She wanted to be a kid. She wanted to take care of the Filly and have her friends and have fun and be just Ari Emory, just nobody-Ari, not—somebody who was dead.
And they—the They who did things in Reseune, like uncle Denys and uncle Giraud and dead Ari—they shoved her into this huge, cold place and told her to live by herself with no maman and no uncle Denys and no Nelly or Seely, nobody to take care of anything if it went wrong.
It had started out feeling good, and then feeling like an adventure, and now, at 0300 and snuggled down in a strange, huge bed with two kid azi, it started feeling like a terrible mistake.
I wonder if I can get Base One to back up and say I'm twelve again.
Or have I gotten myself into a mess and I can't back up and I can't catch up with it, it's just going to keep going, faster and faster, until I can't handle it anymore.
If I say no, Base One will stop all my accesses and take my Super license, and if they take that, they'll take Florian and Catlin—
They can't do that. Everybody across Union knows me, knows Catlin and Florian, I could call Mayday—
Not if I lose those accesses. Base One has to do that.
I daren't lose them. If I lose that I lose everything. I stop being Ari. I stop being—
—Ari.
I've got to do good, I've got to hold on to this, I can't do those things uncle Denys said, I can't foul up. I'm going to look like a fool, I know I'm going to do something wrong the very first day out—
I wish—
I wish I knew whether I like Ari. I wonder whatdid happen to her?
Are they going to do it to me, the way they did everything else?
But in this place Base One is supposed to take care of me. If that's lying, then everything is lying and I'm in bad trouble.
I can't foul up tomorrow. I can't look like I've had no sleep. I've got to do better than I usually do, that'll Get uncle Denys, throw me out, dammit, bug my room, put tapes of me under the mountain. I bet he can get at them, I bet he can, I bet his Base can retrieve it.
That whole list of people with higher clearances than mine—can lie to the system and lie to me and I can't find it out.
Unless I get a higher clearance. . . and the way I get that is when I do something that gets Base One to do it.
Which means doing everything Ari wants.
Nothing Ari wants, me-Ari, myself, for me. If I'm not the same. If there is ame. If there ever was ame that isn't Ari. Or if she's not me.
If I was her, how old would I be? A hundred fifty and twelve, a hundred sixty-two. That's older than Jane, no, she was born—Jane was a teenager, Jane was a hundred forty-two when she died, and she held the first Ari when she was a baby, so if I'm twelve and Jane was my maman when she was a hundred thirty-four and I was born—and if uncle Denys is right and I was begun on paper the day after Ari died—
It could take more work than making the Filly. And that was tons of figuring. And I'm not an azi, I'm not a production geneset, so that's nothing fast. So say it was a year, and then nine, ten months, and everything works out that Ari was a hundred—twenty-something.
You can live longer than that. I wonder if that's when I'm going to die. I wonder what she died of.
Rejuv usually doesn't go till you're a hundred forty if you get it started early, and she was pretty, she was pretty when she was older, she was on it early, for sure—
That's depressing. Don't think of that. It's awful to know when you're going to die.
It's awful to read ahead what's going to happen to you. I don't want to read that stuff in the files. I don't want to know.
And it's real stupid not to.
There was a man who could see the future. He tried to change his. But thatwas his future.
Thatwas his future.
Like changing it—can't work. Because then you go off what the Base wants and you're frozen, locked up, no accesses.
Ihave to do well. I have to do everything they want and then when I grow up I can Get them good.
Damn. That's exactly what Ari said I should do.
How do I get away from her?
Can I get away from her—and still be me?
ii
She was very careful to keep on time when the Minder woke her, shower fast, grab breakfast—Florian and Catlin cooked it: the eggs got too done, and the cocoa was lumpy, but it was food, and she swallowed it down and headed out for class . . . Florian and Catlin to clean up and then wait for the deliveries from Housekeeping and check them out and get their stuff installed in their rooms; and stay put, and debug the place, as soon as Housekeeping brought some batteries up for some of the first Florian's stuff. Theyhad an excuse to miss classes today. She didn't, and there was no stopping by the fishpond this morning: she had to stop by the pharmacy, and she was going to walk through Dr. Edwards' door right on the minute.
Dr. Edwards was very relieved to see her: he said that without saying a word; and was uncommonly easy on her in the work—she noticed that and looked up sideways and gave him her wickedest grin. "I suppose uncle Denys told you what happened last night."
Oh, he didn't want to talk about that. "In a general kind of way. You know he'd be worried."
"You tell him I was on time and we didn't burn up anything in the kitchen."
"I'll tell him. Don't you want to tell him yourself?"
"No," she said cheerfully, and went back to her frog eggs.
She really put her mind to it in Designs, worked with no nonsense, blasted through two lessons and actually enjoyed it: she got Dr. Dietrich to give her a complete manual on one of the Deltas in Housekeeping management, so she could see the whole picture of a Design, because that was the way she liked to learn, get the idea what the whole thing looked like so that the parts made sense.
She wantedan Alpha set, but Dr. Dietrich said it was better to learn a more typical kind and then work on the exotic cases. That made sense.
Dr. Dietrich said it shouldn't be anybody she knew. That she wasn't ready for that.
Nice that she wasn't ready for something.It made her feel like there was at least a floor to stand on. She had learned a very good word in Dr. Dietrich's class.
Flux. Which fairly well said what she was caught in.
She didn't have class with any other kids until just before noon, when she had Economics with Amy and Maddy.
Amy and Maddy hadn'tknown about her moving out. They thought she was putting one on them. So she put her card in the nearest House slot in One A, and it started spitting out all these messages she hadn't known she was going to get, like Housekeeping asking for a verification on an order for a special kind of battery—she knew who had asked that, and punched yes—and a note from Yanni Schwartz telling her that her office in 1-244 was keyed to her card, and he had a secretary and a clerk going to set up in there, whose names were Elly BE 979 and Winnie GW 88690, and their living allowances were now on her card, along with the equipment requisition for another couple of terminals and on-line time on the House system; and a message from Dr. Ivanov that her prescription was waiting at the pharmacy.