"Are we being monitored?" he asked.
"My uncles," she said, "probably." Not saying that shecould. "It might go into Archive. I imagine they take every chance to tape methey can get, since I threw them out of my bedroom a long time ago. Don't worry about it. It doesn't matter what they listen to. There's no way they'll tell meno, when it comes to what I need to learn. Or give you any trouble."
"For somebody who held off the Council in Novgorod," Justin said, "you can still be naive."
"They won't do it, I'm telling you."
"Why? Because you say so? You don't run Reseune, your uncles do. And will, for some years. Ari, —my God,Ari—"
He shoved his chair back and got up and walked out.
Which left her sitting there, with Grant on the other side of the cluttered little office, staring at her, not quite azi-like, but very cold and very wary, like something was her fault.
"Nothing's going to happen!" she said to Grant.
Grant got up and came and took the report from Justin's desk.
"That's his," she said, putting a hand on it.
"It's yours. You can take it back or I can put it in the safe. I don't think Justin wants to teach you any more today, young sera. I imagine he'll read it very carefully if you leave it here. But you've grounded him. I don't doubt you've grounded me as well. Security would never believe I wasn't involved."
"You mean about his father?" She looked up at Grant, caught in the position of disadvantage, with Grant looming over her chair. "It doesn't make any difference. Khalid's not going to hold on to that seat. Another six months and there won't be any problem. Defense is going to be sensible again and there won't be any problem."
Grant only stared at her a moment. Then: "Free Jordan, why don't you, young sera? Possibly because you can't? —Please go. I'll put this up for him."
She sat there a moment more while Grant took the report and took it to the wall-safe and put it inside. Then Grant left.
Just—left her there.
So she left, and walked down the hall with a lump in her throat.
He was better, at home, with a drink in him. With the report in his lap—he had gotten it from the safe, and when Grant said that it was dangerous to carry about, he had said: So let them arrest me. I'm used to it. What the hell?
So he sat sipping a well-watered Scotch and reading the paragraph on 330 over and over again. "God," he said, when he had gone through it the second time, sifting through the limitation of words for the precious content. It was valuable—was like a light going on—in a small area, but there was nothing small or inconsequential where ideas had to link together. "She's talking about values here. The interlock of the ego-net and the value sets in azi psych and the styles of integration—why some are better than others. I needed this—back at the start. I had to work it out. Damn, Grant, how much else I've done—is already in Archives, just waiting there? That's a hell of a thought, isn't it?"
"It isn't true," Grant said. "If it was, Ariwould have been doing the papers."
"I think I know why I interested her," he said. "At least—part of it." He took another drink and thumbed through the report. "I wonder how much of this is ourAri's. Whether it's something Ari senior suggested to her to do—and gave her the framework on—or whether Ari just—put this together. It's a graduation project. That's what it is. A thesis. And I can see how Ari must have looked at mine—when I was seventeen and naive as hell about design. But there's a lot more in this. The model work is first rate."
"She's got a major base in the House computers to help her," Grant said. "She can pull time on nets you couldn't even consult when youwere her age—"
"On facilities I didn't know existed when I was her age. Yes. And I hadn't had her world-experience, and a lot of other things— I was younger—in a lot of ways—than she is right now. Damn, she's done a lot of work on this. And typically, she never said a thing about what she was working on. I think it ishers. This whole model is naive as hell, she's planted twomajor timebombs in the center-set, which is overkill if she's trying to get a failure—but she's likely going to run it with increasing degrees of clean-up. Maybe compare one drift against the other." Another drink and a slow shake of his head. "You know what this is, it's a bribe. It's a damn bribe. Two small windows into those Archived notes, and both of them completely unpublished material— And I'm sitting here weighing what else could be there—that could make everything I'm doing obsolete before it's published—or be the key to what I coulddo—what I could have done—if Ari hadn't been murdered—And I'm weighing it against losing years of contact with Jordan. Against the chance neither one of us might ever—"
He lost his voice again. Took a drink and gazed at the wall.
"Because there's no choice," he concluded, when he had had several more swallows of whiskey and he was halfway numb again. "I don't even know why, or what part of this report is real, or how much of Gehenna is in here." He looked at Grant; and hated himself for the whole situation he was in, because it was Grant's chances of Planys that had been shot to hell, equally as well as his. Grant had sat at home waiting on all his other visits—because the whole weight of law and custom and the practical facts of Grant's azi vulnerabilities to manipulation and his abilities to remember and focus on instruction—had barred him from Planys thus far.
Now their jailers had the ultimate excuse, if they had ever needed one.
"I had no idea," he said to Grant, "I had noidea what she was working on, or where this was going."
"Ari is not entirely naive in this," Grant said. "If Gehenna is what she's working on—and she wants to work on it with you—she knows that won't sit well in some circles; andthat you'll understand right through to the heart of the designs and beyond. Ari is accustomed to having her way. More than that, Ari is convinced her way is all-important. Be careful of her. Be extremely careful."
"She knows something, something that's got to do with Gehenna, that hasn't gotten into public."
Grant looked at him long and hard. "Be careful," Grant said. "Justin, for God's sake, be careful."
"Dammit, I—" The frustration in Grant's voice got to him, reached raw nerves, even past the whiskey. He set the glass down and rested his elbows on his knees, his hands on the back of his neck. "Oh, God." The tears came the way they had not in years. He squeezed his eyes shut, tried to dam them back, aware of painful silence in the room.
After a while he got up and added more whiskey to the ice-melt, and stood staring at the corner until he heard Grant get up and come over to the bar, and he looked and took Grant's glass and added ice and whiskey.
"Someday the situation will change," Grant said, took his glass and touched it to his, a light, fragile clink of glass on glass. "Keep your balance. There's no profit in anything else. The election count will be over by fall. The whole situation may change, not overnight, but change, all the same."
"Khalid could win."
"A meteor could strike us. Do we worry about such things? Finish that. Come to bed. All right?"
He shuddered, drank the rest off and shuddered again. He could not getdrunk enough.
He slammed the glass down on the counter-top and pushed away from the bar, to do what Grant had said.
ii
Ari,Justin's voice had said on the Minder, be in my office in the morning.