Cyteen: The Betrayal (22 page)

Jordan said nothing for a moment. Then: “It doesn’t work.”

“Why not?”

“Let me tell you who else knew I was going down there. You knew. I left. Ari and I talked and I left. Check the Scriber.”

“She didn’t run one. You know that damn Translate. There isn’t any spoken record. And she didn’t leave us any notes. She didn’t have time. You knocked her out, fixed the pipe, slammed the door, raised the pressure. By the time the alarm went off, you were back upstairs.”

“I didn’t do it. I don’t say I’m shedding any tears. But I didn’t do it. And Justin was over in hospital, you say so right on that tape you’ve got. You edit it and I’ll make a liar out of you.”

“Now you’re reaching. Because if you go to trial, Jordie, I’ve got other tapes that belong in evidence. I’m going to run one for you.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Ah. Then you guess what they are. But I want you to watch, Jordie. I’ll run them all if you like. And you can tell me what you think.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Ari said-you’d had your own passage with her… some years ago.”

Jordan drew in a long breath. The mask was down. “You listen to me,” he said on that breath. “You listen to me real well, slime, because you think you’re handling this. If Ari’s dead, and I’m gone, Reseune’s got two wings in complete disorder. Reseune’s got agreements it can’t keep. Reseune’s going to have real trouble meeting its contracts and all its political bedfellows are going to scramble for their pants. Fast. You’re forgetting: if a Special dies, there’s got to be an inquiry. And what they find out is going to be real interesting, not just for us lucky souls inside Reseune. When this hits the news-services, you’re going to see department heads and corporation presidents running like bugs with the lights on. You’re right. You can’t question me. I can’t testify by anything but my given word. You know what I’ll tell them. I’ll tell them you used tape on me. And they can’t tell without a psychprobe. Which the law won’t even let me volunteer for. You put me in front of a mike. You just go ahead and do that. That’s the kind of coverage I’ve been waiting for. Best damn coverage I could get. Ari and her friend Lao could black me out. But you know the way it is-some stories are too big to silence. Murdering the head of Reseune is one of them. I’m damn sorry I didn’t think of it.”

“That’s true. That’s all very true.”

“Right now you’re thinking about killing me. Do it. You think one Special dead is hard to explain.”

“But there’s something so damned final about old news. A little scandal. A lot of silence after that.”

“But you wouldn’t be on Council. Damned sure you wouldn’t. We can do murder in the streets but we can’t cover it up. No political power. No dark spots for the bugs to snuggle in. Public contempt. You want to watch Reseune lose everything it’s got-“

“Old news. Murder-suicide. You couldn’t stand the notoriety that would come with a trial. You thought you could shut it up. You didn’t know there were tapes. You didn’t know Ari recorded her little parties. And people will be shocked. But only for a while. People have always liked scandal around the rich and famous. It’s all lost in the glitter. Who knows, maybe your boy will take to the life. Or come to some tragic end. Drug overdose. Tape-tripping. A waste. But the one thing you know he won’t get is a post at Reseune. Or anywhere else our influence reaches. Not mentioning the other boy. The azi. It’s probably a mistake to put him under interrogation. He’s so fragile right now. But we have to get to the facts.” Jordan did not so much as move for a long while.

“There’s also, of course,” Giraud said, “Paul.”

Jordan shut his eyes.

“Defeat?” Giraud asked.

“I’m sure,” Jordan said, looking at him, “you mean to make me a proposition. You’ve put this together so carefully. Their safety for my silence?”

Giraud smiled without humor. “You know we can take them. You just gave us too many hostages, Jordie, and you can’t protect a one of them, except by following orders. You don’t want your boy to live with that tape. You don’t want him prosecuted, you don’t want the Krugers up on charges, and your friend Merild dragged into court, and all your friends in Council tied to it, one string after another. There’s just no place an investigation like this ends once you start it moving. You don’t want Grant or Paul subject to interrogation after interrogation. You know what that would do. We don’t want an investigation getting out of bounds and I don’t want scandal touching Reseune. Let me tell you how it’ll be. You give us a detailed confession. Nothing’s going to happen to you: you know that. You’ll even get your dearest wish: a transfer out of here. We’ll insist your work is important. And you’ll go on, with it, in a quiet, comfortable place without cameras, without microphones, without visitors. Isn’t that better than the alternatives?”

“Except I didn’t do it. I don’t know what happened. I walked out of there. Ari and I quarreled. I accused her of blackmailing my son. She laughed. I left. I didn’t threaten her. I didn’t say a thing. You know I’d be a damn fool to tell Ari what I intended. And it didn’t include murder. I didn’t know. That’s the plain truth. I hadn’t made up my mind to go to the Bureau. I wasn’t sure if there wasn’t a way to buy her off.”

“Now we have a different truth. Do we get one an hour?”

“It is the truth.”

“But you can’t be psychprobed. You can’t prove what you witnessed. Or did. You can’t prove a damned thing. So we’re back where we started. Frankly, Jordie, I don’t care whether you did it. You’re our chief problem in the mop-up. You’d like to have done it, you’re number one on my agenda, and if you’re not the one who did it, you’re more dangerous than the one who did, because if someone else killed Ari, it was personal. If you did it, it was something else. So we’ll examine hell out of those pipes, the valves, the whole system. If we don’t find evidence, we’ll make it, quite frankly. And I’ll give you the whole script you can use for the Bureau. You stick to that story and I’ll keep my end of the bargain. Just ask for what you want. Anything within reason. You plead guilty, you take the hit, you just retire to a comfortable little enclave, and everything will be fine. If not-I’m really afraid we’ll have to take measures of our own.”

“I want them transferred out of here. Justin. Grant. Paul. That’s my price.”

“You can’t get that much. You can get their safety. That’s all. They’ll stay right here. If you change your mind, so can we. If you attempt escape, if you suicide, if you talk to anyone or pass a message of any kind-they’ll pay for it. That’s the deal. It’s just that simple.”

A long, long silence. “Then put them with me.”

Giraud shook his head. “I’ll be generous. I don’t have to be, understand. I’ll give you Paul. I have some sympathy for you. Paul, of course, will be under the same restrictions.”

“You won’t touch him.”

“What do you think? That I’d set him to spy on you? No. Not him. Not your son. Not the azi. You keep your bargain, I’ll keep mine. Do we have a deal?”

Jordan nodded after a moment. His mouth trembled, only slightly.

“You’ll stay here,” Giraud said, “pending the Internal Affairs investigation. You’ll be in detention. But you’ll have reasonable comforts. Access to Paul-we can manage that. Access to your son-only under very restricted circumstances. Let me advise you on that: that boy will try to help you. For his sake, you’d better stop it cold. You’re probably the only one who can. Do we agree?”

“Yes.”

“I want to show you that tape I promised you.”

“No.”

“I think you should see it. I think you really should. I want you to think about it-what we can use if you can’t provide political motives for your crime. I’m sure you can be convincing. I’m sure you can suggest radical connections. Centrist connections. Because there has to be a motive. Doesn’t there?” He pressed a button. The wall-screen lit. It was Jordan’s face he watched. Jordan with his eyes fixed on the corner not the screen. Jordan, with a face like a carved image in the dimmed light, the flashes from the screen. Voices spoke. Bodies intertwined. Jordan did not look. But he reacted. He heard.

Giraud had no doubt of it.

“Did Jordan Warrick ever discuss in your presence his opinion of Ariane Emory?”

“Yes, ser,” Grant answered. He sat still at the desk, his hands folded in front of him, and watched the light on the Scriber flicker, the little black box between himself and this man who said he was from the Bureau of Internal Affairs. He answered question after question.

Justin had not come back. They had fed him and let him take a shower, and told him that a man would be interviewing him that afternoon. Then they had put him back to bed and put the restraints back on. So he supposed it was afternoon. Or it was whatever they wanted it to be. He could become very angry at what they had done to him, but there was no use in it; it was what they wanted to do, and he had no way to prevent it. He was frightened; but that did no good either. He calmed himself and answered the questions, not trying to make a logic structure out of them yet, because that would affect his responses and they would lead him then; and he would lead them; and it would become adversarial. Which he did not want. He wanted to understand, but when he caught himself wanting it too much, he turned everything off, in that way he had learned when he was very, very small-azi tactic. Perhaps it helped him. Perhaps it was another of the differences between himself and Justin, between himself and a born-man. Perhaps it made him less than human. Or more. He did not know. It was only useful, sometimes, when he knew that someone wanted to manipulate him.

He just became not-there. The information flowed. They would take it when he was unconscious if he did not give it freely; and he expected they would check it by psychprobe anyway, no matter.

He would put it together later, recalling the questions, just what he had been asked and what the answers were. Then he might be able to think. But not now.

Not-there, that was all.

Eventually the man from Internal Affairs was not-there too. Others appeared and the illusions of doors opened.

The next place was the psych-lab. Then was the hardest thing, to flow with it, to be not-there through the interrogation under drugs. To walk the line between there and not-there took u great deal of concentration, and if he began to wobble and went too far into not-there and stayed too long, then it would be hard to find his way back again.

There tried to find its way into his thinking, with doubt that Justin had ever come to his room, with suspicion that, if he had, Ari’s wrath had finally come down on them, and Justin and Jordan were being charged with his abduction… .

But he drove that out. He did not fight the techs as he had the men-if ever they had been real. The techs were Reseune techs and they had the keys to every smallest thought he owned.

The first rule said: It is always right to open to your key-command.

The second rule said: A key-command is absolute.

The third rule said: An operator with your keys is always right.

No Reseune operator, he believed with all his heart, would create an illusion of Reseune operators. No one but a Reseune operator held his keys. The whole universe might be flux of particles and dissolve about him: but in it, he existed, and the operator who had his keys existed.

Justin might never have existed at all. There might be no such place as Reseune and no such world as Cyteen. But the one who whispered correct numbers and code-phrases to him could enter his mind at will, and leave without a trace; or pick up this or that and look at it-not change it: a vase set on a table stayed a moment and sought its old position, not violently, just persistently-the other face belongs out. It would take many such entries, many rotations of the same vase, many distractions, like moving another table, shifting the couch about, before the vase would stay awhile in its new orientation. Even then it would tend to go back-over time.

Easier if the visitor said: we’re going to rearrange this one room; and showed him the key. And ordered him to stand aside and watch. And then explained how all of it was going to fit together with the rest of the house, after which, if it truly worked, he would have less and less apprehension about it.

As it was, this visitor was rough, and knocked things about and then cornered him and asked him questions. Which made him anxious, because he was smart enough to know that occasionally tactics like that could be a distraction to get that vase on the table moved. Or to avoid that obvious temptation and go for something he might not notice for a while.

The visitor hit him once or twice and left him dazed. When he knew the door was closed he lay there awhile, and the vase that was in pieces picked itself up and mended itself; and the furniture straightened itself, and all the pieces started to go back again.

He had to lie there a long time being sure that everything really was in its right place. The stranger could have done worse. The stranger could have gone a level deeper, and chased him through deeper and deeper rooms, until the stranger cornered him where there was no retreat. Then the stranger would have found a way into him, whereafter he would have been dragged inside himself, into dark territory the invader knew and he would probe only reluctantly.

That was not the way it was, of course. It was only the image he had, a child’s picture, that a tech had helped him build. The vase was the tamper-gate. The yes-no/are-you-safe gate. It was right at the entry and any operator who tried to reassure him always rotated it just a little.

This visitor had thrown it to the floor.

He came out again in a room far more bleak and blank Shadows came and went and spoke to him. But he was still largely not-there. He was exhausted, and the rooms kept coming disarranged, the furniture flying about at random, requiring him to order it again, which meant he had to go inside a great deal, and these people kept hitting him, blows on the cheek which felt like the flesh was deadened there. They spoke to him, but the words flew apart in pieces. He had no time for them. He was coming apart inside and if they woke him up he was not sure things would go back where they belonged.