Cyteen

And because Ari was right, if you loved anyone They could get to you, the way They had gotten to Jordan. Grant was the way to him. Of course. That was why They had let him have Grant back.

He was not on his own now. Someday Grant was going to lay him wide open to his enemies. Maybe get him killed. Or worse—do to him what he had done to Jordan.

But until then he was not alone, either. Until then, for a few years, he could have something precious to him. Until Grant found out what kind of ugliness he had in him. Or even after Grant found out. Grant, being azi, would forgive anything.

"Grant, I'm here. I told you I'd come. I'm here."

Perhaps for Grant it was still that night. Perhaps he could go back to that, and pick it up again at the morning after.

Another blink, and another.

"Come on, Grant. No more nonsense. You fooled them. Come on. Squeeze my hand. You can do that."

Fingers tightened. Just slightly. The breathing rate increased. He shook at Grant slightly, reached up and flicked a finger against his cheek.

"Hey. Feel that? Come on. I'm not taking any of this. It's me. Dammit, I want to talk to you. Pay attention."

The lips acquired muscle tone. Relaxed again. The breaths were hard now. Several rapid blinks.

"Are you listening?"

Grant nodded.

"Good." He was shaking. He tried to stop it. "We've got a problem. But I've got permission to get you out of here. If you can wake up."

"Is it morning?"

He drew a quick breath, thought at first to say yes, then thought that disorientation was dangerous. That Grant was wary. That Grant might pull back at a lie. "A little later than that. There was a glitch-up. A bad one. I'll explain later. Can you move your arm?"

Grant moved it, a little twitch. A lift of the hand, then. "I'm weak. I'm awfully weak."

"That's all right. They're going to take you over in the bus. You can sleep in your own bed tonight if you can prove you can sit up."

Grant's chest rose and fell rapidly. The arm moved, dragged over, fell at his side like something dead. He gulped air and made a convulsive move of his whole body, lifting his shoulders barely enough to let the pillow slip before he fell back.

"Close enough," Justin said.

Food tasted very strange to him. Too strong. Even soggy cereal was work, and made his jaws ache. He ate about half the bowl that Justin spooned into his mouth and made a weak movement of his hand. " 'Nough."

Justin looked worried when he set the bowl aside.

"It's a lot for me," Grant said. Talking was an effort too, but Justin looked so scared. Grant reached put and put his hand on Justin's because that was easier than talking. Justin still looked at him with all hell in his eyes. And he wished like hell he could take that pain away.

Justin had told him everything last night, poured it on him while he was still groggy and exhausted, because, Justin had said, t hat's the way they hit me with it, and I guess it hurts less while you're numb.

Grant had cried then. And Justin had cried. And Justin had been so tired and so unwilling to leave him that he had stretched himself out on Grant's bed beside him, still dressed and on top of the covers, and fallen to sleep.

Grant had struggled to throw the bedspread over him, had not had the strength in his arm; so he had rolled over, left the spread with Justin and rolled back again.

And lay there with just the sheet, too cold until Justin woke up midway through the night and got a blanket for him. And hugged him and cried on his shoulder, a long, long time.

"I need you so much," Justin had said.

Perhaps because he was azi, perhaps because he was human, he did not know—that was the most important thing anyone had ever said to him. He had wept too. He did not know why, except Justin was his life. Justin was everything to him. "I need you too," he had said. "I love you."

In the dark hours. In the hours before morning. When people could say things that were too real to say by daylight.

Justin had fallen to sleep by his side a second time. Grant had waked first, and lain there a long time, content to know Justin was there. Until Justin had waked and gotten up, apologizing for having slept there.

As if he had not wanted Justin there, all night. As if Justin was not the most important thing in the world to him, who made him feel safe. Who was the one he would do anything for.

Whom he loved, in a way that no woman and nothing he had ever longed for could matter to him.

xiii

"Ari's set is positive,"the voice from the lab informed Giraud Nye, and he drew a long breath of relief.

"That's wonderful," he said. "That's really wonderful. How are the other two?"

"Both positive. We've got a take on all three in all the tanks."

"Wonderful."

Schwartz signed off. Giraud Nye leaned back with a sigh.

There were nine womb-tanks active on the Rubin project. Triple redundancy on each of the subjects, over Strassen's loud complaints. It was rare that Reseune ran any backups at all on a CIT replication; if a set failed to implant or had some problem, the restart just put it a few weeks late, that was all, and the recipient could wait, unless the recipient wanted to pay double the already astronomical cost to have a backup. In the case of a contracted run of azi sets, or somebody's project, the normal rule was one spare for every pair, the spares to be voided after six weeks.

This one was going to tie up nine tanks for three weeks, and six for six weeks, before they made a final selection and voided the last backups.

Reseune was taking no chances.

Verbal Text from:

PATTERNS OF GROWTH

A Tapestudy in Genetics: #1

Reseune Educational Publications: 8970-8768-1 approved for 80+

Everyone who has ever taken a tape with prescriptive drugs is familiar with the sensor patch. The simplest home-use machines use a one-way cardiac sensor, a simple patch which monitors pulse rate. Any tape, whether entertainment or informational, when taken with a prescription cataphoric, has the potential to produce severe emotional stress where the content triggers memory or empathy. In experiencing the classic playOthello, for instance, a certain individual, viewing a certain performance, and bringing to it his own life experience, may empathize with one or the other characters to an extent no mass-production tape can anticipate.

This viewer is undergoing stress natural to the drama. The heart rate increases. The sensor picks it up and carries it to the machine's monitor-circuits. If it rises above the level set by the tape-technician the tape will automatically switch to a different program, a small tape-hop that provides only relaxing music and sound.

This young boy has come to a learning clinic to acquire a skill—improvement in penmanship. As he tenses muscles in his hand and lower arm his clinical technician's skilled fingers locate the muscles and place the numbered patches precisely on the skin. More are added to the muscles about the eye. Others go beneath the arm, over the heart, and over the carotid artery.

These small gray strips have two contacts: this much more advanced machine has a biofeedback loop. The numbers on the patches correspond to the numbers the tape-manual gives to the technician, who need not, for this kind of manual skill tape, be a licensed psychotherapist. Attaching these to the skin above the muscles indicated in the manual makes it possible for the machine to sense the activity of an individual muscle or muscle group and immediately send or cease sending impulses.