieu’s short-term memory is going.”

  “Must be contagious. Forgetfulness seems to have infected Patil, too. She claims no connection with Jordan at all. Yet Thieu, whose memory is going, thinks she’d remember him. I wonder what we could find in her letter files.”

  “Worth noting.”

  Those records, except what Yanni might have, lay outside Reseune System. “Base Cue could try to crack University System, but it’s not guaranteed to leave no traces.” Florian said. “We probably shouldn’t try it. We can take what Yanni’s got. And his files on Thieu. If Thieu’s dying—whether or not Thieu has all his faculties—that might stir somebody to make a move, whatever’s going on.”

  “Thieu couldn’t possibly have anticipated Jordan leaving Planys,” Catlin said. “Jordan didn’t expect security to pull him and Paul out of their office and put them on the plane.”

  Florian ran further through medical records. “Thieu’s doctor records cognitive function definitely suffering. Short-term memory markedly impaired. Long-term recall can be intact for a time.”

  “So back to his giving Jordan the card—did he have enough faculties left for that?”

  “Maybe. Maybe Jordan had it without his knowing. Jordan had access in his apartment. The one thing that didn’t happen was Thieu knowing Jordan was being released and giving him the card as something to do once he got out, because he didn’t know Jordan was leaving. As you say, he couldn’t know. That intention was in sera’s mind, but not in any record.”

  “The current letter,” Catlin said. “Thieu wants Patil to look up Jordan. He’s trying to get them together. Whatever the state of his mind, that’s apparently somewhere on his agenda, for some reason.”

  “And what is Jordan, besides a Special in educational psych design? Very friendly with people in Citizens, in Defense, and people with ties to the Abolitionists.”

  “We don’t know that he knew the nature of the Abolitionist connection,” Catlin said.

  “He was certainly tapped into the network that moves people and items for the dissidents—some twenty years ago. It doesn’t say he’s trying to establish such connections again. He can’t call outside, anyway. He was barred from mail, to anybody but Justin. He still is. Justin can make a call for him. But Justin didn’t. And a restaurant wasn’t the place to pass on something Jordan didn’t want us to investigate. He was asking for attention.”

  “A card is a stupid way to keep an address. It’s just good for passing it on. If Thieu gave Jordan that card and wanted him to call Patil, Jordan could just have memorized the address and phone number, then simply tossed the card into recycling. He didn’t do it in Planys; he didn’t do it here. He either slipped it through a security search, or, more likely in that regard, he actually acquired it—or produced it—here.”

  “And then.” Florian said, “he handed that particular card to Justin on a night when he was absolutely certain to be watched. There’s certainly a lot here that doesn’t make sense. CITs don’t make sense. But this one is a real puzzle.”

  A moment of silence. Then Catlin said, “It’s still tempting to think he got the card from Thieu. We’re assuming that, because of Thieu’s association with Patil. Thieu didn’t need to give him a card. It doesn’t make sense, except the fact Thieu has been talking about this Dr. Patil for years. Maybe there’s been a long term effort, on both sides of the Tethys Sea, to get those two together—for whatever reason.”

  “It opens up a lot of possibilities.”

  “It does.”

  “The old connections,” Florian said. “Reestablished. He was a friend of Thieu’s. That there was a connection to Patil at Planys doesn’t mean there isn’t a connection to Thieu or Patil here in Reseune. These are born-men. They have that social dimension. Knowing people who know people—those connections matter. Don’t they?” Florian swung his chair around. “The card itself can tell us, with luck. I’m betting ReseuneSec has already run the check on the card’s chip. Let’s see what they found.”

  He hit keys in quick succession, macros for their clearances, and a search into ReseuneSec files.

  Analysis of the problematic card itself was in. It did include its microscopic markers—a very nice precaution from Giraud’s time as head of ReseuneSec—which indicated that the office supplies used in the card indeed belonged to PlanysLabs.

  “Entirely reasonable for ReseuneSec to assume it was printed in Planys,” Florian said. “Planys markers.”

  “Physically reasonable to assume it. But anyone with Planys card stock could print it, here or there.”

  An e-card, never manifest as paper, was the common way for CITs to trade addresses, often arriving as an attachment to a sig line, available for print, available to be shot straight into address files if one trusted the sender.

  And for office use, it was common to print a card out physically off the signature line of a letter, including even its chip-load, if the computer in question had the chip-write feature. Careful offices tended to prefe
r physical cards for introductions and follow-up—but they wouldn’t routinely slide a card from some random visitor into their systems. Some cards had proved to carry more than ROM. Some could be quite malicious—a little matter some offices in the world had discovered the hard way.

  Content, however, was disappointing. It was Patil’s academic vita on the card, nothing special. Her bibliography, nothing untoward, in surface appearance. Check of the bibliography against her actual record in file in Yanni’s office produced no variances.

  “Still possible,” he said, “that Jordan could have brought card stock and paper from Planys. Card stock wouldn’t necessarily be viewed as contraband.”

  Catlin clicked keys. “Jordan’s file. List of what they did find in his luggage’.”

  That went to Florian’s second screen.

  “ ‘Paper goods,’ ” Florian read. “So we can officially wonder what that encompasses.”

  “Or…back to the original assumption,” Catlin said, “Thieu gave it to him and Jordan just walked through customs. Sandwiched in with a stack of blank cards, it wouldn’t show on a quick and dirty scan. But again, he could have printed it here, himself—if he could find a printer that wasn’t micro-tagged. He doesn’t have access to one.”

  “If it came from Planys, Jordan took real pains to get it here and put it in our hands. Yanni said that Thieu was upset with the reactivation of the terraforming project; he’d been an activist scientist, in his day. So was Jordan. That gives Jordan a motive: political. Jordan’s old alliance with Centrists. His tendency to play both sides of the game. His anger against sera.” He swung back to the second screen. “So what else did security find on him, in the search? Personal notes?”

  “Repro’ed and already returned to him. Dense. Scientific.” Those had flashed to one screen, at least the initial page, which was overwritten with Jordan’s hand notes. There was computer storage. That was huge, encompassing Paul’s personal manual, specifically, with all its files internal to the computer…nothing reliant on Library. Jordan hadn’t had Library access to other manuals. Just that one. Someone must have given him the entire thing, subfolders and all. There were image files. There were more notes, in the peculiar shorthand of design.

  “Not beyond sera to decipher. We could ask her if it’s significant. Or if there’s anything embedded in it. I’m sure Hicks has had to refer the notes to experts. I’m sure Paul’s manual would be significant—if sera could find time to look at it.”

  “Jordan and Paul’s computers were returned within the week. His notes came with it. His books. He was complaining two months ago about access to his own past publications. We know the files he’s gotten at since he got clearance. Sera might recognize something in that list that we couldn’t.”

  “Interesting thought,” Florian said. “Just a second.” He called up that list and ran a filter. It took a moment.

  “Well,” Catlin said.

  “Every one of those publications has Ari Senior’s articles, as well as some they co-wrote. Not too surprising, since they worked together.”

  “Interesting, though.”

  “Topics…” More keys. “Integrations. Nothing at all to do with Patil.”

  “Nothing to do with Patil at all.”

  “Integrations was the subject of his quarrel with Justin. And integrations isn’t in his field.”

  “Justin’s working in that field. He had a quarrel with that, and with the first Ari’s style.”

  “Could he have picked the fight as part of a diversion?” Florian asked. “Possibly preparing Justin or Grant for some intervention?”

  Catlin frowned. “That would be somewhat beyond us. Certainly outside the question of the card.”

  “Except that Justin became the target of it, after they had a fight about the first Ari’s procedures. I don’t see a connection, unless he’s aiming at something and wants to divert Justin into some scheme of his own. Maybe he really does hate Thieu. Or wants to sabotage Patil, just for spite.”

  “Or for profit. Profit would be a reason,” Catlin said. “A re-contact with old networks. Former alliances. That has politics in it. That’s more like what the records say of Jordan Warrick.”

  An action, not a gesture, something designed to do exactly what it was doing…getting Patil delayed in her move to Fargone. Possible.

  And someone, probably Base Two, in Yanni’s hands, was hiding Jordan’s records from Hicks…or Hicks was hiding them from sera.

  “Well,” Florian said, and flicked up the general ReseuneSec Planys office reports on Jordan Warrick. One statistic leapt out. “Jordan received two thousand eight hundred and fourteen security cautions during his tenure at Planys. Persistent note on his file: Immune. Do Not Interrogate.”

  “That’s been the problem all along with him.”

  “Yanni doesn’t want him in the public eye again. Reseune doesn’t want the first Ari’s murder opened up again. That was what was going on when Denys went down. We’ve got the content of the card chip—nothing overt there, if it’s not a verbal code; and still no absolute assurance where the card itself was made. They can go after where it’s been—testing to destruction if they do. But I think it was made for exactly what it was used for: an introduction, dropped right in front of us.”

  “From whom?” Catlin asked. “To whom?”

  “Let’s see what ReseuneSec admits it knows about Patil.”

  ReseuneSec’s top-level surveillance of Patil came up easily, creditably meticulous, and ongoing, in Novgorod, within the University where she taught. Her contacts, back inside ReseuneSec files, were all neatly mapped—including letters, some sixty-three in number, to her old mentor Thieu, and one hundred eighteen from Thieu to Patil, fifty-two of them in the last half year.

  “None to Jordan,” Catlin said. “None from Jordan. As should be. Several from Yanni to Patil.”

  “Patil’s house sale is pending. Reseune’s buying it. This week. Yanni’s order. He had some reason. That could hurry up her trip to Fargone.”

  Meanwhile the list of Patil’s other possible primary and secondary contacts stretched on and on, listed and identified by ReseuneSec agents in the ReseuneSec files, every class of person from senators and councillors to teaching assistants, radicals, vid personalities, her real estate agent, and the home repair technician who’d recently fixed her refrigerator. She’d made numerous net calls on the local Fargone site, investigating housing, amenities, facilities, reasonable in someone contemplating a move there. She’d made a few tries at getting into the restricted Fargone ReseuneSpace site, on a long lag to Cyteen Station, which held that site and others available in its months-ago state: data arrived at the speed of ships that picked up that electronic load at Cyteen Station via their black boxes, and delivered that load to somewhere else, and on to Fargone—in a sense, if you sent a message that entered Cyteen Station, it eventually reached every civilized star, and was everywhere at once, until deleted as absolutely irrelevant to the locale where it had ended up. There was no such thing as complete privacy on interstation mail, by the nature of black boxes; and that also went for net data, restricted or not: it got everywhere unless it had a gate restriction that didn’t let it flow to any ships but, say, military, or to no ships at all.

  A lot of CITs weren’t aware of that fact of life, or, being aware, so profoundly took it for granted that they didn’t worry about it. Patil’s request for information was certainly widespread by now, so if she’d intended any secrecy, that was blown.

  Meticulous, vexatious police work filled other pages, agents patiently tracing out the threads of contact and delving into Patil’s household garbage, a list of items intended to be recycled, and diverted, some of it interesting, in the list items, including unopened physical mail. ReseuneSec’s investigation seemed thorough. It was a fat correspondence folder. The woman didn’t open mail that arrived from unknowns: her system routed it to delete, which deleted a lot of files—or appeared to delete them. ReseuneSec had gotten at the ma
il source, and been into that, with a resultant long list of would-be contacts, some of which were red-flagged.

  “Lot of Paxer contact. Lot of complete unknowns,” Florian observed.

  “She’d be a fool to send messages of any interesting sort to anyone,” Catlin said. “She deletes their messages—evidently knows who to delete. Some of them are on the watch list.”

  Her mailings out to PlanysLabs were all electronic. One mailing was, by title, “Rethinking the Theory of Long-Period Nanistic Self-direction,” —the censored Scientia article—sent, with indignation, to Thieu, who had been her teacher. Thieu had replied that it was brilliant. She had written back, decrying entrenched War-years thinking and Luddism…the commenting agent had flagged that word and supplied a definition. It meant people who were against progress, based on a political movement of 1811 and some years after, against the introduction of weaving machines in pre-space England.

  “Patil has a large vocabulary,” Florian said wryly, “clearly.”

  “Why weaving machines?” Catlin wanted to know. But the remark in context seemed metaphorical, not literal.

  “I have no idea,” Florian muttered. He was already tracing other things, successfully pulling up ReseuneSec files on the ongoing investigation of Jordan’s Planys apartment, and the people ReseuneSec had sent into Planys were clearly better than the airport security team haste had trusted with the outbound search. Jordan hadn’t gotten to go back to his apartment once he’d been notified he was returning to Reseune: agents had packed for him.

  While Jordan and Paul, caught in their office, had perversely or purposefully brought paper goods—either to camouflage something; or simply because, being a person for whom hand notes and writing were a habit, Jordan had wanted materials he hadn’t been sure he’d get easily if he returned to house arrest in Reseune. It might have been innocent. It seemed Jordan Warrick rarely had been innocent—not by that Planys ReseuneSec record.

  One thing he knew: sera’s security wouldn’t have let Jordan fly without a body scan, let alone turning out his pockets. The staff at Planys’ airport had searched him for foodstuffs and biological contraband, their usual worry in flights originating from Planys, but nothing more—because, for security reasons, they hadn’t been in on the investigation ReseuneSec was making of Jordan’s apartment and had no idea at all what they were looking for.