"Poor kid," Justin said, and poured more wine into the glass. "Poor little kid, dammit to hell, couldn't they let her come down to the airport?"
Grant just shook his head. And drank his own wine. He made a tiny handsign that warned of eavesdroppers.
Justin wiped his eyes. He never forgot that. Sometimes he found it hard to care.
"Not our problem," Grant said. "Not yours."
"I know it."
That for the listeners. That they never knew, one way or the other, whether they were there. They thought of ways to confound Security, even thought of devising a language without cognates, with erratic grammar, and using tape to memorize it. But they were afraid of the suspicion their using it might raise. So they went the simplest route: the tablet. He reached for it and scrawled: Sometimes I'd like to run off to Novgorod and get a job in a factory. We design tape to make normal people. We build in trust and confidence and make them love each other. But the designers are all crazy.
Grant wrote: I have profound faith in my creators and my Supervisor. I find comfort in that.
"You're sick," Justin said aloud.
Grant laughed. And Grant went serious again, and leaned over and took hold of Justin's knee, the two of them sitting cross-legged on the couch. "I don't understand good and evil. I've decided that. An azi has no business tossing words like that around, in the cosmic sense. But to me you're everything good."
He was touched by that. And the damned tape-flashes still bothered him. Even after this many years, like an old, old pain. With Grant it never mattered. That, as much as anything, gave him a sense of comfort. He laid his hand on Grant's, pressed it slightly, because he could not say anything.
"I mean it," Grant said. "You hold a difficult place. You do as much good as you can. Sometimes too much. Even I can rest. You should."
"What can I do when Yanni loads me down with—"
"No." Grant shook at his knee. "You can say no. You can quit working these hours. You can work on the things you want to work on. You've said yourself—you know what he's doing. Don't let them give you this other thing. Refuse it. You don't need it."
There was a baby in process on Fargone, replicate of one Benjamin Ru-bin, who lived in the enclave on the other side of an uncrossable wall, and worked in a lab Reseune had provided.
It provided something visible for Defense to hover over. And Jane Strassen, when she arrived, would find herself mother to another of the project's children.
He knew. They gave him Rubin's interviews. They let him do the tape-structures. He had no illusions they would run them without checks.
Not, at least, these. And that was a relief, after running without them for a year.
"It's a degree of trust, isn't it?" His voice came out hoarse, showing the strain he had not wanted to show.
"It puts another kind of load on you, a load you don't need."
"Maybe it's my chance to do something worthwhile. It's a major project.
Isn't it? It's the best thing that's happened in a long time. Maybe I can make Rubin's life—better or something." He leaned forward to pour more wine. Grant moved and did it for him. "At least Rubin had some compassion in his life. His mother lives on-station, he sees her, he's got something to hold on to."
Give or take the guards that attended a Special. Justin knew all these things. A confused, remote intellectual whose early health problems had been extreme, whose attachment to his mother was excessive and desperate; whose frail body had made health a preoccupation for him; whose various preoccupations had excluded adolescent passions, except for his work. But nothing—nothing of what had shaped Ari Emory.
Thank God.
"I can do something with it," he said. "I'm going to take some work in citizen psych. Do me some good. It's a different methodology."
Grant frowned at him. They could talk work at home, without worrying about monitors. But their line of conversation had gotten dangerous, maybe already gone over the line. He was not sure anymore. He was exhausted. Study, he thought, would take him off real-time work. Study was all he wanted. Grant was right, he was never cut out for trouble-shooting real-time situations. He cared too damn much.
Yanni had yelled at him: "Empathy is fine in an interview. It's got no place in the solution! Get it straight in your head who you're treating!"
Which made sense to him. He was not cut out for clinical psych. Because he never could get it straight, when he felt the pain himself.
By Yanni's lights, even, he thought, by Denys'—because there was no way this could have come to him without Denys working at Giraud—it was the most generous thing they could have done for him, putting him back in work that took a security clearance, re-establish his career in a slightly different field, in work very like Jordan's, let him work on a project where he could gain some reputation—CIT work was something the military would notice without actually giving the military an excuse to move on him, and it might clear him and do some good for Jordan. That was at least a possibility.
It was a kind of ultimatum, he thought, a kindness that could go entirely the other way if he tried to avoid the honor. That was always what he had to think about. Even when they were doing him favors.