She shook her head. "Not really move.I've got a Wing One office. It's just paper stuff. It just means my staff does your paperwork. —I'm sorry." When he said nothing in her pause: "I didit."

"Damnit, Ari—"

"It's just paperwork. And Idon't like having stuff I'm working on lying around your office. —I can change it back, if you like."

"I'd rather." He leaned his arms on his knees, looking her in the eye. "Ari, —I told you. I've got little enough in my life. I'd like to hang on to my independence. If you don't mind."

"They're bugging your apartment. You know that."

"I figured they might be."

"If you're in my wing, I can re-route the Security stuff so I get it, same as uncle Denys."

"I don't wantit, Ari."

She gave him a worried, slightly hurt look. "Will you teach me?"

"All right," he said. Because there was no way out of it.

"You don't sound happy."

"I don't know, Ari."

She reached out and squeezed his hand. "Friends. All right? Friends?"

He squeezed hers. And tried to believe it.

"They'll probably arrest me when I get back to the House."

"No, they won't." She drew her hand back. "Come on. We'll all walk up together. I'vegot to get a shower before I go anywhere. But you can tell me what you're working on."

x

They parted company at the quadrangle. He walked on, heart racing as he walked toward the Wing One doors, where the guard always stood, where—quite likely, the guard was getting an advisement over the pocket-corn; or sending one and getting orders back.

He had seen enough of Security's inner rooms.

He walked through the door, looked at the guard eye to eye—offering no threat, trying without saying a thing to communicate that he was not going to be a problem: he had had enough in his life of being slammed face-about against walls.

"Good day, ser," the guard said, and his heart did a skip-beat. "Good day," he said, and walked on through the small foyer into the hall, all the way to the lift, all the time he was standing there expecting to get a sharp order from behind him, still expecting it all the way down the hall upstairs. But he got as far as his office, and Grant was there, unarrested, looking worried and frayed at the edges.

"It's all right," he said, to relieve the worst of Grant's fears. "Went pretty well. A lot better than it could have." He sat down, drew a breath or two. "She's asked me to teach her."

Grant did not react overmuch. He shrugged finally. "Denys will put the quietus on that."

"No. I don't know whatin hell it is. She got us transferred. I," he said as Grant showed alarm, "got us transferred backto Yanni's wing. But right now—and until she gets it straight with Security—we're not Wing One. That's how serious it is—if she's telling the truth; and I haven't a reason in the world to doubt it. She wantsme to work with her. She's been talking with Yanni about my work, Yanni told her—damn him—he thinks I'm on some kind of important track, and young sera wantswhat I know, wants me to show her everything I'm working on."

Grant exhaled a long, slow breath.

"So, well—" Justin swung the chair around, reached for his coffee cup and got up to fill it from the pot. "That's the story. If Security doesn't come storming in here— You want a cup?"

"Thanks. —Sit down, let me get it."

"I've got it." He retrieved Grant's cup and gave him the rest of the pot and a little of his own. "Here." He handed Grant the cup. "Anyway, she was reasonable. She was—"

Not quite the little kid anymore.

But he didn't say that. He said: "—quite reasonable. Concerned." And then remembered with a flood of panic: We're in her administration at the moment; if there's monitoring going on, it's not routed just to Denys, it's going straight to her. My God, what have we said?

"We'll be under her security for a little while," he said with that little Remember the eavesdroppers sign, and Grant's eyes followed that move.

Trying to remember what he had said, too, he imagined, and to figure out how a young and very dangerous CIT could interpret it.

ARCHIVES: RUBIN PROJECT: CLASSIFIED CLASS AA

DO NOT COPY

CONTENT: Computer Transcript File #19031 Seq. #9

Personal Archive

Emory II

2421: 3/4: 1945

AE2: Base One, enter: Archive. Personal.

I think I ought to keep these notes. I feel a little strange doing it. My predecessor's never told me to. But they archived everything I did up to a few years ago. I imagine everything on Base One gets archived. Maybe I should put my own notes in. Maybe someday that'll be important. Because I think I am important.

That sounds egotistical. But that's all right. They wanted me to be.

I'm Ari Emory. I'm not the first but I'm not quite only the second either. We've got so much in common. Sometimes I hate my uncles for doing what they did to me—especially about maman. But if they hadn't—I don't know, I wouldn't want to be different than I am. I wouldn't want to not be me. I sure wouldn't want to be other people I could name. Maybe the first Ari could say that too.

I know she would. I know it even if she never told me.

I'd say: That's spooky.

She'd say: That's damned dangerous.

And I know what she'd mean. I know exactly what she'd mean by that and why she'd worry about me—but I know some things she didn't, like how I feel and whether the way I think about her is dangerous, or whether being a little different from her is dangerous. I'm pretty sure I'm all right, but I don't know if I'm close enough to her to be as smart as she was or to take care of the things she left me, and I won't know the things that made me smart enough until I'm good enough to look back on how they made me and say—they needed that. Or, they didn't.

I'm riding about fifteen to twenty points above her scores in psych—at the same chronological age. And I'm two points ahead of her score two years from now. Same in most of my subjects. But that's deceptive because I've had the benefits of the things she did and the way she worked, that everybody does now. That's spooky too. But that's the way it'd have to be, isn't it? Tapes have gotten better, and they've tailored so much of this for me, specifically, off her strong points and weaknesses, it's no wonder I'm going faster. But I can't get smug about it, because there's no guarantee on anything, and no guarantee I'll stay ahead at any given point.

It's spooky to know you're an experiment, and to watch yourself work. There's this boy out on Fargone, who's like me. Someday I'm going to write to him and just say hello, Ben, this is Ari. I hope you're all right.

Justin says they're easier on him than on me. He says maybe they didn't have to be so rough, but they couldn't take chances with me, and when I'm grown maybe I can figure out what they really could have left out.

I said I thought that was damned dangerous, wasn't it? Doing psych on yourself-is real dangerous, especially if you're psych-trained. I'm always scared when I start thinking about how I work, because that's an intervention, when you really know psych, but you don't know enough yet. It's like—my mind is so hard to keep aimed, it wants to go sideways and inside and everywhere—