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"Considering what's going to arrive out there in another six months or so."
"Ari's interviews, you mean."
"He's a biochemist. He's aware they're ru
"Especially—" Ya
"Reseune can do that, can't it?"
"Let me give you the profile I've got: Rubin isn't the young kid they made a Special out of. Rubin'sgrown up. Rubin's realized there's something going on outside the walls of his lab, Rubin's realized he's got a sexual dimension, he's frustrated as hell with his health problems, RESEUNESPACE goes into a power crisis at the top and Rubin's hitherto quiet, hypochondriac mother, who used to focus his health anxieties andhis dependencies on herself, is carrying on a feud with Administration and the Defense Bureau andreaching for the old control mechanisms with her son, who's reacting to those button-pushes with lies on his psych tests and stress in the bloodwork, while Je
"Damn," Justin murmured, gut reaction, and wished he hadn't. But Ya
"I'm firing her, needless to say," Ya
What in hell am I in here for? He knew this. It didn't take me to see it. What's he doing?
"You have some insights," Ya
"Dammit, Ya
"You happened to agree with him,son, and Denys has the say where it concerns Ari's programs. Giraud was his usual argumentative self, but I had a long quiet talk with Denys, about you, about your projects, about the whole ongoing situation. I'll tell you what you're seeing here at Reseune. You're seeing a system that's stressed to its limits and putting second-tier administrative perso
"What?"
"I want you to keep ru
"You mean you're thinking of intervention? On which one of them?"
"It's the structures we want to look at. It's the feedback between job and reward. Gustav Morley's working on the problem. You don't know CIT psych that well, that's always been one of your problems. No. If we have to make course changes, you won't design it. We just want to compare his notes against yours. And we want to compare the situation against Ari's, frankly."
He was very calm on the surface. "I really want to think you're telling the truth, Ya
"It's no longer real-time. I'll tell you the truth, Justin. I'll tell you the absolute truth. A military courier came in hard after the freighter that got us this data, cutting—a classified amount of time—off the freighter run. Benjamin Rubin committed suicide."
"Oh, God."
Ya
"I haven't got any animosity toward a nine-year-old kid, for God's sake, I've proved that, I've answered it under probe—"
"Calm down. That's not what I'm saying. We've got a kid out at Fargone who's the psychological replicate of a suicide. We've got decisions to make—one possibility is handing him to Stella Rubin, in the theory she's the ultimate surrogate for the clone. But Stella Rubin has problems, problems of the first order. Leave him with Morley. But where's the glitch-up that led to this? With Je
"Motivational psych."
"Relating to Emory's work. There's a reason she wanted you, I'm prepared to believe that. Jordan's being handed the Rubin data too. When you say you've got some clear thought on it—I'm sending you out to Planys for a week or so."
"Grant—"
"You. Grant will be all right here, my word on it. Absolutely no one is going to lay a hand on him. We just don't need complications. Defense is going to be damned nervous about Reseune. We've got some careful navigation to do. I'm telling you, son, Administration is watching you very, very closely. You've been immaculate. If you—and Jordan—can get through the next few years—there's some chance of getting a much, much better situation. But if this situation blows up, if anything—if anythinggoes wrong with Ari—I don't make any bets. For any of us."
"Dammit, doesn't anybody care about the kid?"
"We care. You can answer this one for yourself. Right now, Reseune is in a major financial mess and Defense is keeping us alive. What happens to her—if Defense moves in on this, if this project ends up—under that Bureau instead of Science? What happens to any of us? What happens to the direction all of Unionwill take after that? Changes, that much is certain. Imbalance—in the whole system of priorities we've run on. I'm no politician. I hate politics. But, damn, son, I can see the pit ahead of us."