That started going down, too, as if Yanni were half-starved, and Yanni"s wine was at a quarter of the gla.s.s left.

"Yanni," she said. "You"re worried about something."

"I"ve got a lot of pieces trying to come unglued," Yanni said, and swallowed a bite. "Sorry. I"m just elsewhere this evening, I"m afraid."

"Who"s Anton Clavery?"

"Not a pleasant dinner conversation," Yanni said.

"But this is our window to have this conversation, unless you want to stay for drinks, and I know you"re tired. Yanni, I need to know what"s going on."

"We don"t know. Clavery"s n.o.body. Literally, n.o.body."

"Nonperson?"

"Something like."

"Did he kill Patil?"

"Behind it, we"re pretty sure. Not the hand on the trigger, necessarily, but"

"Why did he kill Patil?"

"Because &" Another bite went down, chased by the rest of the wine. "Because Patil was coming over to Science, or because certain people know about Eversnow, and shouldn"t, and that blew up before it ever got to public knowledge."

"Jordan?"

Last bite. She pressed a silent signal, and Haze came in and removed the plates, while Yanni had to think about that question. Haze refilled Yanni"s wine gla.s.s. Yanni let it sit.

"Jordan knew about Eversnow," she said. "He said he did. I gave you that transcript, too Did you lie to me, Yanni? I thought you were honest. But maybe you"re just good."

Yanni nodded. "When I have to be. Yes, I told him about it. He didn"t approve. He hit the ceiling, in fact."

"In your office before you left. That was what the fight was really about."

"Young sera, you know quite a lot."

"It was pretty famous, Uncle Yanni. You weren"t very quiet. And Jordan is news. So yes, I heard there was a fight. So did everybody in Admin and Ed. Why did you tell him?"

Long silence. And Haze wasn"t going to come back in until signaled.

"We"re the same generation," Yanni said. "Old a.s.sociates. I know the way he thinks. He was in on the project at the beginning. I didn"t want him to find out later and blow up or go behind my back. I wanted to control how he learned and what he thought and know what his movements were once he knew. And I pretty well got the reaction I thought I"d get, so Jordan didn"t surprise me in that respect. He doesn"t like it. He said he"d had enough of Thieu, and I was crazy, and terraforming anything was a good way to get biologicals loose we just won"t like. Old argument, with Jordan. I said he didn"t like planets on principle, and he said they were good for studying, but he"d rather not live there if he had any choice. And he asked me about his transfer to Fargone, old topic. Which I told him was dead. Totally dead. He"s not going anywhere in the foreseeable future. He shouted. I shouted. He called me a d.a.m.ned fool. We weren"t on record."

"Somebody slipped that card into his pocket, and it turned up, he says, the night you got back from Novgorod, from all this dealing. You didn"t do that, did you?"

"No."

"Can I believe that? Did anybody working for you do it? Do I have to pare it down until something finally fits?"

"I have no idea where that came from, or, more to the point, how whoever did it knew Jordan knewif they knew Jordan knew. It"s a d.a.m.ned maze. And it wasn"t my doing."

"He"s connected to Thieu. Thieu didn"t know about Eversnow, or did he?"

"Thieu did know something, because we made a request for his Eversnow notes back when we set this up."

"Thieu had notes on Eversnow in his files?"

"He doesn"t, now. Didn"t. We borrowed them and didn"t return them. But yes, he was doing some work on that once upon a time. Defense had used his work, in their little version of the Eversnow project. We"d studied it. It"s foundational to what we propose to do next."

"h.e.l.l, Yanni! That"s a little oversight in informing me!"

"It"s a worrisome piece of information to leave out, I agree. Doubly so, now."

"I don"t suppose Patil phoned Thieu to advise him when she got the appointment. I don"t suppose she said the word Eversnow."

"He didn"t get a phone call. He did get the advis.e.m.e.nt back in April that she"d taken a job at Reseunes.p.a.ce on Fargone: she sent him a message to that effect, He was not mentally what he had been. But possibly possibly he did put two and two together. Possibly he knew very well what she was doing, a nanistics Special on the farthest station outward, next to Eversnow. Where he would have gone, if they"d gone ahead with his program."

"And before that he was bedeviling Jordan to contact her. Contact her. As if Jordan could. But we have just a slight clue what he wanted Jordan to find out, don"t we? If you gave Patil his notes & don"t you think that explains just a little bit? He had no warning at all that Jordan was actually going to get out of Planys. But he knew Jordan had contacts inside Reseune, that he has a son here. And you just lifted his files and sent them where he couldn"t get them, so small wonder he was a little agitated. How long ago?"

"During Denys" tenure. Late last year."

"The man was a Special. It was his life"s work. His stuff was disappearing. They were never going to run his work on Cyteen. He knew that better than anybody, if he"d managed the remediation program. And there"s the military nanistics programhe worked on that during the War, didn"t he?"

"Yes."

"And he worked on Eversnow, you s.n.a.t.c.hed his files, and he knew the only planet we own where it"s remotely appropriate to use the terraforming data is Eversnow. And Patil was moving to Fargone, right next door."

"He was in rejuv failure. The notes were cla.s.sified. It was perfectly logical we take them, in his retirement. We don"t know how much of all that he put together. The rejuv failure was progressing fast. We"re talking about a few months, here."

"Does Patil have them in her possession? Were they possibly in her apartment?"

Yanni shook his head. "No. They were sent on to Fargonecopies were. She didn"t have them yet."

She let go a short breath. "Thank G.o.d for that."

"She didn"t have them, and they"re in a military courier"s black box en route. n.o.body can get at them but someone with the keyword."

It didn"t make her feel that much better. "So Defense has them."

"Can"t access them. Not unless they"ve messed with the black boxes themselves. Don"t even talk about getting into those. Elections. The stock market. Public records. There"s deeper security on that system than anything else we"ve got. It"ll feed into Fargone Central, totally robotic, and it has a gate-restriction on it. It won"t feed out again until someone arrives there with a pa.s.sword. That"s the way it works. Those notes will be sealed, until someone authorized shows up there."

"What pa.s.sword? Do you know it? Or who does know it?"

"I won"t tell you here. I know it. I hadn"t even told Patil. I will tell you."

"Do. Please. That"s too thin a thread, Yanni. There"s security, but that"s way too thin a thread. Catlin."

"Sera."

"Paper."

Catlin went to a sideboard, got a single sheet of paper and a pen, and gave them to Yanni. He wrote, and Catlin carried it to her. Alphanumeric, long, and without mnemonics evident. GIIW20280082Y2.

Then 28912HW. And W/18.

She tucked that paper into her decolletage. "Ash before midnight," she said. "Thank you, Yanni.""

A nod of his head. Catlin had resumed her place. Likely had already memorized it, in the one glance she"d gotten. Catlin was good at that.

"So do we have a copy here at Reseune?" she asked.

"It"s there," he said. "Filed in your archive."

She had to be amused. they hadn"t turned it up by accident. It wasn"t part of the ordinary Library archive, nor Security"s ordinary file, not out there. "What else have you stored in my files?"

"Just things your successor might need. Or you might. Someday."

"Clever."

Yanni gave a little nod, sipped his wine. "Thank you. You"re right: somebody might have a.s.sumed she had thembut they didn"t stay to search the apartment, so they didn"t think they were there. They might try to hack her access."

"Or Thieu"s. Thieu"s is the place I"d expect them to go after."

"And he was dying. It was a good idea to get those files entirely out of there. Beyond an erase. They"re gone from storage at Planys."

"And they"re here. Under my name. And in that ship, outbound. The only copies in the universe."

"The only copies."

"Nothing at Beta."

"Nothing at Betaat least on our side of the wall. If Defense has a copy, we can"t find that."

"So Thieu wants to know what"s going on with his files. The man may have been going downhill fast, but he wasn"t stupid. Jordan meanwhile didn"t want to get involved in his scheme"

"Jordan was involved in another information flow," Yanni said. "A man named McCabe"

"Airport maintenance. Giraud told me. A middleman in a contact between Councillor Corain and Jordan."

"A two-way conduit of information. We detained him, of course we did. But we don"t know if he"s the only one. A leak to and from Novgorod? Absolutely there was. There may have been others. It"s possible Thieu didn"t need his mental faculties about him to know Patil was going to Eversnow & if Corain"s contact man wasn"t the only font of information in Planys. The fact that the news hasn"t broken in wider Paxer circles yet indicates if there is a flow of information we haven"t already stopped, it"s tightly controlled and it"s being careful. We"re watching that possibility carefully & feeding a little disinformation to see where it turns up. It was one reason I wanted to break that news to Jordan and watch his reaction. I was running truthers. The surprise seemed real & so he didn"t get the information from Corain"s man. But what goes on in Corain"s office & who knows where they have contacts? You don"t blow a good spy for some minor piece of news. You let him sit and wait until there"s something worth his being there. And so far n.o.body"s breached security in Corain"s officeuntilpossiblynow. Somebody took out our plans for Eversnow, in one day."

Finally. Finally she had the notion Yanni was leveling with her.

"So," she said, "Thieu wanted to get to Patilwho"s the logical recipient of those notes you took from him, one of the only people, maybe, who"ll really understand them."

"Understand, there was absolutely nothing illegal in what we did: it"s cla.s.sified material, the man was going downhill medically, we had to protect it. The military sits right there next to Planys, with the capability to "protect and defend" military interests. They could be across that gap in fifteen minutes flat."

"Eversnow is still their project. Thieu was working for them, but physically inside PlanysLabs. And they didn"t have those notes."

"He"d been working with them, still corresponding with them quite extensivelywe don"t have the content of many of those letters. They dropped into the great black hole of Defense Communications. We a.s.sume they don"t have his last notes. If they have their own copy, we don"t know. Can"t know."

"Didn"t his notes go to them, if he was working for them?"

"His work is proprietary to Reseune. They wanted something done, they got the result, not the research. We have his side of the exchange with them, not their answers."

"Will Jacques talk?" she asked.

"I may make headway with Spurlin on that fronta.s.suming the election goes his way. Meanwhile, before the election results, I want the project staffed. I have to replace Patil."

"If Khalid should get into office &"

"Exactly. I"m going to be raiding other nanistics people out of Beta where Defense is going to be mildly unhappy with me. I"m going to hire people away from their programs."

"So you"re going full speed ahead. But we"re running out of nanistics Specials."

"We"re out of Specials. I do have five candidates for the Eversnow directorship, backup in case Patil had said no, top of her list of her own choices to go to Fargone. I"m going ahead with the project, all out. Be advised of that."

"I think we pretty well have to, don"t we?" she said, because that really was where her thoughts were tending now. "We need to find out what"s going on. Not to let our enemies win this. I wasn"t for it. But somebody who doesn"t like us is against it."

"I"m glad you take that position," Yanni said, looking tired. He"d resisted the wine, beyond a sip or two. He picked it up, looked at it. Looked at her. "If I drink this and get indiscreet, are you going to be a priss about it?"

"I"m not," she said. "Never will be. But answer me first, Uncle Yanni. I really, really love you and I so want you to tell me the absolutely honest truth in this. Maybe Jordan"s lying to everybody. Maybe he brought that card with him from Thieu for his own reasons. Do you have any inkling that"s the case?"

"I just think he knows more than he"s saying."

That was a disappointment. She wanted more out of Yanni. She pressed her lips together. And waited.

Yanni said: "You really shouldn"t try to run Reseune yet, you know."

Shift of direction. She saw it. She still tracked. "What makes you think about that?"

"Because you"re getting very sharp, very fast, and you"ve gathered a small army."

"Yanni, somebody bugged my new staff, and I"m pretty sure who, and probably you are. I didn"t like that."

"It wasn"t me," he said.

"Hicks, then," she said. "Independently. I may eventually forgive him for it, but he did it, and he pretty certainly knew he did it. I"m onto it, and I"ve fixed the problem. Don"t mention it to him, though. I"m trusting you to know about it and keep quiet. For your own protection. My people are dangerous to people who"d try to do things like that."

"You remind me of your predecessor."

"Did you like her?"

"Odd question."

"Did you like her, Yanni?"

"I did, actually. She was what she was, and she did good in her life, on the average. And let me say right now that if you want me to step down tonight, I will, but I hope you"ll reconsider a move like that."