"Appearances, Ari. I have to get to the capital. There"s no question of it."

"I want agents with Lynch. Fast."

"I"m ahead of you on that one. Hicks has got a team headed for his office, too. They"ll do all driving, all transport, all meals."

"Hicks. Yanni, I"m not that confident in Hicks. He makes mistakes."

"It happens to all of us."

"I"m saying I don"t trust him, Yanni! If we lose Lynch, you lose the proxy, and we revert, G.o.d, where do we revert? The Secretary for Science?"

"That would be it," Yanni said, "who would immediately reappoint me Proxy Councillor and I"d be back in. I"m d.a.m.ned hard to get rid of, so don"t worry too much."

"Not if you"re not in Novgorod, I don"t need to worry too much, and I don"t want you to go."

"The man could have had a heart attack."

"And you know he didn"t. Yanni, I can"t lose you. I can"t. You want me trying to figure things out day to day and running everything into the ground. You"re risking too much. Easier to send me, for G.o.d"s sake. I"m duplicatable. Your knowledge isn"t in databanks."

"Bad joke, young lady, and you"re not going. I need to talk directly to Jacques and to Corain and to Lynch: there"s no subst.i.tute in virtuality for a face-to-face. You know that or you don"t know anything."

"Don"t read me lessons, Yanni Schwartz. And don"t be a d.a.m.ned fool. You know what I can do if you push me, and I"ll do it!"

"Don"t be a child. And that is being a child, Ari."

"Fine. You"re not going."

"Ari, do I have to come there and have this out?"

"Don"t bother. Reseune One isn"t going to budge off the strip, so you might as well release your call on it. How is it going to look if you go flying in there to consult with the election results not even read yet? We may have to deal with Khalid. Let"s not start it off with a media show and get caught in statements before we even know what the man died of. And let"s not be caught negotiating with Corain before the man is buried. Or shot into the sun. Or whatever he wants done with him."

"Fine. And when they read the results, and it"s Spurlin, then what do you think we"re going to do? I"ve got to talk to Jacques, and I can"t call him here to do it, because we can"t have him step down. The man has a lucrative job lined up, he wants it, we bent his arm and got him that job to get him out of the post, and now he"s got the offer, he wants it. He wants to be rich and comfortable and safe, and the man who"s supposed to replace him just f.u.c.king died, pardon my language, but he died, he may have been murdered, and that"s not going to dispose an old man ready to retire to stand his ground."

"This is Defense! He"s a Marine officer!"

"He did his fighting mostly behind a desk, if you recall."

"Well, I don"t personally recall the whole War, and you do, and that"s just one of the reasons why I need you not-dead at the moment, Yanni. Call Jacques: tell him hold pat. Get them to hold the job for him. If anybody killed Spurlin, it"d look really peculiar if Jacques drops dead next, so he"s safe. Tell him that. Maybe that will encourage him."

A silence on the other end. "I"m not sure it"s quite illegal to bribe Jacques with a job, but it"s not the sort of thing we want on the news, Ari."

"Well? We already have, haven"t we, to get him not to run again? So now we change our minds and we bribe him to keep it until somebody besides Khalid can organize another challenge. Send Frank to tell him so. Frank doesn"t get the attention you do."

"I"m not sending Frank."

"Why not? Because it"s dangerous?"

"Ari, you"re taking up my time and I"ve got business to do."

"That plane"s not moving. Think of other ways to do it." She hung up on him. And immediately used Base One to put an executive hold on Reseune One, and to forbid fueling.

Then she put in a call to Amy and Maddy, and told them individually, but they"d already gotten the news, Amy had called Maddy, Amy and Maddy were both taking the morning off and stood ready to come back home. So did Tommy Carnath, Maddy said, who"d told Mischa, and most everybody else must be getting it on the news by now. SamSam was still out on site. "Come here," she told Maddy. "Bring everybody."

And she called Rafael, and briefed him, with orders to stand by. Florian and Catlin were more than briefed: they were in the security station with Wes and Marco, pulling up Novgorod data as fast as they could and monitoring police reports, which was all they could get out of Defense. Military Police were investigating, standing off the Novgorod authorities, Military Police currently under Councillor Jacques" direction & that was a d.a.m.ned uneasy arrangement. But there was one other investigative authority, and that was the Council of the Nine itself, with its Office of Inquiry, which could cross jurisdictional lines, and which reported straight to the Council.

She called Hicks. Personally. "We"ve heard the news," she said straight off to Hicks. "We want every whisper out of that situation, as fast as you get it. Route it to my security office. No matter if it"s raw."

"I understand you, sera," Hicks said. "You"ll have it as fast as we can produce it. Councillor Jacques has requested a Council inquiry, seconded by Councillor Lynch."

Lynch hadn"t made a move in monthsnotoriously didn"t act, deferring consistently to his Proxy, namely Yanni, who was Councillor in all but name: but Lynch had waked up this morning and made an actual motion to get at the facts, fast, and locally.

"Lynch is probably scared," she said disingenuously. "I"ll imagine Yanni is moving to protect him."

"He is, sera," Hicks said.

"Yanni is in charge," she said. "I"m holding Reseune One ready, but it"s staying grounded. Security concerns. Protect Yanni. He"s not looking at his own safety. I"m looking at it for him."

"We"re in agreement," Hicks said. "I"ll trust if you hear anything, I"ll get that advis.e.m.e.nt."

"I trust I"ll hear it from you fastest," she said, and let him figure out what that meant, whether it was a compliment or an order. "Thank you, ser. I"ll let you get on it."

She broke the contact. Sat staring at the police report. The Novgorod Police had the body; the Bureau of Defense wanted it; the Office of Inquiry demanded it be sent to the University, its usual recourse for scientific questions, and it was going on two hours since a frightened housemaid had found the body. By the minute, evidence was being lost.

At least the Bureau of Defense wasn"t investigating it as an internal matter, and the Office of Inquiry was going to win. n.o.body trumped them; and currently they"d sent a hea.r.s.e to the District Coroner"s office to collect Spurlin"s remains. The OOI had also put a lock on the potential crime scene, and taken steps to secure all computer records and recent communications. She drew part of that from the news and part from the Office of Inquiry itself, which she could get to by pa.s.sive inquiry, just riding Yanni"s authority. She didn"t lodge any requests. She just read.

And frowned at the screen, and asked herself what in h.e.l.l they were going to do about it if something happened to Lynch, or worse, Jacques.

"Sera," Florian said from the doorway of her office. "The OOI has taken physical custody of the body. They"ll be at the University inside half an hour. They"ve a.s.sembled a team of experts."

"This is just bad," she said. "This is bad, Florian."

"Catlin would say there"s a solution for it, sera."

"What? Go to the station and a.s.sa.s.sinate Khalid? And then somebody else comes after us?"

"We have no idea regarding that, sera."

"Come here." Her tone had been sharp. She regretted it. It was loss of control, but she felt less safe than she had felt a certain number of days ago. People died. Every time things reached a point of decision, people died, and everybody shifted places. Denys. That was her fault. His own fault. But Patil, and Thieu, upset Yanni"s plans for things, and now Spurlin? Everything Yanni had put together was getting hammered by successive events, and the Eversnow business wasn"t even underway yet.

Worse, much worse, it began to raise a specter of who-benefitted, and that answer was beginning to shape up in a very ugly fashion.

Florian came close. She got up from her desk and hugged him, took his face between her hands and saw slight puzzlement. "I"m not criticizing," she said. "Doing that is a possibility, a real one, if anything should happen to Yanni. If I take over, they"ll be after me, and I don"t trust that man."

"We think they already are after you," Florian said. "They surely plan for contingencies. And, more than a contingency, you"re a certainty, sera. You"re a hundred-percent certainty unless someone stops you. And we won"t permit that. None of us will permit that."

She certainly was a target. The first Ari had been. And it was the same thing she"d said to Yanni: she didn"t remember the War. She didn"t remember the Treaty of Pell. She just read about it. The fine textures of history just went away, the fabric lost its tensions and shredded until it didn"t make thorough sense any more, and n.o.body knew now what the deeper part of the issues had been, except what they"d recorded during the actual negotiations.

But how could anybody of her generation pull all those hours of recorded history up, and listen to all of it, and understand it? You"d have to live all the hours of all those negotiations, and all the simultaneous other hours of every other record, and you still wouldn"t get the gestalt of having grown up in it. You knew more, viewing it from the perspective of another generation, because the hidden things came out, but you knew less, too, because the context that made it all make sense had gone away. The first Ari had been somebody"s target, and she"d died, but how could you know why she"d died without being there, and only Yanni and Jordan, of the people still living, had been real close to the facts & And if Abban had done it, how had Abban gotten the notion? Abban was Giraud"s shadow, not Denys". And Giraud had mourned the first Ari. He"d loved her, she knew Giraud had loved the first Ari, so how had Abban possibly been the instrument of the other brother"s policy?

"Sera?" Florian said in a hushed voice, and touched her hair, and looked at her the way she looked at him, only with more awareness than she"d had in the last few seconds. She felt half paralyzed, the way she felt when the brain started working and working and working, pulling things together from one side of flux and the other, nothing matching & nothing making sense.

The first Ari died. Her Florian and Catlin died. Maman died. Giraud died. Denys died. Abban died. Seely died. Thieu died. Patil died. Now Spurlin. Seven were killed by violence. Three had been old. And now there was Spurlin. The odds were definitely not with natural causes, when power pa.s.sed from hand to hand.

"A lot of people have died," she said to Florian. "A lot of people. You can"t count Denys and Abban and Seely. That was us pushing back when they pushed us. But your predecessors and mine & why would Abban be taking Denys" orders, if it was Abban that did it?"

"If Denys ran tape on him," Florian said. "If somebody good set it up. Denys had a lot of opportunity."

"Was he the only one who could?" she asked. Her hands had fallen to his shoulders. He was a safe haven, Florian was. "Who could get to him, else? Track that."

Fabric of history, all decayed, all the evidence, evaporating with every stray gust from a vent. The rime ice melted. The body went to the sun. People went on dying around the hinge-points of power. It had gone on a long, long time. Before any time she remembered, certainly.

"What priority?" Florian asked her. His hands were at her waist. He"d become a young man. He"d become what he was designed to be and he asked an important question: in the crisis of the moment, with Spurlin dead and Jacques" decisions in doubt and Lynch possibly next on somebody"s listwhat priority, the investigation of three twenty-year-old murders?

Absolute priority. It was the environment of her life. It was the reason she existed. Because she existed, all the others had died: her doing, or others" doing, because of her.

Some few were still alive, still in power, in various places. Some of them she trusted. And that could be deadly.

"High," she said. "See if it was investigated, that first. Then see how well it was investigated."

"We"ll do that," Florian said.

She kissed him, not for any good reason, except it fuzzed the brain for a moment, and it felt good, and she wanted to feel good for a moment. She wanted to lie to her senses for a moment and say they were all safe.

But it wasn"t true. The kiss was over and she sent him off to Catlin and Wes and Marco, and knew he"d do bothkeep up with what was going on and investigate old history, both, if he and Catlin had to give up sleep, they weren"t safe. And the next few days were going to be hard ones.

Dangerous. She wasn"t ready to take over. Yanni"d told her that. But events weren"t going to wait for her. People were pushing, already, to get places and do things before she could possibly interfere and change the rules. People might die, in that push.

She couldn"t prevent it. That was the point.

So far, she couldn"t prevent it.

Section 5

Chapter i.

July 24, 2424 0821 H.

Giraud and Seely and Abban all reached their twenty-third week. They swallowed & their lungs developed more pa.s.sageways, and blood vessels, which would one day soon be useful: the proximity of these structures to each other would ultimately make it possible to breathe. Right now they drew their oxygen through the bioplasm of the artificial womb itself. And it rocked, and moved, and occasionally received sounds, internally generated, which made muscles twitch. By now, the brains sent faint light stimuli to a particular center, and sound to another. Nothing was overload. Everything was even keel.

They each weighed about half a kilo, and looked human. Seely weighed a few grams more than Giraud, and was a few centimeters taller. Abban was larger, and weighed six grams more than Giraud. Proportionately, he always would be larger. But Giraud would overtake both in girth, and Seely in weight, before he was fifty.

They moved, they turned. They had their own agendas, based somewhat on what the womb was doing. But something different had happened. The two wombs that contained azi were active at scheduled times. The one that contained a CIT was completely random. Chaos was a part of Giraud"s life now. Order had begun to a.s.sert itself in the other two. And that would always be true.

Chapter ii.

July 25, 2424 1931 H.

Probably every vid in Reseune that wasn"t in a child"s room was tuned to the Novgorod news channel. That was probably true up on Cyteen Station.

This election matteredimmensely: the balance of power between parties was at stake. And n.o.body knew the results yet. The computers were counting and recounting and running complex check routines.

Justin and Grant occupied themselves with a manual, at home, over pizzathe downstairs restaurant, named Seasons, had done mostly deliveries tonight, very likely. Ari was closeted with her staff across the hall. Justin had seen the deliveryman with a trolley full of other orders, mostly pizza, with one address designation on it, and that was Amy"s apartment & so he had the notion a lot of people were there.

YanniYanni wasn"t home, or if he was, he was quiet about it. More likely he was in his office; and if Ari wasn"t with her young friends for something this important, it was because Ari was busy and planned to be busy, whatever happened.

Himself, he just read through a great deal of Jordan"s notes, exactly replicated: he"d already read the basic program. So had Grant. And he couldn"t concentrate worth a d.a.m.n, with the clock now thirty-three minutes past the antic.i.p.ated hour of the announcement of results. So he skimmed ahead, looking for the last and next to last note Jordan had made on that manual. Sequence of note was determined by the outline of programming itself. But Jordan"s handwriting had changed over twenty years, and he knew the way it had changed. It wasn"t that hard to find the latest ones.

"Page 183.23," he said to Grant, a little troubled by what he saw.

Grant flipped pages, settled.

A little line appeared between Grant"s brows.

The station had been playing old tape of Spurlin, discussing Gorodin"s term as Proxy, Gorodin"s deathnatural causes, that; then commentators discussing Spurlin"s suspicious death and the fact the special team at the University Hospital hadn"t published a cause of deathdiscussing Khalid"s last administration, familiar stuff to anybody who hadn"t been living in the outback for the last ten yearsincluding the famous argument with young Ariover and over and over. They"d turned the audio way down.

But the breaking news flasher went on, and Justin said, "Minder, sound."

Audio came up. "The five minute alert has been given. We are five minutes away from hearing the results of &"

Chapter iii.

July 25, 2424 1940 H.

" & the Bureau of Defense election," the vid said, and the web didn"t get the results or relay them any fasterjust the timelag between Cyteen Station, where the counting was done, and Novgorod, where the news station resided. Base One, directly receiving the satellite, was a fraction faster than the news station. the vid said, and the web didn"t get the results or relay them any fasterjust the timelag between Cyteen Station, where the counting was done, and Novgorod, where the news station resided. Base One, directly receiving the satellite, was a fraction faster than the news station.