“Please don’t!”
“–in case, I say, I’m telling you verbally. There is that one very untidy and roundabout link to Jordan Warrick that we don’t like, the elderly and sometimes erratic Dr. Thieu, who connects with Patil, who’s the person we want to use at Eversnow, partly for very political reasons. But while we’re going ahead with the Patil nomination, we’re also going through the establishment on Planys with a microscope right now on the excuse of investigating Jordan, and it’s why we shouldn’t roundtrip Jordan right back to Planys at first excuse. If fire and fuel canmeet, we just want to be very sure the bottles are secure. Once we ship Patil out to Fargone, we’ll feel a lot safer.”
“But you’re saying it’s possibly all innocent.”
“Patil’s a natural candidate for the Eversnow post. But hauling her from the Centrist party to the Expansionist side of the slate is going to mightily annoy some people. It’s possible certain factions will be more interested in the politics of it than in the actual science, which is years off. Short‑term, it’s very likely to be political.”
“ ‘Rethinking the Theory of Long‑Period Nanistic Self‑direction.’ ”
“God, where did you run across that?”
“It was going to run in Scientialast year. It was pretty thick going, but I read it.”
“I should think it was. You and the censors. How did you get it?”
“The Centrists had made a fuss about it, pre‑publication, said it proved they could do what they wanted to do on Cyteen without killing the rejuv ecology. Uncle Denys was mad about it. He was threatening to have the editor fired if it ran, so they pulled it. I figured I should give it a look. So she was writing up what she shouldn’t have written about?”
“It was an agitation on her part. But a quiet one, the presentation of a theory, not a how‑to. The War’s over. We could enlist any nanistics expert we want out of Beta, and will–but for various reasons–including the fact she’s the darling of the Paxers, the Centrists, and the military, and could get us the votes–she’s our pick for the lab going out to Eversnow. It’s a dream assignment for her. She may be the Centrist intellectuals’ darling, not that they understand half of what she’s about, but she does want to see her theories put into the field, and she’show we got the two Councillors to shift their vote to support mine, notable Defense and Citizens. And just to draw a line under the fact of who’s in bed with whom, our Jordan’s spent the last eight years having lunch with the professor who taught Patil.”
“He doesn’t havea Base in System any more. So how did he know about it? How did he get the card? Maybe he wanted us to have it. Maybe he’s trying to ask a question…in his unique way.”
“That would be an interesting position,” Yanni said. “Or maybe he just wanted Justin to take exception to the ensuing investigation.”
“To drag Justin into it on his side,” Ari said, “but I don’t think he did what Jordan would want him to do.”
“Oh, it probably was within his guesswork,” Yanni said. “I assume Jordan expected the card to be confiscated, and Justin to be involved, and upset, and maybe more amenable to Jordan’s arguments. He’s psych, not nanistics, educational psych, at that. I don’tlike the notion he could have gotten this card from Thieu, and gotten it through our screening. Security’s got to take a look at that. But it’s not much more comfortable a thought that someone here gave it to him…probably with information.”
“It has a reader‑strip, ser,” Florian said. “We didn’t put it into a System‑connected reader.”
“Probably a very good notion,” Yanni said. “Damn it! Damn Jordan to bloody hell.”
“I’d rather not if I can avoid it,” Ari said. “But Justin is staying in Wing One.”
“Granted,” Yanni said. “No question. Good call.”
“ Youdidn’t bring Patil’s name up with Jordan, did you?”
“Hell, no.”
“Just asking,” she said easily. It remained a possibility, all the same. But less likely, perhaps.
So Justin was safe. But Jordan definitely wasn’t.
BOOK ONE Section 2 Chapter iii
APRIL 26, 2424
0855H
Late to bed, late to rise, and not that early to the office.
The morning was definitely off routine, when you had to rack your memory to recall what your own office address was, and it was entirely surreal to walk in and find the set‑up pretty much what you remembered–and you hadn’t put it there.
Justin had expected boxes. The office was–just moved. Things were on shelves in exactly the same order…apparently so, at least. Florian hadn’t exaggerated.
“Well,” Grant said, at his shoulder, “they were neat.”
“Certainly better than some invasions we’ve had,” Justin muttered, and let go a long, long breath. He hadn’t known he was that wound up about the move, but he had been. He didn’t see a safe. Opening several desk drawers didn’t turn up Ari’s material. It had gone somewhere, and that bothered him.
“Her stuff isn’t here,” he said.
“Security will have it,” Grant said. “Five against ten, Florian will have gotten it, personally.”
“Well, it’s not a bad office,” Justin said, looking around. It wasn’t bad. It was even good, given there was room for the two of them–ample room, but nothing for staff. God knew what Em thought, this morning, arriving to find he had no office and no job.
There was a window. The view from the purported window was fake, but it was a very expensive fake: a screen showed the Novaya Volga from, one supposed, the top of the cliffs, more likely the top of one of the precip towers–he’d never been up there: nobody went there, except the repair and maintenance crews working on the weather system, and most of those were robots.
It was a dizzying image, if one thought about it. It gave an illusion the whole building was forty stories tall, when the brain knew for a fact they were on the ground floor.
“Nice view,” Grant said.
“You’re such an optimist.” Justin ran his hand over the spines of the physical books on the shelf, finding no flaw in the order of them–printout of this and that psychset. He likedprintout, when it came to review. He marked‑up with abandon, and liked things in order, hisorder. The stacks on the desk looked like his stacks. He thumbed through them. They were in a reasonable order. Likely the stacks on Grant’s desk were the same.
But he wanted to find something they’d messed up. He checked the drawers. Exact order, exact contents. “I hate it when I don’t know what they’ve done wrong. I’m sure there’s something.”
“The movers were ReseuneSec, weren’t they?” Grant asked. “They’re used to not having things look disturbed.”