REGENESIS.

C. J. Cherryh.

HISTORY OF UNION:.

The Past-War Period Novgorod Publications 2424

Union came out of the Company Wars with both territory and political integrity, not beholden to Earth or Alliance for either. The Treaty of Pell, which ended active hostilities between Union and Alliance, left Earth independent, though militarily reliant on Pell"s Star. The Company Fleet had defied Earth"s authority, rejected the Treaty of Pell, and continued acts of piracy, as apt to prey on Earth"s ships as on Union"s, and now lacking a safe port.

The Treaty incidentally left the merchanter Council of Captains with more power than Pell"s Star Station held in the affairs of the Alliance.

And the same Treaty ceded the greater expanse of human-explored s.p.a.ce to the authority of Union . . . but placed merchant trade exclusively in the hands of the Alliance Council of Captains.

It was an agreement equally unpopular on all sideswhich spoke a great deal to its fairnessand it was immediately followed by a period in which all former combatants maneuvered for advantage, everyone dreading a resumption of hostilities, but most convinced that war would break out again, probably within a lifetime.

The Hinder Stars, that bridge of closely lying, generally barren stars between Earth and Pell, became a zone of renewed interest for the Alliance, which governed that region. The Council of Captains, whose livelihood was their ships and their trade, looked to revitalize the moth-balled stations on that routestations that had collapsed economically with the advent of faster-than-light engines. Alliance thus moved to set itself as middleman between Earth and Union, and to profit from that trade . . . if it could re-establish viable populations to consume the goods it wanted to trade along the way.

Union enjoyed the manufacture, mining, and prosperity of Us own widely scattered stations, from Mariner and Viking to outlying Forgone, and it had the colonized world of Cyteen, with its major exports: the rejuv drug, embryos, genetically enhanced biologicals, azi workers, and concentrated foodstuffs.

In the viewpoint of the merchanter captains of the Alliance, that was a somewhat reasonable model for what the Alliance could create around Pell"s WorldDownbelowby repopulating the abandoned starstations of the Hinder Stars, and revivifying trade with, not one, but two living worlds within their reachDownbelow and Earth itself.

It was a reasonable model in all save one respect: the Alliance plan for the Hinder Stars relied on recruitment of station citizens and the natural human birth rate to provide population. This meant luring the poorer of the residents of Pell and Earth to live in frontier conditions at outmoded, pre-FTL stations.

The natural human birth rate is slow: that was one flaw in the plan; and, the second, the poorer residents of Pell Station, who had suffered most in the war years, were not generally optimists about government promises. s.p.a.cers would never give up their ships and family connections to settle permanently on stations. Earth residents were barred by laws restricting emigration of its educated and essential. So a consumer population, particularly of educated and prosperous cla.s.ses, was very hard to obtain in the Hinder Stars. Subsidies began to drain Pell"s economy and raise taxes on Pell Station itself, a source of great discontent.

There was also a basic conflict between station interests and s.p.a.cer interests: stationers were not anxious to see their power further diminished by s.p.a.cer exploitation of the planet beneath their feet. On the one hand there was no great enthusiasm among stationers to visit their sole Earthlike planet.i.t had its hazards, and intelligent inhabitants. And secondly, there had begun to be a strong green party. That party, combined with those stationers fearing the Council of Captains would dominate the station itself, pa.s.sed legislation making Pell"s World a protectorate unavailable for colonization. That cut one leg from under the merchanter captains" plan.

Contrast this situation with Union, which exited the Company Wars with an abundance of thriving stations, two stations at Cyteen"s own home star, besides Mariner and Viking, which posed, a convenient bridge to the Alliance trade. The terms of the Treaty of Pell demanded Alliance merchanters serve those routes, as a condition of Union not building merchanters of their own. And this, of course, provided sorely needed markets for Alliance, but not as profitable markets, counting Union tariffs, as they would be if Alliance owned the cargos and the stations.

And, while Alliance merchanter ships plied Union s.p.a.ce, serving chains of Union starstations down various strands of stars, it was universally Union industry which benefitted from the transport. From Pan-Paris, on one route, to Fargone, on the other, with Cyteen itself at the center, Union had come out of the Company Wars with the kind of trade network and consumer base that the Alliance only dreamed of building.

Union stations numbered populations in the multiple hundreds of thousands, though Union was far younger than Pell. Cyteen itself which did allow humans onworld, counted, population in the millions . . . but the largest population center in Alliance s.p.a.ce numbered, officially, counting both the remote and the near station at Pell, around half a million. Counting the merchanters on ships and miners at various outposts, the whole population of the Alliance numbered probably a quarter of a million more. So the bulk of human population in the universe might still be still centered at Sol, with its billions, but the population of Union now had to be counted as a major alternate center. The exponential increase challenged the economic power that Alliance had once considered una.s.sailable: If that rate of growth continued, one day there would be more humans in Union than presently lived on Earth itself.

Union did not rely on natural birth rate, or on emigration. Union used, birthlabs. Union could create a station and, within twenty years, raise up thousands of highly motivated, trained inhabitantsinhabitants ready to meet the difficulties of station-building, perfectly content with barracks conditions at the outset, and ready to teach their naturally born children their values of hard work, adequate leisure, partic.i.p.ation in the group, and, in due proportion, independent a.n.a.lytical thinking.

More, Union had rejuv, a product of Cyteens biology, which doubled and tripled the productive years of its workers and thinkers. Natural reproduction might stop at forty, when a person went on rejuv, but work and economic production went on . . . and the birthlabs could enable individuals to reproduce into their next century.

Alliance efforts to revive the Hinder Stars, even starting with prebuilt residencies and mothballed businesses, were slow and subject to supply and personnel shortages. They failed to meet immigrant expectations of quick riches and reasonable living conditions. Only the smallest, marginal traders were willing to ply those routes, while the richer Alliance ships engaged in the far more lucrative trade within Union s.p.a.ce. Factor in the occasional appearance of Mazianni piratesformer Earth Company Fleetat these lonely, largely undefended stations of the Hinder Stars, and the reluctance of Alliance stationers to undertake the risk of living there was understandable.

Union, seeing that the Mazianni were deriving supply and new personnel from those stations, offered to a.s.sist the Alliance in patrols there, but old suspicions died hard. Alliance rebuffed Union offers, convinced that Union was seeking to control all these stations, which represented their route to Earth.

Besides, the Alliance was engaged in another, secret project: it had long known of an Earth-cla.s.s world within its grasp, and it mounted an expedition which the Alliance captains saw as finally giving the Alliance the exploitable world they so greatly wanted.

The expedition arrived at that planet, and found it already occupied by a human colony . . . a Union colony.

The timing of the revelation could not have been worse for Alliance-Union relations. During the negotiations for the Treaty, Pell had strongly insisted on acquiring adjacent territory . . . knowing that world was there.

But a secret Union operation at the close of the War had landed not a military occupation, but a colony. The CIT supervisors of the colony, largely military, had perished, early. The azi workers, however, had survived, multiplied, and scattered into the outback, incidentally commingling Terran-origin biologicals and highly engineered microbes with the native fauna . . . and ultimately making accommodation with the native life.

The revelation of the Union colony on that worldwhich came to be known as Gehennacame close to shipwrecking the Treaty of Pell. Alliance held that the Union signers of the Treaty had kept Gehenna a secret, and that the Treaty had thus not been negotiated in good faith. Union responded that its negotiators had not known about the colony, and that, within the framework of Union government, all knowledge of the settlement had been sequestered within two of the branches of government, Science and Defense. Thus the Bureau of State, which had negotiated and maintained the Treaty, had had absolutely no knowledge there was a problem.

Further, Union argued, the administrations of Science and Defense, under Emory of Science and Adm. Azov of Defense, had profoundly changed personnel since the War, and with the present Council of Nine pressing strongly for peace, it made no sense even to the most hawkish of the Alliance political parties to lead humanity back to a state of war. Union formally apologized for the situation and offered amends. The situation was so volatile that Union accepted, the Treaty of Gehenna, presented by Pell, virtually without amendmentto wit, that there would be no future manned landing on a biologically complex world except by joint partic.i.p.ation of Alliance and Union on the mission, and there would be no landing on a world with a native intelligence until that intelligence could meet humans in s.p.a.ce and speak for itself.

By the same treaty, Union offered access to certain restricted technology in a joint Alliance-Union mission to be settled in orbit about Gehenna . . . a watchdog mission designed to preclude any biohazard getting off the planet. Regulations for any persons in contact with Gehenna became the standard for any future exploratory missions.

Though the Treaty of Gehenna was accepted by both sides, the matter of Union a.s.sistance at the Hinder Stars was quietly tabled "pending future study," and, as the third component of the treaty, certain trade concessions and tariff reductions were given to the Alliance Council of Captains; as a confidence-building measure.

Scholars tend to mark the Treaty of Pell as the beginning of the postwar cooling-off period, and the Treaty of Gehenna as its close, as if the era could be summed up within those parentheses. But between those two events, the death of a single human woman, Ariane Emory, and her rebirth in a Parental Replicate, could ultimately prove of greater import in human history. As the rumor reached Pell and Earth that the Architect of Unionand of Gehennahad died, there had been reaction clear to the ends of human s.p.a.ce.

The war years, in which stations and whole planets had become logical targets, had threatened the existence of humankind, from the motherworld to the most remote colony of Union s.p.a.ce. That state of affairs had remained true for much of the first Ariane Emory"s tenure in various offices. She had been a genius in genetics and psychology, served as Director of Reseune for a number of years, was the principle theorist behind Union"s strong population push during the War. . . and she had served as Councillor of Science during a critical period of the post-War era, including the Gehenna operation. Her political views were pro-Expansionist. She had been instrumental in the push of human population and commerce to the farthest reaches of explored s.p.a.ce. She had founded the genetic Arks, in which genetic records of every available Earth species were preserved. She had steered the development of the planet of Cyteen from a largely vacant wilderness to a continent spanning network of towns and research centers, and the establishment of ecological studies on the second continent. She had begun her career in full accord with Union"s early intentions to terraform the world of Cyteen into a new Earth, but her opinion had evolved over time into a determination to preserve its native fauna.

The Centrist party of her day, which had crystallized around Emory"s change of opinion about terraforming, continued to press for terraforming Cyteen and basing Union around a strong centered authority. Emory and the Expansionists contrarily argued against further alterations to Cyteen, and in favor of further colonization, with a strong emphasis on local autonomy of governments thus formed, a de facto decentralization of power.

And Emory prevailed.

Then, as a war-weary universe foresaw Emory"s life winding down to a natural close, and as powers jockeyed to position themselves for a quieter post-Emory era of consolidation, Emory advanced a process called psychogenesis, the cloning of a psychologically and intellectually identical offspring. It was a procedure that had conspicuously failed before.

When Emory was a.s.sa.s.sinated, many in Alliance and even in Union a.s.sumed that her fined project had been aborted, incomplete, or that if ever attempted, it would failthat, in effect, it had been the last, forlorn hope of a dying woman.

Within two years, a child named Ariane Emory was born at Cyteen.

BOOK ONE.

Section 1

Chapter i.

March 27, 2424 1328 H.

Hundreds of babies floated in their vats, in various stages, in Reseune"s largest birthlabazi babies, CIT babies, much the same. Azi were in one section. CIT babiesfor Citizen mothers who for physical reasons, job reasons, or personal preference, didn"t want to handle pregnancy the old-fashioned wayoccupied another section of the same lab. The only difference between the two groups at this stage was a doorway, and whether a number or a CIT name tagged the vat. The data of real pregnancies bathed all the fetuses in a perpetual sea of appropriate chemistry and sound. The machinery of artificial wombs rocked them, moved them, kept them close and safe and warm.

There was, on one side of that doorway, Abban AB-688, an azi. It would take a text-align:ose look to see him floating in his tank. At six weeks, Abban AB was about pea-sized, though growing fast. He"d be tall, someday. He"d be dark-haired, and very, very clever, and cold as ice.

In the tank beside him was Seely AS-9, who had been conceived in the same hour. He would be of a slighter build, pale blond, eyes fair blue, and, like Abban, he would be an alpha, and very, very smart. The 9 should have meant he was the ninth of his exact geneset and psychset combination: in fact he was the tenth.

The ordinary naming conventions did fall by the wayside at times, especially among highly socialized alphas, whose Supervisors named them whatever they liked, or among very old, foundational sets, whose numbers and alphabetics didn"t always conform to modern usage. Abban, for instance: his personal alphabetic was B. But he had been given a name starting with both his letterssomeone"s whimsy, perhaps.

That was the first thing that was odd about Abban AB. Another was that, just like Seely AS, this Abban reused a sequence number: 688.

And that, all other conventions aside, should never happen.

On the other side of that doorway, Giraud Nye, conceived within minutes of the others, would be born a CIT, Citizen cla.s.s, for no other reason than that he had a CIT number and came with no manual, no set course to take him through his first years. He would learn in chaos, being a born-man; and after he reached adulthood he would become responsible for himself. In his sixth week, just like Abban AB and Seely AS, he had just the start of a bloodstream. Last week he"d been nothing but a tube, the beginnings of a backbone and a spinal cord. This week he had a tail, had spots for eyes, had the beginnings of a heart, and the faintest discernable buds for arms and legs. He didn"t have a brain yet. He didn"t have eyelids because he didn"t really have eyes. Any of the three of them could have been almost any mammal: Giraud could have been a piglet, as easily, or a horse. He could have been Abban or Seely. He could just as well have been a little girl, for that matter. But the DNA in his cells and the tag on his vat both said he was Giraud Nye, a CIT, and he"d be a square-built man with sandy hair, large bones, and cold blue eyes. Going on rejuv at age forty or so, give or take how well he took care of himself, he"d live to be around a hundred and thirty-three Earth Standard years before the drug played out on him, and then he"d probably die of a heart attack.

That was the blueprint of the last Giraud Nye, and this one was destined for the old Giraud Nye"s power, someday, unless someone threw the switch and stopped him.

Ari Emory visited him today, out of curiosity, and with mixed emotions. She came with her two bodyguards, Florian and Catlin, and she created a stir in the labs. Even at eighteen, she had power, and she could throw that switch.

She could also create Giraud"s brother Denys, completing the set, on any given day. She still had seven years" leeway in which to do that, that span of time having been the gap between the brothers. In her own untested opinion, any day would do. But doing it at all was, personally, a very hard decision.

For one thing, psychogenesis wasn"t going to be a sure thing in the Nyes" case. ReseuneLabs didn"t have the data on the Nyes that they"d had on her, whose predecessor"s every living day had been doc.u.mented down to the hormones, the chemistry, the actions and the reactions, for at least her formative years. The first Ariane Emory had been her own mother Olga Emory"s living lab, and all her predecessor"s data was out there in a vault under a gra.s.sy hill, just beyond the sprawling city-sized complex that was Reseune, with ReseuneLabs and its adjacent town.

This Ariane Emory was the second of her own geneset. And all her data was being saved under another such hill, so she was already pretty sure there"d someday be a third of her set. Like an azi, she supposed she could view continuance of her geneset as a vote of confidence by those who made such decisions. But whether they"d clone the original, or her, wellthat was still to determine, wasn"t it?

Successful cloning was a given for ReseuneLabs, an easy job. Cloning human beings or rare animals, with gene-manipulation tossed in for variety, or, more to the point, for good healththat was what Reseune and other labs did every day of the month, for the whole star-spanning state that was Union.

You wanted a child of your own genotype, or just a roll of the dice, the old-fashioned way? If you pa.s.sed the psych exams, male or female, you could have a child, two children, as many as you likedor as many as your local law allowed. You wanted a genetic problem fixed? Reseune could do that. Embryos shipped constantly, shuttled up to station, dispersed as far as Union reached . . . even, though rarely, to Earth. It was a huge industry. Reseune had the largest of the CIT birthlabs . . . but it had compet.i.tion.

Psychogenesis, however, replicating a mindthat was a whole new twist on an old process . . . and only Reseune had done that.

It was the year 2424, and this Ariane Emory was the first success of that kind.

She could create Denys, if she wanted to. She"d killed Denysat least her bodyguard had. Giraud and Denys had created her, right after they had, perhaps, killed the first Ari Emory. Turn about, fair play.

Chapter ii.

April 21, 2424 1509 H.

"If you do exist, third Ariane, and if you"re hearing my record, with or without the first Ariane"s, be warned that I intend to shape the world that you will inhabit, but be warned tooI can never utterly guarantee the outcome of what I do, or the outcome of what I am. Fixing anything that"s wrong will be your job, the same way the first Ari created me to fix her mistakes.

"So I give you this advice: you have my geneset, and you may be shaped by many of my experiences, as I was shaped by the first Ariane"s. But remember you"re no more me than I am you. You"re no more me, than youor Ican ever be the first Ariane Emory, no matter how carefully they pattern us. Why? Because we don"t live in her time. We can"t live her life exactly as she lived it, and we shouldn"t try, because then we wouldn"t fit into the world we live in. You don"t live in my time, and should never try to.

"This I do have in common with her: mine is not a peaceful time. Not all the decisions she made were the best ones, and she knew that long before she died. In many cases we both did as we could, too late for good sense.

"But I am certainly more the first Ariane than you can be, since the times in which I exist are directly linked to her time. The times I"ll shape, with whatever power I can get into my hands, will link me to your time. I don"t know how I"ll feel decades from now, but it"s my opinion that you"ll ultimately need to hear from both of usbecause the first Ari invented herself and I"m the bridge between.

"Do the math. The first Ari died twenty years ago. I"m eighteen, I"ve been living on my own since I was twelve, because they preferred me to any other alternatives they had, most of which were bad. And, never mind that your records may insist I was fourteen when I set out on my own, I was twelve. The program just wasn"t ready for me, so it said I was fourteen and I had to scramble to catch up.

"I owe my current situation to Dr. Yanni Schwartz, who saw Reseune through difficult yearsand who followed the program laid out in the first Ari"s systems. If you know the records, the first Ariane came to adult rights early. So did I. Both events were driven by legislators who feared their alternatives far more than they feared a child . . . or her overseers.

"Mine is still not an unlimited power, in my eighteenth year. I wasn"t born with a Parental Replicates rights. I didn"t even have my CIT number. I had to prove genetic ident.i.ty before I got possession of Ari"s old CIT number and became the owner of everything attached to iteverything the first Ari owned. And I got it primarily because Reseune wanted those rights to stay in Reseune. So Reseune backed my claims.

"But it didn"t prove in all senses that I was Ariane Emory. I"m still doing that, and people still question. Yanni Schwartz is Director of Reseune as well as Proxy Councillor of Science for Union, a situation which won"t last foreverpossibly not much beyond two years, or maybe longer. You"ll know by your own lifetime how that transition of power played outwhat I had to do, what I chose to do, and whether it was the best thing to have done. I"m pretty sure you"ll get the CIT number attached before you"re born: I"ll try to see to that, since I fought that battle and there"s no longer an issue. But no matter how much I can smooth the way for you, you"ll likely face your own crisis of maturity, because money and power in the hands of a child make for powerful politics. Just say that right now my uncles are both dead and I"m alive.

"This, too, you should know. The Council of Nine always preferred me over the alternativesone of which was for the Council to actually make a decision and plot a course away from the world that the first Ariane created. They didn"t do that. Possibly that lack of initiative was planned into them: you know that Reseune had a hand in Novgorod"s population. I"ve not gotten anything from my predecessor that gives me a specific clue about that theory . . . but then I don"t have access to all of the records that exist, even if I"m told I have it. One can"t prove a negative, and if I haven"t got it, it"s hard to know if it existsbut I"m still searching. My best theory says the Council might have hated the first Ariane, but they were scared of life without her. And getting her back, in methat felt much safer for them. At least the court voted to give me my ident.i.ty, even if they couldn"t give me control of Reseune: Denys was responsible for pushing that; n.o.body knew it then, since Giraud was the face they saw, but don"t believe the histories: it was a combination of Giraud and Denys who really ran things, and Denys was brighter, but he was, let me say, a little odd.

"When Uncle Denys died, I overcame his Base in the house systems. I"d already opened up all of Base OneAri"s computer systemand gotten it to give me its records. I investigated all sorts of things that Denys had put under seal.

"Denys wasn"t the one who"d walled me off from knowing things. Base One had done that, But when it was tune, Base One was really his downfall. He couldn"t seal the things the first Ariane had done, when Base One was ready to tell me: the little surprises in the computer system, the sudden appearance of which to this hour I can"t predict, just happen, and they began happening years before Denys died. That"s how she got past Denys, posthumously, by installing the program that taught me step by step what she wanted me to know. She created areas of the house system no one knew existed, and she did it so that, after she was dead, Base One would wait, intact, never letting Base Two rename itself. Then when I reached the right age and the right circ.u.mstances, Base One a.s.sembled itself. In my case, I suspect the trigger was not my birthday, as I used to believe, but a combination of moves by my caretaker.

"I"m pretty sure Denys thought he could, turn me into a useful but much safer version of my predecessor. But that didn"t happen. Understand: Base One isn"t a computer. It"s always a moving target within the software of the main house systemand there"s no knowing what it will be by the time you inherit it. Denys" experts couldn"t find, its parts, they couldn"t shut it down without consequences, and it self-heals and adapts. So far as I know, it will still go on triggering things in your timeand I don"t think that Uncle Denys" experts could do anything on their own that ever matched it, but I"m never sureso I am careful, and so must you be. Never take Base One entirely for granted. You have to ask it very good questions to get its best and truest answers. And never a.s.sume the other Bases won"t maneuver to get past it.

"Evidently Base One has opened some of my files to you, so I a.s.sume you have reached a birthday or a crisis of some kind, and that your own accession to power is very near. Are you, in fact, eighteen as you read this? I have no way to know. At this stage I can"t govern the age at which you get this, because I can"t create the complexity of program that the first Ari wrote into Base One. I"ll learn. For now, I just make the records.

"So maybe you"re twelve. Maybe you"re out on your own. Maybe not. I do a.s.sume that I"m dead by this time in your life, and that I have been since before your life beganby a few days, or maybe by some few months. It may have been my murder that brought about your birth, I shouldn"t actually he surprised at that. And if that is what did happen to me, consider your own safety. They may have decided to create you thinking they can control you, and Reseune"s moneyand when they find out to the contrary, they"ll change their minds fast. Uncle Denys certainly did.

"Look around you. Ask who profited by my death, whether or not it was natural causes. I"m still asking that question about Ari One. Someone killed her. Someone ordered the termination of the first Florian and the first Catlin, too, and curiously that makes me madder than someone killing my predecessor. If you don"t feel much the same on that matter, we"re different, and you should think really carefully about that. You have the intelligence to see why it should be dangerous, or we are very, very different indeed, and something critical to our nature has failed.

"Whoever killed Ari One, the plan to create me was already far advanced when she died, and my life went forward, in one sense, with the push of a b.u.t.ton. You may know a lot about that by now, and likely you"ll hear more about me as the years pa.s.s. You may know how I grew up, and you may know how I reacted to what they did. I learned to play their games. I was cute at the right momentsUncle Denys saw through that, because cuteness was completely wasted on him. He was a very inward person pretending to be a good, sweet uncle. He relied on me for his power, because he couldn"t hold it without someone to do the public things, and for a long time that was Giraud and at the last it was me. He didn"t know how to be nice, just how to act nice, and people believed he cared, but he didn"t. When I figured that out, things changed.

"When Uncle Giraud died, I think that was when Denys really began to be scared, because Giraud had always been his protection and his public face. I"m sure Denys was more and more afraid of me as I grew. He was so afraid of meand, I think, of Yannithat he never found a way to kill me in time. . . and I think that was his game. I think he wanted to have me get the first Ari"s CIT number; I think he wanted me to get everything I could, and convince everybody I was real, which put a lot of money and power into his hands. When I nearly broke my neck, he was really, really upset. But he always planned I"d die before I got smarter than he was. He never knew when the right moment was, because he could judge how to make people trust him, but he couldn"t do that so well once they got older and began to pretend to trust him. That was a very, very great weakness. And if the Denys I create grows up to be Denys the way he was, he might or might not be better at his games. So be careful.

"I do have ultimately to make a decision about Uncle Denys. Brilliant as he was in his field, he"s not essential to the universe. But I"m nearly certain Uncle Giraud may need him, once he"s born. Giraud is important to us, and it might be important that my Giraud have a brother he can take care of, speak for, and protect obsessively. Not to have Uncle Denys born might change Giraud, maybe not for the better. . . though I have as long as seven years before I make the ultimate decision on that. I won"t prejudice your thinking about Giraud, supposing my version of him is in your lifeor maybe a third is, who knows? He could outlive me, and you might well have to deal with the Giraud I created. How I create him and whether I ultimately create Denys for him to focus on has bearing on what, kind of Giraud you"ll have. So pay close attention to what I say on that subject. If you"re not in power yet, you need to start taking measures to protect yourself and stay alive. Giraud can be pleasant, but he"s capable of killing you.

"So I am leaning toward yes on the matter of Denys. Ultimately, I liked Giraud. I didn"t like him most of the time he was alive, really, not as much as I like him in retrospect. One thing I know: I have to keep myself somewhat distant from the Giraud yet to be born, and not let my feelings for the old one enter into his upbringing He has to oppose me: that"s what his use is.

"The first Giraud always wanted to belong to something. Or he wanted something to belong to him. He had to serve something. He wasn"t inclined, like me, like you, like the first Ari, to covet a solitary eminence. He had an azi"s need to serve, in a certain sensein his case, he served Denysand I find that need fascinating . . . proving, I suppose, that one of the most universal and limiting traits we instill into the azi we create is actually a profoundly human one.

"Giraud served his brother long before I existed. And after Giraud died, Denys was, I think, a sad and very unbalanced man. Denys began to take actions, being afraid of me, and not having Giraud any longer to keep the world away from him. That was what Denys most feared, you should know. Not me. Not even dying Denys was afraid of the world outside his world. And when Giraud died, Denys started having to do things for himself. He had very good azi: Abban, of course, who had belonged to Giraud first, and he had Seely, but they weren"t Giraud, Worse, Denys didn"t ever respect azi, not even alpha azi, and that lack of respect colored everything he ever did with them. They were loyal to him; they wanted to serve him; they did everything for him; but Denys couldn"t respect anybody but Giraud. Born-men, CITs: they were even more of a cipher to him, and he knew it. He had the program manuals for Abban and Seely; he could read them very well, so he knew them as well as he knew any azi, and I"m sure he thought he understood them, the way he thought he understood me.

"But to really understand either born-men or azi, or me, you have to understand feelings, and Uncle Denys was all turned inward. He understood what he wanted. He could predict what Uncle Giraud was going to do most of the time. He actually trusted Giraud, and after Uncle Giraud died, Denys didn"t trust anybody. He probably had confidence that Abban and Seely would do what their manuals said they had to do, but here"s the salient part: he didn"t, I think, have the least idea why they would do it. He was so far from being able to deal with azi on an individual level, it"s a wonder he got a non-provisional Supervisor"s certificate; I"m sure he finagled it, or Giraud got it for him. But don"t ever think he didn"t know azi, in the macro sense. He really did. His writings are brilliant, on economics stemming from azi populations turned CIT, macrosets in the largest sense, and profound integrations. I very, very much respect that work and I"m still reading it.

"And personally, one on one, he could smile and be sweet. He did favors for people, and he could tell in talking to them just what they wanted to hearoh, he"d give them just exactly what would make them relax and believe him, and he could read that the way you"d read a book. But all that understanding of what people wanted to hear never got inside him, where he really lived, Inside he was all numbers, just numbers, and all the macroview, nothing micro at all. Much as I loathed Abban and Seely, I know he mishandled them terribly, and that may be their destiny again, because they"ll be Jus when he needs them.

"Maybe you see the situation clearer than I do, because emotions both make things clearer and obscure the truth. You can understand and manipulate people without experiencing empathysociopaths do that really well; but if you don"t know very clearly what your own objective is in the transaction, you can"t really understand what your own emotions are doing to you, and it"s easy to get confused. You can think you"re being really smart, when you"re really just getting by. I think that was Denys" central trouble: he had a lot of the traits of a sociopathtotally self-interested, no empathy even for Giraud. . . . And it"s not a flaw in him I feel safe correcting yet, or we could lose everything he was, intellectually.

"I"m just beginning work on my section of the tape you"ll get. And maybe I won"t tell you everything I could say right now, because you have to figure certain things out for yourself.

"My current decision is to let Ari One talk to you first, with the very same tape she gave to me, starting with your first log-on to Base One for one thing, because it exists, and I can"t predict how long I"ll live. If things turn out the way I plan, you"ll have heard her voice for years before you hear mine.

"So you"ll come to know me, starting with this tape, if I haven"t created any others to precede it.

"One thing is relatively sure: that you won"t remember me. But you may know Justin, and Grant, and Yanni, and maybe you"ll deal with my Amy and Sam and Maddy. And maybe even my Florian and my Catlin, whom I love above all the world, though I may have to order them to die. They"re too powerful, and I honestly don"t know what they"d do without me, or if they could love an Ari who isn"t theirs. Most of all, they couldn"t be children with you. But I don"t want to think about that. Of all the things I suspect Ari One did, that"s the one I can"t stand. And yet it may have been absolutely necessary. It may have been the hardest and the kindest thing she ever did. I can"t think what would have happened if I hadn"t had my Florian and my Catlin when I was growing up. It would have changed everything.

"You see why, with all the questions I haven"t answered for myself, I may let Ari Senior talk to you first. She never grew too old for questions. But she could give you answers from a much longer view. That isn"t my perspective yet.

"I hope I have her years, to gain that sense. I hope I leave things in better order for you than she did for me. But I can"t promise it.