Whatever someone had laid into him, it was a hard block.

Sera said, slightly more sternly: "Rafael."

"Sera?"

"When I tell you something, it"s true. It will always be true. Do you need to see your Contract, to know that?"

"I want to see it," Rafael said.

Very high beta, strong-willed, not easily overcome. Catlin felt it in her own nerves. This azi was Enemy, and resisting, hard. Sera said, quietly, "Catlin, unlock the door."

"Sera, show him through the window."

"Unlock the door, Catlin. It"s all right."

She was alpha, and her resistance was harder to overcome than any beta ever devised. But she had to, if sera insisted. Florian and Wes were right with sera while she moved back to the console to open the door. If the Enemy went berserk, they"d hit him with all they had. But "He"s security, sera."

"Do it," sera said.

Sera"s orders, in that tone, were sera"s orders, off her own deep sets, and Catlin moved and did it, watching the subject the while, her heart ticking up another notch as Florian and Wes moved in, right with sera.

"These are your allies," sera said calmly. "And this is your Contract." She took a small reader from her coat pocket, and walked toward the subject, whose leaning against the wall could propel him off it in half a heartbeat, and sera was small and fragile in that reckoning, the subject a head taller, b.l.o.o.d.y-faced, drenched in sweat, and, at the moment, between loyalties.

Sera calmly held the reader out to him, and he stood away from the wall, took it, and looked at it. Looked for a long time.

It was something, to see one"s real Contract, and read the name on it, for the first time. It was ident.i.ty, and right, and duty, all those things wrapped up in one. It had to have an effect. Just thinking about it had an effect on every azi in the room, and Catlin moved close to the door, tense as drawn wire, ready to defend her Contract if Rafael made a sudden move.

"Do you believe," sera asked Rafael quietly, "that I"m your Supervisor?"

- Nod. Second nod. The eyes flickered. Rafael was processing things. Hard. He shook badly as he gave the reader back. It could go any direction from here. Any direction.

"It"s all right," sera said. "You"re one of us. You"re safe. You"re where you belong."

He felt for the wall behind him. Leaned against it. "It"s all right. Come here. Come."

He got his balance. Sera stood there holding out open arms, and that great tall azi came close and let her take his hands. "It"s all right," sera said. "You only report to me, now and forever. All other claims on you are completely gone. Erased. You don"t have to do the other thing, do you?"

"No," Rafael said. A huge sigh came out of him, and he said shakily: "I won"t." Deep breath. "I don"t have to."

Not a lie, Catlin thought. That had been a Conflict. Bad one. Something in that tape had reached out and presented this azi an irresolvable contradiction, thrown him into a box to which only an appropriate Supervisor had the key.

And sera had come and rescued him, that simply.

Catlin found her leg twitching. She was that wired up. But Rafael was Sera"s now. Safe. She saw the same subtle shift in Florian"s stance, and Wes"s. Three of them might not have been quick enough, strong enough, to take the man out fast enough, as close as sera had pushed it: they had to talk with her about that. But done was done. It was all right. The other three, down the row, they were sera"s, too, peacefully, with no reactions.

This onethis one had been a spy at very least, and sera had found it out.

"You can come up to the Wing with us," sera told Rafael. "So can the other three. You"ll make things ready for the rest of your command."

"Yes, sera," Rafael said. He squared himself on his feet. Gave a little bow of the head.

"My name is Florian," Florian said then, "sera"s personal security." A nod over his shoulder. "Catlin." And left, "Wes. Wes will walk up the hill with you. Everything will be provided for you in the quarters there, including uniforms. You don"t have to bring anything but yourselves. You"ll prepare the place for the others when they come."

"Yes," Rafael said. His face had a different look. An azi knew. He was still somewhat in shock, still rattled, the experience having knocked his defenses flat.i.t was a kind of openness that might never appear in this azi again. Right now he was fragile, entirely, needing protection. When he got where he was going, when he got an official a.s.signment, and knew where he would be and what he was to do, he"d become what he would be, and not until then. Right now he needed help.

"I"ll meet you there," sera said, "and give you your orders."

"Yes," he answered her, and nodded. "Yes, sera." The waking mind was in fragments. It needed time and quiet to rea.s.semble its boundaries.

"You can go with Wes," sera said gently. "Go on, now. The others will follow when they wake."

The door was open. Wes took him by the arm, and steered him out, past John Elway, past the other staff. Sweat stood on Elway"s face & fear for sera, or fear of his situation, Catlin was unsure which, and didn"t like that lack of information.

"It"s perfectly all right," sera said, pausing for a moment to address the man. "I can take care of him. Catlin will stay here and escort the others up the hill. Are we agreed about that?"

Elway nodded slightly, looking pale. Elway might, Catlin thought, be just a little less conflicted than the azi, but sera was going to run Reseune one day, and born-men in Reseune all knew that. If Elway was supposed to report this, he might decide to be careful what he reported and to whom. He was a very worried born-man.

And maybe it wasn"t just Rafael sera had Worked, omitting to give Elway any clear indication what he ought to do and what was safe.

Instead sera simply walked off with Florian, behind Wes and Rafael. Rafael was theirs now, very, very little chance he wasn"t.

It was a scary thing to watch. It had been a far scarier moment when sera had walked into that room. But given sera"s work, it was very likely it wouldn"t be the last time sera personally did a thing like that, no matter how they objected.

And her security just had to be in position, and fast. Very, very fast, Catlin thought. And armed with non-lethals, next time. Sera had surprised her security. It felt wrong to complain about it, but it certainly shouldn"t happen twice, and it was their job to take precautions.

There was another matter. Rafael had come from Hicks, at least by previous Contract.

That was worth talking over with Florian and with sera, on an absolutely urgent basis. For right now, Hicks and all his immediate staff were on her Unreliable list.

Chapter viii.

June 7, 2424 1712 H.

Catlin was back, Ari noted, from the minder link in her office. Florian had escorted her back. Wes was still downstairs, helping Rafael and his three settle into their temporary quartersMarco had been manning the security station solo the while, and Ari let pa.s.s a little sigh, now that everybody was back safely.

Four Contracts down, twenty-six more to set, and there was a message on the minder this evening from Justin, informing her that he didn"t think Library had given him everything it said it had given them.

No, she noted, at her console, Justin hadn"t quite caught the problem. But she hadn"t either, from a scan of the set.i.t was there, and you could spend hours and hours looking through the set and the specific individual"s list of tapes given, searching and searching for something to make sense of a set of lines in that program & all the earmarks of reference to deep set, but nothing in the deep set record that would quite satisfy- it. It was like an if-then link, but when you got there, there was nothing listed. Every instruction ever given to that azi was supposed to be recorded in his specific manualbut if it wasn"t?

That if-then was just a shape without anything to attach toa point at which hooks could be set to turn an azi into a spy & or a.s.sa.s.sin, if that was the game; and Justin had found something wrong: he just hadn"t a.s.sumed it wasn"t him, so he was still looking for the link.

She sent him a memo that said: All done. You should have trusted yourself. You were right to keep looking, your delay warned me to keep looking, and Library wasn"t lying to us. "Night, both of you.

Nasty. It wouldn"t let Justin get a peaceful sleep. He"d worry about it. He"d reach a right conclusion. And now after one long, hard stretch of work, he knew what ReseuneSec tape looked like, and he"d found a problem and put a finger close to it. Not too shabby an accomplishment on his part, considering she"d been working with security sets for years.

And what someone had done with Rafael & the deep level at which that compulsion had gone in said Alpha Supervisor in blazing letters. A Beta Supervisor could marginally have done it, and it was true it hadn"t been totally neat, but it had been d.a.m.ned deep and resistant, all of which argued only that the perpetrator wasn"t the best Alpha Supervisor Alpha Supervisor in Reseune. The best? That was, in her private a.s.sessment, beginning to be her. in Reseune. The best? That was, in her private a.s.sessment, beginning to be her.

But it left Yanni, Hicks, Jordan Warrick, Justin Warrick. And, postscript, there was also grim old Chi Prang, the head of Alpha section in the azi labs. Prang could have done it, at someone"s orders, or in collusion with someone, and she didn"t know the woman.

Fast computer search said Prang was one hundred thirty-seven years old and had, yes, worked in that capacity during the first Ari"s regime and Denys" and now Yanni"s. That was a wide range of potential allegiances. Prang had five a.s.sistants, any one of which was provisionally alpha-licensed, which meant they had the skills, but had to have Prang"s oversight. That spread the search wider afield, and led, very probably, further and further from the culprit, because subordinates wouldn"t have as immediate a motive. So she was wrong about there being just five people. But the list of original suspects was still the primary list. Yanni, she was relatively sure, could have done a better job, Justin wouldn"t have done it in the first place, Jordan hadn"t had access, and that & That left the fingerprints of the Director of ReseuneSec, Hicks, who had the rating to handle his own a.s.sistant, but who didn"t practice on a wider scalehis command was beta, in the main. Very, very few alphas, and those not socialized into the general societyspecialists, technicals they"d report their own personal problems to Hicks, but being purely technicals, they weren"t in a position, in their ivory tower, to encounter much angst. That meant Hicks wouldn"t be often in practice. A provisionally licensed, only-occasional kind of operator wasn"t really up to finesse, unless he"d been shown how to do it, and was following a sort of recipe.

There were two styles of dealing with azi difficulties. One was the meticulous route that figured a Supervisor could make a mistake: you searched and researched the files until there was a theory, and a treatment: it was a very soft, very gentle method of going after the problem and fixing itwhich didn"t always work at optimum, unless you were as good as Justin; but at least it didn"t generally go badly. If you were good, you could eventually lay a finger on the specific line in the set that was causing the conflict and change it, with proper annotations on the record. That was very much Justin.

The other was the brute force methodwhen you wanted something and knew the basic architecture of the set, you could ignore most of the subsequent manual and go right after the primal sets, gut level. You could do that if you didn"t, ultimately, care about the result long-term, or you could also do it if you were that good, that you could work at primary level in a subject, and if you had a clear vision how it could make everything subsequent settle into place.

I"m that good, she thought. She"d taken a chance with it. Was still taking a chance with it, in the sense that she now believed Rafael was clearbecause she"d set his Contract very tightly, very exclusively on her, as the resolver of all conflicts, the source of all orders. She"d been brought up on the first Ari"s tapes. She"d been working with two alpha sets for years; and, being the born-man equivalent of an alpha, what she read in the manuals resonated at gut level; and the differences between an alpha and a theta resonated that way, and, once she got into the manuals, beta level made sensethe same with gamma, zeta, and etaeach with their own constellation of needs and satisfactions. Even for a born-man & it made sense.

Why was the key. Why individuals did things, even when they had consistently negative outcomes & why people had to do things & she"d been asking that question of the universe for years. And born-men got the worst of it, all their lives.

Why did they have to take Maman away? Why was Denys nice to me sometimes? Why is Jordan what he is? Why does Yanni bring me presents? Who is Hicks working for?

Those were all, all important questions, and she"d fairly well gotten the answer to all but the last onewhich might lie somewhere tangled with the cruel thing someone had done to Rafael.

She was very very thankful Catlin hadn"t had to shoot Rafael, or that she herself hadn"t broken him down and not been able to fix it.

Typical of the really big problems in the azi world, the fix was actually simple, because the layers were so clean. Born-menborn-men were a muddled mess, as if someone had stirred a layered pudding with a knife. But when an azi was in primary conflict, his earliest, most basic self-protective rule was, "Appeal to a Supervisor." Second was, "The Contract is the ultimate right." And when Rafael had been drugged-down and wide open, she"d laid hands right on the conflict. She"d given him the Contract at the beginning, and that was all right: he"d taken it in, and immediately his reservations had attached, and he"d arranged his safe loophole. And then she"d hit him with the deep set changes, and a reiteration of the Contract, which had torn it all wide open, and set it up for healing.

He"d sleep once he"d carried out her orders to arrange the barracks. He"d work until he dropped, sleep like the dead, and wake up clear and sure of himself and with all his layers in good order.

The compulsion for a dual loyalty had to have been planted way back, from when he was a child; or it had to have been planted fairly near term by someone with the ability to plant it. Which again said Alpha Supervisor.

But say that the compulsion had been there for his whole life.

Fingers flew. Base One slithered quietly across departmental lines and nabbed another azi record, this one from a very young trainee designated for ReseuneSecanother B-28, BA-289, to be precise, which meant there were as many as seven more B-28"s already out there, somewhere.

It took a computer comparison to wade through that training record, proving it was identical to BR-283"s, and a little research to determine that that particular azi, BA-289, had been born and started on that path in 2412, before BR-283 had proved out, so there were three others old enough to be in place somewhere, and, after 283, four more theoretically in the system, younger than 289. You didn"t start proliferating a new routine through a geneset like that until you"d proved it out & not if you were operating by the book.

Was BR-283 the- first of his kind?

Joyesse came in to ask if sera would want supper delayed.

"Ten minutes," she said, because she was close, and she had an idea exactly what she was looking for.

And there they were. One B-28 in Reseunes.p.a.ce, up on Beta Station. One in Novgorod, in the ReseuneSec Special Operations office. One, oh, delightful! was in Reseunes.p.a.ce on Fargone, in Ollie"s service. BR-280, named Regis, an operations agent, had been born in 2373, and had been in servicein her predecessor"s service, no lesswhen she died. The first Ari"s security staff had been rea.s.signedscattered to the edge of s.p.a.ce, evidently, when Giraud took over.

Oh, d.a.m.ned right they had scattered them. That staff, if questioned, knew things. And there was no d.a.m.ned reason her predecessor would have created an off-the-books routine in this Regiswho was in her security groupunless she hadn"t trusted the security group itself. And that was too many layers to be sane, especially when the first Ari could have peeled any of that group like an onion it she had any suspicion.

No. Someone had actually infiltrated Ari"s staff. And Denys, putatively. had been the agency of her deathwhich Giraud had pinned on Jordanand Yanni had shipped Jordan to Planys to avoid a trial. While the original Florian and Catlin had died, and the security detail had been shipped out. scattered to all points of Union s.p.a.ce, not one of them left on Cyteen.

Chin on hand, she contemplated that scenario.

ReseuneSec. An azi that had served the first Ari, now with Ollie. Other azi, who had never served Ari, at Beta, in Novgorod. And now she got one, in Hicks" goodwill gift to her.

If it were the first Ari"s programming, she"d surely have had the finesse to van" the geneset and the psychset of her spiespiece of cake for Ari One. Someone of lesser ability, on the either hand, might have stuck with the first success and built spies like production items & then managed to get his favorite number a.s.signed hither and yon.

Maybe the same person had moved BR-280 out, fast, with all the others, after the first Ari"s death. To have killed 280 with Florian and Catlin might have drawn attention to him and his history, and all the others.

She drew in a slow breath.

Hicks could, if he worked at it, reprogram a beta. But Hicks hadn"t been in office, them.

G.o.d, this was archaeology. Everything was buried.

First logical query was to be sure the Regis base" program was identical to Rafael"s, and that all the others were. Base One filched that manual from deep, deep storageReseune never erased a manual. Any version of it.

Beyond ten minutes. Joyesse came back, a little diffident.

"I apologize," Ari said. "This isn"t finished yet. Tell cook I am so sorry. Another twenty minutes. Staff should have their supper."

Joyesse left. And she let the computer sift through that mountain of material, which took only one of those minutes. It flagged no difference at all.

So BR-280 was the same as 281. That meant the window for that special routine had always been there in that mindset. And possibly that same routine, which wasn"t in the manualillegal as h.e.l.lhad indeed existed in 280. She couldn"t lay hands on 280 to find out, not easily. But she"d bet 280 reported to Hicks & who hadn"t been in charge of ReseuneSec long enough to have set it up that way.

Giraud had been. It had been Giraud"s office.

Oh, lay bets on Giraud. There was the mind that might have done it. Hicks had only been number two to Giraud. Hicks might not even have known. But he"d very likely known the special use of the BR-28 series. And he"d seen to it that one got into her unit.

If that was true, then the Nyes still had tentacles threaded through ReseuneSec, and, through ReseuneSec, into all sorts of places. The dead man"s hand was still on the controls. His programs persisted into the next regime, still on Giraud"s orders.

Thank you, Uncle Giraud. Dear Uncle Giraud. You could so easily have done it to Rafael and all his kind, and the labs are still producing them. You"d do that for Denys, to be sure he got information he wouldn"t know how to chase. You"d do anything for Denys. You set it up so Denys would get his information even if you weren"t there. And the BR-28s are just the set I know about.

I know one thing, at least. You laid traps you neglected to tell me about. Denys was still alive, and you wouldn"t betray him: I understand that. And I understand Denys was protecting me. But you ended up putting me in danger to give Denys that little advantage in keeping power, because you didn"t tell me there was anything like this buried in ReseuneSec.

And that makes me just a little mad, Uncle Giraud.

So now I know what you did, and what your mindset is capable of in your next incarnation, toward my successor & all sorts of betrayal, for the one you"re protecting. And I see very well how your own mindset arrived at the notion of this compulsion to report. You made it your own mirror. You so liked information. You never trusted any of your own subordinates. I"ll bet you even planted one on Hicks. On your own second-in-command. I"ll bet if I went over his beta a.s.sistants, I"d find one with a block very much like that. I bet you did some very special work on that one other azi. And ten of the BR-28"s?

Oh, that was wicked, Uncle.

But now I do know.

And solving Rafael"s problem, I know what to do about you. Denys doesn"t need, to be born. Just you do. Just you, to be fixed, on me, Uncle, the way you fixed on Denys.

Denys has just become irrelevant.

Good. That makes me happier. I"m sorry about it, simultaneously, and I wish I didn"t have to. but I think we"re both going to be happier in the long run.

She prepared a letter to Yannijust in case Yanni had gotten wind of her activity with her new, Hicks-provided staff. Yanni might be guilty as sin in the first Ari"s deathat least in the cover-up and blaming Jordan part of it. Yanni might know exactly what Giraud had been up to, infiltrating ReseuneSec, Reseunes.p.a.ce at Fargone and Betaand if he did know, and he"d been letting that happen, and not telling her, he was on the verge of becoming irrelevant, too.

Dear Uncle Yanni, she wrote, with a little pain in her heart. she wrote, with a little pain in her heart.

I turned up something. And fixed it, so you know. I think you should be aware. I leave it to you whether to tell Director Hicks his own staff may have a problem. Be discreet. You know what your lines of honest communication are.