Cyteen: The Betrayal (14 page)

“Who’s Corot?”

“God, child. Trees. Green trees. Have you seen the Terran tapes?”

“A lot of them.” He forgot his anxiety for a moment, recollecting a profusion of landscapes stranger than native Cyteen.

“Well, Corot painted landscapes. Among other things. I should lend you some of my tapes. I should put them on tonight-Catlin, have you got that Origins of Human Art series?”

“I’m sure we do, sera. I’ll key it up.”

“Among others. -That, young friend, is one of our own. Shevchenki. We have him on file. He died, poor fellow, of lifesupport failure, when they were setting up Pytho, up on the coast. But he really did remarkable work.”

Red cliffs and the blue of woolwood. That was too familiar to interest him. He could do that, he thought privately. But he. was too polite to say it. He sketched. He even painted, or had, when he was fresh from the inspiration of the explorer-painters. Ground-bound, he imagined stars and alien worlds. And had never in his life expected to get clear of Reseune.

Until it looked like Jordan might.

Florian came up and offered Ari a drink, a bright golden concoction in a cut-crystal glass. “Orange and vodka,” she said. “Have you ever tasted orange?”

“Synthetic,” he said. Everyone had.

“No, real. Here. Have a sip.”

He took a little from the offered glass. It was strange, a complicated, sour-sweet-bitter taste under the alcohol. A taste of old Earth, if she was serious, and no one who had these paintings on her walls could be otherwise.

“It’s nice,” he said.

“Nice. It’s marvelous. AG is going to make a try with the trees. We think we have a site for them-no messing about with genetics: we think the Zones can accommodate them just the way they are. It’s a bright orange fruit. Just like the name. Full of good things. Go on. Take it. Florian, do me another, will you?” She locked her arm tighter, steered him toward the steps and down, toward the couch. “What did you tell Jordan?”

“Just that Grant was out of the way and everything was all right.” He sat down, took a large swallow of the drink, then set it down on the brass counter behind the couch, having gotten ‘control of his nerves as much as he figured was likely in this place, in present company. “I didn’t tell him anything else. I figure it’s my business.”

“Is it?” Ari settled close to him, at which his stomach tightened and felt utterly queasy. She laid her hand on his leg and leaned against him, and all he could think of was the azi Jordan had talked about, the ones she had put down for no reason at all, the poor damned azi not even knowing they were dying-just some order to report for a medical. “Sit a little closer, dear. That’s all right. It’s just pleasant, isn’t it? You really shouldn’t tense up like that, all nervous.” She slipped her arm about his ribs and rubbed his back. “There, relax. That feels good, doesn’t it? Turn around and let me do something for those shoulders.”

It was like when she had trapped him in the lab. He tried to think what to answer to something that outrageous and failed, completely. He picked up the drink and took a heavy swallow and another and did not do what she asked. Neither did her hand stop its slow movement.

“You’re so tight. Look, it’s a simple little bargain. And you don’t have to be here. All you have to do is walk out the door.”

“Sure. Why don’t we just go into the bedroom, dammit?” His hands were close to shaking. The chill of the ice went right through his fingers to the bone. He finished the drink without looking at her.

/ could kill her, he thought, not angrily. Just as a solution to the insoluble. Before Florian and Catlin could stop me. I could just break her neck. What could they do then?

Psychprobe me and find out everything she did? That’d fix her.

It might be the way. It might be the way to get out of this.

“Florian, he’s out of orange juice. Get him another. -Come on, sweet. Relax. You really can’t do anything like that, you know better and I know better. You want to try it yourself? Is that the problem?”

“I want the drink,” he muttered. Everything seemed unreal, nightmarish. In a moment she was going to start talking to him the way she had in the interviews, and that was all part of it, a sordid, dirty business he did not know how to get through, but he wanted to be very drunk, very, very drunk, so that possibly he would get sick, turn out incapable, and she would just give up on this.

“You said you never had experimented around,” Ari said. “Just the tapes. Is that the truth?”

He did not answer. He only twisted round on the couch to see how long it was going to take Florian to get him the drink, to have any distraction that might turn this in some other direction.

“Do you think you’re normal?” Ari asked. He did not answer that either. He watched Florian’s back as Florian poured and mixed the drink. He felt Ari’s hands on his back, felt the cushion give as she shifted against him, as her hand came around his side.

Florian handed him the drink, and he leaned there with his elbow on the back of the couch sipping the orange drink and feeling the slow, light movement of Ari’s hands on his back.

“Let me tell you something,” Ari said softly, behind him. “You remember what I told you about family relationships? That they’re a liability? I’m going to do you a real favor. Ask me what that is.”

“What?” he asked because he had to.

Her arms came around him, and he took a drink, trying to ignore the nausea she made in his gut.

“You think tenderness ought to have something to do with this,” Ari said. “Wrong. Tenderness hasn’t got a thing to do with it. Sex is what you do for yourself, for your own reasons, sweet, just because it feels good. That’s all. Now sometimes you get real close to somebody and you want to do it back and forth, that’s fine, and maybe you trust them, but you shouldn’t. You really shouldn’t. The first thing you have to learn is that you can get it anywhere. The second thing-it ties you to people who aren’t family and it mucks up your judgment unless you remember the first rule. That’s how I’m going to do you a favor, sweet. You’re not going to confuse what we’re doing here. Does that feel good?”

It was hard to breathe. It was hard to think. His heart was hammering and her hands did quiet, disturbing things that made his skin all too sensitive, the edge of pleasure-or intense discomfort. He was no longer sure which. He drank a large gulp of the orange and vodka and tried to put his mind anywhere else, anywhere at all, in a kind of fog in which he was less and less in control of himself.

“How are you doing, dear?”

Not well, he thought, and thought that he was drunk. But at the edge of his senses he felt a dislocation, a difficulty in spatial relationships-like the feeling that Ari was a thousand miles away, her voice coming from behind him and not straight back, but aside in a strange and asymmetrical way—

It was a cataphoric. Tapestudy drug. Panic raced through hi: brain, chaotic, stimuli coming in on him too fast, while body seemed to lag in an atmosphere gone to syrup. Not a high dosage. He could see. He could still feel Ari tug his shirt up, run her hands over his bare skin, even while his sense of balance deserted him and he felt his head spinning, the whole room going around. He lost the glass and felt the chill of ice and liquid spreading against his hip and under his buttocks.

“Oh, dear. Florian. Get that.”

He was sinking. He was still aware. He tried to move, but confusion set in, a roaring muddle of sound and sensation. He tried to doubt. That was the hardest thing. He was quite aware that Florian had rescued the glass and that his head was back in Ari’s lap, in the hollow of her crossed legs, that he was gazing up into Ari’s face upside down and that she was unfastening his shirt.

She was not the only one unfastening his clothing. He heard a murmur of voices, but none of them involved him. “Justin,” a voice said, and Ari turned his head between her hands. “You can blink when you need to,” she whispered, the way the tapes would. “Are you comfortable?”

He did not know. He was terrified and ashamed, and in a long nightmare he felt touches go over him, felt himself lifted up and dragged off whatever he was lying on and down onto the floor.

It was Catlin and Florian who hovered over him. It was Catlin and Florian who touched him and moved him and did things to him that he was aware of in a kind of vague nowhere way, which were wrong, wrong and terrible.

Stop this, he thought. Stop this. I don’t agree with this.

I don’t want this.

But there was pleasure. There was an explosion in his senses, somewhere infinite, somewhere dark.

Help me.

I don’t want this.

He was half conscious when Ari said to him: “You’re awake, aren’t you? Do you understand now? There’s nothing more than this. That’s as good as it gets. There’s nothing more than this, no matter who it’s with. Just biological reactions. That’s the first and the second rule. …”

“Watch the screen.”

Tape was running. It was erotic. It blurred into what was happening to him. It felt good and he did not want it to, but he was not responsible for it, he was not responsible for anything and it was not his fault… .

“I think he’s coming out of it. …”

“Just give him a little more. He’ll do fine.”

“There’s nothing can do to you what tape can do. Can it, boy? No matter who it is. Biological reactions. Whatever does it for you… .”

“Don’t move. …”

“Pain and pleasure, sweet, are so thin a line. You can cross it a dozen times a minute, and the pain becomes the pleasure. I can show you. You’ll remember what I can do for you, sweet, and nothing will ever be like it. You’ll think about that, you’ll think about it for the rest of your life … and nothing will ever be the same. …”

He opened his eyes and found a shadow over him, himself naked, in a bed he did not know, a hand patting his shoulder, moving to brush hair from his brow. “Well, well, awake,” Ari said. It was her weight that pushed down the edge of the mattress, Ari sitting there dressed and he—

His heart jumped and started hammering.

“I’m off to the office, sweet. You can sleep in, if you like. Florian will serve you breakfast.”

“I’m going home,” he said, and dragged the sheet over him.

“Whatever you like.” Ariane got up, releasing the mattress, and walked across to take a look in the wall mirror, demonstrative unconcern that crawled over his nerves and unsettled his stomach. “Come in when you like. -Talk to Jordan if you like.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Whatever you like.”

“Am I supposed to stay here?” Panic sharpened his voice. He knew the danger in Ari hearing it, acting on it, working on it. It was a threat she had just made. He thought that it was. Her tone was blank, void of cues. Her voice tweaked at nerves and made him forget for a handful of seconds that he had a counter-threat in Grant, upriver. “It won’t work.”

“Won’t it?” Ari gave her hair a pat. She was elegant, in a beige suit. She turned and smiled at him. “Come in when you like. You can go home tonight. Maybe we’ll do it again, who knows? Maybe you can tell your father and get him to pass it off, hmmn? Tell him whatever you like. Of course I had a recorder on. There’s plenty of evidence if he wants to go to the Bureau.”

He felt cold through and through. He tried not to show it. He glared at her, jaw set, as she smiled and walked out the door. And for a long while he lay there cold as ice, sick to his stomach, darts of headache going from the top of his skull through to the nape of his neck. His skin felt hypersensitized, sore in places. There were bruises on his arm, the marks of fingers.

-Florian—

A flash came back to him, sensation and image from out of the dark, and he plunged his face into his hands and tried to shove it out. Tape-flash. Deep-tape. More and more of them would come back. He did not know what could come back. And they would, bits of memory floating up to the surface and showing a moment, a drift of words and feeling and vision, before they rolled over and sank again into the dark, nothing complete-just more and more of them. He could not stop it.

He threw the sheets back and got out of bed, unfocusing his eyes where it came to his own body. He staggered into the bathroom, turned on the shower and bathed, soaped himself again and again and again, scrubbed without looking at himself, trying not to feel anything, remember anything, wonder anything. He scrubbed his face and hair and even the inside of his mouth with the perfumed soap, because he did not know if there was anything else to use; and spat and spat and gagged from the sharp, soapy taste, but it did not make him clean. It was a scent he remembered as hers. Now he smelled like it, and tasted it in the back of his throat.

And when he had chafed himself dry in the shower-cabinet blower and he had come out into the cold air of the bathroom, Florian walked in with a folded stack of his clothes.

“There’s coffee, ser, if you like.”

Bland as if nothing had happened. As if none of it were real. “Where’s a shaver?” he asked.

“The counter, ser.” Florian motioned toward the mirrored end of the bath. “Toothbrush, comb, lotion. Is there anything you need?”

“No.” He kept his voice even. He thought of going home. He thought of killing himself. Of knives in the kitchen. Of pills in the bathroom cabinet. But the investigation afterward would open everything up to politics, and politics would swallow his father up. In the same moment he thought of subliminals that might have been buried in his mind last night, urges to suicide, God knew what. Any irrational thought was suspect. He could not trust them. A series of tape-flashes ripped past him, sensations, erotic visions, landscapes and ancient artworks… .

Then real things, set in the future. Images of Jordan’s outrage. Himself, dead, on the floor of his kitchen. He rebuilt the image and tried to make it something exotic: himself, just walking out beyond the precip towers, a body to be found like a scrap of white rag by air-search a few hours later … “Sorry, ser, looks like we’ve found him-“

But that was not a valid test of any suspected subliminal Ari might have put into his tape. When a mind drank in tapestudy, it incorporated it. Tape images faded and resident memory wove itself into the implant-structure and grew and grew in its own way. There was no reliable way to detect an embedded command; but it could not make him act when he was conscious, unless it accurately triggered some predisposition. Only when drugs had the threshold flat, then he would take in stimuli without censoring, answer what he was asked, do whatever he was told-Anything he was asked, anything he was told, if it slipped past the subconscious barriers of his value-sets and his natural blocks. A psychsurgeon could, given time, get answers that revealed the sets and their configurations, then just insert an argument or two that confounded the internal logic: rearrange the set after that, create a new microstructure and link it where the surgeon chose-All those questions, those questions in the damned psych-tests Ari had given him, calling them routine for Wing One aides … questions about his work, his beliefs, his sexual experiences … that he, being a fool, had thought were simply Ari’s way of tormenting him …