Cyteen Read online

  Watch me closely, that look said. That will cost.

  The vote went round, unanimous, Denzill Lal voting proxy in the vote that took the Hope appropriations bill out of his hands.

  “That concludes the agenda,” Bogdanovitch said. “We had allotted three days for debate. The next bill on the calendar is yours, sera Emory, number 2405, also budget appropriations, for the Bureau of Science. Do you wish to re-schedule?”

  “Ser President, I’m ready to proceed, but I certainly wouldn’t want to rush a measure through without giving my colleagues adequate time to prepare debate. I would like to move it up to tomorrow, if my distinguished colleagues have no objection.”

  A polite murmuring. No objections. Corain murmured the same.

  “Sera Emory, would you like to put that in the form of a motion?”

  Seconded and passed.

  Motion to adjourn.

  Seconded and passed.

  The room erupted into more than usual disorder. Corain sat still, felt the weight of a hand on his shoulder and looked up at Mahmud Chavez’s face. Chavez looked relieved and worried at the same time.

  What happened? that look said. But aloud: “That was a surprise.”

  “My office,” Corain said. “Thirty minutes.”

  Lunch was a matter of tea and sandwiches couriered in by aides. The meeting had grown beyond the office and filled the conference room. In a fit of paranoia, the military aides had gone over the room for bugs and searched other aides and the scientists for recorders, while Adm. Gorodin sat glumly silent through everything, arms folded. Gorodin had been willing to go along with the walkout. Now things had slid sideways, and the admiral was glowering, anxious, silent, as it developed they had cornered Emory on the Hope corridor budget and might have an ultimatum on their hands.

  “It’s information we’re after,” Corain said, and took a glass of mineral water from an aide. In front of him, in front of all of them and most of the aides, eight hundred pages of exposition and figures that constituted the Science budget, in hard-copy, with certain items underlined: there were Centrists inside the Science Bureau, and there were strong rumors of sleepers in the bill. There always were. And every year no few of them involved Reseune. “The damn place doesn’t ask for budget itself, the only thing we’ve got on it is the gross tax returns, and why in hell does Reseune want to get Special Person status for a twenty-year-old chemist on Fargone? Who in hell is Benjamin P. Rubin?”

  Chavez sorted papers on his table, took one that an aide slid under his hand and gnawed at his lip, following the aide’s finger down the paper. “A student,” Chavez said. “No special data.”

  “Is there any way it’s part of the Hope project? By any stretch of the imagination?”

  “It’s at Fargone. It’s on the route.”

  “We could ask Emory,” Chavez said sourly.

  “We damn well may have to, on the floor, and take whatever documentation she comes up with.”

  There were dour looks all around. “We’re beyond jokes,” Gorodin said.

  Lu, the Secretary of Defense, cleared his throat. “There is a contact we might trust, at least a chain of contacts. Our recent candidate for Science—”

  “He’s a xenologist,” Tien objected.

  “And a personal friend of Dr. Jordan Warrick, of Reseune. Dr. Warrick is here. He came in as part of Councillor Emory’s advance staff. He’s asked, through Byrd, for a meeting with, mmnn, certain members of Science.”

  When Lu spoke with that much specificity, he was often saying more than he could officially say in so many words. Corain looked straight at him, and Gorodin was paying full attention. The admiral had come in from military operations, would go back to military operations and leave the administrative details of the Bureau of Defense to the Secretary and his staff: it was axiomatic—Councillors might be the experts in their respective fields, but the Secretaries ran the apparatus and the department heads knew who was sleeping with whom.

  “Byrd among them?”

  “Very likely,” Lu said primly, and shut his mouth.

  Mark that one down, Corain thought.

  “Is that an old friendship?” Tien asked in a low voice.

  “About twenty years.”

  “How safe is that for Warrick?” Gorodin asked. “What are we jeopardizing?”

  “Very little,” Lu said. “Certainly not Warrick’s friendship with Emory. Warrick himself has his own offices, rarely enters hers, and vice versa. In fact there’s considerable hostility there. He’s demanded autonomy inside Reseune. He has it. There are no Centrists in Reseune. But Warrick is—not an Emory partisan. He’s here, in fact, to consult with the Bureau on a transfer.”

  “He’s one of the Specials,” Corain said, for those not from Cyteen, and not, perhaps, entirely aware who Warrick was. A certified genius. A national treasure, by law. “Forty-odd years old, no friend of Emory’s. He’s had a dozen chances to leave and found his own facilities, and she keeps blocking it in the Bureau, cut him off at every turn.” He had made a personal study of Reseune and Emory. It was only reasonable. But some pieces of information were not as available as others, and Lu’s tracing of connections was one of them. “Byrd can contact him?”

  “Schedules have gone amok,” Lu said softly, in his scholarly way. “Of course things have to be rearranged all along the agenda. I’m sure something can be done. Do you want me to mark that down?”

  “Absolutely. Let’s break this up. Get the staffs to working.”

  “That leaves us meeting in the morning,” Tien said.

  “My staff will be here,” Corain said, “very late tonight. If anything comes up that we have to—” He shrugged. “If anything comes up, of the nature—you understand, something of a need to know nature—” Walk-out was not a word they used openly, and not all the staff present knew that that was in the offing, particularly the clerks. “My staff will contact you directly.”

  And quietly, catching Gorodin and Lu as the rest of them drifted out to offices and staff meetings in their own Bureaus and departments:

  “Can you get Warrick?”

  “Lu?” Gorodin said, and Lu, with a lift of clerkly shoulders:

  “I should think.”

  ii

  He was an ordinary enough man who showed up in the Hall of State conference room, wearing a brown casual suit, carrying a briefcase that looked as if it had been sent through baggage once too often. Corain would not have picked him out of any crowd: a brown-haired, handsome, athletic sort, not looking quite his forty-six years. But bodyguards would have attended this man until military police took him under their own wing, and very likely servants had all but dressed him and staffers attended him on ordinary business. By no means would Jordan Warrick have come by commercial carrier or a baggage department gotten its hands on that briefcase.

  Emory was a Special. There were three at Reseune, the highest number at any single installation. One was this man, who devised and debugged psych tape structures, so they said, in his head. Computers ordinarily did that kind of work. When an important enough tape program had to be built or debugged, they gave it to Jordan Warrick’s staff, and when a problem was more than any or all of them could handle it went to Warrick himself. That was as much as Corain understood. The man was a certified genius and a Ward of the State. Like Emory. Like the other dozen Special Persons.

  And presumably if Emory wanted to accord that status to a twenty-year-old chemist on Fargone, and, the rumor said, open an office there to attach him to Reseune staff, and seemed to imply she attached a priority to that project that made it worth something in the scales right along with her cherished colonial push, there was a damned good reason for it.

  “Ser Lu,” Warrick said, shaking Lu’s offered hand. “Adm. Gorodin. A pleasure.” And a worried look but an overall friendly one as he looked toward Corain and offered his hand. “Councillor. I hadn’t expected you.”

  Corain’s heart did a little skip-and-race. Danger, it said. Warrick, he r
eminded himself, was not one of those bright types who operated in some foggy realm of abstract logic completely detached from humanity: he was a psych-surgeon, manipulation was his work, and he was quite in his element stripping people down to their motives. All this lay behind that sober pleasantness and those younger-than-forty eyes.

  “You may have guessed,” Lu said, “that this is more than I told you it would be.”

  A little alarm registered on Warrick’s face. “Oh?” he said.

  “Councillor Corain very much wanted to speak with you—without public attention. This is political, Dr. Warrick. It’s quite important. Certainly if you would rather get on to your other meeting, for which you will otherwise be perhaps ten minutes late—we will understand that you don’t want to involve yourself with our questions, and I hope you’ll accept my personal apologies in that case. It’s my profession, you understand, a disposition to intrigue.”

  Warrick drew a breath, distanced himself the few paces to the conference table, and set his briefcase down on it. “Is this something to do with Council? Do you mind explaining what, before I make any decision?”

  “It’s about the bill coming up. The Science appropriations bill.”

  Warrick’s head lifted just the little bit that said: Ah. A small smile touched his face. He folded his arms and leaned back against the table, in every evidence a relaxed man. “What about the bill?”

  “What’s in it,” Corain asked, “—really?”

  The secret smile widened and hardened. “You mean what’s it covering? Or something else?”

  “Is—what it’s covering—in any way connected to the Hope project?”

  “No. Nothing in that budget to do with it. Nothing I’m aware of. Well, SETI-scan. But that’s fairly general.”

  “What about the Special appointment? Is Reseune interested?”

  “You might say. You want to know about Fargone in general?”

  “I’m interested in whatever you have to say, Dr. Warrick.”

  “I can spare the ten minutes. I can tell you in less than that what’s going on. I can tell you in one word. Psychogenesis. Mind-cloning, in the popular press.”

  It was not the answer Corain had expected. It was certainly not what the military expected. Gorodin snorted.

  “What’s it covering?”

  “Not a cover,” Warrick said. “Not the process in the popular press. Not exact duplicates, but duplicate capabilities. Not real significant for, say, a child trying to recover a lost parent. But in the case of, say, a Special, where the ability is what you want to hang on to—You’re familiar with the attempt to recover Bok.”

  Estelle Bok. The woman whose work led to faster-than-light. “They tried,” Corain said. “It didn’t work.”

  “Her clone was bright. But she wasn’t Bok. She was a better musician than she was a physicist, and desperately unhappy, thanks to all the notoriety. She wouldn’t take her rejuv for days on end, till the effects caught up with her and she’d have to. Wore herself down that way, finally died at ninety-two. Wouldn’t even leave her room during the last few years of her life.

  “What we didn’t have then was the machinery we have now; and the records. Dr. Emory’s work in the war, you know, the studies with learning and body chemistry—

  “The human body has internal regulating systems, the whole complex that regulates sex and growth and defense against infection. In a replication, the genetic code isn’t the whole game. Experience impacts the chemical system the genetic code set up. This is all available in the scientific journals. I could give you the actual references—”

  “You’re doing quite well,” Corain said. “Please.”

  “Say that we know things now that we didn’t when we cloned Bok. If the program does what Dr. Emory hopes, we can recover the ability in the same field. It involves genetics, endocrinology, a large array of tests, physiological and psychological; and the records have to be there. I don’t know all of it. It’s Dr. Emory’s project, it’s secret, and it’s in a different wing. But I do know that it’s serious and it’s not extremely far off the present state of the art. A little speculative, perhaps; but you have to understand, in our science, there’s a particularly difficult constraint: the scientist himself has to live long enough to draw his conclusions; and Dr. Emory is not young. Every azi experimentation takes at least fifteen years. The Rubin project is going to take at least twenty. You see the difficulty. She has to take some small risks.”

  “Health problems?” Corain said quietly, recollecting the subtle change in skin tone, the loss of weight. Rejuv lasted an unpredictable number of years. Once it started to lose its effect—problems started. And aging set in with a vengeance.

  Warrick’s eyes left his. He was not going to answer that question frankly, Corain reckoned before he said anything. He had pressed too closely.

  “Mortality is an increasing concern,” Warrick said, “for anyone her age, in our field. It’s what I said: the time the projects take.”

  “What’s your estimate of this project?” Gorodin asked.

  “It’s very, very important to her: all her theories, understand, all her personal work, her work on endocrine systems and genetics, on psych-structures—lead toward this.”

  “She’s a Special. She can requisition damn near anything she needs—”

  “Except the Special status that would protect her subject from what happened to Bok. I agree with her on the matter of not using someone inside Reseune. The clone will be at Reseune, but not Rubin. Rubin is young. That’s a prerequisite. He’s brilliant, he was born on a station, and every move he’s ever made down to buying a drink out of a machine is there in station records. He was also born with an immune deficiency, and there are extensive medical records that go back to his infancy. That’s the most important part. Ari can do it without the Council’s approval; but she can’t keep Fargone’s local government from doing something that might compromise her results.”

  “Is Rubin supposed to be aware of this?”

  “He’ll be aware he’s a blind control on an experiment at Reseune. More significantly, his clone won’t know Rubin exists until he’s the same age Rubin is now.”

  “Do you think it’s a valid project?” Corain asked.

  Warrick was silent a moment. “I think whether or not one equals the other, the scientific benefits are there.”

  “You have reservations,” Lu said.

  “I see minimal harm to Rubin. He’s a scientist. He’s capable of understanding what blind control means. I would oppose any meeting of the two, at any future date. I’ll go on record on that. But I wouldn’t oppose the program.”

  “It’s not yours.”

  “I have no personal work involved in it.”

  “Your son,” Corain said, “does work closely with Dr. Emory.”

  “My son is a student,” Warrick said, expressionless, “in tape design. Whether or not he’ll be involved is up to Dr. Emory. It would be a rare opportunity. Possibly he might apply for the Fargone office, if it goes through. I’d like to see that.”

  Why? Corain wondered, and wished he dared ask it. But there were limits with a hitherto friendly informant, and there were persistent rumors about Emory that no one proved.

  “Student,” Lu said, “at Reseune, means rather more than student at the university.”

  “Considerably, yes,” Warrick said. All liveliness had left his face. It was guarded now, extremely careful of expressions and reactions.

  “How do you feel about the Hope project?” Corain asked.

  “Is that a political question?”

  “It’s a political question.”

  “Say that I avoid politics, except as a study.” Warrick looked down and up again, directly at Corain. “Reseune no longer depends on the azi trade. We could live quite well off our research, whether colonies go out or not,—there’ll be a need for what we do, never mind the fate of the other labs—who couldn’t undercut us. We have too great a head start on other fields. We
wouldn’t be as rich, of course. But we’d do quite well. It’s not economics that troubles me. Someday we should talk.”

  Corain blinked. That was not what he expected, a feeler from a Reseune scientist. He put his hands in his coat pockets and looked at the others. “Can Dr. Warrick miss that meeting—without it leaking?”

  “No difficulty,” Lu said; and added: “If Dr. Warrick wants to miss it.”

  Warrick drew a long breath, then set the briefcase on the floor and pulled a chair back at the conference table. “I’m willing,” he said, and sank into the chair.

  Corain sat down. Gorodin and Lu took the chairs at the end.

  Warrick’s face held no expression still. “I know these gentlemen,” he said with a slide of the eyes toward the military. “I know your reputation, Councillor Corain. I know you’re an honest man. What I’m going to tell you could cost me—considerably. I hope you’ll use this—only for what it contains, and I hope you won’t lay it to personal dislike. Dr. Emory and I have had our differences. You understand—working at Reseune, you have to make a lot of critical decisions. Our material is human. Sometimes the ethics of a situation are—without precedent. All we operate on is our best estimation, and sometimes those estimates don’t agree.

  “Dr. Emory and I have had—more than the average number of confrontations. I’ve written papers opposing her. We have a conflicting view of—certain aspects of her operations. So if she finds out I’ve been talking to you, she’ll believe I’ve tried to do her damage. But I hope to God you give her this program at Fargone. It doesn’t cost the government anything but that Special—”

  “It creates a dangerous precedent, to create a Special just to satisfy a research project. Just to keep a subject in your reach.”

  “I want myself and my son transferred out of Reseune.”

  Corain stopped breathing a moment. “You’re a Special, the same as she is.”

  “I’m not political. I don’t have her pull. She’ll claim I’m essential, under the very terms that make me a Special—I’m bound to stay where the government needs me. And so far it arranges to need me at Reseune. Right now my son is working in her program for two reasons: first because it’s his field and she’s the best; second, because he’s my son and Ari wants a hold on me, and in the politics inside Reseune, there’s nothing I can do about that. I can try again to get myself out of there, and if I’m out from under her direction, I can request my son over to the other project on a personal hardship transfer. That’s one reason I’m anxious to see this Fargone facility built. It would be the best thing for the state. It would be the best thing for Reseune. God knows it would be the best thing for Reseune.”