Regenesis

And Justin: “I’m going to give Catlin another phone call. I’m not taking this. I’m not taking this from him. He wants us back under suspicion, he wants us arrested, he wants me upset, he’ll make himself the martyr, so we both get sent to Planys, back to his private kingdom, and he has years to work on us… Damn it. Grant, you’re right.”

“ Didhe call you?” Ari asked, when the clip ended.

“Yes,” Catlin said, with a nod. “He did. He said–” She keyed another clip, listened, then made it audible.

“…he doesn’t give a damn about this Dr. Patil. He’s after me. He wants to get me at odds with admin and better yet, get us all sent back to Planys, where he has a base.”

“ Why would he pick Dr. Patil?” recorded‑Catlin asked.

“ I’ve no idea. An outside and problematic contact he once had. Somebody he didn’t really know and doesn’t care about. Maybe somebody he hates. I just don’t know.”

Catlin stopped the clip.

“Jordan Warrick is a very interesting person,” Ari said. “And now Justin’s quite angry at him. Jordan’s supposed to be good at Working. Very good. I wonder if he intended all he got from Justin.”

“Warrick Senior’s behavior seems self‑destructive,” Catlin said.

“Not only self‑destructive,” Ari said. “He’d gladly take us with him. He seems to want things back the way they were before I was born, and he’s bound to be frustrated with me.”

“There is a solution to this,” Catlin said.

Kill him, Catlin meant. It wasn’t legal to do, but that certainly wouldn’t stop Catlin and Florian, if she ordered it. And very likely Ya

But not in Justin’s eyes, and the likelihood that Justin would find out sooner or later–oddly enough that was the first Stop the thought ran into. Not the Law. Justin.

Jordan was just very, very interesting–someone from the first Ari’s time, a piece of the puzzle of the first Ari’s life and death that had been missing all these. Everyone had said Jordan was a problem.

He certainly was. A very high‑powered problem. He was attempting to Work his son, whatever else this was about, and Justin possibly had it figured out entirely accurately.

It was also clear Jordan Warrick still had secrets. The first Ari had wanted him for a partner: they’d worked together productively for a while, before their personalities clashed. Politics had been part of it–the Centrist Party with their program of stopping further explorations, concentrating Union into a tight, strong knot, so that their longtime rivals over at Pell’s Star–the Alliance–had to concentrate there, too. So no one would be expanding. If mankind went on exploring and expanding and trying to out‑race each other to likely stars, expanding so fast they had to use birthlabs to multiply fast enough to keep economies going, the Centrists feared that so much use of birthlabs was going to change mankind–

And that was quite true. It was changing the balance in the genome. It had, already, in much more than just the genome. There were differences between them and Alliance and Earth far other than genetic balance.

But psychosociology wasn’t the reason why Jordan had aligned with the Centrists. Oh, no. His reason for taking their side was that the first Ari and most of Reseune was Expansionist. The first Ari’s whole life’s work was Expansionist.

And, not too strange to say, Jordan had taken up corresponding with the Centrists and their more radical branch at about the time the partnership between himself and Ari had broken up…so figure that Jordan didn’t really believe in the Centrist Party or give a damn about their fears for the future. He’d just used them.

Interesting.

Interesting, interesting.

“We’re going to watch him,” Ari said. “Ya

“Hicks has given us agents to be totally at our disposal,” Catlin said. “Thirty, with clericals.”

This was news. “Because of Jordan Warrick?”

“Perhaps. Ser Warrick, Dr. Patil, Dr. Thieu, and events unforeseen. We laid down conditions to our working with this staff. Florian is over at the barracks going through their records, analyzing the abilities of what we’ve been given.”

“A permanent gift? From Hicks?”

“Permanent, yes, sera. Much like the protection the first Ari had, high‑level ReseuneSec, with accesses, only Florian said we wouldn’t take them except if you hold the Contracts, sera.”

“The first Ari’s guard. They were Contracted to Reseune itself?”

“Not our predecessors. But yes, the others were. Your predecessor never internalized the staff ReseuneSec lent her–she rather used all of ReseuneSec; but we think that may have been a problem, that her security staff wasn’twholly hers. We’re taking care of that. You need to hold those Contracts.”

“To be inside the apartment?” She was a little appalled. “We need domestic staff.”

“Those are coming, sera. But we were offered the others. They can have a barracks here, in the wing, an adjunct office with computer ties to ReseuneSec. We’re moving out the rest of the records storage and taking over the guest apartment on the first floor. We can cancel everything if it’s not a good idea. But there’s room for them on the first floor, down by the old lab, and they won’t be in the apartment–we wouldn’t let them in, until we’re very comfortable with them; though I’m sure, when they are Contracted, that they’d like you to be there, sera. If it’s all right.”

That was a natural thing, an emotional thing. And it would cement the Contract, in that sense. She’d be their Supervisor, the CIT they’d come to in distress or in need–to be remote from them was unacceptable. And she’d told Florian to see to staff. He certainly had. She’d turned them loose to see to things, and they’d done it without making a ripple in her own schedule…maybe a bit widely, but–all the same–they had the chance to gain loyal perso

“Of course,” she said. “Of course I will. When are they coming in?”

“Soon. A few days. The domestic staff should get here first. Florian’s checking on their progress while he’s down the hill.”

“You’ve been very quiet to be so busy.”

“These are things we can do. I hope we’ve done them well enough.”

She’d been completely lost in her work, her deepstudy and her own tracking of problems down in Novgorod, out of touch with domestic issues, so long as her clothes appeared clean and her breakfast and supper arrived mostly on time. She walked about with her head stuffed with population equations and spent her days in the first Ari’s population dynamics designs–she’d reached a point, a strange point in such study, when whole disciplines had begun to come into focus, as if the brain had started assembling all the scattered bits of what had been her predecessor’s operations two decades ago, and put it all together. She was at that critical point, dammit, on the verge of overload, and she just went there on any stray thought, far, far from the needs of domestic staff. Her head ached–literally ached–from the effort it was to jump between the real world and Ari’s world, and back again–to try to grasp the underlying reasons for the ethics her predecessor had installed to patch what had already been done at Novgorod–laying down the commandment to work, and the necessity for recreation, and above all the mantra “We are different as our world is different, and our different world is a valuable resource…”