"I know," Ari said, because she did.
"There you are. You're a brave little girl. You aren't a baby at all. It's very hard, very hard. Thank you, Seely."
Seely had brought her a glass of water and a pill, and expected her to take it. Seely was a nobody. He wasn't like Ollie. He wasn't nice, he wasn't mean, he wasn't anything but azi all the time. And he took her glass and put it on his tray and offered her the water.
"I don't want any tape!" she said.
"It's not that kind of pill," uncle Denys said. "It'll make your head stop hurting. It'll make you feel better."
She didn't remember telling him her head hurt. Maman always said don't take other people's pills. Never, never take azi-pills. But maman was not here to tell her what this one was.
Like Valery. Like sera Schwartz. Like all the Disappeareds. Maman and Ollie had gotten caught too.
Maybe I can Disappear next. And find them.
"Sera," Seely said. "Please."
She took the pill off the tray. She put it in her mouth and drank it down with the water.
"Thank you," Seely said. He was so smooth he wasn't there. He took the glass away. You would never notice Seely.
Uncle Denys sat there so fat he made the whole chair go down, with his arms on his knees and his round face upset and worried. "You won't have to go to playschool for a few days. Until you want to. You don't think you can feel better. I know. But you will. You'll feel better even tomorrow. You'll miss your maman. Of course you will. But you won't hurt as much. Every day will be a little better."
She didn't want it to be better. She didn't know who made people Disappear. But it wasn't maman. They could offer her whatever they wanted. It wouldn't make her believe what they said.
Maman and Ollie had known there was trouble. They had been terribly upset and kept hiding it from her. Maybe they thought they could take care of it and they couldn't. She had felt it coming and hadn't understood.
Perhaps there was a place people went to. Perhaps it was like being dead. You got in trouble and you got Disappeared somewhere in some way even maman couldn't stop it happening.
So she knew she couldn't either. She had to push and push, that was what, and get in trouble until there wasn't anybody. Maybe it was her fault. She had always thought so. But when they ran out of people to Disappear she had to find out what was going on.
Then maybe she could go.
She was Wrong, of a sudden. She couldn't feel her hands or her feet, and she felt a burning in her stomach.
She was having trouble. But Seely picked her up in his arms and the whole room swung and became the hall and became the bedroom. Seely laid her gently on the bed and took her shoes off, and put a blanket over her.
Poo-thing was beside her on the bedspread. She put out her hand and touched him. She could not remember where she had gotten Poo-thing. He had always been there. Now he was here. That was all. Now Poo-thing was all there was.
v
"Poor kid," Justin said, and poured more wine into the glass. "Poor little kid, dammit to hell, couldn't they let her come down to the airport?"
Grant just shook his head. And drank his own wine. He made a tiny handsign that warned of eavesdroppers.
Justin wiped his eyes. He never forgot that. Sometimes he found it hard to care.
"Not our problem," Grant said. "Not yours."
"I know it."
That for the listeners. That they never knew, one way or the other, whether they were there. They thought of ways to confound Security, even thought of devising a language without cognates, with erratic grammar, and using tape to memorize it. But they were afraid of the suspicion their using it might raise. So they went the simplest route: the tablet. He reached for it and scrawled: Sometimes I'd like to run off to Novgorod and get a job in a factory. We design tape to make normal people. We build in trust and confidence and make them love each other. But the designers are all crazy.
Grant wrote: I have profound faith in my creators and my Supervisor. I find comfort in that.
"You're sick," Justin said aloud.
Grant laughed. And Grant went serious again, and leaned over and took hold of Justin's knee, the two of them sitting cross-legged on the couch. "I don't understand good and evil. I've decided that. An azi has no business tossing words like that around, in the cosmic sense. But to me you're everything good."
He was touched by that. And the damned tape-flashes still bothered him. Even after this many years, like an old, old pain. With Grant it never mattered. That, as much as anything, gave him a sense of comfort. He laid his hand on Grant's, pressed it slightly, because he could not say anything.
"I mean it," Grant said. "You hold a difficult place. You do as much good as you can. Sometimes too much. Even I can rest. You should."
"What can I do when Yanni loads me down with"
"No." Grant shook at his knee. "You can say no. You can quit working these hours. You can work on the things you want to work on. You've said yourselfyou know what he's doing. Don't let them give you this other thing. Refuse it. You don't need it."
There was a baby in process on Fargone, replicate of one Benjamin Ru-bin, who lived in the enclave on the other side of an uncrossable wall, and worked in a lab Reseune had provided.
It provided something visible for Defense to hover over. And Jane Strassen, when she arrived, would find herself mother to another of the project's children.
He knew. They gave him Rubin's interviews. They let him do the tape-structures. He had no illusions they would run them without checks.
Not, at least, these. And that was a relief, after running without them for a year.
"It's a degree of trust, isn't it?" His voice came out hoarse, showing the strain he had not wanted to show.
"It puts another kind of load on you, a load you don't need."
"Maybe it's my chance to do something worthwhile. It's a major project.
Isn't it? It's the best thing that's happened in a long time. Maybe I can make Rubin's lifebetter or something." He leaned forward to pour more wine. Grant moved and did it for him. "At least Rubin had some compassion in his life. His mother lives on-station, he sees her, he's got something to hold on to."
Give or take the guards that attended a Special. Justin knew all these things. A confused, remote intellectual whose early health problems had been extreme, whose attachment to his mother was excessive and desperate; whose frail body had made health a preoccupation for him; whose various preoccupations had excluded adolescent passions, except for his work. But nothingnothing of what had shaped Ari Emory.
Thank God.
"I can do something with it," he said. "I'm going to take some work in citizen psych. Do me some good. It's a different methodology."
Grant frowned at him. They could talk work at home, without worrying about monitors. But their line of conversation had gotten dangerous, maybe already gone over the line. He was not sure anymore. He was exhausted. Study, he thought, would take him off real-time work. Study was all he wanted. Grant was right, he was never cut out for trouble-shooting real-time situations. He cared too damn much.
Yanni had yelled at him: "Empathy is fine in an interview. It's got no place in the solution! Get it straight in your head who you're treating!"
Which made sense to him. He was not cut out for clinical psych. Because he never could get it straight, when he felt the pain himself.
By Yanni's lights, even, he thought, by Denys'because there was no way this could have come to him without Denys working at Giraudit was the most generous thing they could have done for him, putting him back in work that took a security clearance, re-establish his career in a slightly different field, in work very like Jordan's, let him work on a project where he could gain some reputationCIT work was something the military would notice without actually giving the military an excuse to move on him, and it might clear him and do some good for Jordan. That was at least a possibility.