Four Contracts down, twenty‑six more to set, and there was a message on the minder this evening from Justin, informing her that he didn’t think Library had given him everything it said it had given them.
No, she noted, at her console, Justin hadn’tquite caught the problem. But she hadn’t either, from a scan of the set–it was there, and you could spend hours and hours looking through the set and the specific individual’s list of tapes given, searching and searching for something to make sense of a set of lines in that program…all the earmarks of reference to deep set, but nothing in the deep set record that would quite satisfy it. It was like an if‑then link, but when you got there, there was nothing listed. Every instruction ever given to that azi was supposed to be recorded in his specific manual–but if it wasn’t?
That if‑then was just a shape without anything to attach to–a point at which hooks could be set to turn an azi into a spy…or assassin, if that was the game; and Justin hadfound something wrong: he just hadn’t assumed it wasn’t him, so he was still looking for the link.
She sent him a memo that said:
All done. You should have trusted yourself. You were right to keep looking, your delay warned me to keep looking, and Library wasn’t lying to us. ‘Night, both of you.
Nasty. It wouldn’tlet Justin get a peaceful sleep. He’d worry about it. He’d reach a right conclusion. And now after one long, hard stretch of work, he knew what ReseuneSec tape looked like, and he’d found a problem and put a finger close to it. Not too shabby an accomplishment on his part, considering she’d been working with security sets for years.
And what someone had done with Rafael…the deep level at which that compulsion had gone in said Alpha Supervisorin blazing letters. A Beta Supervisor could marginally have done it, and it was true it hadn’t been totally neat, but it had been damned deep and resistant, all of which argued only that the perpetrator wasn’t the bestAlpha Supervisor in Reseune. The best? That was, in her private assessment, beginning to be her.
But it left Yanni, Hicks, Jordan Warrick, Justin Warrick. And, postscript, there was also grim old Chi Prang, the head of Alpha section in the azi labs. Prang couldhave done it, at someone’s orders, or in collusion with someone, and she didn’t know the woman.
Fast computer search said Prang was one hundred thirty‑seven years old and had, yes, worked in that capacity during the first Ari’s regime and Denys’ and now Yanni’s. That was a wide range of potential allegiances. Prang had five assistants, any one of which was provisionally alpha‑licensed, which meant they had the skills, but had to have Prang’s oversight. Thatspread the search wider afield, and led, very probably, further and further from the culprit, because subordinates wouldn’t have as immediate a motive. So she was wrong about there being just five people. But the list of original suspects was still the primary list. Yanni, she was relatively sure, could have done a better job, Justin wouldn’t have done it in the first place, Jordan hadn’t had access, and that…
That left the fingerprints of the Director of ReseuneSec, Hicks, who had the rating to handle his own assistant, but who didn’t practice on a wider scale– hiscommand was beta, in the main. Very, very few alphas, and those notsocialized into the general society–specialists, technicals–they’d report their own personal problems to Hicks, but being purely technicals, they weren’t in a position, in their ivory tower, to encounter much angst. That meant Hicks wouldn’t be often in practice. A provisionally licensed, only‑occasional kind of operator wasn’t really up to finesse, unless he’d been shown how to do it, and was following a sort of recipe.
There were two styles of dealing with azi difficulties. One was the meticulous route that figured a Supervisor couldmake a mistake. You searched and researched the files until there was a theory, and a treatment. It was a very soft, very gentle method of going after the problem and fixing it–which didn’t always work at optimum, unless you were as good as Justin; but at least it didn’t generally go badly. If you weregood, you could eventually lay a finger on the specific line in the set that was causing the conflict and change it, with proper annotations on the record. That was very much Justin.
The other was the brute force method–when you wanted something and knew the basic architecture of the set, you could ignore most of the subsequent manual and go right after the primal sets, gut level. You could do that if you didn’t, ultimately, care about the result long‑term, or you could also do it if you were that good, that you couldwork at primary level in a subject, and if you had a clear vision how it could make everything subsequent settle into place.
I’m that good, she thought. She’d taken a chance with it. Was still taking a chance with it, in the sense that she now believed Rafael was clear–because she’d set his Contract very tightly, very exclusively on her, as the resolver of all conflicts, the source of all orders. She’d been brought up on the first Ari’s tapes. She’d been working with two alpha sets for years; and, being the born‑man equivalent of an alpha, what she read in the manuals resonated at gut level; and the differences between an alpha and a theta resonated that way, and, once she got into the manuals, beta level made sense–the same with gamma, zeta, and eta–each with their own constellation of needs and satisfactions. Even for a born‑man…it made sense.
Whywas the key. Whyindividuals did things, even when they had consistently negative outcomes… whypeople had to do things…she’d been asking thatquestion of the universe for years. And born‑men got the worst of it, all their lives.
Why did they have to take Maman away?
Why was Denys nice to me sometimes?
Why is Jordan what he is?
Why does Yanni bring me presents?
Who is Hicks working for?
Those were all, all important questions, and she’d fairly well gotten the answer to all but the last one–which might lie somewhere tangled with the cruel thing someone had done to Rafael.
She was very, very thankful Catlin hadn’t had to shoot Rafael, or that she herself hadn’t broken him down and not been able to fix it.
Typical of the really big problems in the azi world, the fix was actually simple, because the layers were so clean. Born‑men–born‑men were a muddled mess, as if someone had stirred a layered pudding with a knife. But when an azi was in primary conflict, his earliest, most basic self‑protective rule was, “Appeal to a Supervisor.” Second was, “The Contract is the ultimate right.” And when Rafael had been drugged‑down and wide open, she’d laid hands right on the conflict. She’d given him the Contract at the beginning, and that was all right: he’d taken it in, and immediately his reservations had attached, and he’d arranged his safe loophole. And then she’d hit him with the deep set changes, and a reiteration of the Contract, which had torn it all wide open, and set it up for healing.
He’d sleep once he’d carried out her orders to arrange the barracks. He’d work until he dropped, sleep like the dead, and wake up clear and sure of himself and with all his layers in good order.
The compulsion for a dual loyalty had to have been planted way back, from when he was a child; or it had to have been planted fairly near term by someone with the ability to plant it. Which again said Alpha Supervisor.
But say that the compulsion hadbeen there for his whole life.
Fingers flew. Base One slithered quietly across departmental lines and nabbed another azi record, this one from a very young trainee designated for ReseuneSec–another B‑28, BA‑289, to be precise, which meant there were as many as seven more B‑28’s already out there, somewhere.