"Thanks. —Sit down, let me get it."
"I've got it." He retrieved Grant's cup and gave him the rest of the pot and a little of his own. "Here." He handed Grant the cup. "Anyway, she was reasonable. She was—"
Not quite the little kid anymore.
But he didn't say that. He said: "—quite reasonable. Concerned." And then remembered with a flood of panic: We're in her administration at the moment; if there's monitoring going on, it's not routed just to Denys, it's going straight to her. My God, what have we said?
"We'll be under her security for a little while," he said with that little Remember the eavesdroppers sign, and Grant's eyes followed that move.
Trying to remember what he had said, too, he imagined, and to figure out how a young and very dangerous CIT could interpret it.
ARCHIVES: RUBIN PROJECT: CLASSIFIED CLASS AA
DO NOT COPY
CONTENT: Computer Transcript File #19031 Seq. #9
Personal Archive
Emory II
2421: 3/4: 1945
AE2: Base One, enter: Archive. Personal.
I think I ought to keep these notes. I feel a little strange doing it. My predecessor's never told me to. But they archived everything I did up to a few years ago. I imagine everything on Base One gets archived. Maybe I should put my own notes in. Maybe someday that'll be important. Because I think I am important.
That sounds egotistical. But that's all right. They wanted me to be.
I'm Ari Emory. I'm not the first but I'm not quite only the second either. We've got so much in common. Sometimes I hate my uncles for doing what they did to me—especially about maman. But if they hadn't—I don't know, I wouldn't want to be different than I am. I wouldn't want to not be me. I sure wouldn't want to be other people I could name. Maybe the first Ari could say that too.
I know she would. I know it even if she never told me.
I'd say: That's spooky.
She'd say: That's damned dangerous.
And I know what she'd mean. I know exactly what she'd mean by that and why she'd worry about me—but I know some things she didn't, like how I feel and whether the way I think about her is dangerous, or whether being a little different from her is dangerous. I'm pretty sure I'm all right, but I don't know if I'm close enough to her to be as smart as she was or to take care of the things she left me, and I won't know the things that made me smart enough until I'm good enough to look back on how they made me and say—they needed that. Or, they didn't.
I'm riding about fifteen to twenty points above her scores in psych—at the same chronological age. And I'm two points ahead of her score two years from now. Same in most of my subjects. But that's deceptive because I've had the benefits of the things she did and the way she worked, that everybody does now. That's spooky too. But that's the way it'd have to be, isn't it? Tapes have gotten better, and they've tailored so much of this for me, specifically, off her strong points and weaknesses, it's no wonder I'm going faster. But I can't get smug about it, because there's no guarantee on anything, and no guarantee I'll stay ahead at any given point.
It's spooky to know you're an experiment, and to watch yourself work. There's this boy out on Fargone, who's like me. Someday I'm going to write to him and just say hello, Ben, this is Ari. I hope you're all right.
Justin says they're easier on him than on me. He says maybe they didn't have to be so rough, but they couldn't take chances with me, and when I'm grown maybe I can figure out what they really could have left out.
I said I thought that was damned dangerous, wasn't it? Doing psych on yourself-is real dangerous, especially if you're psych-trained. I'm always scared when I start thinking about how I work, because that's an intervention, when you really know psych, but you don't know enough yet. It's like—my mind is so hard to keep aimed, it wants to go sideways and inside and everywhere—
I told Justin that too. He said he understood. He said sometimes when you re young you have to think about things, because you're forming your value-sets and you keep coming up with Data Insufficient and finding holes in your programs. So you keep trying to do a fix on your sets. And the more powerful your mind is and the more intense your concentration is, the worse damage you can do to yourself, which is why, Justin says, Alphas always have trouble and some of them go way off and out-there, and why almost all Alphas are eccentric. But he says the best thing you can do if you're too bright for your own good is what the Testers do, be aware where you got which idea, keep a tab on everything know how your ideas link up with each other and with your deep-sets and value-sets, so when you're forty or fifty or a hundred forty and you find something that doesn't work, you can still find all the threads and pull them.
But that's not real easy unless you know what your value-sets are, and most CITs don't. CITs have a trouble with not wanting to know that kind of thing. Because some of them are real eetee once you get to thinking about how they link. Especially about sex and ego-nets.
Justin says inflexibility is a trap and most Alpha types are inward-turned because they process so fast they're gone and linking before a Gamma gets a sentence out. Then they get in the habit of thinking they thought of everything, but they don't remember everything stems from input. You may have a new idea, but it stems from input somebody gave you, and that could be wrong or your senses could have been lying to you. He says it can be an equipment-quality problem or a program-quality problem, but once an Alpha takes a falsehood for true, it's a personal problem. I like that. I wish I'd said it.
And once an Alpha stops re-analyzing his input and starts outputting only, he's gone completely eetee. Which is why, Justin says, Alpha azi can't be tape-trained past a certain point, because they don't learn to analyze and question the flux-level input they get later, and when they socialize too late, they go more and more internal because things actually seem too fast and too random for them, exactly the opposite of the problem the socialized Alphas have—too fast, though, only because they're processing like crazy trying to make more out of the input than's really there, because they don't understand there is no system, at least there's no micro-system, and they keep trying to make one out of the flux they don't understand. Which is why some Alphas go dangerous and why you have trouble getting them to take help-tapes: some start flux-thinking on everything, and some just go schiz, de-structure their deep-sets and reconstruct their own, based on whatever comes intact out of the flux they're getting. And after that you don't know what they are. They become like CITs, only with some real strange logic areas.
Which is why they're so hard to help.
I think Yanni is right about Justin. I think he's awfully smart. I've asked my uncle Denys about him, about whether they don't make him a Special because of politics; and Denys said he didn't know whether Justin qualified, but the politics part was definitely true.