There was a certain strange atmosphere in the restaurant in the North corridor—in the attitude of staff and patrons, in the fact that the modest-price eatery was jammed and taking reservations by mid-afternoon—and only the quick-witted and lucky had realized, making the afternoon calls for supper accommodations, that thoroughly extravagant Changes was the only restaurant that might have slots left. Five minutes more, Grant had said, smug with success, and they would have had cheese sandwiches at home.
As it was, it was cocktails, hors d'oeuvres, spiced pork roast with imported fruit, in a restaurant jammed with Wing One staff spending credit and drinking a little too much and huddling together in furtive speculations that were not quite celebration, not quite confidence, but a sense of Occasion, a sense after hanging all day on every syllable that fell from the mouth of a little girl in more danger than she possibly understood—that something had resulted, the Project that had monopolized their lives for years had unfolded unexpected wings and demonstrated—God knew what: something alchemical; or something utterly, simply human.
Strange, Justin thought, that he had felt so proprietary, so anxious—and so damned personally affected when the Project perched on a chair in front of all of Union, swung her feet like any little girl, and switched from bright chatter to pensive intelligence and back again—
Unscathed and still afloat.
The rest of the clientele in Changes might be startled to find the Warrick faction out to dinner, a case of the skeleton at the feast; there were looks and he was sure there was comment at Suli Schwartz's table.
"Maybe they think we're making a point," he said to Grant over the soup.
"Maybe," Grant said. "Do you care? I don't." Justin gave a humorless laugh. "I kept thinking—"
"What?"
"I kept thinking all through that interview, God, what if she blurts out something about: 'My friend Justin Warrick.'"
"Mmmn, the child has much too much finesse for that. She knew what she was doing. Every word of it."
"You think so."
"I truly think so."
"They say those test scores aren't equal to Ari's."
"What do you think?"
Justin gazed at the vase on the table, the single red geranium cluster that shed a pleasant if strong green-plant scent. Definite, bright, alien to a gray-blue world. "I think—she's a fighter. If she weren't, they'd have driven her crazy. I don't know what she is, but, God, I think sometimes, —God, why in hell can't they declare it a success and let the kid just grow up, that's all. And then I think about the Bok-clone thing, and I think—what happens if they did that? Or what if they drive her over the edge with their damn hormones and their damn tapes—? Or what if they stop now—and she can't—"
"—Integrate the sets?" Grant asked. Azi-psych term. The point of collation, the coming-of-age in an ascending pyramid of logic structures.
It fit, in its bizarre way. It fit the concept floating in his mind. But not that. Not for a CIT, whose value-structures were, if Emory was right and Hauptmann and Poley were wrong, flux-learned and locked in matrices.
"—master the flux," he said. Straight Emory theory, contrary to the Hauptmann-Poley thesis. "Control the hormones. Instead of the other way around."
Grant picked up his wine-glass, held it up and looked at it. "One glass of this. God. Revelation. The man accepts flux-theory." And then a glance in Justin's direction, sober and straight and concerned. "You think it's working—for Emory's reasons?"
"I don't know anymore. I really don't know." The soup changed taste on him, went coppery and for a moment unpleasant; but he took another spoonful and the feeling passed. Sanity reasserted itself, a profound regret for a little girl in a hell of a situation. "I keep thinking—if they pull the program from under her now— Where's her compass, then? When you spend your life in a whirlwind—and then the wind dies down—there's all this quiet—this terrible quiet—"
He was not talking about Ari, suddenly, and realized he was not. Grant was staring at him, worriedly, and he was caught in a cold clear moment, lamplight, Grant, the smell of geranium, in a dark void where other faces hung in separate, lamplit existence.
"When the flux stops," he said, "when it goes null—you feel like you've lost all contact with things. That nothing makes sense. Like all values going equal, none more valid than any other. And you can't move. So you devise your own pressure to make yourself move. You invent a flux-state. Even panic helps. Otherwise you go like the Bok clone, you just diffuse in all directions, and get no more input than before."
"Flow-through," Grant said. "Without a supervisor to pull you out. I've been there. Are we talking about An? Or are you telling me something?"
"CITs," Justin said. "CITs. We can flux-think our flux-states too, endless subdivisions. We tunnel between realities." He finished his soup and took a sip of wine. "Anything can throw you there—like a broken hologram, any piece of it the matrix evokes the flux. The taste of orange juice. After today—the smell of geraniums. You start booting up memories to recollect the hormone-shifts, because when the wind stops, and nothing is moving, you start retrieving old states to run in—am I making sense? Because when the wind stops, you haven't got anything else. Bok's clone became a musician. A fair one. Not great. But music is emotion. Emotional flux through a math system of tones and ratios. Flux and flow-through state for a brain that might have dealt with hyperspace."
"Except they never took the pressure off Bok's clone," Grant said. "She was always news, to the day she died."
"Or it was skewed, chaotic pressure, piling up confusions. You're brilliant. You're a failure. You're failing us. Can you tell us why you're such a disappointment? I wonder if anyone ever put any enjoyment loop into the Bok clone's deep-sets."
"How do you do that," Grant asked, "when putting it in our eminently sensible sets—flirts with psychosis? I think you teach the subject to enjoy the adrenaline rushes. Or to produce pleasure out of the flux itself instead of retrieving it out of the data-banks."
The waiter came and deftly removed the empty soup-bowls, added more wine to the glasses.
"I think," Justin said uncomfortably, "you've defined a masochist. Or said something." His mind kept jumping between his own situation, Jordan, the kid in the courtroom, the cold, green lines of his programs on the vid display, the protected, carefully stressed and de-stressed society of the Town, where the loads were calculated and a logical, humane, human-run system of operations forbade overload.
Pleasure and pain, sweet.
He reached for the wine-glass, and kept his hand steady as he sipped it, set it down again as the waiters brought the main course.
He was still thinking while he was chewing his first bite, and Grant held a long, long silence.
God, he thought, do I need a state of panic to think straight?
Am I going off down a tangent to lunacy, or am I onto something?
"I'm damn tempted," he said to Grant finally, "to make them a suggestion about Ari."
"God," Grant said, and swallowed a bite in haste. "They'd hyperventilate. —You're serious. What would you suggest to them?"
"That they get Ari a different teacher. At least one more teacher, someone less patient than John Edwards. She isn't going to push her own limits if she has Edwards figured out, is she? She's got a whole lot of approval and damned little affection in her life. Which would you be more interested in, in the Edwards set-up? Edwards is a damned nice fellow—damned fine teacher, does wonders getting the students interested; but if you're Ari Emory, what are you going to work for—Edwards' full attention—or a test score?"
Grant quirked a brow, genuine bemusement. "You could be right."
"Damn, I know I'm right. What in hell was she looking for in the office?" He remembered then what he had thought of when they made the reservations, that Security could find them, Security could bug the damned geranium for all he knew. The thought came with its own little adrenaline flux. A reminder he was alive. "The kid wants attention, that's all. And they've just given her the biggest adrenaline high she's had in years. Sailing through the interview. Everyone pouring attention on her. She's happier than she's been in her poor manipulated life. How can Edwards fight that when she gets back? What's he got to offer, to keep her interested in her studies, against that kind of rush? They need somebody who can get her attention, not somebody who lets her get his." He shook his head and applied his knife to the roast. "Damn. It's not my problem, is it?"
"I'd strongly suggest you not get into it," Grant said. "I'd suggest you not mention it to Yanni."
"The problem is, no one wants to be the focus of her displeasure," Justin said. "No one wants to stand in that hot spot, no more than you or I do. Ari always did have a temper—the cold sort. The sort that knew how to wait. I'm not sure how far it went, I never knew her that well. But senior staff did. Didn't they?"